Eschaton 01 The Other End of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  "Nephew," Dannerman admitted. "Mr. Dixler made an appointment for me to see Dr. Adcock."

  "Yes, sir," the guard said, suddenly deferential. "I'll have to ask you to wait over there until someone can show you to Dr. Adcock's office. It'll just be a moment."

  It wasn't just a moment, though. Dannerman hadn't expected that it would be. The observatory's private elevator doors opened and closed a dozen times before a large, sullen man came out and lumbered over to the holding pen. He was not deferential at all. "You the guy from Dixler, J. D. Dannerman? Show me some ID." He didn't offer to shake hands. When he had checked the card he passed Dannerman through the turnstiles and into an elevator, and only then introduced himself. "I'm Mick Jarvas, Dr. Adcock's personal assistant. Give me your gun."

  Dannerman took his twenty-shot from his shoulder holster and passed it over. "Do I get a receipt?"

  The man looked at the weapon with contempt. "I'll remember where I got it, don't worry. Who's this Dixler?"

  "Family lawyer."

  "Huh. Okay. Wait here. Janice'll tell you when you can go in." That ended the conversation, and Dannerman was left to sit in the waiting room. It didn't bother him. It gave him a chance to see what a modern astrophysical observatory was like. This one wasn't like the mountaintop domes he remembered from his childhood. It was full of people glimpsed down corridors, elderly men talking to young dark-skinned women in saris, groups drinking Cokes or herbal tea out of the machines, a couple of people sharing the waiting room with him and improving their waiting time by talking business on their pocket phones. What interested him most was the big liquid-crystal screen behind the receptionist's desk. It was showing a great pearly mural that he recognized as a picture of a galaxy, some galaxy or other; switched to a picture of what he took to be an exploding star; switched again to a huge photograph of an orbiting observatory. He had no trouble recognizing that. It was the one he had been studying on the way over; it was also, he was aware, the gift that had eaten up half of Uncle Cubby's fortune before he died. The observatory was Starlab-sometime uncharitably called Starcophagus, for the dead astronomer who was still orbiting inside it. Starlab was the ancient, biggest and best-but unfortunately no longer operational-astronomical orbiter of them all.

  Dan Dannerman's only previous experience of an astronomical facility had been when he was four years old and his father had taken him to visit Uncle Cubby in the old optical observatory in Arizona. Starlab was quite different, and all the engineering specs he'd been able to dig out of the databank didn't make it real for him. Getting up, he strolled over to the reception desk and cleared his throat. "Janice? I mean, I don't know your last name-"

  "Janice is good enough," she said agreeably. "And you're Mr. Dannerman."

  "Dan. I noticed you were showing the Starcophagus on the wall a minute ago-" She had begun shaking her head. "Is something wrong?"

  "Dr. Adcock doesn't like us ever to use that word here. It's the Dannerman Astrophysical Starlab. Mostly we just call it Star-lab."

  "Thanks," he said, meaning it; it was a useful bit of information for someone who was about to ask the boss for a favor.

  "It used to be the Dannerman Orbiting Astrolab," she went on, looking him over, "but Dr. Adcock changed that. Because of, you know, the initials."

  "Oh, right," he said, nodding. "DOA. I see what you mean. I guess nobody wants to be reminded about the dead guy up there. Anyway, I was wondering if you could fill me in a little bit. I understand, uh, Dr. Adcock's trying to get a mission flown to reactivate it."

  "There's talk," she admitted cautiously.

  "Well, when's that going to happen, do you know?"

  "No idea," she said cheerfully. "You'd have to ask Dr. Adcock about that-wait a minute." She paused, squinting as she listened to the voice in her earpiece, and paid no further attention to him.

  He went back and sat down. Evidently he was to be kept waiting for a while, as was appropriate for someone who wanted to ask a favor. He didn't mind. It was what he had expected from a cousin-by-marriage he hadn't seen for years, and wouldn't be seeing now if the Bureau had not taken a sudden and serious interest in just what the woman was up to.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pat

  Dr. Pat Adcock's morning was pure hell-crises in the money problem and the Starlab problem, not to mention all the usual Hurry of regular observatory problems-but she took the long way from the bursar's office to Rosaleen Artzybachova's anyhow. I 'hat way passed by the reception room, and that let her get a quick look at her waiting cousin Dan.

