'Yes, I thought you would. Well, when Hilda comes back I'll have her take you down to the shop and they'll remove it.... Excuse me.' There had been an inaudible signal; Pell lifted his phone to his ear. He listened for quite a long time, spoke briefly-Pat couldn't make out a word-and listened again. When he was through he looked up at them.
'Well,' he said, sounding pleasantly surprised, 'sometimes you get lucky when you least expect it. The Cape's socked in-thunderstorms, high winds; the weather's going to persist for a couple of days at least. So they can't land there. That's good; the last thing we want is to get the Floridians involved in this.'
'So where will they land?'
'That's the question, isn't it? They're working on it. Meanwhile, the President has warned everybody, especially the damn Europeans, that Starlab is U.S. property and anyone who attempts to board it risks being shot at.'
Pat stared at him blankly. 'Shot at? What with?'
Pell said comfortably, 'I always knew some of those old Star Wars orbiters might come in useful someday. There are two of them that still have some navigation capacity. They're in the wrong part of the orbit, but the guys in Houston are working on moving them into position even as we speak. Of course the Europeans and the Chinese and so on know that. So we can leave it alone for a while, and right now the first thing we're going to do is to get that party of nine down-and there are some surprises there. They're not all human, you see.'
'Not all human?'
'That's what Dannerman says, yes. He said a lot of other stuff, too-until we told him to shut up, even in code, and report in full once he's landed.' He hesitated. 'One thing, though. You're an astronomer, Dr. Adcock. Have you ever heard of somebody named Frank Tipler?'
'Tipler?' She frowned. 'I think I might've heard the name-'
'He was some kind of astronomer, too. Late twentieth century. We retrieved all we could find about him from the bank, but the only interesting thing was that he wrote a book once about how Heaven was astronomically real.'
'Oh, right,' Pat said, tracking down a faint recollection. 'I remember hearing something about him-maybe in grad school? It sounded pretty silly to me. What does Tipler have to do with all this?'
'That's what I'd like to know. Dannerman-the other Dannerman, I mean-said we should look him up. If I get you access to the network, can you do the Bureau a favor and see what you can find?'
· or Dr. Patrice Adcock the worst thing
about jail was having nothing to do-this woman who had never before in her life found herself with nothing to do. Now things were looking up. She wasn't in jail anymore and, better still, she had a job to do that she was good at.
It took Pat an impatient half hour's waiting to get access to Bureau's databank-no, not the classified databank, of course, but to the one that accessed most of the country's libraries. Then it took a while longer to get used to the Bureau's procedures. She found the American Men of Science entry for Dr. Frank Tipler quickly and began sorting through some of the sources cited. She hardly noticed when Dannerman was back, collarless and occasionally touching his now bare neck to remind himself of the change. That Colonel Hilda Morrisey came in with him.
'New orders, Dr. Adcock,' Morrisey said cheerfully. 'We're all going for a little ride tonight. The people from Starlab are coming down, and we're going to meet them.'
CHAPTER SIX
Dan Dannerman had never been in the deputy director's plane before. In spite of himself, he was impressed. It wasn't one of those custom-converted thousand-seat leviathans, like the President's Air Force One, but those few who had experienced both reported that it was just as luxurious. Dannerman and Pat Adcock were even given a private compartment of their own. Their little cubicle wasn't as fancy as the room Colonel Hilda had appropriated for her own use, and certainly it was nothing like the four-room private suite belonging to the D.D. himself, but it definitely was not shabby. It had full electronics. It had cut flowers floating in a sort of fishbowl, a pair of screens, a call button for one of the police-cadet flight attendants, even two pullout beds neatly made up in case they wanted to sleep on the way-on the way to wherever they were going, because neither Pat nor Dannerman had been given the word on where that might be.
Dannerman had lost his sense of time. Somehow a whole day had got away from him, all spent on waiting. After the long wait time while the deputy director got his ducks in order there was the waiting for the Bureau's sniffer squads to finish their routine inspections-you never knew where someone might sneak in a bomb. It was full dark again by the time they took off.
Dannerman saw Pat cast one yearning look at the beds, but then she resolutely turned her back on them. She had no time to sleep because she was busy at one of the screens, checking databases for information on the Tipler person for the deputy director. Dannerman wasn't sleeping, either, but the reason was different. The prospect of seeing this man who claimed to use his own name and spoke with his own voice had pumped him full of adrenaline. He used his screen on and off, sometimes to kill time by watching news summaries, sometimes to try to find answers to some of the questions that inflamed his thoughts. Perhaps some of the answers were there, but Dannerman didn't have enough clearance to penetrate these particular systems.
He was seriously considering trying out one of the beds after all when Pat made a small grunt of conditional satisfaction. She sat back, watching the printer squirt out hard copy.
'Did you find what you wanted?' Dannerman asked.
'I hope,' she said, standing up, evidently getting ready to take the printout to Marcus Pell. 'It's weird. You can read it for yourself on the screen.'
'Weird how?'
But she was gone. He shifted to her seat and scrolled the screen, beginning to read.
Dr. Frank Tipler was a highly respected cosmologist until he published the book called The Physics of Immortality. In it Tipler predicted that the universe, currently expanding, sooner or later would fall back to what is called 'the Big Crunch,' reproducing the conditions of the Big Bang, but in reverse. At that time, Tipler said,
