conceal. This is not permit in the Free State of Florida. It must be confiscate.' She beckoned to a state policeman, who patted his own gun to make sure it hadn't fallen out of its holster as he strolled toward them.
The cop waved all four of the party over to a little quarantine ghetto while the customs agent and her supervisor debated the matter in Spanish. Pat was irate. Rosaleen Artzybachova waited patiently for a resolution to the problem. Jimmy Lin showed amusement. 'Danny, Danny,' he said reproachfully, 'don't you know any better than that? When you go to Florida you leave your own gun at home. Nobody brings a gun to Florida. You don't need it. You can always pick up another on the street-there's not a block in the state where you can't buy anything you want.'
Dannerman didn't answer. He did know better; he just hadn't wanted to part with his service special.
'It's all right,' Pat announced, waving in relief to a tall man who had appeared at the customs desk. Although he was wearing a different uniform this time, gleaming dress whites with clusters of ribbons at his chest, Dannerman recognized General Martin Delasquez. He spoke rapidly to the customs agents, then approached them, looking grave.
'What a pity, Dr. Adcock,' he said to Pat, ignoring Dannerman. 'Your man has attempted to break our law. Therefore he is forbidden admission to our state. However, I believe that we can avoid the legal penalties. I have arranged that he will be placed on the first return flight to New York, and the rest of you may proceed to the staging area.'
'Oh, no!' Pat Adcock exclaimed. 'I want him with me.'
Delasquez shook his head politely. 'But it is impossible, you see?' he said reasonably.
'Maybe not,' Dannerman said. He had been watching Delasquez carefully. The general looked at him for the first time.
'You spoke?' he asked, his tone frosty.
'Yes, I did, General. You know what I bet? I bet you have enough authority to get us all through these bureaucrats, don't you, General?'
Delasquez said coldly, 'It is apparent that you do not understand the gravity of your situation.'
'I bet I do. For instance, I bet I know what would happen next. I bet while I was waiting for the next plane the cops would ask me a lot of questions. I wouldn't want to lie to them, either. And if the subject of our first meeting came up I'd have to tell them anything they wanted to know-you know, like the articles I delivered to you in New York?'
Delasquez did not respond for a moment. He studied Dannerman in silence, then turned to Pat Adcock. 'Who is this man?' he demanded.
She shrugged. 'He's my cousin.'
'And do you know what trouble this could cause?' She didn't answer, only shrugged again. Then Delasquez smiled. 'Well, what harm can it do? It is only a technical violation, after all. I think I can persuade the authorities to let you pass.'
'And get our guns back for us, too, please,' Dannerman added.
CHAPTER TEN
Dan
The flight started tamely. The takeoff thrust was not much worse than some of the high-speed scramjets Dannerman had taken to cross an ocean, but the Clipper was still being an airplane then.
He hardly noticed when the takeoff jets switched over to the higher-speed contoured flow, but then the time came when the scram cut over to rocket thrust, and he noticed that, all right. That was real acceleration. He was squashed into his seat for four long minutes. His belly sagged, his head drooped, he realized for the first time that even his eyeballs had weight on their sockets. Then he fell forward against his chest straps as the thrust cut; he was suddenly weightless, and they were on their way.
It was about then that Dannerman realized that space travel took a long time to happen… and that while it was happening there was nothing much to do. What he wanted to do was to get out of his seat and roam around the Clipper, but he had been warned against that. He quickly saw why. Every course correction brought another jolt, not nearly as violent as the first but unpredictable for either time or direction. Then the gimbaled seats tilted, the motors roared, and you were lucky if you didn't bite your tongue or bash your head.
A window, at least, would have been nice. He didn't have one. All he had was the tiny TV screen on his armrest, but all it showed was black, empty space. By his side Rosaleen Artzybachova sat with her eyes placidly closed, maybe even napping; well, spaceflight was nothing new to her. She could not have been comfortable; her feet rested on a pair of gray metal boxes, lashed to the seat supports, and so her knees were squeezed almost into her belly. Just ahead, but out of his sight, Pat was in the third-pilot seat, trying to talk to Delasquez and Lin at the controls; Dannerman couldn't make out the words, and if the pilots answered he couldn't hear.
In the seat next to him Artzybachova opened her eyes and gazed at him. 'Are you all right?' When he nodded, she asked politely, 'And how are you enjoying spaceflight? Is it what you expected?'
'Well, no. Not exactly. I thought we'd have to go through more training-'
She laughed. 'Like high-G conditioning in those awful old centrifuges? Drills for emergency actions? Thank heaven, we don't do that anymore. We don't wear spacesuits, either.'
'I noticed that.' What Dannerman himself had on was the slacks and jacket he had put on that morning. Dr. Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin were wearing one-piece coveralls, General Delasquez the combat fatigues of the Florida Air Guard.
Dr. Artzybachova was still being grandmotherly. 'Are you hungry? I brought some apples and I believe there are other things on board.'
'Hungry? No.'
'And you don't have to pee or anything? You should've gone before we took off.'
'I don't,' he said shortly, but she had put the idea in his mind. He quelled it, for there was an opportunity here to be taken. 'Dr. Artzybachova? Can I ask you something? Is there something, well, peculiar about what we're doing?'
She gave him an amused look, pale eyebrows raised. 'Define 'peculiar.' '
He chose his words with care. 'This is supposed to be a simple repair mission, right? But there are all these rumors-'
'What kind of rumors?'
He spread his hands. 'Something about some kind of radiation from Starlab that wasn't supposed to be there? I don't understand that very well, Dr. Artzybachova; I was an English major. And something about those messages with the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs?'
'You are very skilled at listening to rumors, Mr. Dannerman.' It wasn't a compliment.
He pressed on. 'I get the idea that that's really what this mission is about. Something alien on Starlab? Something that might be worth a lot of money. Pat wouldn't talk to me about it-'
'That is not surprising,' the old lady observed.
'I guess not. Will you?'
Dr. Artzybachova studied his face for a moment, considering, while the Clipper rolled itself into a new position. 'I suppose it could do no harm now. In a little while you will see what we all see-whatever that turns out to be. Or it will turn out that there is nothing worth seeing, and then we will simply try to determine what repairs might make Starlab function as originally designed again. So,' she said, sighing, 'yes, the rumors are true. Fifteen months ago your cousin's observatory detected a burst of synchrotron radiation from Starlab. No one else appeared to observe it, but then no one else was actively trying to reestablish communications with the orbiter. So she called me at my dacha. I flew at once to New York. We examined all the logs of instrumentation changes and, no, there simply was nothing on Starlab that could have produced that emission. So we performed a data check.'
Dannerman pricked up his ears; this was new. 'What kind of data check?'
'A fortunate coincidence: the Japanese were getting ready to replace one of their old weather satellites, so they did a census of everything in orbit-to select a safe slot for their satellite, you see. One of their instrument
