Eschaton 02 The Siege of Eternity

by Frederik Pohl

  The door opened again. Dannerman looked up, but the Pat who came in wasn't the remaining one with the bug. It was the pregnant one, Pat Five, just back from an examination by the hospital's obstetrical staff and looking hostile.

  The thought of Pat Adcock, any Pat Adcock, being pregnant was almost as bizarre for Dannerman as his own bug, or the freaks who had implanted it. It didn't seem to strike the other Pats that way. They were quick to find her a chair and perch on either side of it. "Tell," one of them demanded.

  Pat Five shrugged. "They said I'm a healthy middle-aged primapara," she said. "They wanted to do ultrasound and all that stuff, but I wouldn't let them; I want to get back to my-our-own doctor."

  "Right on," agreed Patrice. "But what about-" She glanced at the Dannermans, and lowered her voice before she asked her question.

  They had, Dannerman supposed, got into some of the more intimate aspects of pregnancy. He didn't listen in. What he did, though, was put on a pretense of eavesdropping, not because he particularly wanted to hear how the pregnant one was doing with such matters as morning sickness and bladder control, but so that he would not have to make conversation with that other Dan Dannerman sitting there, as uncomfortable as himself.

  Federal Reserve Inflation Bulletin

  The morning recommended price adjustment for inflation is set at 0.74%, reflecting an annualized rate of 532%. Federal Reserve Chairman Walter C. Boettger expressed alarm at the increase, which, he said in a prepared statement, "is entirely due to public hysteria at recent events, does not fairly represent the nation's economic realities and which, if continued, will necessitate adjustments in the interest rate."

  When he glanced at the other Dannerman he found the man looking at him in the same rueful and perplexed way. "Oh, hell, Dan," the other one said, coming over and sitting beside him, "I guess sooner or later you and I are going to have to talk."

  "I guess so," Dannerman said stiffly. The question was what to talk about. He chose an innocuous subject to start: "Have they said anything to you about money?"

  "Oh, sure. They said they had never had a situation like this before and they didn't know who was entitled to what."

  "Same here." The bearded one was glancing at one of the Pats- his Pat-so Dannerman tried something a little more personal. "Are you two going to get married?"

  That Dannerman looked resentful in his turn, but then he shrugged. "We never said so, but-yeah, I think we might. Funny, isn't it?"

  It wasn't, exactly. Not really funny, but certainly, considering Dannerman's own experiences with Pat Adcock, pretty odd. There had been nothing like that between the two of them before they went to Starlab. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Jim Daniel was now looking a little bit embarrassed. "The thing is," he said diffidently, "Anita. The girl I, uh, we were dating. I thought about her a lot at first, when Pat and I were getting interested in each other, back in captivity. I think I had a kind of a guilty conscience, maybe; Anita deserved better than an occasional roll in the hay, and- Well, you know what I'm talking about. Have you seen her lately?"

  It was a perfectly reasonable question, but Dannerman felt a sudden flash of warmth in his face, and knew it was anger. He was-yes, damn it, he was jealous. The unpleasant fact was that this other man who was not himself-never mind the fact that in some sense he actually was-had taken his very own Anita Berman to bed. Often. Knew all of her scents and habits as intimately as Dannerman himself. Nothing that had passed between them was secret from him, at least not up until the moment they had left for the Starlab… and there had been little enough happening since then.

  Dannerman knew it was not a reasonable rage.

  But what was there about the things that had been going on for all of them that was really reasonable? "Not lately," he said stiffly, and turned away. He knew perfectly well that sooner or later he and this other Dan would have to try to come to terms. Maybe they could. Maybe sometime they could be as close and amiable as the Pats…

  But not yet.

