Eschaton 01 The Other End of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  But no one was. What they wanted was sleep. Exploration could wait, eating could wait- it had been a long day for everyone. For Patsy, too, but somehow she found herself volunteering to take the first watch to keep the fire fed. She had had some idea that, once everyone else was well and truly asleep, she might just dip herself into that brook and try to get at least the surface layers of grime and stench off her long-unwashed body. That notion didn't last; when she tried the water with one toe it was even colder than she had remembered.

  Replenishing the fire was about the easiest job Patsy had ever had. Jimmy's orders had been explicit: no more than four or five sticks at a time, none at all until there were no more flames, just glowing coals, because you didn't want actual flames. Patsy debated what to do with the longest sticks, too long to fit in the tiny fire. She didn't want to try to break them for fear of waking the others up, wasn't sure she had the strength to do it, anyhow, and had no idea where Dannerman had left his glassy blade; but then she worked out a simple solution. She laid them across the fire until the middle sections had burned through, then picked up the ends and tossed them in. Nothing to it.

  The hard part was staying awake. For the first hour or so little pinpricks of fear kept the adrenaline flowing. Distant whickerings in the wood, the gentle plop of something falling from a tree, a nearby growl (which turned out only to be Martin snoring)-every sound was an alarm. Almost anything, Patsy thought, could leap raging at her out of the trees; but then time passed and nothing did, and the fears, while not going away, changed character. Were they really going to try to take on the might of the Horch killing machines with a handful of popguns? Should they be doing that, anyhow? (Or was Dannerman right about the dangers of taking sides?) And, that biggest question of all, how much truth was there in the promise of eternal bliss (or otherwise) in this improbable eschaton? The questions revolved themselves through her tired brain-with, of course, no answers. She was fed up with the endless supply of unanswerable questions.

  But then she had only to lift her eyes to the sky to see the kind of marvel she had never expected to behold. It was-there was only one word for it-magnificent. She noticed, as time went on, that the stars were appropriately wheeling across the heaven, just as they should do; that pair of blue-white beacons that had been low on the horizon when they arrived was now gone from view, and on the other side of the sky-she supposed she should call it the "east"-there was a whole new puzzle to gape at. Streamers of pale light stretched among the newly risen stars, some of them almost as bright as the stars themselves, almost enough to make her squint. She realized with a sudden shiver- part excitement, part wonder at being privileged to see such a thing with her own unaided eyes-that she was looking at stars in the very act of stealing gas from one another, a spectacle she had never before beheld except in plates from Starlab or the old Kecks.

  She was so absorbed in the sight overhead that she wasn't aware Dannerman was coming up to her until he called her name, and then she jumped. "Jesus, Dan-Dan! What are you doing up?"

  "Time to relieve you," he said, following her example and staring toward the east. "What the hell's that? It looks like something you'd see under a microscope?"

  Well, it did; all filamentary and webby. But she was glad to be able to explain something at least, when so little was explainable. "They're exchanging matter. Stars can do that when they're close, and some of those are probably nearer each other than Pluto is to the Sun. So you're looking at the naked hearts of stars, Dan. If our models of star evolution are right," she went on, warming to the subject, "some of those stars used to be red giants, but when the gas was stripped away they were rejuvenated. They became what we call 'blue stragglers,' with surface temperatures five or six times as hot as our own Sun. The bad part of that," she began, but Dannerman held up his hand.

  "Please, Patsy. Don't tell me any bad parts right now, okay?' You better get some sleep while you can. It's almost daylight."

  And he was right about that, too, of course. Past the cobwebby gas streamers the far horizon was beginning to lighten; and Patsy felt the sudden weight of her fatigue. Gratefully enough she climbed onto the pallet that had been set aside for her, Pat stirring gently as she came in, Rosaleen moaning faintly in her sleep. It was not a comfortable bed. Whoever made it must have had skins like armor plate, she thought, and closed her eyes.

  But she hadn't told him what the bad part was.

  The bad part was that some of those cannibal stars would sooner or later glut themselves on the mass they had stolen from the others. And then there would be a nova, maybe even a supernova, flooding the space around it with radiation of all kinds… at the congested distances of the globular cluster.

  When might that happen? The astronomical time scale was far slower than the human. Such things might take centuries to occur, but when they did-

  When they did, this would not be a good place to be, and the life expectancy of anyone out in the open under that suddenly lethal sky would be short indeed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Patsy

  Patsy woke up with bright sunlight outside the opening of the yurt and the sound of somebody yelling at somebody, not very near, but not all that far away, either. When she peered out she saw that it was Dannerman who was doing the yelling. The person he was yelling at was Pat, placidly hanging her underwear on a tree branch to dry. "It's just damn foolish for you to go wandering off by yourself," he scolded. "Who knows what's out there?"

  "But you said yourself we needed to check out our surroundings," Pat said reasonably, adjusting the bra to catch the sun.

  "Not alone!"

  "No," she said, acknowledging the justice of what he said- but not, Patsy thought, particularly penitent about it, either. "I should have waited till the others woke up. But, Dan, I found this lovely pond just a little way down the stream, and I got a bath. Well, sort of a bath-no soap, of course, and it was really cold-but I can't tell you how much better I feel. Maybe the two of us can go out later?" And then, looking past him, "Well, good morning, Patsy. Did you have a nice sleep?"

