Eschaton 02 The Siege of Eternity

by Frederik Pohl

  And then, the funny thing, they all suddenly looked both surprised and relieved. The deputy director man-was his name Pell?- nodded to the Morrisey woman. That was the end of it. The woman took Pat back to her new home and left her to lie awake an hour or so longer, with all the old questions and a dozen new ones to keep her from sleep.

  So when a uniform knocked at her door and opened it a crack she woke at once. "Good morning, ma'am," the woman said civilly. "It's oh-eight-hundred, and you might want to get ready to see the deputy director." Then she closed the door, without saying when the deputy director was likely to arrive. Or why.

  But when Pat Adcock came out of her very own private bathroom-another touch of luxury, complete with a full array of toiletries in their original unopened wrappings-she made a pleasing discovery. The guard must have come back while she was in the shower. Pat's own clothes-the ones she had been arrested in-were draped over the foot of the bed, cleaned and ready to put on.

  A few minutes later, dressed in something other than that jail uniform after all these long weeks and pleased about that much, anyway, she opened the door. It led into a little sitting room, with comfortable chairs and pictures on the wall and even a fireplace-fake, of course, but a nice touch. A moment later Dannerman came out of his own room to join her, just in time for the guard to roll in a cart loaded with breakfast.

  Dannerman gave her an appreciative grin. "Hey, nice outfit. Did you have a good night's sleep?"

  She didn't bother to answer that, and after an uncertain moment lie turned his attention to their breakfast. Pat took a while longer to get to it, but when she tasted the fresh, ripe papaya and the cold, sweet juice she dug in as well. It was the best meal she'd had since the police had picked her up at her Observatory.

  Her Observatory. She wondered if it was really still hers.

  Well, probably the Observatory itself was still running, more or less normally; Uncle Cubby's money was still available to finance its op-rations, and no doubt Pete Schneyman, or one of the other senior scientists, had taken over as acting director in her absence. Gwen Morisaki would be going right on with her Cepheid counts and Kit Papathanassiou with his cosmological studies and all the rest of it, whether she was present or not. Things might even be going better without her because, Pat had to admit, her last few months at the Observatory she'd been a lot more interested in Starlab than in doing science.

  The other question that entered her mind was to wonder if she herself were in bankruptcy yet.

  How "United" Are the United Nations?

  The current imbroglio in the United Nations General Assembly reminds us once more of the worser consequences of the infamous Resolution 1822. Under this, you may recall, the General Assembly decreed that each signatory nation was to elect one delegate to the Assembly by means of popular vote. This well-meaning "reform" was intended to ensure that the people at large, rather than some junta or clique, represented each country in its deliberations; the models for this were the European Community's Council and, more appositely, the United States Senate.

  But what has been the effect? Rather than achieving unity, the delegates now represent parochial issues and, worse, political parties. In this "Parliament of Man," with its lamentable tendency toward passing sweeping resolutions that are meant to micromanage purely internal matters throughout the world, our own delegate, Mr. Hiram Singh-who, it will be remembered, was until recently First Lord of the Admiralty in the New Labor Party government-is not least at fault.

  Do we really want to import the tawdry political practices of the Americans to govern our planet? We think not. We think it is time for a thoroughgoing reconsideration of this ill-advised measure.

  – Financial Times, London

  The economic fact was that she had hocked just about everything she owned to raise the money for her flight to the orbiter. Money shouldn't have been any problem at all. The government should have financed or provided the whole thing. But the government hadn't. So she'd had to find the money herself. It came to serious money, too, enough to bribe the Floridian authorities who controlled the launch pads at the Cape, to hire pilots, to fight the Feds' lawyers through the courts until, reluctantly, they did give in and provide a launch vehicle for her.

  And then she had managed to get that Clipper launched with the five of them in it. And then-

  And then it all went to hell. "Dan-Dan?" she said tentatively.

  He looked up warily from his eggs Benedict. "Yeah?"

