happening?' Delasquez asked irritably.
The woman from the controller's staff was already answering hers, and when she turned to look at them her face was pale. 'That object that was approaching Earth? It is a spacecraft. It has been observed to make a burn, and its new course will impact the Earth.'
The cheese boards sat abandoned on every table, rounds of perfect Camembert, slabs of bleu and Brie.
There was no one left in the room to eat them. Everyone had flown to the briefing room, where Colonel duValier had a phone to his ear and an eye on the wall screen.
Hilda stared at the pictures. After all the searching, not one of Earth's giant telescopes had had its instruments bearing on the incoming object. That was left to the smaller ones, and so they had been the ones that were dazzled when the object emitted a stream of fire. Beside her Martin Delasquez muttered something in Spanish, but when she asked he said it in English for her benefit. 'It is a braking burn,' he said. 'They are preparing for reentry.'
'But what is it?' someone asked. No one tried to answer. Everyone was thinking the same thoughts, though, for they had all heard the stories the captives brought back of Scarecrow vengeance that dropped KT-type asteroids on the planets of their enemies, wiping them out as thoroughly as the sixty-five-million-year-old impact not far from where they were standing had wiped out the dinosaurs.
Hilda could not help a small shudder. Then someone cried, 'Look at the other screen!'
It was displaying a series of numbers-orbital elements, Hilda supposed, though the digits meant nothing to her. Then the screen provided a graphic, a globe of the Earth, with a great oval of pink light overspreading a west-to- east area from Baja California almost to the African coast.
'That is its landing footprint,' Delasquez said tautly. 'When it makes final course corrections it can strike anywhere in that area. If you notice, we are inside it here in Kourou.'
Everyone in the room had noticed that. Colonel duValier was gabbling with the controllers. Then, grim-faced, he seized the microphone.
'It is my belief,' he said, his voice taut and his accent thickening, 'that these Scarecrows are aiming this missile directly at us in order to keep us from accomplishing our launch to the Starlab orbiter. I do not intend to let them do that. Our next launch window is in eighteen minutes; we can't make that one, but we can make the one after that. I order refueling topped off and the alien creature to be brought aboard. It is now a little after thirteen hundred hours local time; the remainder of the crew will board the spacecraft by fourteen ten, for possible liftoff at fourteen fifty-seven.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Even a Bureau agent was entitled to an afternoon off now and then. Once Dannerman had supervised the changing of shifts for the guards at the Observatory and the apartment, and the other guard at the hospital where poor Pat Five was flat on her back in the ob-gyn wing, he was free for personal business.
Which, of course, was Anita Berman. He met her for a pleasant, if inexpensive, lunch not far from his room in Rita Gammidge's condo, and when he suggested they go up to his place afterward she was not surprised.
The landlady popped out of her own room to see who was coming into her condo in the middle of the day, but when she saw Anita she smiled and closed the door. Then Dannerman and Anita did what they had come there to do; and that went well, too. Then, satisfied, they lay spooned in the bed, Dannerman's arm over her, his face in the sweet, red hair at the nape of her neck. He was quite content. When she spoke he didn't hear her at first, she spoke so softly. 'I said,' she repeated, 'what happens next?'
'Oh,' he said. He stretched, yawned and tried to collect his thoughts. 'Well, I guess I kind of get back to my life. I'm still waiting for the damn payroll people to clear my status, now that there are two of me. The big problem is-'
But it wasn't Dannerman's file and pension account she wanted to talk about. She said, 'That isn't what I meant. I meant, what happens next with us?'
'Oh,' he said again, suddenly thoughtful. He readjusted his mind. He had been asked that 'what about us?' question more than once before, by more than one other young woman. When you decoded it, it usually turned out to mean, 'Are we going to get married?'
All the other times he had been asked that question the answer had been pretty much out of his control, often enough because the woman who asked it happened to be a suspect in his ongoing mission. But now..
She wasn't waiting for his answer. She had something else on her mind. 'Listen,' she said tentatively, 'there's something I didn't tell you.'
Oh, hell, he thought, because he could decode that one, too; it meant a lot of things, and one of them might be that another man had suddenly appeared in her life.
But not this time. 'Dan,' she said, 'have you ever thought of leaving the Bureau?'
He propped himself up to look at her, honestly puzzled. 'And do what?'
'Well, I always had the idea that you really wanted to be an actor. Am I wrong?'
That came right out of left field. Be an actor? He'd certainly thought about it, especially while he was taking all those drama courses in college. It had been a sort of dream-time thought, the way he'd also now and then thought about how nice it would be to win the Olympic decathlon or run for President. It was a daydream and not at all realistic…
No, that wasn't true anymore. It hadn't been realistic before because of his job. The Bureau wouldn't let him go public as an actor. By definition actors were there to be seen, while a Bureau agent's chief asset was his invisibility.
Uncle Cubby financed Dan Dannerman's education right through graduate school, whence he emerged with a doctorate in theater arts-just in time to be called up for active duty from the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps he had ill-advisedly joined as an undergraduate. Working for the Bureau didn't end his interest in theater, it just made it hard to do anything about it… until he was assigned to a drug case in New York City, and found the Off- Off-Off Broadway Theater Aristophanes Two, and the girl named Anita Herman who acted in it.
But he wasn't invisible anymore. That had been taken care of by the Scarecrows.
'If I quit,' he said thoughtfully, 'I'd be able to collect all my back pay. I guess I'd have to split with the other guy, but there should be enough there to live on, maybe.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Well, they don't pay much at Theater Aristophanes Two-'
'Oh, Dan! Who said anything about Theater Aristophanes Two? Do you know who Ron Zigler is?'
'The producer?'
'Yes, the producer. He came backstage at the theater the other night and he wanted to talk to me. Did you ever hear of Star Trek!'
'Star Trek?' Dannerman tracked down an old memory. 'Oh, sure. Back in-what was it, the 1980s? Uncle Cubby was a Trekkie when he was a kid; that's what got him into the astronomy business.'
Anita frowned. 'Trekkie? What's that? Never mind; the thing is, Zigler wants to do a remake of Star Trek. He's got a script, with the Scarecrows in it and everything, and he's casting. The thing is,' she said, clearing her throat, 'Zigler's been trying to get in touch with you, either of you, but the Bureau won't pass his messages on. He wants you for Captain Kirk. That's the lead part, in case you didn't know.' Dannerman stared at her. She stood up, beginning to dress. 'He said there'd be a part in it for me, too, if he could get you for the Kirk role,' she finished, sounding embarrassed and defensive, 'but that's my problem, not yours. Think about it, will you? Now, which way is that bathroom of yours?'
When Anita was gone Dannerman pulled his own clothes on, thinking.
Too much was happening. Never mind the fact that there were two of him, never mind the Scarecrows, never mind any of those great events that were screwing up the lives of everybody in the world. The things that were happening in his own personal world were already more than he knew how to handle. Acting? A starring part?-and
