Eschaton 02 The Siege of Eternity

by Frederik Pohl

  It was one of those strange little chemical steam guns they called bomb-buggers.

  Hell, she thought glumly.

  They were not children anymore, of course. And they weren't playing a game here in Ukraine.

  So when they climbed into the big, welcoming bed, Pat turned away and stayed virtuously on her own side. So did Dannerman, and those unseen observers, if any, got nothing interesting to look at that night.

  The next morning it was snowing again.

  Pat viewed it with mixed emotions. Maybe they wouldn't go into the evacuated zone after all?

  But Dannerman was firm. The car was hired, the snow was only a light dusting, he was definitely going, she could stay in the hotel if she was that frightened of a little residual radiation, but that would make her whole presence here pointless, wouldn't it?

  All through breakfast she considered that option, but who was Dannerman to tell her she was frightened?

  Then, when they arrived in the lobby, complete with parkas and boots, the concierge was apologetic. Yes, he had arranged their picnic baskets, which the doorman would put in their car-there were no restaurant facilities in the evacuated zone-but it would be a different car. The German-speaking Stefan had had an unfortunate accident. He would not be able to take them after all. However, the concierge had arranged for another man, Vassili, very good, spoke little German but his English was excellent and he knew the zone very well. Besides, he was already committed to go to Chernobyl that morning, in order to drive an engineer who worked with the monitoring crew back from leave; he would drop the woman off at Far Rainbow, the town where the workers lived, and then simply take them on to the reactor itself. She would not be in the way. She would have her own food, as would the driver. Also, she knew the zone well, and perhaps could tell them things even Vassili didn't know.

  At least the car was bigger than Pat had feared-the woman engineer sat in front with Vassili, and Dannerman and Pat had the fairly spacious backseat to themselves-and it had a good heater. Pat dozed on Dannerman's shoulder for the hour it took to get to the zone proper, and only woke when she heard the driver talking to him. They were passing a structure like a toll plaza on an American superhighway that sat on the other side of the road. The road wasn't any superhighway. It was paved, but it had a hard and potholed life. There were two or three cars going through the structure on the other side, and the driver explained: "Check wheels, cars, people for radioactivity, do you see? Us also when we come out." The woman rattled something, and the driver grinned and translated: "She says easy to get in, not so easy to get out. You step in wrong place, you pick up radioactive mud, then you have to take shower and wash clothes before you leave. No hot water, either. So please be careful where you step."

  What Is Being Concealed?

  Are there indeed intelligent creatures living on other stars in our universe? Yes, we are told there are, and some representatives of them are currently being held incommunicado in the chambers of the American spy agency. Do they possess priceless information which is being withheld from the great mass of peoples of the world? There can be no question of that, either. What must be done to rectify this wrong? There can be only one response. The General Assembly of the United Nations must convene its emergency session and seek, yea, demand, answers to all these questions.

  – ElAhram, Cairo

  Behind them was a little village of small houses; it was one of the purpose-built places where the people of the town of Pripyat had been rehoused, after the great explosion. Ahead was nothing. The dead zone didn't look particularly dead in its coating of snow, and when Pat said something the driver spoke briefly to the engineer and reported, "No, is not dead. She say you come back in two months in spring and you see everything wonderful green. Trees, meadows. Even crops still coming up in places, only nobody eat them. Too much cesium-137, you know what that is? You eat them, your children have two heads, unless you die first."

  It seemed that the engineer did have a little English after all, because she wasn't letting Vassili get away with any of that. For the next twenty minutes, all the way to Far Rainbow, she spouted facts and statistics to the driver, who dutifully translated the flow of Ukrainian to Dannerman, who, in his incarnation as visiting research scientist, dutifully made notes. When they had dropped her in the company town the driver turned and made a face at Dannerman and Pat. "How she talks! Amazing!" he said, and said nothing more until they were well clear of the town.

