because she had nothing to say to either Pat or Dan and didn't want to hear any more of their questions. There was one good thing, she thought. There was at least a temporary hold to the D.D.'s little plan to anesthetize Dannerman and Adcock and then blandly hand Dr. Evergood the impeccably best 'signed' release the skilled forgers of Documents could produce. Maybe that hold would be permanent. Maybe even this baffling new development was going to confirm what Hilda had always known in her heart. Her own Dan Dannerman simply could not possibly have been turned or subverted. Oh, ' sure, the evidence had looked pretty bad, but that just meant the evidence had to be wrong. There had to be some other explanation.
Now it appeared that there was one-well, sort of an explanation, anyway-but who was going to explain this wholly incomprehensible explanation?
At the headquarters she wasted no time. She hustled the two of them into an elevator, down to the accommodations she had arranged for them. 'You can watch the news,' she said, 'or you can go to bed or you can do anything you like-except leave here. I'll see you in the morning.'
'Have a heart, Hilda!' Dannerman begged. 'I want to know what's happening!'
'So do I. Get some sleep. I've got work to do.'
I he truth, though, was that she didn't.
Everyone else did. Every other person she saw in the Bureau's underground fortress seemed not only to have something to do, but to be about thirty minutes late in getting it done and desperately trying to make up lost time, but not Hilda Morrisey. The last time she had seen the joint jumping like this had been when the President's press secretary got himself kidnapped and murdered-no, she corrected herself, not even then. That was just an ordinary kill; the only reason the Bureau got involved in it at all was because the President demanded it. What was going on now was-was-well, what was it, exactly? Weirdness, that's what it was. Unthinkably preposterous weirdness. But it happened to be real.
She couldn't find Marcus Pell or the director herself. She couldn't even find Daisy Fennell. They were certainly somewhere, on some level of the subterranean headquarters. No one seemed to know just where. More likely, Hilda thought bitterly, the ones who did know simply weren't telling. The topmost of the top brass were holed up somewhere, dealing with this new crisis as best they could, and they didn't want to be bothered with peons who would only get in the way.
Hilda Morrisey did not like being one of the peons.
The obvious place for them to be was the Communications Center. That was the first place Hilda looked, but when she had looked in every other place she could think of she went back there. At least there she could get some idea of what was happening, although what was happening seemed to be only that half the population of the planet Earth was asking questions that nobody here could answer. There were plaintive coded queries from the Bureau's field managers by the score. There were begging-or pleading, or sometimes demanding-transmissions from fifty or sixty of the friendlies, the other national intelligence agencies with which the Bureau maintained some sort of cooperative relationship. Then there were the heavy hitters, the question from the Senate and the House, from State and Defense, from the White House itself. . . not to mention the endless flurry of concerned citizens who somehow had learned the Bureau's least classified call codes and wanted to be informed. These last were the least bothersome. The only answers they got didn't come from a human being; they were computer-generated and all they said was, Regret have no further information at this time. Please watch your local newscasts. The other queries could not be brushed off so lightly. They took personal responses from some human being. Tending to them was what a large fraction of the Bureau personnel on duty were doing with their time, but though the responses were more elaborate, the information they contained was about the same.
But the little that was different about them was interesting. Hilda gleaned a fact here and a hint there and slowly pieced together a picture. Why had there been no further transmissions from this other Dan Dannerman? Because the Comm officer on duty had been bright enough and quick enough to send an instant narrow-beam order to this Dannerman on the satellite, telling him to shut up, do nothing, just wait there for further instructions. And a lucky thing that, for once, this other Dannerman had done exactly what he was told. . . .
There was a quick, breathy sound of surprise from the group clustered around one screen. They had heard something.
Half the Comm Center immediately dropped what they were doing to see what it was they had heard. 'It was a blip,' one of the technicians was saying excitedly. 'No, nothing more. Just one quick pulse, but it definitely came from Starlab. Direct? No, I guess they're somewhere out of sight in their orbit; it was relayed from Goldstone, but it was positively-Hey! There's another one!'
It wasn't one. It was two. Everyone heard them this time, and the screen showed them moving slowly across the field, two brightly jagged spikes. So Dannerman was communicating again, more or less.
That was enough for Hilda Morrisey.
She stood up, stretched, yawned and walked out of the Communications Center.
She knew what had happened, because it was what she would have done in the same case. What the closeted big brass had been doing was trying to figure some way of arranging a two-way conversation that the rest of the world couldn't hear. Apparently Starlab wasn't rigged for narrowcasting-well, it wouldn't matter if it were. Reporters weren't stupid, and they had resources of their own; undoubtedly there were forests of mobile antennae deployed all over Arlington, and probably all around Goldstone and the station on Wake and every other place where the Bureau might receive a signal. So they had worked out a simple code. The Bureau could ask a question, and Dannerman could answer by blipping his transmitter-something like one blip yes and two blips no-and maybe three blips for How the hell do you expect me to do THAT? But you had no hope of deciphering what the answers meant unless you knew what the questions had been.
She glanced at her watch. 0544. It would be daybreak in an hour or two, and she hadn't had sleep, shower or a change of clothing since she got out of the bed in her New York City apartment nearly twenty-four hours ago. The lack of sleep wasn't a big problem; the Bureau's standard-issue wakeup pills took care of it. The problem was something else. Surreptitiously she bent her head for a quick sniff at her armpit, envious of the crisp cleanliness of everyone around her. She knew why that was. They had all been able to take enough time off to get cleaned and changed. That was the way it was when you were headquarters-based, you kept spares of everything on hand in case of emergency. If she were to give up the struggle and let them hand her that damned promotion—
But that was out of the question. Hilda Morrisey didn't belong in this place. She was a field manager. She could make herself at home wherever the job took her, San Diego or New York, Berlin or Karachi. In those places she was the boss, and as long as her teams produced results nobody got in her thinning but still bravely blond hair. Here she was just one of a mob of fifty or sixty people of equivalent rank, with the top-heavy Bureau executive staff over them all.
Here, as a matter of fact, if anything she was in the way. But she couldn't leave. Not only was this whole business a puzzle that Hilda Morrisey didn't trust anyone but herself to solve, but it was her own agent who was at the core of it.