  She said slowly, trying to think it through as she spoke, "You know what's funny, Dan? I can remember the flight up to orbit; I can remember the flight back. But all I can remember of what we saw in Starlab was that everything was just the way it was left when the satellite was abandoned. There wasn't anything there that wasn't on the specs. Nothing had changed."

  "Nothing had."

  "Well, I know that. I remember remembering that, when we were on our way back. But I don't remember seeing it. Do you know what I mean?

  He frowned. "Well, that's the way it was for me, too. It's funny, now that you mention it."

  "Do you think your Bureau people know why that is?"

  But he was shaking his head. "Not those turkeys. They don't know any more than we do."

  When the door opened again, the man who came in was the deputy director, Marcus Pell. He was followed by one of the uniformed cops. "Coffee for you too, sir?" the cop suggested.

  "Coffee my ass. It might be breakfast time for you, but for me its lust the tail end of a long, long night. Get us a bottle of Jim Beam and some glasses." He turned to Pat. "You were right, Dr. Adcock." He caught her off-balance. "What was I right about?" "Alien technology. The man said so himself. The orbiter's loaded with it… among other things. No"-he held up his hand-"I don't know exactly whose technology, or how it got there. We're having to be careful about communicating. You know all about that, Dr. Ad-cock; that's what we got you out of bed for."

  "Was I actually any help?" she asked curiously. "It didn't look that way."

  He gave her a judicious look, punctuated by a yawn "Sorry. Well, you were and you weren't. What you did was remind us of Dr. Artzybachova."

  "But she's dead!"

  He shook his head, looking amused. "Not anymore. She's alive and well on your Starlab. Or one of her is. There are a lot of duplicate people around, wouldn't you say? So we sent her a narrow-beam query. She didn't have anything that could make a really secure link, but we worked out a code."

  Dannerman was asking the deputy director questions, but Pat hardly heard. She was trying to get used to the idea of Rosie Artzybachova alive again. Then she remembered to ask a question,. "Why are you making such a big secret out of it?"

  He grinned at her. "You're asking me that? The lady that bet the ranch on finding extraterrestrial technology? Because if any part of what this man is saying is true, then there's a lot of stuff there that we want, and maybe we want to keep it for ourselves-ah, about time," he finished, as the door opened, and two of the uniforms came in. Silently they set down the whiskey, some mixers, glasses, ice, even a tray of hastily slapped-together hors d'oeuvres, glanced at the deputy director for permission to leave again, and did.

  Pell poured himself two fingers of whiskey, disdaining the ice and the mixers. "Help yourselves," he invited.

  Pat shook her head. "I didn't know prisoners were allowed to have liquor," she said.

  He gave her a friendly smile-no, she thought, not really a smile of any kind of friendship; it was the kind of smile you manufactured to make somebody think you were being friendly when you wanted to soften them up. This was a complex and totally controlled man. "You're thinking about those federal charges against you. Bribery, filing false flight plans-all chickenshit, of course. You can forget them.

  They're dropped. And as for you, Dannerman"-he shrugged-"your suspension is lifted, too. You're back on duty, with full pay restored."

  Incoming dispatch.

  Spanish Federal Police, Madrid.

  To
Director U.S. National Bureau of Investigation.

  Most secret.

  Humint indicates probable major action by Catalan separatist forces in connection with the Iberian games, to be held in Barcelona this spring. Internal source states a large shipment of weaponry and explosive devices is expected from American sympathizers, probably channeled through Basque underground. Urgently request cooperation in dealing with this terrorist threat, in particular in identifying and embargoing arms shipment.

  Dannerman looked wary, fingering his collar. "What about this?"

  "Well," the deputy director said, "that's a whole other thing, isn't it? Are you sure you want it taken off?"

  Dannerman's expression changed, now mostly puzzled. "Why wouldn't I?"