  Then he stopped the car. He peered up and down the deserted road, then turned to his passengers. "You get out now. I must search you for weapons. Then we will meet a friend, and he will take us to Dr. Artzybachova."

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Rosaleen Artzybachova stood as much as she could of the solicitous yammering from the three of them. Then she retired to the bathroom. She did not actually have to move her bowels, and when she did have to she managed the feat expeditiously enough. Still there she was, perched morosely on the pot for half an hour and more, because where else in her little dacha could she be alone?

  Even so, she could hear them muttering to each other outside the bathroom door. They were getting impatient. They wanted decisions made and actions taken. Soon enough Marisa would be knocking in polite inquiry, or Yuri would, to ask if she were quite all right in there. Soon enough she would have to come out. Then she would have to face their tender, bossy concern again.

  She didn't want to.

  What Rosaleen Artzybachova wanted was to be left in the sort of peaceful solitude that had seemed so boring to her just a few, months before all this began, and now seemed like heaven. She sighed, gloomily yearning for the tedium of those endless games of chess-by-fax. She stood up and flushed the toilet-not that there was anything there to flush apart from the sparkling (if faintly radioactive) water from the Dnieper River two kilometers away. She ran some more of that water in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror.

  In just a few years she would be-God's sake!-a hundred. She observed herself critically. She was definitely more hunched over than she had been a few months before. That was osteoporosis, one of the side effects of those months in the captivity of the Beloved Leaders without her medications, and it would be with her for the rest of her life. Once the calcium was gone it didn't come back. But at least she had stopped losing it, and, taken all in all she looked no more than, well, perhaps seventy-five, eighty at the most.

  But ninety-and-some was how old she truly was, and wasn't that enough of an age to content any reasonable human being? Was it worth the trouble to try to prolong it?

  The zek children wanted her to prolong it. They wanted to save her from all the threats that were building up around her, and it would be impolite to refuse their kind, if unwanted, solicitude. When she opened the door Marisa was standing there. The girl had a couple of towels in her hand, not because she was carrying them anywhere but to provide an excuse for being in that place at that moment. "All right," Rosaleen Artzybachova said, roughly but fondly, "you see for yourself that I did not die in there. So please put those silly towels down and sit somewhere."

  The dacha of Doktor-nauk Rosaleen Artzybachova had only four rooms, but that was because she only wanted four. It wasn't her father's dacha, though it was built on the same tenth of a hectare, on the same hillside fifty-two kilometers from Kiev, with the same pretty-if distant-view of the Dnieper River. Her father's dacha had also been four rooms, but those rooms were slapped together of rough-sawn boards from the trees at the top of the hill. It had not been anything like a luxurious country home. It was hardly heated at all, apart from one fireplace and the jawboned-together tangle of copper water pipes that was meant to, but seldom did, conduct some of the fireplace heat to the bedroom. Of course it was lacking electricity and running water. And, of course, it had been taken away from the family when the GehBehs carried her grandfather off to the camps.

  When Rosaleen began to be distinguished in her field it had given her some satisfaction to buy the dacha back-
cheaply enough, after that whole area had been contaminated by the explosion in the Chernobyl power plant-and then to tear it down and have the new one built in its place. Which had been not at all cheap, since the workmen demanded, and got, triple pay for the risks of working in the Zone of Alienation.

  In the dacha's spacious living room Tamara and Yuri were somberly watching a news channel; the pictures on the wall screen were of Dopey and the two Docs, caught as they were being escorted from one place to another somewhere in America, but Rosaleen could not tell where because the sound was off. "Where's Bogdan?" she asked.

  "He has gone to find an untapped phone," Tamara said. "He will be back very soon, I think. He says we may have to move tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest. Also there is another legal notice in the incoming."

