'And you've had-' She paused to count up. 'Jesus, Dan, you've had four other jobs in the past few years. Are you going to quit here too because you don't like somebody?' He didn't answer that. 'And you've been dicking around with little theater groups all over the place, not just in Brooklyn. I thought you were the kind of guy who went for the macho kind of thing.'
'There's enough macho in the world already, Pat.'
'Hum,' she said again. Then, 'All right, our mutual uncle gave a lot of money to found this observatory, that's a fact. But it doesn't mean we have to support the whole damn family.'
'Of course not.'
'If we decided to take a chance and we did give you a job for Uncle Cubby's sake, don't expect it would be anything big. You'd be getting minimum wage, daily COLA, no fringe benefits. This is a scientific establishment. We're all highly trained people. You just don't have the skills for anything better than scutwork.'
'I understand, Dr. Adcock.'
That made her laugh. 'Oh, hell, Dan, I guess Pat's good enough. Considering we've known each other since we were in diapers. You don't bear any grudges, do you? About the money, I mean?' He shook his head. 'I mean, you got as much as I did under Uncle Cubby's will.'
'Not exactly.'
'Well, you would have if you'd been around when the will was probated. Then the whole thing wouldn't've been eaten up by inflation by the time you collected it and you wouldn't be looking for a scutwork job now, would you? What were you doing in Europe anyway?'
'I guess you'd call it postdoctoral research,' he said, coming reasonably close to an honest answer. The statement was technically true, at least; he really had had his doctorate by then and what he had been doing in Europe surely was research of a kind.
'And maybe there was a girl?'
'You could say a woman was involved,' he admitted, again skirting the truth-Use was indeed female, and so was the colonel. 'I guess I made a mistake, not keeping in touch.'
'I guess you did. All right, I don't see why we shouldn't do old Dixler a favor-and you too, of course. We'll find you something to do. Go down to Security and get your badge and passes from Mick Jarvas. You can start tomorrow-but remember, you get no medical benefits, no tenure. You'll be a temp, hired on a week-to-week basis, and how long you stay depends on you. Or, actually, it will depend on me, because I'm the director here. Is that going to give you a problem?'
'No problem.'
'It better not be a problem. I don't mix family loyalty and science. We've got a lot to do here right now, trying to get Star-lab back on line and all. I don't want you thinking that the fact that we played together when we were babies is going to get you any special privileges.'
Dannerman grinned, thinking about the kinds of games they'd played. 'You're the boss, Pat,' he said. But of course she'd been the boss then, too.
Is soon as he was out of the building he paused before the window of a betting parlor to lift his commset to his lips and make his call. He didn't give a name. He didn't have to. All he said was, 'Mission accomplished. I got the job.'
'That's nice,' the voice on the other end said chattily. 'Congratulations. You've still got one thing to do with the other guys, though.'
'I know. I'll phone it in when I get home.' 'Make sure you do, Danno. Talk to you later.' On the subway ride home Dannerman pretended to watch the news on his communicator-the hot new story was that the President's press secretary had been kidnapped-but he wasn't paying it much attention. He was content with the day's work. To be sure, he didn't know exactly why he was going to work for his cousin, but he was reasonably sure he would be told in time. What he had to take care of with the Carpezzios wouldn't take long. And of course the eschaton, that ultimate transcendence, had never yet even crossed his mind.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dan
The process of getting photographed and fingerprinted for the job had made Dannerman late leaving the observatory. It got even later; he got caught in the rush hour and the subways were running even slower than usual because of a bomb scare at the Seventy-second Street station. That meant the trains weren't allowed to stop there until the security police finished checking out whatever suspicious object was worrying them, so Dan Dannerman had to travel an extra stop north and make his way back on foot through the jammed sidewalk vendors along Broadway. The peddlers did their best to slow him down-'Hey, mon, here we have got tomorrow's top collectibles, get them today while the price is right!'-but Dannerman was interested only in food just then. By the time he'd picked up some groceries for his dinner and got home, all the other tenants had finished their meals. He had the condo's kitchen to himself.
He dumped his purchases on the kitchen table and began to cut up the vegetables for his stir-fry. While he was waiting for the rice to steam he tried to get some news on his landlady's old screen. All the stories looked very familiar. The only additions to the ones he'd heard on the subway were that a new serial killer seemed to be at large in the city, two senators were under indictment for embezzlement, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world had announced his plans to enter the priesthood, the President had received a ransom demand for his kidnapped press secretary and the time for the free-fire zone that the Law'n' Order Enforcers had announced for the Wall Street area had just expired, with only seven persons wounded. Nothing very interesting. Nothing about the possible bomb in the subway, even on the local menu; but then the services hardly bothered reporting that sort of thing anymore.
Stirring up the fry didn't take more than five minutes, but Rita Gammidge must have smelled it cooking from her room. 'Evening, Danny,' she said, appearing at the door as Dannerman was ladling it into his plate. 'Um. Do I smell chorro sausages in there?'
Rita Gammidge was his landlady. Tiny, old, white-haired, quick and inquisitive, she owned the duplex condo where Dan rented his room-well, his half a room, if you went by the original layout. The condo was a valuable piece of property, originally eight big rooms and three baths; but Dannerman knew that the condo was also about the only thing Rita had saved out of what must once have been a considerable fortune before she, and a lot of others, were wiped out in the Big Devaluation. Dannerman did what was expected of him. 'Join me,' he invited. 'There's plenty for two.'
She hesitated. 'If you're sure-?'
'I'm sure.' There was. There always was; the rents Rita collected were barely enough to keep her ahead of the taxes and the maintenance charges, and so he made a point of cooking enough for both of them. He knew that the other thing she wanted from him was his day's rent, so they settled that before they began to eat.
'The good news,' she said, ringing up her deposit, 'is today's inflation adjustment was only two per cent.'
He nodded, and remembered to tell her, 'There's other good news. I've got a new job.'
'Well, wonderful! Calls for a drink-let me supply the beer.' She had unlocked the fridge and brought out a bottle from her private stock-one half-liter bottle for the two of them to share-before she thought to ask, 'What was wrong with the job in import-export?'
'No future,' he said. As was usual with most of the things he told people about himself, the statement was true enough; whatever future there had been with the importers had vanished when the colonel ordered him to drop it and try to hook on with his cousin. 'The place I'm working for now is an astronomical observatory.'
'Oh, boy! What, do you think there's money in looking for Martians?'
'There aren't any Martians, Rita, and anyway that isn't what we do.' He explained to her, from his small and very recently acquired store of astronomical knowledge, that the Dannerman Observatory spent its time analyzing data about distant gas clouds and quasars, trying to puzzle out the origins of the universe. Then he had to explain why the observatory was called 'Dannerman.'
