The Siege of Eternity

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—