CHAPTER NINETEEN
There were about thirty new arrivals in the batch that had landed a half-hour or so earlier. Some of them were forming short lines to check in at registration desks set up in the lobby of the Admin Block while the rest stood around in scattered groups waiting for something to happen.
Her cowl of raven hair singled her out immediately. She was wearing slate-gray slacks that glistened where they caught the light, and a pale-blue lightweight jacket draped loosely over her shoulders. She seemed jauntily at ease as she stood apart from the throng, casually studying a wall chart showing orders of military rank and officers’ insignias. Dyer crossed the lobby and moved up quietly behind her.
“Welcome to China,” he said.
Laura stiffened as if a voice had just spoken to her out of a tomb. Her shoulders slowly squared themselves as she remained staring fixedly at the wall in front of her. She didn’t move for what seemed a long time, then turned her head a fraction.
“This isn’t happening,” she said.
“No,” Dyer agreed, standing with his hands on his hips and his weight on the balls of his feet, thoroughly enjoying himself. “You’re having an aural hallucination. This only looks like Fort Vokes. It’s really Peking.”
She turned around slowly to face him. Her eyes were wide and staring but already he could see the wheels turning behind them. Within seconds she had it all figured out. There was no need to say anything.
“You knew all the time!” she accused. “You . . . you . . . unspeakable wretch! You let me sit there making an idiot out of myself talking all that stuff about China. And all the time you knew more about what was going on than I did.”
Dyer nodded unhesitatingly on every point, all the time grinning like a Cheshire cat. Suddenly Laura was smiling too.
“It’s . . .” she shrugged helplessly, “. . . just great. All these months and I never really knew. They told us a lot about Janus and the reasons for it and all that, but nothing about the other people mixed up in it. I’m going to be working with a team of computer scientists. I was hoping you’d be a part of it. Are you?”
“I run it,” Dyer told her simply.
“Ray, that’s fantastic! It’ll be just like old times.”
“More so than you think. Chris and Ron are here. Kim’s here. Frank Wescott from CIT, whom you know about, is here. There are a few more that you probably haven’t heard of, but they’re all good people. It’s a great group.”
“Chris, Ron . . . Kim . . . ?” Laura looked at him in surprise. “They’re all here too? You mean the whole story about going on training with ISA was bogus?”
“Right,” Dyer told her. “Just like your China trip. Same reason.”
“So who’s running the unit . . . what’s left of it?”
“Oh, it’s under temporary management.”
“You left Al Morrow and Pattie there all on their own? Shame on you. Anything could happen.”
“They won’t have a chance to stray far with Betty around,” Dyer said. “I think she adopted them as her personal charges.”
At that moment a young corporal marched briskly in through the main door and came to a halt in the center of the waiting group.
“All new arrivals billeted in Hut Five,” he called in a loud voice. “Acknowledge your names please,” He proceeded to call out about half a dozen names from a list that he was carrying in his hand. Their owners responded in turn from various places around the lobby. The corporal folded the paper, tucked it into his shirt pocket and raised his head again.
“Follow me to the bus outside, please.” The half-dozen began moving toward the door. Dyer watched absently for a few seconds and then turned back toward Laura.
“Have you checked in yet?” he asked. She nodded and held up a yellow docket of the kind that was being handed out at the registration desks.
“I’m in Hut Three.”
“Where’s everybody’s baggage?”
“They told us it’d be taken straight on from the plane. All I’m waiting for is a bus, or whatever the Army uses instead.”
“Hut Three’s not far,” Dyer told her. “Come on and stretch your legs. I’ll walk you across.” They stopped at one of the desks to inform the clerk there that Laura had gone on ahead and wouldn’t be needing transportation, and then crossed the lobby and left through the main door, followed by a few curious looks from some of the new arrivals. Minutes later they were walking slowly along one side of the parade ground toward where Huts One through Four were clustered closely together between the gymnasium and the water tower.
“The first thing I knew about it was when one of the directors at Zeegram called me in and asked me if I’d be interested in going away for an unspecified period to do some secret job with the Government,” Laura said. “He didn’t know anything at all about what the job was, but apparently he’d been approached by someone in Washington who said that somebody somewhere had recommended me for it.”
Dyer smiled to himself but said nothing.
“Apparently the deal was that if Zeegram agreed to my vanishing for a while and didn’t ask any questions, they’d get all kinds of exclusive rights and publication privileges later when the security was lifted.”
“Which they obviously liked the sound of,” Dyer commented.
“Klaus never lets a chance go by,” Laura said. “Anyhow, a couple of days later this guy called me at home and said he wanted to talk to me in connection with the job. He wouldn’t give any name and wouldn’t say where he was calling from or who he was working for. Just ‘. . . could we meet and talk it over somewhere, maybe over lunch?’ Well, the whole thing was getting kind of weird by that time and I was pretty tempted to hang up . . .”
“But you were too curious,” Dyer guessed.
“Okay, so I’m curious. There are worse things to be.”
“So what did he tell you when you talked to him?” he asked.
