can get his job.'
'You broke his arm on purpose.'
'Damn straight we did. So now his job's open, because what's the use of a bodyguard with a broken arm? Get it. Her bodyguard goes wherever she goes, so you can keep tabs on her when she's out of the observatory. Now, let's hear your report.'
There wasn't much to say, until he got to his lunch with the lawyer. She scowled at that. 'Him, too. Maybe we should sell tickets.'
'You don't act surprised at what he said,' he pointed out.
'You mean because this Dixler thinks your cousin's trying to make some money out of the Starlab? But we already knew all that, of course.'
'Hell, Hilda, I didn't! So now that I know that much, how about telling me the rest?'
She shook her head. 'Don't hassle me about that. What else?'
He hesitated. 'One thing. I want to go back and visit at the theater. They're opening The Subway tomorrow night and I want to be there.'
She frowned again. 'Is that wise? The only reason we let you do that theater crap was because it made good cover on the Carpezzio job, and that's over for you. Don't get the two things mixed up.'
'It's personal, Hilda.'
She sighed and surrendered. 'That goddam Berman woman, right? Well, I won't say no, but if there's any fallout it's your ass, Danno. All right, I've got some orders for you. We can't get through your cousin's encoding; we need a key. That Greek fellow-'
'Papathanassiou.'
'That one. He probably has it, and I've got his data packet; I'll pass it on to you. Couple of others, too, but the Greek's is the one that looks good. You ought to be able to get something out of him.'
'Blackmail him, you mean?'
'Whatever. And that Chinaman we were interested in, Jimmy Lin. He's coming back tomorrow morning, so you want to get on him, too.' She reflected for a moment, peering past him.
'Did you clean your clothes after firing your bomb-bugger? Once you fire one of those things the stink stays, so everybody's going to know you've got a hideout gun.'
'I will,' he promised; then, 'Hey! You've had me followed!' 'Well, sure. If we didn't do that how would we know if anybody else was following you? You're clean, so far-and, don't forget, the first thing you do in the morning is see if you can go for Jarvas's job.'
But, as it turned out, that wasn't an option. Somebody had forgotten to tell the bureau's arm-breakers that Jarvas was left-handed; and when Dannerman put his card in the turnstile at the observatory entrance the next morning his cousin Pat was ahead of him, and beside her, punching out the combination to summon an elevator, was Mick Jarvas, a translucent cast on his right arm.
'Morning,' Dannerman said, trying not to grin.
'And good morning to you,' his cousin said, smiling. She reached over to touch him on the shoulder-not affectionately, exactly, but a lot more amiably than before. 'You surprised me yesterday, old Dan. For an English major, I mean,' she said. 'Listen, come see me this afternoon. I've got an errand for you to run.'
'Sure thing, Pat.' He might have asked what kind of an errand, but he didn't get the chance. As they stepped out of the car at their floor she almost bumped into a large, sand-colored man with short black hair who was waiting there.
'Why, Jimmy,' she said. 'I didn't expect you so early.'
'I just dropped off some of my stuff. I have an appointment downtown to check in at the embassy in half an hour,' the man said, holding the elevator door open.
'Well, I won't keep you,' Pat said. 'You know Mick Jarvas, of course? And this is my cousin, Dan Dannerman. Commander Jimmy Lin.'
Dannerman hadn't had any clear idea of what he expected a Chinese astronaut to be like, but Jimmy Lin wasn't it. The man was taller than he had imagined, and a lot huskier; he wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt, and shoes that, Dannerman was pretty sure, would have cost him a month of his observatory pay. 'Glad to know you, Commander,' Dannerman said, automatically extending his hand.
But the People's Republic astronaut obviously didn't share the pleasure. He didn't accept Dannerman's hand. He didn't even speak to him. He gave him a long, hard look, then turned to Pat Adcock. 'I'll be back before lunch,' he said. 'We can talk then.'
'I've got a lunch date; make it this afternoon,' she said, gazing after Lin as he let the elevator door close behind him. Then she turned to Dannerman with a mildly puzzled look. 'He's usually chummier than that. You didn't forget to shower this morning, did you?' He shrugged. 'Well, let's get to work; you can sort that out later.'
Dannerman would have to sort that out, somehow, if he was going to carry out the colonel's orders, but it was going to be harder than he'd thought. He hadn't expected that kind of unprovoked hostility from Lin; and he was going to have to come up with something better than a broken wrong arm to get Jarvas out of the way. And then, as he checked his weapon with Jarvas, there was another curious thing. The bodyguard gave him a long look, partly abashed, partly pugnacious, but, though he seemed to want to say something, he didn't get it out.
There was one thing Dannerman could do, though. Hilda had kept her promise and transmitted the background packets on the observatory employees who had turned up in the sin file. Two of them were unlikely to help: the astrophysics grad student three weeks past her period and frantically sending faxes to her boyfriend, now in Sierra Leone; Harry Chesweiler, identified as a former member of the Man-Boy Love Association. But the packet on Christo Papathanassiou did look good. The old man had got himself picked up for questioning about a terrorist assassination back in the old country. That, Dannerman thought judiciously, could be made to work-whether or not Papathanassiou was actually guilty of anything.
Dannerman couldn't do anything about it for the first couple of hours that morning, because he was kept busy with his nominal observatory duties. And then, when he went looking for the Cypriot, Papathanassiou was nowhere to be found. He wasn't in his office. He wasn't in with Pat, or in the room of number crunchers all the scientists used to set up their mathematical models. When Dannerman looked into Rosaleen Artzybachova's cubicle he wasn't there, either, and the old lady herself was, incredibly, doing push-ups on the floor. 'You want me?' she called, looking up at Dannerman.
'Actually I was looking for Dr. Papathanassiou.'
'Try the canteen,' she said; and that was where Dannerman found him, attacking a wedge of some unfamiliar kind of pastry smothered in heavy cream.
He looked defensive. 'One has to keep one's blood sugar up,' he said.
'Good idea,' said Dannerman. 'Mind if I join you?' And when he had a dish of sherbet for himself he said, 'I was kind of hoping I'd run into you, Dr. Papathanassiou. I was looking at those tapes from space again last night-'
'Those odd-looking alien creatures? Yes?'
'And I just didn't understand about this Big Crunch.'
'Ah,' Papathanassiou said, gratified, 'but really, it's very simple. The universe is expanding; in the future it will collapse again; that's all of it. Of course,' he went on, 'the mathematics is, yes, rather complex. Actually it was the subject of my dissertation in graduate school, did you know that?' Dannerman did, but saw no reason to say so. 'It was necessary to use symplectic integrators to predict the next fifty quadrillion years of motion in only our own galaxy. You've heard of the three-body problem? What I had to solve was the two-hundred-billion-body problem.'
He tittered. Dannerman pressed on. 'But what I don't understand is, when the universe collapses again, what does it collapse to?'
'Ah.' The astronomer ruminated for a moment, licking cream off his upper lip. 'Well, you see, when everything has come together again great velocities and pressures are involved. First all matter is compressed. Then the atomic nuclei themselves are compressed. They become a new form of very dense matter which is stable-well, temporarily stable. Are you following me so far?'
Dannerman nodded, not entirely truthfully.