  She let him wait. She was impatient to hear what Rosaleen had to tell her about Starlab's instrumentation. Then the bursar had had no good news for her, and she needed to do a little thinking about that. She needed, too, to think about whether she wanted to go out of her way, at this particularly hectic time, to find some kind of spot on the staff for her job-seeking cousin. It was not a good time to be adding to the payroll. On the other hand-

  On the other hand, family was family, and Pat wasn't displeased to have one of her few remaining relatives ask for a favor. Especially when the relative was Dan Dannerman. So she rushed through her meeting with Rosaleen Artzybachova, door closed and electronics off; the woman might be old but she was still sharp, and she was doing a good job of tracing the history of all the additions and retrofits Starlab had suffered in its observing career. "And there's nothing that would account for the radiation?" Pat demanded. "You're sure?"

  The old lady looked up at her thoughtfully. "Are you getting enough exercise?" she asked. "You look like you could use some fresh air. Yes, I'm sure."

  "Thanks," Pat said, not answering her question. But when she got back to her own office the first thing she did, even before she closed the door, was to study herself in the wall mirror. It wasn't really exercise she needed, she told herself. It was rest. A good night's sleep, for a start, and no worries. But what were the chances of that?

  While Pat's office door was open the walls were displaying a selection of the major current projects of the observatory: the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, with its new gamma-ray bursters; the huge mass of neutral gas in Capricorn that Warren Krepps was investigating; and, just for the sake of prettiness, some particularly nice shots of nearby objects like Saturn, Phobos and the Moon. Those weren't really high-priority projects. The Dannerman Observatory didn't do much planetary astronomy, but the pictures were the kind of thing that impressed possible donors when, after leading them through the grand tour of the observatory, Pat took them into her office for the glass of wine and the kill.

  When Pat closed her privacy door the display changed. Then what the walls showed was Starlab, and, on either side of it, like a portrait gallery, the images of the aliens from the space message. Pat didn't look at the freaks as she settled herself at her desk. She didn't need to; but she wanted them there, to remind her.

  Time for Cousin Dan? She decided not; it wouldn't hurt him to sit a while longer, and there was still the business of the observatory to run. It took more than science to keep an enterprise like the Dannerman Observatory going.

  After her name Patrice Dannerman Bly Metcalf Adcock was entitled to put the initials B.S., M.A., Ph.D., D.H.L. and Sc.D. Considering that she was still a young woman, not very much more than thirty (and looking younger still when she got enough sleep), that was quite a lot. To be sure, the last two degrees were honorary, being the kind of thing you got from small and hungry universities when you happened to be the head of an institution that might offer useful fellowships to underemployed faculty members, but she had truly earned all the rest.

  The trouble was, they weren't enough. Why hadn't someone told her to slip a couple of economics and business-management classes in among the cosmologies and the histories of science? Her skills at reading a spectrogram were all very well, but what she really needed to understand was a spreadsheet.

  And this morning, like most mornings, the problems were mostly money. Kit Papathanassiou was requesting twenty hours of observi
ng time on the big Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Pat knew that Papathanassiou would make good use of the time, but the Kecks were a big-ticket item; she cut it to five hours. Gwen Morisaki wanted to hire another postdoc to help out with the Cepheid census in NGC 3821; but that job only amounted to counting, after all, and why did you need a doctoral degree for that? Cousin Dan? Probably not, Pat thought, and decided to offer Gwen an undergraduate intern from one of the local schools. That wouldn't save much money. You could hardly hire anybody for less than the average postdoc would gladly accept, but a dollar saved, plus its cost-of-living adjustment, was a dollar plus COLA earned. This month's communications bills were higher than ever; Pat reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was time for her to get on everybody's back again about keeping the phone bills down. She didn't look forward to it. Hassling the staff to watch pennies was not what she had earned all those degrees for. Maybe, if things got better-the way she dreamed they might, if the Starlab thing worked out…

  But it was all taking so long.