“Not a darn thing! He asked all kinds of questions about my background and the kinds of jobs I’d had and that kind of stuff, and kept hinting at how important security was, but he wouldn’t come out in the open and say anything about what they wanted me to do . . . not even about what it was connected with. I was getting pretty mad at him at one point. Then I figured maybe he was trying to test me out or something so I calmed down again.”
Dyer laughed as he pictured it. If there was one thing that could be guaranteed to rouse Laura to a fury it was people being secretive.
“Well, to cut a long story short, I said I was interested. He went away and a day or two later this other guy and a woman showed up at my apartment to talk about it some more. They went as far as telling me that the requirement was for somebody to work as an observer with a scientific outfit in much the same kind of way as I’d been doing for Zeegram. That was why they thought I might be suitable. They couldn’t say at that point where this outfit would be located or what they’d be doing there. All they’d give was that it would mean spending an indefinite period at some remote place and without outside communications. Also that there could be considerable personal risk attached to it. I’d only be able to learn more after I’d signed all the official secret papers and decided I was in. After that there couldn’t be any out. If I changed my mind about going after I reached that point, I couldn’t be allowed out into the big world again until whatever it was was all over.” She gave a sigh of resignation and concluded. “So, here I am. There was no way I could say no after that buildup.”
“So who dreamed up the trip to China? Was that off the top of your head?”
“No. They had it all figured out as an airtight cover story and fixed up with Zeegram for them to back it up. It made me feel like one of those secret agents in the old movies.”
They turned onto the concrete path that led between the two pairs of huts. Short sets of wooden stairs led up to the hut doors on either side, each guarded by a coiled hose and a bright-red fire extinguisher.
“So they gave you a pretty good rundown on what Janus is all about, eh?” Dyer said as they stopped outside Hut Three. “You said once that you’ve always wanted to go up into space. I bet you never dreamed that when it happened, it would be on this kind of an escapade.”
“I bet you never dreamed you’d ever be on something like this either,” Laura replied. “Are you going to admit now that you were wrong?”
Dyer looked at her in sudden surprise. This was getting like old times again.
“Wrong about what?” he asked.
“Computers. You told me lots of times that there was nothing to worry about. If that’s true, what are we and all these fine people doing here?”
“Finding out whether or not there is something to worry about,” he said.
“You’re making it sound just like another experiment in one of your labs,” Laura told him. Her tone implied that she wasn’t letting him get away with trying to pass it off that casually. Dyer shrugged.
“It is. The lab’s a bit bigger than usual, that’s all.”
“Oh, come on, Ray!” At once her manner became openly challenging. “The whole thing is practically an admission that we’re on the verge of the biggest screw-up in the history of the human race, if it hasn’t happened already. Why else is everything being hushed up like this? They told us all about Maskelyne. Admit, it. Nobody knows if the world’s being taken over by a half-wit or not, and Janus is a last-ditch attempt to try and find some way of unscrambling the mess.”
She was doing it again. Dyer felt his emotional pressure gauge nudging into the red.
“That’s garbage!” he told her. “The purpose of Janus is to gather data—factual data. Sure, there are answers that we don’t have right now. No one’s trying to pretend that there aren’t. There will always be questions that can’t be answered right now. When it comes to the point where we need to know, we do the only thing that makes sense—we find a way to find the facts. The way to stop being scared of ghosts is to go out and look for ’em. That’s when you find out they only exist in your own head.”
“Uh uh. You’re selling science again,” Laura warned him.
“I’m selling common sense. Anyhow, they’re the same thing. The end-product of science is reliable information, in other words knowledge. The opposite of that is ignorance, which can’t solve anything.”
“Okay, okay.” Laura raised a hand as if to ward him off. “Our beautiful friendship only began again five minutes ago and I’m not going to argue, at least not for the rest of today. It looks as if we’re going to have plenty of time for all that fun later. Let’s call it a tie.”
Dyer’s mood evaporated abruptly. He grinned.
“Okay. You’re obviously intelligent enough to know deep down that I’m right anyway, so I’ll go along with a tie so you won’t lose face.” His body swayed back and easily evaded the short jab that she aimed at his ribs.
“The problem with all you scientists is that you’re always too proud to admit when you’ve goofed,” she retorted. “That’s bad. Pride always comes before a fall. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”
“And so does walking around with your eyes shut,” he answered.
Later that evening Laura joined the scientists for dinner. By a unanimous vote they decided to forego work for once and to get together for a social evening in the bar of the Officers’ Mess. Kim was very quiet and withdrawn and Dyer steeled himself inwardly to the thought that where women were concerned anything could happen. To his relief, however, Laura made no attempt to monopolize his company or to pin him down with conversation. In fact she spent most of her time joking with Chris and talking to people she hadn’t met previously, especially Frank Wescott and Fred Hayes. Either she was being discreet, Dyer decided, or her uncanny radar had sensed the situation within the first half-hour. By the end of the evening Kim was back to her normal self and joining in the fun; Dyer began feeling at ease again.
Afterward they went outside to watch the contingents departing for Janus lining up to board the transports that had been shuttling back and forth all day between Fort Vokes and Kennedy. Janus was already a functioning world and week by week its population was growing.
In less than a month it would be the scientists’ turn to go.