The Siege of Eternity

Rank helped. The Bureau's housing office was eager to serve a brigadier. They quickly pulled three possible apartments for her out of the databank, and she signed herself out on personal time to look them over. The first was good. The second was better. The third was perfect. They called it a "studio," but it had a Jacuzzi and a balcony and, if you stood just right, even a view of the distant Potomac River. And it had a fine, strong bed, easily large enough for two persons who were on friendly terms. And, of course, when and if some other person might occasionally share it with her they would definitely be friendly indeed.

'hen she slipped in to take her seat at the team meeting the man from the Naval Observatory was talking about the comet-like object from space that might, or might not, have been the mother ship that delivered the pod that contained the equipment that let the Scarecrows take over Starlab. Hilda didn't listen very attentively. She was thinking of where one might best look for that suitable other person, and of whether the doorman would remember all the instructions she had given him about the personal stuff that would be coming from her New York pad by Bureau courier. She nudged the man next to her and pointed to the coffee pitcher. It wasn't until he had passed it to her with a wry look that she realized he was a new face on the team.

His name was Harold Ott. He was the Bureau's number two electronics nerd, and no friend of Hilda Morrisey's. It was Ott's disdainful opinion that flesh-and-blood agents were the hard way to obtain intelligence that could be got a lot more easily with one of his surveillance tools. Though wrong-headed, of course, the man did know his stuff. But what did his stuff have to do with the Ananias team?

He didn't seem any more interested in what the astronomer was saying than Hilda herself. Ott had his screen up and was idly playing with it. Doing what Hilda could not tell, because he had the privacy flaps up. He seemed to be waiting for something.

So was Daisy Fennell, in the chair. She was nodding absently as the astronomer complained that, although they had identified the object on its approach, no one had been paying much attention to it. Therefore, they had a very incomplete orbit and had not succeeded in tracking its subsequent course. Which would in any case be difficult, since it seemed to have been a powered, rather than a ballistic, flight. "Yes, well, thank you," Fennell said. "Now let's hear from Dr. ben Jayya-" And there was another new face at the table.

It might have been better, Hilda thought, to have done her apartment hunting on a different morning, since she'd missed all the introductions. As unobtrusively as she could she popped her own screen and did some hunting. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked at the doctor with more interest. Dr. Sidoni ben Jayya was a biochemist, and he had just been coopted to the team from his regular base of operations.

Which was Camp Smolley.

That made Hilda sit up. She had never visited Camp Smolley, but she knew what it was about. So did everybody in the Bureau, though not too many civilians did. Camp Smolley was biowar! And what the hell did that have to do with the Ananias team?

Camp Smolley began its existence as a top-secret research facility for the development of biological weapons. When the United States signed on to the treaty banning these, it continued its activities as a top-secret laboratory for developing defenses against biowar. When some busybodies in the Congress thought that was too close to actually making the things, it switched its efforts over to general biochemical research-most of them, anyway. In the change it was administratively reassigned to the NBI, and the Bureau found some uses for its skills it did not think necessary to report to Congress.

As it turned out, plenty. All three of the weird space cratures had been moved there. "For maximum security," he explained, "and for convenience in research. Our primary concern at the moment is feeding them, and so we have been analyzing some of the food canisters that they brought from Starlab."

That made sense to Hilda. There weren't many biolaboratories better equipped than Camp Smolley's, and certainly none that was easier to keep private from the outside world. However, the problem of extraterrestrial nutrition was not a subject that interested Hilda a lot, and her attention began to wander again.