At the ninety-fifth floor, Westervelt left the public elevator for
a private automatic one which he took four floors further. When he
stepped out, the dark, lean youth faced an office entrance whose
double, transparent doors bore the discreet legend: "Department 99."
He crossed the hall and entered. Waving at the little blonde in the
switchboard cubby to the right of the doorway, he continued a few steps
into the office beyond. Two secretaries looked up from the row of desks
facing him, a third place being unoccupied. Behind them, long windows
filtered the late afternoon light to a mellow tint.
"Did you get it all right, Willie?" asked the dark girl to his left.
"Mr. Smith wants you to take it right in. He expected you earlier."
"My flight from London was late; I did the best I could after we
landed," said Westervelt. "It took me the whole day to fetch this
gadget. At least let me get my coat off!"
He moved to his right, to a modest desk in an alcove formed by the end
of the office and the high partition that enclosed the switchboard.
"How do you find yourself inside that?" asked the other secretary, a
golden haired girl with a lazy smile. "Talk about women's clothes! The
men are wearing topcoats like tents this year."
Westervelt felt himself flushing, to his disgust. He struggled out of
the coat, removed an oblong package and a large envelope from inner
pockets, and tossed the coat on his desk.
It had hardly settled before the door at the opposite end of the
office, beyond the dark girl, was flung open. From the next room
lumbered a man who looked even lankier than Westervelt because he was
an inch or two over six feet tall. His broad forehead was grooved by a
scowl of concentration that brought heavy eyebrows nearly together over
a high-bridged nose. His chin seemed longer for his chewing nervously
upon his lower lip. He was in shirtsleeves and badly needed a haircut.
"I'm going down to the com room, Miss Diorio," he told the brunette.
"There's another weird report coming in!"
He vanished into the hall with a clatter.
His secretary looked at Westervelt, a smile tugging at the corners of
her full lips. She threw up her hands with a little flip.
"I told you to take it right in," she reminded him.
"Aw, come on, Si! What if I'd been in the doorway when he came through?"
"What is it, anyway?" asked the other girl.
Westervelt looked around as she rose. Beryl Austin, he thought, would
be a knockout if only there were less of a hint of ice about her. She
was, in her high heels, only an inch shorter than he. Her face was
round, but with a delicate bone structure that lent it an odd beauty.
Westervelt was privately of the opinion that she spoiled the effect by
wearing her hair in a style too short and too precisely arranged. _And
too bleached_, he told himself.
The talk was that before coming to the Department, she had won two or
three minor beauty contests. That might explain the meticulous make-up
and the smart blue dress that followed the curves of her figure so
flatteringly. Westervelt suspected, from hints dropped by Simonetta
Diorio, that this was insufficient qualification for being a secretary,
even in such a peculiar institution as Department 99. Of course, maybe
Smith had ideas of making her a field agent.
He held out the package in the palm of his hand.
"They said at the London lab that it was a special flashlight that
would pass for an ordinary one."
"Oh, the one for that Antares case," exclaimed Beryl. "Si was telling
me how they'll send out plans of that. Did they show you how it works?"
"It gives just a dim beam until you press an extra switch," said
Westervelt. "Then it puts out a series of dashes bright enough to hurt
your eyes."
"What in the world do they want that for?" asked Beryl.
"What in some other world, you mean! On some of these planets, the
native life is so used to a dim red sun that a flash like this on their
sensitive eyes can knock them unconscious."
"This place is just full of dirty tricks like that," said the blonde.
"Why can't they free these people some other way?"
Westervelt and Simonetta looked at each other. Beryl had been in the
Department only a few weeks, and did not yet seem to have heard the
word.
_Or understood it, maybe_, thought Westervelt. _She might not look half
so intelligent without that nice chest expansion._
"Some of them just get in trouble," Simonetta was saying. "The laws of
alien peoples we've been meeting around the galaxy don't necessarily
make sense to Terrans."
"But why can't they stay away from such queer places?"
"What would you do," asked Westervelt, "if you were in a spaceship that
blew up near a strange planetary system, and you took an emergency
rocket to land on the best looking planet, and the local bems arrested
you because they have a law against anyone passing through their system
without special permission?"
"But how can they make a law like that?" demanded Beryl.
"Who says they can't? They had a war with beings from the star nearest
them; and wound up suspicious of every kind of spaceship. We have a
case like that now."
"They've been working on it two months," Simonetta confirmed. "Those
poor men were jailed over a month before anybody even heard about them."
Beryl shrugged and turned back to her desk. Westervelt watched her
walk, thinking that the rear elevation was good too, until it occurred
to him that Simonetta might be taking in his expression. The blonde
settled herself and leaned back to stretch. He was willing to bet ten
credits that she did it just to get his goat.
"Well, the work is interesting," Beryl admitted, "but I don't see why
it can't be done by the Department of Interstellar Relations. The
D.I.R. has trained diplomats and knows all about dealing with aliens."
"Come on, now, dear!" said Simonetta. "Where do you think your paycheck
originates? Publicly, the D.I.R. doesn't like to admit that we exist.
To hide the connection, they named us after the floor we're on in this
building, and hoped that nobody would notice us."
"I knew I was getting into something crooked!" exclaimed Beryl.
"It depends," said Westervelt. "Suppose some Terran spacer is slung
into jail out there somewhere, for something that would never be a
crime in the Solar System. The D.I.R. protests, and the bems simply
deny they have him. How far can diplomacy go? We try getting him out
some other way."