There wasn't any name on that one, either, but there didn't need to be. No one called him by the code name 'Danno' but Colonel Hilda Morrisey.
A call from the colonel was not one he could answer on the open lines. Dannerman pulled down an old flatscreen converter from its place on his shelf and jacked it into his modem. Then he dialed the number he knew by heart. His screen instantly showed a bewildering fractal pattern of wedges and wriggling lines, until he cut in the 300-digit-prime synchronized-chaos decoder.
Then Colonel Hilda Morrisey was looking out at him, plump, dark, bright-eyed-just like always.
'Evening, Colonel honey,' he said.
She didn't acknowledge the greeting. She didn't waste time on congratulating him on getting the job, either. 'All right,' she said, 'cut the crap. Have you done your homework?'
'I sure have, Colonel honey, all you gave me, anyway. Star-lab went out a few years ago so the observatory applied for a repair mission to fix it. Naturally nothing happened. The red tape-'
'Don't tell me about the red tape.'
'Anyway, the application wasn't moving. There's no public support for space missions. Let's see, I think the latest polls show about seventy-four percent opposed to spending another dollar on it anywhere. How much of that is Bureau dirty tricks, do you suppose?'
'Never mind.'
'Anyway, now, all of a sudden, my cousin Pat got hot. She took the government to court, and she won, but it still don't move. So now she's doing a lot of wheeling and dealing on her own.'
'And spending serious money, right. Okay, look. I had hoped to have background checks for you on the people you'll be working with but, right now, with this President's press secretary thing, it's hard to get any action out of Washington. So far it looks like two of them are dirty-not counting your cousin. One's a bruiser named Mick Jarvas-'
'I've met the man.'
'He's a doper; that might be useful. He used to be a professional kick-boxer, now he's your cousin's bodyguard; he stays with her wherever she goes, so he knows what she does outside the office. The other one's a Chink named Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin. He's an astronaut, or was until the People's Republic privatized its space program and he went freelance. He got in some political trouble in the People's Republic, too, but I don't know exactly what yet. That's all I've got so far. Any questions?'
'Matter of fact I do have one, Hilda. Mind if I ask how the Carpezzio case is going?'
'You're not on the Carpezzio case anymore, Dannerman. That's just a routine drug bust and we'll handle that.'
'You shouldn't do it yet,' he said, as he'd said before-knowing that it was useless. 'If you'd just wait two weeks till the major guys from Winnipeg and Saginaw get in-'
'Can't do it. You're needed on this one.'
'But you'll just be getting low-level dummies-'
'Danno,' she sighed, 'are you empathizing again? You damn near blew the Mad King Ludwig operation because you didn't want to get your girlfriend Use in trouble.'
'She wasn't my girlfriend,' he protested. 'Exactly. I just thought she was basically a decent human being.' And, for that matter, the Carpezzios weren't that awful, either; sure, they sold drugs, but they were loyal to their people and he was going to miss some of those all-night parties in the loft with its constant aroma of room freshener and oregano that they hoped would keep any stray police dog from detecting the more interesting scents from their merchandise.
'Your kind heart does you credit, but forget it. What you're on now is a number-one priority from the director himself. Don't screw around with anything else, you hear? Check it out; see what you can get. And I want you to report in every night about this time.'
'You're not making it easy for me. Do you want to tell me what I'm looking for, exactly?'
'XT '
No.
'Come on, Colonel! How the hell can I do my job?' She hesitated. 'You might see if you can find out anything about gamma-ray emissions from the Starlab,' she said reluctantly.
'Gamma rays?'
'That's what I said. Don't use that term unless someone else uses it first.'
'Aw, Colonel, you don't give me much to go on.' 'I give you all I can. Tell you what, I'll see if they want to give me permission to tell you more. Now, get some sleep. You want to be fresh and pretty for your cousin tomorrow- and that reminds me, have you ditched that actress from Brooklyn yet? Well, do it. Your cousin likes men, and we want you concentrating on making her like you.'
CHAPTER FIVE
Dan
With Starlab out of action the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory didn't have a telescope of its own anymore; what it had was people. A lot of people. More than a hundred full-time scientific and clerical people worked there, with another twenty or thirty visiting astronomers, postdocs and slave-labor graduate students on and off the premises. That was good, for Danner-man's purposes; tradecraft said that the first thing you did in a new assignment was to let yourself be seen by as many people as possible so that they would get used to you, think of you as part of the furniture and accordingly pay no attention to you. On his first day in the new job he covered all the floors the observatory occupied, and was pleased to be generally ignored.
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