  That was a big disappointment. Pat had hoped that once the judge decreed that the feds were obliged to honor the contract Uncle Cubby had made with them-had to provide a Clipper spacecraft to take a repair mission to Starlab and, what's more, had to pay for putting the old spacecraft into working order- why, then, the whole thing should have been automatic. It wasn't. The feds and the Floridians were dragging their feet. Somehow somebody somewhere in their bureaucracies had begun to suspect that she knew something they didn't.

  Well, she did. And it was none of their damn business.

  She leaned back and studied the pictures on the wall. Not the Starlab itself. She didn't need to look at that again; with Rosaleen Artzybachova's help she had already memorized every centimeter of that. What she was looking at was the freak show from the space messages. There were eight of the aliens, starting with the universe-crushing scarecrow, and every one of them was ugly. One looked like Pat's idea of a golem, huge bipedal body with some arms like elephant limbs and some like limp spaghetti, and the bearded head with its glaring eyes; that was the one the comics called "Doc." Another-the "Grumpy"- looked a little like a sea horse with legs; a third, the "Dopey," had a whiskered kitten's head on a chicken's body; another might have been a huge-eyed lemur if it weren't for its own extra pairs of limbs, and she couldn't recall what nonsensical name it had been given.

  Pat closed her eyes and sighed. She wished, as half the world wished, that she knew why the unidentified transmitter of these unpleasing pictures had wanted humans to see them. What were these creatures? Not a zoo; these were not animals; most of them wore clothing, some carried artifacts of one kind or another-some that looked unpleasantly like weapons.

  Of course, the fact that they had weapons didn't mean they were killers. Everybody carried weapons. Pat kept one on her person whenever she left her office or her home-not counting whatever additional firepower her bodyguard carried-and she certainly wasn't intending to shoot anybody. Unless, of course, she absolutely had to.

  Which raised the question of under what circumstances the freaks might think they absolutely had to; but she didn't want to think about that. Pat Adcock had considered the possibility that some of those alien creatures might be hanging around somewhere in Earth orbit, where the mission to Starlab might encounter them, and decided that the odds were strongly against. There wasn't any reason to reconsider that question now-most likely.

  – She opened her eyes and looked at her watch.

  Actually, she had kept Cousin Dan waiting long enough. She pushed the button that transformed her desk screen to a mirror, checked her hair and her face-yes, still not bad, in spite of what Rosaleen had said-then sighed, pushed the control that unlocked her door and restored her wall display to the one she was willing to let the world see and called the receptionist. "My cousin still out there, Janice? All right, then send him on in."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dan

  When Dannerman entered his cousin's office they didn't kiss. Nor did they shake hands, and she didn't even look up at him. Her attention was on her desk screen; displaying the resume he had given Mr. Dixler to send over. "Says here you've got a Ph.D.-but it's in English literature, for Christ's sake? What the hell does Dixler think we're going to do with an English major here? Do you know anything at all about astronomy?"

  "Not a thing," he said cheerfully, studying her: blue eyes, rusty brown hair, yes, that was the cousin he remembered, though now physically well matured. She was wearing a white lab coat, but it hung open. Under it was a one-piece skorts outfit, thermally dilated to adjust to room temperatures. She kept her office warm, so a lot of Pat Adcock showed through the mesh. At thirty-something she was almost as good-looking as pretty little Patty D. Bly had been when they were children; two marriages and a career had just made her taller and even more sure of herself. "I just happen to need a job pretty badly," he added.

  She finally looked up to regard him thoughtfully, then smiled. "Anyway, hello. It's been a long time, Dan-Dan."

  "It's just Dan now that I've grown up, Cousin Pat."

  "And it's just Doctor Adcock. if you're going to work here," she reminded him, a touch of steel peeking through the velvet. "I don't know about hiring you, though, Dan. It says here you got your doctorate at Harvard and your dissertation was called 'Between Two Worlds: Freud and Marx in the Plays of Elmer Rice.' Who the hell was he?"