  When Dr. Evergood arrived, looking baffled, she had two nurses in tow. It took them a while to sort out which three of the six persons involved had just come out of surgery, but after they did they got busy. The nurses began taking pulses and blood pressures and sticking tiny gadgets in the patients' ears to check their temperatures, while the doctor peered unbelievingly at the backs of the patients' necks. She didn't speak until she was quite through. Then she sighed in resignation. "Nobody, "she said, "heals from an incision that fast." She touched the back of Patrice's neck again wonderingly, then shook her head. "Anyway, they're waiting for you three in X ray, but Deputy Director Pell wants to show you something first."

  She looked inquiringly at the nurse standing by the door, who nodded. A moment later Deputy Director Pell arrived. Not alone. Right behind him as he came in the door was Hilda Morrisey, carrying-Dannerman noted with surprise-a lethal-looking carbine. She nodded impartially to the two Dannermans and stepped out of the way to let in four additional armed and uniformed Police Corps guards, two of them pushing what looked like an office safe on wheels.

  "I thought you'd like to see what we took out of you," the deputy director said genially, nodding to Hilda. She took a pair of key-tabs out of her pocket, unlocked the safe and stood back as one of the guards lifted out a transparent box. Inside it was an almond-shaped coppery object not much bigger than the end of Dannermans thumb.

  "It's more complicated than it looks," the deputy director said happily, "and now we've got three of them. According to Dr. Evergood here, while it was in place in your heads it extruded little filaments that penetrated large sections of your brains, but your many-armed friend managed to get it to withdraw them again so it could be removed. Seen enough? All right, Hilda, take it away." And when Hilda had relocked the safe and the guards were rolling it away, he looked around at the Pats and added, "One thing. Which of you is the one that's pregnant?"

  Pat Five raised her hand. "Me. Is something wrong?"

  "You mean medically? No, nothing like that. You're fine, but I got a call from the State Department. The ambassador of the People's Republic paid them a call last night. They didn't waste much time; what he was there for was to serve them with a summons. The complainant is Commander James Peng-tsu Lin, and he's suing you and the government of the United States for custody of the child."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Unsurprisingly, Hilda Morrisey hadn't forgiven the deputy director. She wasn't very good at forgiving. She hadn't had much practice.

  What she was good at was facing facts. In the present situation the deputy director held all the cards. She was stuck here with all these Headquarters cruds for the foreseeable future; therefore, she might as well make herself comfortable. For openers, that meant getting a place of her own-not too far away, but definitely not so near that she was under somebody's eye twenty-four hours a day.

  Rank helped. The Bureau's housing office was eager to serve a brigadier. They quickly pulled three possible apartments for her out of the databank, and she signed herself out on personal time to look them over. The first was good. The second was better. The third was perfect. They called it a "studio," but it had a Jacuzzi and a balcony and, if you stood just right, even a view of the distant Potomac River. And it had a fine, strong bed, easily large enough for two persons who were on friendly terms. And, of course, when and if some other person might occasionally share it with her they would definitely be friendly indeed.

  'hen she slipped in to take her seat at the team meeting the man from the Naval Observatory was talking about the comet-like object from space that might, or might not, have been the mother ship that delivered the pod that contained the equipment that let the Scarecrows take over Starlab. Hilda didn't listen very attentively. She was thinking of where one might best look for that suitable other person, and of whether the doorman would remember all the instructions she had given him about the personal stuff that would be coming from her New York pad by Bureau courier. She nudged
the man next to her and pointed to the coffee pitcher. It wasn't until he had passed it to her with a wry look that she realized he was a new face on the team.

  His name was Harold Ott. He was the Bureau's number two electronics nerd, and no friend of Hilda Morrisey's. It was Ott's disdainful opinion that flesh-and-blood agents were the hard way to obtain intelligence that could be got a lot more easily with one of his surveillance tools. Though wrong-headed, of course, the man did know his stuff. But what did his stuff have to do with the Ananias team?