  Pell's glass was empty; he refilled it, but this time with soda and ice and just enough whiskey to tint it lightly. "You know what you two have inside your skulls," he said. "Did it ever occur to you that some people might want to get their hands on those things? Even if they had to kill you in the process?"

  Pat Adcock felt a sudden chill. "What people?"

  "Why, Dr. Adcock," the man said cozily, "I would say just about anybody. Including some of our own people right here in the Bureau, I wouldn't be surprised. But don't worry about that; the President himself forbade any surgical attempts. So maybe you'd like to keep enjoying our hospitality for a while, don't you think? Or, if you'd rather go out into the world again, we'll supply you with as much protection as we can, same as we've done with Danno here, but there would certainly be a risk."

  "Damn it," Dannerman said with feeling. "I knew I was being followed."

  "Of course you did," Pell said, smiling that warm-hearted, empty smile again. "One way of looking at it, you were bait. If someone wanted to snatch you, we'd pick him up before he could get very far."

  Dannerman was looking at him with distaste. "That's assuming they wanted to kidnap me alive. But if they were going to have to kill me anyhow-"

  "You're not thinking it through," Pell said reprovingly. He reached out and tapped Dannerman's collar. "That thing is tough plastic and metal. As long as you had that on your neck nobody could whack your head off and hustle it away before we got to them. So what would be the point of killing you on the street? No, we figured you were pretty safe… and, of course, there were other reasons for having you wear the collar. There was always the possibility that you were dirty after all, wasn't there? Colonel Morrisey was pretty sure you weren't. But some people had other opinions, and we had to cover all the bases."

  Dannerman said doggedly, "I want it off."

  "Yes, I thought you would. Well, when Hilda comes back I'll have her take you down to the shop and they'll remove it… Excuse me." There had been an inaudible signal; Pell lifted his phone to his ear. He listened for quite a long time, spoke briefly-Pat couldn't make out a word-and listened again. When he was through he looked up at them.

  "Well," he said, sounding pleasantly surprised, "sometimes you get lucky when you least expect it. The Cape's socked in-thunderstorms, high winds; the weather's going to persist for a couple of days at least. So they can't land there. That's good; the last thing we want is to get the Floridians involved in this."

  "So where will they land?"

  "That's the question, isn't it? They're working on it. Meanwhile, the President has warned everybody, especially the damn Europeans, that Starlab is U.S. property and anyone who attempts to board it risks being shot at."

  Pat stared at him blankly. "Shot at? What with?"

  Pell said comfortably, "I always knew some of those old Star Wars orbiters might come in useful someday. There are two of them that still have some navigation capacity. They're in the wrong part of the orbit, but the guys in Houston are working on moving them into position even as we speak. Of course the Europeans and the Chinese and so on know that. So we can leave it alone for a while, and right now the first thing we're going to do is to get that party of nine down- and there are some surprises there. They're not all human, you see."

  "Not all human?"

  "That's what Dannerman says, yes. He said a lot of other stuff, too-until we told him to shut up, even in code, and report in full once he's landed." He hesitated. "One thing, though. You're an astronomer, Dr. Adcock. Have you ever heard of somebody named Frank Tipler?"

  "Tipler?" She frowned. "I think I might've heard the name-"

  "He was some kind of astronomer, too. Late twentieth century. We retrieved all we could find about him from the bank, but the only interesting thing was that he wrote a book once about how Heaven was astronomically real."

  "Oh, right," Pat said, tracking down a faint recollection. "I remember hearing something about him-maybe in grad school? It sounded pretty silly to me. What does Tipler have to do with all this?"

  "That's what I'd like to know. Dannerman-the other Dannerman, I mean-said we should look him up. If I get you access to the network, can you do the Bureau a favor and see what you can find?"

  • or Dr. Patrice Adcock the worst thing

  about jail was having nothing to do-this woman who had never before in her life found herself with nothing to do. Now things were looking up. She wasn't in jail anymore and, better still, she had a job to do that she was good at.

