Smith frowned at her, the rictus slowly deepening into a grimace of anger or frustration. His mood finally snapped like an overstretched rubber band: “Fucking morons!” He slumped into the chair behind his desk. “Siddown, Rita. I am”—he raised his hands—“so sorry I have to tell you this.”
“What?” She sat, bewildered. She’d been nerving herself for a grilling about Angie for the past seventy-two hours. Things weren’t as bad as they were during the crazy noughties, but there were still plenty of crazies willing to throw the Defense of Marriage Act in your face if you stood up to be counted. (Pro-marriage activists had moved on to trying to get the federal ban on sodomy laws revoked, now that they’d rolled back Roe v. Wade.) “Is it about my, uh, friend…”
Smith put her mind at ease: “Your new girlfriend isn’t an issue.” He waved a hand dismissively: “She held a Top Secret clearance back in the day. That ticks most of the boxes on the form. No, it’s the … it’s what Eileen was worrying about the day before yesterday. Too many chefs spoil the broth, and right now we’ve got sixteen different chiefs trying to run the kitchen. They can’t even agree on whether it’s sushi or McDonald’s.”
He pointed at the tablet on his desk stand: “O’Neill and Gomez had your third mission profile mapped out pretty much as I wanted it and we were ready to run you through it today. Then the shit hit the fan. From the Homeland Security Council, no less.” Smith’s frown turned thunderous, as if he were contemplating the wreckage of his midlife-crisis sports car, crumpled under the front fender of an uninsured pickup truck. “They’ve given me a Priority One tasking to look at the state of geological and paleontological research and confirm that BLACK RAIN was created in the Year of Our Lord 4004 B.C., just like our own time line.”
“Huh?”
“That’s not all.” Smith looked grim. “Additionally, you’re supposed to find evidence that BLACK RAIN has been visited by the Grays from Zeta Reticuli, and look for, uh, ‘flying saucer secrets.’ Someone else wants to know if the locals have located the Golden Plates of Moroni. Then there’s a request for information on the state of anthropogenic climate change in BLACK RAIN, and that one actually makes sense, except it contradicts Executive Order 4603 banning use of federal funds for research into … You get the picture.”
Rita closed her mouth. “What is this stuff?” she asked plaintively.
Smith rubbed his eyes and sighed. “It’s open season, or silly season, or both. We’ve unintentionally created a honeypot for excitable whackjobs of every creed, and they’re trying to piss all over the mission requirements with their own agendas.” He tapped his tablet again. “Case in point: there’s a Priority One tasking to locate the site of the Martian implant control station in upstate New York.”
Rita closed her mouth. She opened it, and closed it again, speechless.
“You get the picture. We’re in danger of turning into the ball in a psychoceramic football tournament.” He looked at her pensively. “You’re sure you’re not deeply religious, Rita? No terribly deep convictions about anything?”
“I was raised Lutheran, kinda-sorta.”
“Well, that’s something. At least you’re not going to turn missionary on me.” His smile was disturbingly weak.
She shrugged. “Is that sort of thing common?”
“More than you might think. More than one idiot used discretionary funds to pay for their church outreach program under the guise of running a string of informers.” Smith shook his head. “This game attracts kooks. Before my time, we used to have a real problem with swivel-eyed witch finders pointing and shrieking ‘Communist!’ back when there was a cold war to run. Then we went through the Great Muslim Panic—and look how well that turned out. Now we’ve got a multiverse to police, and no clear idea what’s going on out there. So people with a clear idea of what they want yell the loudest and set policy. And we end up with terms of reference that are total bullshit…”
Smith raised a hand, took two deep gulps of air, deflated visibly, and gave a quietly unhappy chuckle. “You didn’t hear this, Rita. You didn’t see me lose my shit. Understood?”
She nodded.
“I think you need to know about the shit-storm upstairs, even though Eileen and I are going to do our best to keep you sheltered under our umbrella. In case of emergency, if I’m incapacitated and you can’t contact anyone else, I’m going to send you a number in Baltimore that will put you through to Dr. Scranton or her boss. You get to use it once, no questions asked, and if someone is making trouble for you the White House will make them go away. But you only ever use it if you can’t reach me. For the time being”—he shrugged—“the overt mission and the covert mission are still in alignment, ‘kinda-sorta,’ as you young folks say. I’ve made you aware of the priorities of our lords and masters, so I can check that off my list. Now, back to work…”
He spun his tablet round so she could see it. “We punched another couple of micro-drones through, too small and too low to light up their air defense radar. There’s a city where Philadelphia is in this world, as you’d expect: it’s smaller and denser, with more high-rise buildings and less suburban sprawl, but it’s there. We’ve located a passenger railway station, too. These folks are big on public transport and streetcars, less so on automobiles. So we’re going to put you through a quarter hour before dawn, and you’re going to hang out and people-watch for a couple of hours. You’ll be carrying a military inertial nav system. It works like a handheld GPS map except it’s entirely self-contained, and we’ve filled it with lots of waypoints for safe jaunt sites. If there’s any trouble, you just run away. How long you stay there is up to you—it’s entirely up to your comfort zone—except the mapper only has a seven-day fuel cell charge. And we’d rather you came back the same day.”
“Wait, but what am I going to do for clothes? Money?” Rita stared at him. “How will I fit in?”