  He didn't seem any more interested in what the astronomer was saying than Hilda herself. Ott had his screen up and was idly playing with it. Doing what Hilda could not tell, because he had the privacy flaps up. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  So was Daisy Fennell, in the chair. She was nodding absently as the astronomer complained that, although they had identified the object on its approach, no one had been paying much attention to it. Therefore, they had a very incomplete orbit and had not succeeded in tracking its subsequent course. Which would in any case be difficult, since it seemed to have been a powered, rather than a ballistic, flight. "Yes, well, thank you," Fennell said. "Now let's hear from Dr. ben Jayya-" And there was another new face at the table.

  It might have been better, Hilda thought, to have done her apartment hunting on a different morning, since she'd missed all the introductions. As unobtrusively as she could she popped her own screen and did some hunting. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked at the doctor with more interest. Dr. Sidoni ben Jayya was a biochemist, and he had just been coopted to the team from his regular base of operations.

  Which was Camp Smolley.

  That made Hilda sit up. She had never visited Camp Smolley, but she knew what it was about. So did everybody in the Bureau, though not too many civilians did. Camp Smolley was biowar! And what the hell did that have to do with the Ananias team?

  Camp Smolley began its existence as a top-secret research facility for the development of biological weapons. When the United States signed on to the treaty banning these, it continued its activities as a top-secret laboratory for developing defenses against biowar. When some busybodies in the Congress thought that was too close to actually making the things, it switched its efforts over to general biochemical research-most of them, anyway. In the change it was administratively reassigned to the NBI, and the Bureau found some uses for its skills it did not think necessary to report to Congress.

  As it turned out, plenty. All three of the weird space cratures had been moved there. "For maximum security," he explained, "and for convenience in research. Our primary concern at the moment is feeding them, and so we have been analyzing some of the food canisters that they brought from Starlab."

  That made sense to Hilda. There weren't many biolaboratories better equipped than Camp Smolley's, and certainly none that was easier to keep private from the outside world. However, the problem of extraterrestrial nutrition was not a subject that interested Hilda a lot, and her attention began to wander again.

  So did Daisy Fennell's. She was paying more attention to her own screen than to the speaker. Hilda studied the woman thoughtfully, because there was a lesson there for her. Time was when Fennell had been a field manager like herself. She had even once run Junior Agent Hilda Morrisey, when they were trying to infiltrate the religious-right groups that had been setting fire to schoolbook warehouses around the country. Daisy had been good at the work, too, until she had made the mistake of letting herself get promoted. As Hilda just had. And now here she was, stuck in administration, trying to keep people like this biochemist from telling the team more than it had any desire to know about the significance of chirality in organic molecules.

  Across the table the man from the State Department did seem interested. He frowned and lifted one finger to signal he wanted to say something-it was as close as he ever came to raising his hand. "There would be serious international repercussions if we let them die," he pointed out. "Are you saying there isn't anything you can do?"

  Dr. ben Jayya gave him a frosty look. "Of course I am not saying this. We have begun many lines of research. For instance, Dr. App-ley has taken cell samples from each of the extraterrestrials. If we could grow the cells in sufficient quantity in a nutrient solution we might be able to feed these-creatures-on cells from their own bodies. There is, after all, one thing every animal can digest, and that is its own flesh. But we're having a difficult time finding the proper nutrients."

  "And if that fails?"

  Ben Jayya frowned. "But that is only one line of research, as I have just said! In addition we are making genetic studies. There is the possibility that we can immunize certain kinds of food animals against proteins from the aliens themselves, in which case the aliens might be capable of assimilating the meat from, let us say, a hamster or rabbit which has been made compatible-"

  Statement of the Central Presidium.

  The Central Presidium of the People's Republic of China has released this statement:

  "Ever mindful of the vital concerns of its many people, the Central Presidium shares their just wrath at the latest provocation of the snarling dogs of global monopoly capitalism. They presume to kidnap the unborn child of our heroic People's Republic of China astronaut Commander James Peng-tsu Lin. Let these slavish tools of the multinationals keep their bloodstained claws off this heroic unborn Chinese citizen, or the consequences will strike terror to their hearts."

