She had two main worries. First, she had seen her budget for the new base. There wasn’t enough money in it for a mind shield, a discovery that gave her a new case of heartburn every time she considered it.
The other worry was that her new day job was going to drive her crazy—if not because of the clientele, then because of the way the place smelled.
The new office of the United Nations Neutral Observer Project Central European Region had been opened three days previously in the main street of Andermatt, between the Hotel Krone and the Backerei Arens, in a building that had previously been a TV and stereo store. Just as soon as it opened, a stream of concerned Swiss began coming in the door, demanding to know who was running this place and what was being done there—they hadn’t been consulted. In a country where people take to public life the way people in other countries go for contact sports, and where all you need is a petition with a hundred thousand names to force a national referendum on anything, to “not be consulted” is an extremely serious matter, one that Jonelle heard about every five or ten minutes.
She did what one usually did when managing these PR “branches” of X-COM: she gave out glossy brochures that either explained nothing in particular, or explained something that purported (erroneously) to have something to do with why you were really there. These brochures were masterpieces of misdirection, and they usually fooled most of the people most of the time. To the rest of the people, Jonelle spent at least one shift a day listening patiently nodding a great deal, and exercising her no-better-than-college-level German. None of these helped particularly, since for reasons of both content and expression, she couldn’t understand much of what she was listening to. People kept complaining to her about things that weren’t her fault, like the European Union’s farm subsidies, and the United Nations’ interference in Switzerland. And they generally did their complaining in the local dialect of Swiss-German, a variant called Urnerdeutsch (Andermatt being located in the Swiss canton called Uri). It was very difficult to make sense of. People tended to either sing it or cough it—sometimes both. This made for more than usually interesting complaints.
Worst of all, her office was situated between the best hotel/restaurant in town and a bakery that produced bread so good it was rumored that angels came down from God first thing in the morning to get breakfast rolls and the sliced light rye. Jonelle had to sit there and listen to people going on about silage allowances and non-mandatory bomb shelters while her stomach growled, and at the back of her mind, the issue of where to get money for that mind shield kept gnawing at her.
Ari took one afternoon shift in the office, but Jonelle quickly relieved him of this duty when she discovered that his German was even worse than hers, and that he was completely tone-deaf for the local accent. Instead, she kept him busy up under the mountain, seeing about the installation of the initial space dividers for the living quarters and so forth. Fortunately, this was all modular, and would go in fairly quickly. There were other concerns, such as where the new alien containment facilities would go. Irhil M’goun had been getting short of space for a while now, and Jonelle was keen to expand their holding facilities so that live alien research could also be expanded, to two or maybe three times as much as was going on at Irhil.
During their first day’s more exhaustive inspection of the under-mountain facility, Ari had found just the place for this. Down on the third level was a series of chambers hewn out of an isolated, projecting spur of the Chastelhorn mountain: Wildmannsalpli, it was called. These fifty-meter-wide chambers, carefully isolated from one another, had originally been used for ammunition storage and were designed so that if something should set the stuff off, the blast would be confined both from the other chambers and from the rest of the base. Except for multiple baffled and booby-trapped ventilation holes, there was no way in or out of them except through a long, narrow “bottleneck” tunnel where security would be easy to maintain. The whole mini-facility was completely surrounded—above, below, and on all sides—by granite a hundred feet thick. It would make a most satisfactory holding space for even the most dangerous alien.
That afternoon, near closing time, Ari came down to the PR office to brief Jonelle on how things were going. They took refuge in the back office, where they could watch the front through a venetian-blinded window but not be heard, and Ari started his briefing. To Jonelle’s amusement, however, it didn’t immediately concern the new base. He had spent a long time outside the front door, carefully wiping his shoes on the mat.
“There are about eight hundred cows up at the top of town,” he said, examining his boot soles carefully. “Did 1 step in anything?”
“No.” Jonelle sat down at a small desk, which was covered ‘with paperwork and brochures and carefully written complaints waiting to be filed.
“They came right through the town. Have you ever seen anything like that before? It’s like the Wild West out there. And they had bells and flowers all over them. The bells I knew about. What’s with the flowers?”
“They’re awards.”
“What?”
“The cow that produces the most milk gets an award to wear.”
Ari burst out laughing. “You’re trying to tell me that was an awards ceremony!”
“Not as such,” Jonelle said. “But those cows and most of their herds have been up in the high pastures over by Gesehenen since May. This is when they bring them down, when the weather starts; to turn nasty and the grass growth falls off.”
“1 doubt the cows care much about the awards.”
“I don’t know… some of them looked pretty proud.”
“1 didn’t notice. I was looking at the big, mean guy at the front of the parade. Thought they gave him more flowers to keep him from getting jealous.”
“1 have news for you,” Jonelle said, grinning. “That was a she. Didn’t you look at the rear end? That’s unlike you.”
It was rare for Jonelle to get Ari to blush. She managed it this time. “You seem to know a whole lot about this all of a sudden,” Ari said, turning away and busying himself with a filing cabinet.
“I had a full mornings worth of briefings on the subject from the president.”
“The what?”
“The mayor, Ueli Trager. Präsident, the guy who presides—where do you think we got the word? It came from here, via France, I think. Anyway, that big cow up front, that’s the head cow of the herd, the pugniera. She’s the one who enforces the pecking order, since she’s at the top of it. She also scares off wolves and such.”
“I bet she does. Did the president give you a yodeling lesson, too?”
“He did not,” Jonelle said, pointedly ignoring the teasing. “Herr Trager did tell me, though, that there have been a lot of abductions and mutilations of cattle around here lately. People are getting very annoyed.”
Ari looked thoughtful at that. “I thought there had been a worldwide drop-off in cattle abductions.” He did not add, possibly because the rate of human abductions seems to have gone up so sharply in the last few months. That wasn’t public knowledge, and X-COM was hoping that the world’s governments were too busy at the moment to compare figures. The data raised some uncomfortable questions, such as whether the aliens had finished getting whatever data they needed from cows and other higher non-primate animals, and were now concentrating on the primates.