Chapter 1

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.”

He held up the “flashlight.”

“Now they’ll stellarfax plans of this out to Antares to our field agents. After one is made and smuggled in to our case, all they have to do is run in a fast ship to pick him up when he breaks out.”

“Speaking of that gadget,” Simonetta suggested, “why don’t you take it down to Mr. Smith? He must be waiting out the message in the com room.”

Westervelt agreed. He took the package and the envelope of blueprints, and walked into the hall. He turned first to his right, along the base of the U-shaped corridor, then to his left after passing the door to the fire stairs at the inner corner and the private entrance to Smith’s office opposite it.

The walls were covered by a gray plastic that was softly monotonous in the light of the luminous ceiling. The floor, nearly black, was of a springy composition that deadened the sound of footfalls.

Along the wing of the “U” into which he turned, Westervelt passed doors to the department’s reference library and to a conference room on his right, and portal marked “Shaft” on his left. Beyond the latter was a section of blank wall behind which, he knew, was a special shaft for the power conduits that supplied the department’s own communications instruments.

The place was a self-sufficient unit, he reflected. It had its own TV equipment and a sub-space radio for reaching far-out spaceships, although most routine traffic was boosted through relay stations on the outer planets of the Solar System.

Some lines of communication with the field agents were tenuous, but messages usually got through. If the lines broke down, someone would be sent to search the confidential files for a roundabout connection.

I wonder how many of us would wind up in court if those files became public knowledge? thought Westervelt. I’d like to see them trying to handle Smitty! Nobody here can figure him out all the time, and we’re at least half as nutty as he is.

Down beside the communications room, though normally reached by the other wing of the corridor that enclosed the core of elevators, shafts and rest rooms, the department even had a confidential laboratory. Actually, this was more in the nature of a stock room for peculiar gadgets and implements used for the fell purposes of the organization. Westervelt did not like to wander about in there, for fear of setting something off. It was more or less the domain of the one man in the department whom he knew to have been in an alien prison.