Niels Sverenssen lay propped against the pillows in his executive-grade quarters at Giordano Bruno, watching the girl dress by the vanity on the far side of the room. She was young and quite pretty, with the clear complexion and open features typical of many Americans, and her loose black hair cut an intriguing contrast against her white skin. She should use the sunray facilities provided in the gymnasium more often, he thought to himself. As with most of her sex, her superficial layer of college-applied pseudointellectualism went no deeper than the pigment in her skin; beneath it she was as facile as the rest of them—a regrettably necessary but not unpleasant diversion from the more serious side of life. "You only want my body," they had cried indignantly down through the ages. "What else can you offer?" was his reply.
She finished buttoning her shirt and turned toward the mirror to run a comb hurriedly through her hair. "I know it’s a strange time to be leaving," she said. "Trust me to be on early shift this morning. I’m going to be late again as it is."
"Don’t worry about it," Sverenssen told her, putting more concern into his voice than he felt. "First things must come first."
She picked her jacket up off the back of a chair next to the vanity and slung it over her shoulder. "Have you got the cartridge?" she asked, turning back to face him.
Sverenssen opened the drawer of the bedside unit, reached inside, and took out a matchbook-size, computer micromemory cartridge. "Here. Remember to be careful."
The girl walked over to him, took the cartridge and folded it inside a tissue, then slipped it into one of the pockets of her jacket. "I will. When will I see you again?"
"Today will be very busy. I’ll have to let you know."
"Don’t make it too long." She smiled, stooped to kiss him on the forehead, and left, closing the door softly behind her.
Professor Gregor Malliusk, the Director of Astronomy at the Giordano Bruno observatory, was not looking pleased when she arrived in the main-dish control room ten minutes later. "You’re late again, Janet," he grumbled as she hung her jacket in one of the closets by the door and put on her white working coat. "John had to leave in haste because he’s going to Ptolemy today, and I’ve had to cover. I’ve got a meeting in less than an hour and things to do beforehand. This situation is becoming intolerable."
"I’m sorry, Professor," she said. "I overslept. It won’t happen again." She walked quickly across to the supervisory console and began going through the routine of calling up the night’s status logs with deft, practiced movements of her fingers.
Malliusk watched balefully from beside the equipment racks outside his office, trying not to notice the firm, slim lines of her body outlined by the white material of her coat and the raven black curls tumbling carelessly over her collar. "It’s that Swede again, isn’t it," he growled before he could stop himself.
"That’s my business," Janet said without looking up, making her voice as firm as she dared. "I’ve already said—it won’t happen again." She compressed her mouth into a tight line and stabbed savagely at the keyboard to bring another screen of data up in front of her.
"The check correlation on 557B was not completed yesterday," Malliusk said icily. "It was scheduled for completion by fifteen hundred."
Janet hesitated from what she was doing, closed her eyes momentarily, and bit her lip. "Damn!" she muttered beneath her breath, then louder, "I’ll skip break and get it done then. There’s not a lot of it left."
"John has already completed it."
"I’m. . . . sorry. I’ll do an extra hour off his next shift to make up."
Malliusk scowled at her for a few seconds longer, then turned on his heel abruptly and left the control room without saying anything more.
When she had finished checking the status logs, she switched off the screen and walked over to the transmission subsystem cornmunications auxiliary processor cabinet, opened a cover panel, and inserted the cartridge that Sverenssen had given her into an empty slot. Then she moved around to the front of the system console and ran through the routine of integrating the contents of the cartridge into the message buffer already assembled for transmission later that day. Where the transmission was intended for she didn’t know, but it was part of whatever had brought the UN delegation to Bruno. Malliusk always took care of the technical side of that personally, and he never talked about it with the rest of the staff.
Sverenssen had told her that the cartridge contained some mundane data that had come in late from Earth for appending to the transmission that had been already composed; everything that went out was supposed to be approved formally by all of the delegates, but it would have been silly to call them all together merely to rubber-stamp something as petty as this. But a couple of them could be touchy, he had said, and he cautioned her to be discreet. She liked the feeling of being confided in over a matter of UN importance, even if it had only to do with some minor point, especially by somebody so sophisticated and worldly. It was so deliciously romantic! And, who knew? From some of the things that Sverenssen had said, she could be doing herself a really big favor in the long run.
"He is a guest here, like the rest of you, and we have done our best to be accommodating," Malliusk told Sobroskin later that morning in the Soviet delegate’s offices. "But this is interfering with the observatory’s work. I do not expect to have to be accommodating to the point of having my own work disrupted. And besides that, I object to such conduct in my own establishment, particularly from a man in his position. It is not becoming."