  – South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, PRC

  "I don't think," the State Department man said severely, "that that's good enough, Dr., ah, ben Jayya. They must be kept alive."

  The biochemist shrugged. "Of course," he said, looking at Daisy Fennell, "there is also the fact that there are additional stores of food on the Starlab orbiter. The subject called Dopey has urged that a spacecraft be launched to obtain them-"

  "That's being looked into," Daisy said quickly.

  "-but even that, you must understand, is only an interim solution, while our researches must ultimately-"

  But he didn't get a chance to finish saying what his researches must ultimately do. The door opened and the deputy director came in, quietly, but changing the climate of the room.

  Everyone perked up. "Sorry I'm late. Hope I'm not interrupting," he apologized, knowing that he was, "but I think now it's time we gave everybody a look at the gadget we took out of our friends."

  So that was what Harold Ott was doing in the room. The man was already on his feet, politely elbowing Daisy Fennell out of the way to get at the master controls. As he touched the keypad the room lights darkened and the projectors of a 3-D system arose from the tabletop. There was a brief polychromatic haze over the middle of the table, then it cleared and turned into an image of something that looked like a copper-covered almond, slowly rotating as they watched.

  "I thought of bringing one of the actual gadgets in for you to look at," Marcus Pell said chattily, "but we're really not supposed to take them out of the secure lab."

  One of the men raised a hand. "That's pretty big to go in somebody's head," he said doubtfully.

  "It's enlarged so we can see it better," Pell explained. "The actual object is only a little over two centimeters long. It's a bug, all right, and we've got three of them, That's half the world's supply."

  "Where's the other half?" the man asked.

  "Scattered, I'm afraid. There's one in General Delasquez's head, and he's back in Florida. There's another in the Chinese pilot-not the one that just came back, the other one. We don't know where he is-somewhere in China, anyway. And there's the one the Ukrainians took out of the dead Dr. Artzybachova and they let get stolen. That one we're trying to locate; we have some leads."

  The general said testily, "The people who stole it, they're terrorists, right? I don't like having that kind of thing in their hands. What if they take it apart and see what's inside?"

  Pell looked courteously at the electronics man. "Harold?" Ott pursed his lips. "It's not that easy.
Here in the lab we've done about all the noninvasive studies we can, and they don't tell us much. Next step would be to use a can opener on one of them, but there's a considerable risk of destroying it if we do."

  "Tissue and hair samples from the extraterrestrials give us clues as to the basic proteins, fats and other molecules that make up their bodies, but they are not enough; without invasive surgery we can't tell what less common compounds are required by their glands, nervous systems, etc. However, we have succeeded in isolating a number of their basic chemicals, and, through polymerase chain reaction and other techniques, are capable of manufacturing them in dietary quantities. The proteins are the most difficult. Proteins are basically composed of two parts, an alpha helix and a number of beta sheets. We have synthesized quantities of these. However, it isn't enough to put the right ingredients in a kettle and cook them up; the planar beta sheets, for example, must be folded in just the right way. Still, we have produced basic ration packs for each species, which should sustain life for a period. Whether it contains all the required vitamins and minerals is another question; we cannot guarantee that the ETs will not start developing something like scurvy or kwashiorkor over time."

  – The Biowar Report

  "So you re stymied?"

  "Maybe not." He gave the deputy director an inquiring look and got a nod of permission. "It seems that one of the Doc creatures-the one that isn't a brain surgeon-is supposed to be an expert on that sort of thing. We think probably he could disassemble one for us, and then we could get a better look at it. It's a pretty impressive little gadget. Apparently it monitors full five-sense inputs and transmits them to at least orbital distance. We don't have any idea, really, what its range is. It uses some frequency that we haven't been able to detect. It isn't in any of the conventional radio bands. And it requires no external power source."