Most of the staff had no time to chat with a new low-ranking employee, at least until they discovered he happened to be a Dannerman. Then they became more cordial, but were still busy. If the observatory didn't have any instruments of its own, it did have shared-time arrangements with ground-based and radio telescopes in New Mexico and Hawaii and the Canary Islands, not to mention neutrino instruments in Canada and Italy and even odder observatories everywhere in the world. The scientists made their observations, and then they, and all the other specialists at Dannerman, massaged, enhanced and interpreted the data and added it to the general store of human knowledge.
Of course, Dan Dannerman wasn't qualified for any of that. If you didn't count Janice DuPage, the receptionist who doubled as payroll manager, or old Walt Lowenfeld, who ran the stockroom, Dannerman was pretty nearly the least professionally qualified human being on the payroll of the observatory. He hadn't been granted the dignity of a title, but if he had it would have been "office boy." Exploring the observatory was made easy for him, because his work took him everywhere. It included carrying things from the stockroom to the people who needed them, making coffee, killing, for Janice DuPage, a wasp that had somehow made it into the reception room, fetching doughnuts from the shop in the lobby for Harry Chesweiler, the senior planetary astronomer on the staff… taking messages, in fractured English, from the Greek friends of Christo Papathanassiou, the quantum cosmologist from the island of Cyprus… getting Cousin Pat's jewelry out of the safe for her when she was going out socially… bringing tea with a measured twenty cc of clover-blossom honey, no more and no less, for old Rosaleen Artzybachova, well past ninety and still spry but crotchety, as she pored over her instrument schematics. What he did, in short, was whatever they told him to do. "They" could be anybody, because he took orders from any of the fifteen or twenty principal astronomers and physicists and computer nerds and mathematicians who made up the major science staff of the observatory, and from any of their assistants as well. But he especially took orders from Cousin Pat Adcock, because she was the one who ran it all.
Cousin Pat wasn't a bad boss, as bosses went. She wasn't really a good boss, either, though. She seemed to have little patience and no interest in whether any of her employees might have lives of their own. She snapped her orders out-not only to her low-man-on-the-totem-pole cousin but even to people like Pete Schneyman, the mathematician-astrophysicist who, it was said, was high on the list for some future Nobel laurel (and had been everybody's logical best bet for becoming the next director until Pat Adcock came along) and to old, honored Rosaleen Artzybachova. Maybe part of the reason for the impatience, Dannerman thought, was that everybody knew that the only reason Cousin Pat was the director was Uncle Cubby's money. But she seemed tense and preoccupied most of the time. Janice DuPage whispered that Pat hadn't always been like that and probably one reason was that, having gone through two husbands, she didn't currently have even a steady boyfriend. "Maybe so," Dannerman told the receptionist. "But she was a bossy little kid, too."
He didn't believe that was the explanation, anyway. There had to be something else, something most probably to do with the Starlab; or else what was he doing there?
What he was doing there, of course, was following Colonel Hilda Morrisey's orders. As ordered, he kept his eyes and ears open, and if he didn't find much that interested her in his nightly reports it wasn't for lack of trying. It wasn't because the people he worked with weren't willing to talk, either. They were a sociable lot-particularly with somebody who, however lowly his present status, was a definite relative of their great benefactor. "But all they want to talk about is their jobs, Colonel," he complained to her on the coded line. "Dr. Schneyman kept me after work for an hour talking about stuff like something he called isospin and how proton-rich nuclei were created in novae and neutron stars."
"Screw that stuff, Danno. That's not what you're there for. What about the gamma-ray item?"
"Nobody brought it up, so I didn't either. You told me-"
"I know what I told you. Have you at least made contact with Mick Jarvas and the Chink astronaut?"
"I haven't seen Commander Lin yet at all. He's been out of the office; they say he's in Houston, doing something about getting ready for the repair flight."
"I've got one other name for you. Christo Papa-Papathana-"
"The Greek fellow, right. From Cyprus."
"Well, there's a file on him, only I haven't accessed it yet. It's been crazy here." She hesitated, then said, "The thing is, they found the President's press secretary, only he was dead."
Dannerman was scandalized. "Dead? Gripes, Hilda! That was supposed to be a strictly commercial snatch!"
"So something went sour. The word isn't out yet; the President's going to announce it at a news conference in the morning. Meanwhile, everything's pretty screwed up, so it'll be a while before I can get more. And keep after Jarvas."
"He isn't exactly a sociable type."
"Make him sociable, Danno. Didn't I tell you this assignment is priority? Do I have to teach you all over again how to do your job? And, look, see if you can get into some of the technical part of the work there. You're not going to find much out while you're running the coffee machine."
Dannerman followed orders as best he could. He didn't achieve much with Cousin Pat's bodyguard, though he tried getting Jarvas to go with him for lunch or a beer. He got a frosty turndown. Jarvas didn't socialize outside the office. At lunchtime he went out only with Dr. Pat Adcock, and on the rare occasions when she lunched on sandwiches in her office he preferred to go out and eat alone.
Dannerman did better with the other instruction. It occurred to him that the databanks for astrophysics were reached in just about the same ways as the ones for critical studies on American playwrights. When he pointed out to Pat Adcock that he could be more use in research than fixing squeaky drawers, she reluctantly agreed to allow him to do an occasional literature search.
That was useful. It gave him a good reason to talk shop with his coworkers, and, when Harry Chesweiler found out he spoke good German and at least halting French, the planetary astronomer was delighted. "Hell, boy," he boomed, his mouth full of a bagel, "you can do something for me right now. Pat's been after me to check out some little CLO she's interested in-"
"A what?"
"A CLO. A comet-like object. I don't know why she's getting interested in it now-it came through a couple years ago- hut it does have some unusual characteristics. She wants to know its orbital elements for some reason, and I've got all this Ganymede stuff to work up. We don't have any data for the sectors and times she's interested in, so you'll need to check some of the other observatories. Use my screen if you want to; I'd like to get out early for lunch, anyway."
The good part of checking up on the CLO was that it was more interesting than making coffee, and it didn't really require any knowledge of astronomy. With the information Chesweiler left for him Dan Dannerman began calling up other observatories to beg for copies of any plates they might have.
The main sources, Chesweiler had explained, were out of the country: the German Max-Planck Institut fur Extraterristrische Physik, which had both an optical and a gamma-ray observatory still more or less functioning in orbit-gamma rays!-and Cerro Toledo in South America, which had one that observed in the extreme ultraviolet. The woman at Cerro Toledo refused his attempts at French-he knew no more of her own language than the taxi-driver Spanish any American needed-but had good enough English to make clear that, while she was perfectly willing to transmit the plates he asked for, she wanted to be paid; Dannerman took a chance and agreed to the price she asked.