  It took Pat an impatient half hour's waiting to get access to Bureau's databank-no, not the classified databank, of course, but to the one that accessed most of the country's libraries. Then it took a while longer to get used to the Bureau's procedures. She found the American Men of Science entry for Dr. Frank Tipler quickly and began sorting through some of the sources cited. She hardly noticed when Dannerman was back, collarless and occasionally touching his now bare neck to remind himself of the change. That Colonel Hilda Morrisey came in with him.

  "New orders, Dr. Adcock," Morrisey said cheerfully. "We're all going for a little ride tonight. The people from Starlab are coming down, and we're going to meet them."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dan Dannerman had never been in the deputy director's plane before. In spite of himself, he was impressed. It wasn't one of those custom-converted thousand-seat leviathans, like the President's Air Force One, but those few who had experienced both reported that it was just as luxurious. Dannerman and Pat Adcock were even given a private compartment of their own. Their little cubicle wasn't as fancy as the room Colonel Hilda had appropriated for her own use, and certainly it was nothing like the four-room private suite belonging to the D.D. himself, but it definitely was not shabby. It had full electronics. It had cut flowers floating in a sort of fishbowl, a pair of screens, a call button for one of the police-cadet flight attendants, even two pullout beds neatly made up in case they wanted to sleep on the way-on the way to wherever they were going, because neither Pat nor Dannerman had been given the word on where that might be.

  Dannerman had lost his sense of time. Somehow a whole day had got away from him, all spent on waiting. After the long wait time while the deputy director got his ducks in order there was the waiting for the Bureau's sniffer squads to finish their routine inspections-you never knew where someone might sneak in a bomb. It was full dark again by the time they took off.

  Dannerman saw Pat cast one yearning look at the beds, but then she resolutely turned her back on them. She had no time to sleep because she was busy at one of the screens, checking databases for information on the Tipler person for the deputy director. Dannerman wasn't sleeping, either, but the reason was different. The prospect of seeing this man who claimed to use his own name and spoke with his own voice had pumped him full of adrenaline. He used his screen on and off, sometimes to kill time by watching news summaries, sometimes to try to find answers to some of the questions that inflamed his thoughts. Perhaps some of the answers were there, but Dannerman didn't have enough clearance to penetrate these particular systems.

  He was seriously considering trying out one of the beds after all when Pat made a small grunt of conditional satisfaction. She sat back, watching the printer squirt out hard
copy.

  "Did you find what you wanted?" Dannerman asked.

  "I hope," she said, standing up, evidently getting ready to take the printout to Marcus Pell. "It's weird. You can read it for yourself on the screen."

  "Weird how?"

  But she was gone. He shifted to her seat and scrolled the screen, beginning to read.

  Dr. Frank Tipler was a highly respected cosmologist until he published the book called The Physics of Immortality. In it Tipler predicted that the universe, currently expanding, sooner or later would fall back to what is called "the Big Crunch," reproducing the conditions of the Big Bang, but in reverse. At that time, Tipler said, everyone who had ever lived anywhere in the universe would be reborn to live again as an immortal. Most of Tipler's colleagues laughed at his idea, but there were two significant groups who shared his opinion, though Tipler had never heard of either.

  "Weird" was the right word. This Frank Tipler had published a book, back in the closing years of the twentieth century. It was called The Physics of Immortality, and what it was about was Tipler's theory- only he didn't call it a theory; he claimed it was fact, and offered a hundred pages of equations to prove it-that the universe, after expanding as far as it could, would contract again into what he called "the Omega Point"… and then some very strange things would happen.

  The first part of it wasn't surprising. That was what the messages from space had described, years before: the Big Bang and the universe's expansion, the recollapse into the Big Crunch. The surprising part was the consequence that was predicted in Tipler's book. According to Tipler, at that Omega Point or Big Crunch, whichever you chose to call it, everybody who had ever lived would inevitably be brought to life again-in perfect health, at the peak of their powers- and would go on living forever.