  "Early-twentieth-century American playwright. Very seminal for Broadway theater. Some people called him the American Pirandello."

  "Huh." She studied his face. "Are you still stagestruck?"

  "Not really. Oh, there's a little theater group in Brooklyn I help out now and then-"

  "Christ."

  "It wouldn't interfere with my work," he promised.

  She gave him an unconvinced look, but changed the subject. "So Dixler wants me to give you a job here. I was surprised when he called; I thought you weren't speaking to him."

  Dannerman shifted uncomfortably. "You mean about Uncle C Cubby's estate. Well, I wasn't, but I thought the least he could do was put in a word for me with you."

  She was gazing at the screen again. "What happened to the job you had with, it says here, Victor Carpezzio and Sons, Importers of Foods and Fragrances?"

  "Personal problems. I didn't get along with the Carpezzios."

  "And you've had-" She paused to count up. "Jesus, Dan, you've had four other jobs in the past few years. Are you going to quit here too because you don't like somebody?" He didn't answer that. "And you've been dicking around with little theater groups all over the place, not just in Brooklyn. I thought you were the kind of guy who went for the macho kind of thing."

  "There's enough macho in the world already, Pat."

  "Hum," she said again. Then, "All right, our mutual uncle gave a lot of money to found this observatory, that's a fact. But it doesn't mean we have to support the whole damn family."

  "Of course not."

  "If we decided to take a chance and we did give you a job for Uncle Cubby's sake, don't expect it would be anything big. You'd be getting minimum wage, daily COLA, no fringe benefits. This is a scientific establishment. We're all highly trained people. You just don't have the skills for anything better than scutwork."

  "I understand, Dr. Adcock."

  That made her laugh. "Oh, hell, Dan, I guess Pat's good enough. Considering we've known each other since we were in diapers. You don't bear any grudges, do you? About the money, I mean?" He shook his head. "I mean, you got as much as I did under Uncle Cubby's will."

  "Not exactly."

  "Well, you would have if you'd been around when the will was probated. Then the whole thing wouldn't've been eaten up by inflation by the time you collected it and you wouldn't be looking for a scutwork job now, would you? What were you doing in Europe anyway?"

  "I guess you'd call it postdoctoral research," he said, coming reasonably close to an honest answer. The statement was technically true, at least; he really had had his
doctorate by then and what he had been doing in Europe surely was research of a kind.

  "And maybe there was a girl?"

  "You could say a woman was involved," he admitted, again skirting the truth-Use was indeed female, and so was the colonel. "I guess I made a mistake, not keeping in touch."

  "I guess you did. All right, I don't see why we shouldn't do old Dixler a favor-and you too, of course. We'll find you something to do. Go down to Security and get your badge and passes from Mick Jarvas. You can start tomorrow-but remember, you get no medical benefits, no tenure. You'll be a temp, hired on a week-to-week basis, and how long you stay depends on you. Or, actually, it will depend on me, because I'm the director here. Is that going to give you a problem?"

  "No problem."

  "It better not be a problem. I don't mix family loyalty and science. We've got a lot to do here right now, trying to get Star-lab back on line and all. I don't want you thinking that the fact that we played together when we were babies is going to get you any special privileges."

  Dannerman grinned, thinking about the kinds of games they'd played. "You're the boss, Pat," he said. But of course she'd been the boss then, too.

  Is soon as he was out of the building he paused before the window of a betting parlor to lift his commset to his lips and make his call. He didn't give a name. He didn't have to. All he said was, "Mission accomplished. I got the job."

  "That's nice," the voice on the other end said chattily. "Congratulations. You've still got one thing to do with the other guys, though."

  "I know. I'll phone it in when I get home." "Make sure you do, Danno. Talk to you later." On the subway ride home Dannerman pretended to watch the news on his communicator-the hot new story was that the President's press secretary had been kidnapped-but he wasn't paying it much attention. He was content with the day's work. To be sure, he didn't know exactly why he was going to work for his cousin, but he was reasonably sure he would be told in time. What he had to take care of with the Carpezzios wouldn't take long. And of course the eschaton, that ultimate transcendence, had never yet even crossed his mind.