trusted Bogdan. His grandfather had been the one who had tried to keep her own grandfather alive, in the camps of dreary memory. He had found the other zek children to guard her and wait on her-all descendants of men and women from the Gulag-Tamara, who was Bogdan's own niece, Yuri and Marisa from families his family and her own had known for generations. In the final analysis it was family that was important to Ukrainians-even to cosmopolitan Ukrainians like Rosaleen Artzybachova herself.
Except that to certain Ukrainians, the ones who wanted to regain for Ukraine the imperial status it had had under the Grand Duke Cyril, it was the nation that was important.
When, in April of 1986, the controllers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant managed to blow the thing up the resulting explosion spread a dusting of radioiodine, cesium-137 and hundreds of other radioactive isotopes over many thousands of square kilometers of the Ukraine and adjacent Belorussia. In much of that territory the human inhabitants stayed where they were, in spite of growing numbers of childhood cancers and shortened lives, because they had nowhere else to go. In the worst of it-the so-called 'evacuated zone'-the people were moved out, but their livestock, and the wild creatures who shared the space, remained. The animals didn't disappear. They suffered their own cancers and mutations, but, without a human population to hunt or exterminate them, they multiplied.
Rosaleen could not understand those people. To be Ukrainian, yes, that was a good thing; she felt that herself. To have lasting angers against the Russians, yes, that, too. From Soviet times, from czarist times before that, the Russians had shown contempt for Ukrainian customs, language-and people. (Who but the Russians would have sited that terrible Chernobyl plant where it could do so much harm?)
But to want to make Russia a mere province of a greater Ukraine, as in the long-forgotten (but evidently not by everyone) day of Cyril, that was simply insane.
Which did not mean that it wasn't real. If there was one thing about human nature that Rosaleen Artzybachova had learned in more than ninety years of life, it was that people frequently acted quite insane.
Rosaleen was just getting out of her after-exercise shower when she heard the excited voices from outside. She grabbed for a robe and was still tying the sash, dripping wet under the towel cloth, when she saw what was going on. Little Tamara was already in her fleece jacket, assault rifle in her hand, going out the door to take her post commanding the road; Yuri had turned the enabling switch for the mines buried under the pavement and had his hand hovering over the button.
What they were looking at, out the great picture window, was a little electric car whining up the grade. It was Bogdan's car, but there were more people than Bogdan in it. He had, Rosaleen observed without surprise, found more than an untapped phone. Marisa was scrutinizing it through her glasses. 'It's Bogdan driving,' she reported, 'but there are two other men and a woman in it. I know one of the men: Vassili. I don't know the others.'
'He's stopping,' Yuri said.
Marisa took the glasses away from her eyes to give him a nervous look. 'You're not detonating the mines, are you?'
Yuri didn't even look at her. He picked up the desk phone. 'Tamara? They're supposed to get out of the car there. Keep them covered.'
If Tamara answered, Rosaleen couldn't hear her; but what Yuri said was happening. The little car's doors opened and Bogdan and a woman got out, followed a moment later by the other two men, squeezing their way over the front seats to exit through the only doors the car had.
'I don't know them,' Marisa reported, and Rosaleen clenched her teeth.
'Give me the damn binoculars,' she ordered; and, when she had them to her eyes, studied the people carefully. Then she set the glasses down.
'I do,' she said. 'Two of them, anyway. Pat Adcock and Dan Dannerman. They were with me in captivity.'
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He was waiting for Hilda in her office when she got back from her five minutes with the deputy director: Lt. Col. Priam Makalanos, fifty-five years old but looking no more than mid-thirties, tall, solid, reliable, pulled in from a dirty job in Hanford, Washington, (but one he had been doing well) to become Hilda's new chief at Camp Smolley. Makalanos hadn't been in the top three of the candidates Personnel had offered her, but he had one big advantage over the others. As a brand-new agent he had been part of the team that Hilda had run in El Paso, cleaning up some smugglers of fake antibiotics.
Although Makalanos had had no more sleep than you could catch on a red-eye across the continent, he had already been out to Smolley on his own initiative and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he sat across from her. He'd done more than just visit, too. He'd brought back some samples. 'I understand there's a team meeting this morning,' he said, 'so I thought you might like to show these around.' He opened a duffel bag on the floor and pulled out a purplish metal object, hexagonal, the size of a hatbox, to put on Hilda's desk.
'It's one of the food containers,' she said.
'Yes, ma'am. This one's empty, and it's been cleaned and sterilized. And these are some of the drawings the Doc made. The things that are on the Starlab orbiter,' he added, pulling out a sheaf of papers.
Well, damn the man, Hilda thought, half-annoyed, half-proud of her choice; there was such a thing as almost too much initiative. But as she glanced through the papers pride won out over annoyance. They were wonderfully clear sketches of objects she didn't recognize but were clearly strange. 'Do we know what the things are?' she asked.
'Sort of, yes. I had the Dopey identify them, as much as he could.'
'Well-done,' she said. 'Now you'll need to familiarize yourself with the situation. When you get a chance, pull up the backgrounders on Camp Smolley and the whole Starlab business-' 'Already did, ma'am. I played them over on the flight.' 'Well,' she said, 'good for you. All right. The team people should
be getting together already, so you can take this stuff up there. I'll be there in a minute.'
Medical report
Food supplies of extraterrestrials
Classified
The food supplies consist of four items: a leafy vegetable, greenish yellow in color; a compressed bar, dark gray
