The Siege of Eternity by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312863753
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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."

106

"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 in appearance and with a high water content, apparently manufactured; another bar, greenish in color, circular in cross section and gelatinous in texture, also apparently manufactured; and a small quantity of brown powdery substance, perhaps used as a condiment. The two species of extraterrestrials apparently eat the same foods, though the "Docs" are not observed to consume the brown powdery substance and only infrequently the gelatinous bar.

Biochemical assays are under way, but are hampered by the fact that we have received only a gram or smaller quantities of each. Preliminary examination, following indications from the

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