"I can hardly intervene in personal matters that are not part of the delegation’s business," Sobroskin pointed out, doing his best to be diplomatic as he detected more than merely outraged propriety beneath the scientist’s indignation. "It would be more appropriate for you to try talking to Sverenssen directly. She is your assistant, after all, and it is the department’s work that is being affected."
"I have already done that, and the response was not satisfactory," Malliusk replied stiffly. "As a Russian, I wish my cornplaint to be conveyed to whichever office of the Soviet Government is concerned with the business of this delegation, with the request that they apply some appropriate influence through the UN. Therefore I am talking to you as the representative here of that office."
Sobroskin was not really interested in Malliusk’s jealousies, and he didn’t particularly want to stir up things in Moscow over something like this; too many people would want to know what the delegation was doing on Farside in the first place, and that would invite all kinds of questions and poking around. On the other hand, Malliusk obviously wanted something done, and if Sobroskin declined there was no telling whom the professor might be on the phone to next. There really wasn’t a lot of choice. "Very well," he agreed with a sigh. "Leave it with me. I’ll see if I can talk to Sverenssen today, or maybe tomorrow."
"Thank you," Malliusk acknowledged formally, then marched out of the office.
Sobroskin sat there thinking for a while, then reached behind himself to unlock a safe, from which he took a file that an old friend in Soviet military intelligence had sent up to Bruno unofficially at his request. He spent some time thumbing through its contents to refresh his memory, and as he thought further, he changed his mind about what he was going to do.
There were a number of strange things recorded in the file on Niels Sverenssen—the Swede, supposedly born in Malmo in 1981, who had vanished while serving as a mercenary in Africa in his late teens and then reappeared ten years later in Europe with inconsistent accounts of where he had been and what he had been doing. How had he suddenly reemerged from obscurity as a man of considerable wealth and social standing with no record of his movements during that time that could be traced? How had he established his international connections without it being common knowledge?
The pattern of womanizing was long and clear. The affair with the German financier’s wife was interesting . . . with the rival lover who had publicly sworn vengeance and then met with a skiing accident less than a month later in dubious circumstances. A lot of evidence implied people had been bought off to close the investigation. Yes, Sverenssen was a man with connections he would not like to see aired publicly and the ruthlessness to use them without hesitation if need be, Sobroskin thought to himself.
And more recently—within the last month, in fact—why had Sverenssen been communicating regularly and secretly with Verikoff, the space-communications specialist at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow who was intimately involved with the top-secret Soviet channel to Gistar? The Soviet Government did not comprehend the UN’s apparent policy but it suited them, and that meant that the existence of the independent channel had to be concealed from the UN more than from anybody else; the Americans had doubtless deduced what was happening, but they were unable to prove it. That was their loss. If they insisted on tying themselves down with their notions of fair play, that was up to them. But why was Verikoff talking to Sverenssen?
And finally, in years gone by Sverenssen had always been a prominent figure in leading the UN drive for strategic disarmament, and a champion of world-wide cooperation and increased productivity. Why was he now vigorously supporting a UN policy that seemed opposed to seizing the greatest opportunity the human race had ever had to achieve those very things? It seemed strange. Everything to do with Sverenssen seemed strange.
Anyhow, what was he going to do about Malliusk’s assistant? She was an American girl, Malliusk had said. Perhaps there was a way in which be could clear this irritating business up without inviting Sverenssen’s close attention at a time when he was particularly anxious to avoid it. Their national loyalties aside, he admired the way in which Pacey had continued battling to promote his country’s views after Heller left, and he had got to know the American quite well socially. In fact it was a shame in some ways that over this particular issue the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. were not together on the same side of the table; at heart they seemed to have more in common with each other than with the rest of the delegation. Very probably it wouldn’t make much difference for a lot longer anyway, be admitted to himself. As Karen Heller had said on one occasion, it was the future of the whole race they should be thinking about. As a man he tended to agree with her; if the contact with Gistar meant what he thought it meant, there would be no national differences to worry about in fifty years’ time, nor maybe even any nations. But that was as a man. In the meantime, as a Russian, he had a job to do.
He nodded to himself as he closed the file and returned it to the safe. He would talk to Norman Pacey and see if Pacey would talk to the American girl quietly. Then, with luck, the whole thing would resolve itself with no more than a few ripples that would soon die away.