  Damn the woman, Patsy thought. Damn the man, too; they might as well be married if they were going to squabble like that. She didn't answer, simply turned and headed for the bushes. Then, delighting in the luxury of being able at last to pee without an audience, she relented. She was just jealous, she admitted to herself. Not merely jealous of the Dan-Pat relationship, although she was certainly envious of that, but extremely jealous of the bath.

  On the way back she paused to peer down the stream and, yes, she was nearly sure that, just past where the brook made a bend around a grove of tall, emerald-leaved trees, there was a definite widening. That went right to the top of her list of priorities. Not to be taken advantage of just yet, maybe; she hadn't missed Pat's complaint about the cold, but as soon as the air warmed up a little…

  It was astonishing how that thought elevated her mood. She glanced up, and there was the sky. The blue sky, with fleecy little muffins of fair-weather clouds scattered around, and the sun. The sun! Of course, it wasn't their familiar sun of Earth; too large, too orangey. But it was a great deal better than that unending featureless white glow they had lived under in their cell, and she was interested to observe that, even in daylight, a scattering of those incredible stars were bright enough to be visible in the sky. This was not an awful place, she told herself. It was even sort of pretty: the grove of trees behind her was hung with clusters of things like bright-yellow berries; the spiky ground-cover stuff underfoot that was like grass (but wasn't any grass Patsy had ever seen) was spotted with wildflower dots of color. Most important of all, she was outside. Things might be heading for something even worse than what had gone before, but at this moment, Patsy thought, they didn't seem bad at all. So she had a cheery smile for Pat and Dan as she rejoined the group, and another for Rosaleen and Martin Delasquez, doing something with the stack of ration containers. The only ones missing were Patrice and Jimmy Lin, and about as soon as the thoug
ht crossed her mind they both appeared out of their respective yurts, Patrice heading toward the bushes without a word, Jimmy yawning, barely glancing at the others, making a beeline to check the condition of his pet campfire.

  To Patsy's eyes the fire was behaving just as it was supposed to behave. It was a neat bed of glowing coals, sixty or seventy centimeters across, with only a couple of lately added sticks palely flaming on top. Clearly, however, it did not meet Jimmy Lin's expectations. He pushed the burning sticks together and carefully added two more, just so, muttering to himself. Then he caught sight of Rosaleen. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

  She didn't take offense. "We're counting our rations," she said, "and at the same time looking for containers that won't burn if we boil water in them."

  "Thought so," he said, patiently superior. "I told you to leave that sort of thing to me, didn't I? What you should do now is find a big empty container and fill it with water, while I get some rocks from the brook."

  He made a production out of it, selecting golf-ball-sized pebbles, which he carried back and painstakingly placed on the coals. "Give them ten minutes," he said, wise old expert showing the tenderfeet how to get along in the wild. "Then the rocks will be hot enough; we drop them in the water and they'll have it hot in no time."

  "Hey," Pat said, admiring against her will. "More Boy Scout stuff?"

  He didn't deign to answer, merely walked off to the shelter of the trees to relieve himself.

  "Bastard," Dannerman said, but his tone was tolerant. He glanced at Pat. "Shall we eat something? And then go explore?"

  "If Rosaleen's through with her count?" Pat said, looking toward the stack of rations.

  "In a minute," Rosaleen called. "Martin's found a couple of other packets-I guess we dropped them."

  But Martin was standing a good three or four meters away- how could we have dropped any of the packets over there? Patsy wondered-and his expression was forbidding. He was holding two of what looked like dehydrated stew packets, and staring at the ground.

  "Something's been nibbling at these things," he called. "And I think I see what was doing it. Only they're dead."

  Jimmy Lin's hot-water scheme worked fine-to be sure, at the cost of some burned fingers, transferring the hot pebbles to the container of water, but in a few minutes the container was gently simmering and meals were coming along. When Patsy got her stew, though, it was lukewarm and only partially softened. It didn't matter. She'd lost most of her appetite when she saw the three little dead creatures-looking a little like lizards, maybe, though densely furred-with their mouths wide open in the rictus of death.

  "Different chemistry," Rosaleen said soberly. "I guess I can forget that idea." And when someone asked what idea she was talking about, she explained, "I was thinking we might try some of the fruits from those trees when our rations run out, but if our food kills them, I doubt their food will be any better for us."

  Patsy stopped eating to look at the heap of rations. It had not occurred to her to think of it as a nonrenewable resource. She didn't like the conclusions that thought led to. "Rosaleen? With seven of us eating, how long do you think the food will last?"

  Rosaleen looked at the tally in her hand. "Let's see, three meals per day per person, that's twenty-one portions a day, divided into, according to this, two hundred and seventy-three portions… say, thirteen days. A bit more, maybe."

  "And then?"

  "And by then," Rosaleen said firmly, "I presume Dopey will have come back with the guns, and we'll have taken over the base and there'll be all the food we want from Starlab."

  "Or not," Patrice said.

  Rosaleen nodded. "Or else we will probably have been killed in the attempt, so it's not a problem."

  "So then why were you counting the food?"

  She hesitated. "I suppose because there is always the chance that Dopey won't come back."

  It was what Patsy had known she would hear, but that didn't make it any nicer. She pressed the point. "And if Dopey doesn't come back, and that's all there is, how long before we starve to death?"

  Rosaleen didn't answer at first; while she was thinking Dannerman spoke up. "Did you ever hear of a man named William Bligh?"

  "I don't think so."

  "He was the captain of an old sailing ship, the Bounty, hundreds of years ago. I guess he was a pretty mean son of a bitch, even for those days; anyway, his crew mutinied. Somebody made a book out of it. I never read the book, but one summer in graduate school I worked for a local theater, and they put on a musical based on it. I sang the first mate, the guy who led the mutiny. He was a man named Fletcher Christian."

  "I didn't know you were a singer."

  "Who said I was a singer? They weren't fussy about that kind of thing at the theater. Neither was I; they didn't pay anything, but you got to meet a lot of girls there. Anyway, Christian made the mutineers put the captain and some of his loyal crew over the side in a longboat instead of hanging them out of hand. The mutineers gave them two days' rations or so, and Captain Bligh managed to get every man in the boat safely to a British port a couple of thousand miles away. They rowed six or eight weeks before they reached land, and all that time they lived on the little bit of water they could catch when there were rainstorms, and the food that was only supposed to be rations for a couple of days."

  She thought that over. Another month or two in this place, with nothing to eat at all? And no realistic hope of rescue? "That's not particularly good news," she said.

  Dannerman nodded. "We don't really need three meals a day, though. Two would be enough, I think. That ought to give us another couple of weeks, anyway."

  But that wasn't really great news either.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Patsy

  When everyone had eaten, Pat and Dan took off on their mission of exploration. It surprised no one to see that they were walking hand in hand as they left. No one said anything, though-well, no one but Jimmy Lin. "Hey, guess what?" he said, grinning, pointing to where Pat's laundry still hung on the tree. "The lady left her underwear behind. Probably figured it would just get in the way?"

  Nobody responded but Patsy, and she said only, "Shut your mouth." She turned her back on him and walked over to where Patrice was sitting cross-legged on the ground, studying some carved wooden objects pulled out of the yurts. "It's none of his damn business what they do," she said-then, lowering her voice, "Although, you know?, he's probably right. How about that bath?"

  "In a while," Patrice said absently, looking at a piece of age-darkened wood as long as her forearm, one end flattened and rounded. "Rosaleen wants to go along, but she's resting. Patsy? What do you think this thing is?"

  Patsy considered the question. Although the object was worn and chipped at the edges, she was pretty sure of its identity. "I'd say a snow shovel-if they ever had snow here," she hazarded. "Some kind of a shovel, anyway." She squatted beside the other woman, poking through the little pile of artifacts. Most were wood-the shovel, a rod with a pointed, fire-hardened end (too thick to be a spear; maybe a digging stick?), something that looked like a salad fork, several things that didn't look like anything Patsy recognized at all. What wasn't wood was glassy rock-one pretty obviously a sharp-edged knife, the others harder to identify. "They didn't have any metal, did they?" Patsy discovered. "Sort of like the Stone Age?"

  "More like pre-Columbian America," Patrice said thoughtfully. "Those yurts are pretty well built… and doesn't this look like writing?" She flipped over an oval chunk of wood, and it was true, there were things that looked like wobbly characters incized on the wood. "Makes you wonder who these people were."

  But Patsy didn't want to wonder about these unknown people. They were tall and skinny; they lived in tents; they farmed- there was the remains of an overgrown produce plot along the stream-and they were gone. That much they knew, and the only important fact in the lot was the last one. The Skinnies were gone. There was no chance they would ever know anything more about them; but when Pats
y said as much, Patrice got a funny expression. "You're sure of that? You don't think we'll all meet up again at the eschaton?"

  Patsy gave her a hard look, and got up to put some new pebbles in the fire to heat. That was another thing she didn't want to think about.

  Then, when Rosaleen woke up and announced it was time for the adventure of the bath, there was another one. Patrice helped Rosaleen to the "ladies' room" in the bushes; Martin, gathering wood for the fire, decorously diverted himself to a part of the grove they hadn't investigated, and a moment later appeared again, looking perturbed. "There's something odd here," he called. "Come look."

  As the others straggled over, Patsy saw what he was talking about. "It just stops," she said, looking in wonderment at the vegetation. It did. The gnarly trees they had used for firewood stopped short, in a mathematically precise straight line; the branches on the near side swooped and dangled in all directions, but on the side away from them the branches were bent at sharp angles. Past them was a growth of quite different vegetation, equally dense, but thick shrubbery rather than trees. There was no point where a shrub crossed into tree territory or a tree branch into the shrubs'.

  Rosaleen studied the line of demarcation for a moment, then painfully lowered herself to grub at the ground. A moment later she had revealed the same sort of line that had surrounded their cell, metal and glassy segments alternating. "Do you know what I think?" she said wonderingly. "I believe there used to be one of those walls here."