  "All right, fine," Rosaleen said, and gestured toward the samovar. While Marisa was getting her a glass of tea she sat down on the comfortable chaise, warmed to body temperature and thankfully free of the bedding her guests used, since there was no actual bed on the premises for anyone but Rosaleen herself. She didn't ask what the legal notice was about. She knew. Somebody somehow had persuaded the village clerk to make a fuss about her ownership of the dacha again. It was pure-pure-pure "chickenshit," she thought to herself, her America-acquired vocabulary always useful for such matters. No one contested that Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova had owned the dacha in fee simple. What they were making trouble about was that it was clearly established in the official records that Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova had unfortunately died, having left no will and therefore with her estate reverting to the government. Although this new Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova certainly seemed to be in some sense the same person, there would have to be a hearing, and a court determination, and-

  And, yes, it was chickenshit, all right. Rosaleen knew that the only thing those powerful unseen someones really wanted to accomplish was to get her out of the safety of her house. For what precise reason Rosaleen did not know, but was sure it was an unpleasant one.

  She took a lump of sugar from the tray Tamara offered and placed it in her mouth. As she sucked the first scalding sip of the tea through it Tamara waved shyly to the picture on the wall screen. "Doctor? What was it like, to be a captive of those horrible creatures? Were you frightened?"

  Mr. L. Korovy: "And in our own country of Ukraine, what do we see? Our inflation rate has trebled, for no other reason than apprehension in our financial circles over the impact of these new technologies from space. And whose efforts are largely responsible for wresting these precious articles from their source and bringing them back to us? Why, none other than our own dear Doktor-nauk emeritus R. V. Artzybachova. Yet the Americans have usurped them from us and all the world!

  "This is clearly unsupportable. It is the evident duty of the United Nations General Assembly to, with immediate effect, begin a formal investigation into this matter, and then to ensure that the fruits of these discoveries are shared with all the world's people, particularly those who, like Ukraine, have done so much to obtain them."

  – Proceedings of the General Assembly

  Yuri clucked angrily at her impudence, but Rosaleen shook her head at the man. She was grateful to all her companions in this new captivity, but small, young Tamara was the one who touched her heart. She expertly tucked the sugar in the corner of her mouth and said, "Yes, I was frightened, my dear. What was it like? Very much like it is here. Crowded. Frustrating. Worrying. Like being imprisoned anywhere, although you all smell better than the extraterrestrials did. Indeed," she said, smiling fondly at her three protectors, "no doubt better than I will in just a moment, since, as long as Bogdan is not here yet, I think I will do my exercises."

  Tamara nodded, and began to set up the exercise machines. Marisa said fretfully, "But where is Bogdan?"

  Where was he? Tugging at the weights of her exercise machine before the great picture window, Rosaleen asked herself the same question. It was curious that a short time ago she had been trying to postpone the discussion as long as she could, and now she was impatient to get it over with. All down the slope of the mountain the snow was still thick. The picture windows layered thicknesses of thermal glass and inert gases shut the outside cold away from the people in the dacha. But Rosaleen knew exactly how bitterly cold it would be out there if they had to leave. She did not look forward to being cold.

  She didn't look forward to leaving her dacha at all, as a matter of fact, but Bogdan was firm. She could not stay here, he declared.

  Well, she knew that. Apart from anything else, she could not allow her companions to remain in this place, where the ground was soaked with cesium-137 and all the residual radiation permeated even the house they were in. True, there was very little radiation left now. Not enough to kill. Not even enough to make one sick-had she not lived in it herself for the years of her "retirement," before Pat Adcock called her to the adventure of visiting Starlab? But in those pre-Starlab days no one had lived in the house but Rosaleen herself and her do it-all housekeeper and companion, both too old to worry about the real dangers of the radiation. Those dangers were primarily to unborn children. So many had been born with incomplete hearts or brainless heads, with quick-growing cancers, with every sort of damage. Rosaleen would certainly never bear a child, but what about these young people who were protecting her?

  Bogdan, of course, said that he was well aware of the problem and was monitoring their exposure. And he was the one who gave orders.

  He was the doctor, in fact. That had been useful in getting her out of the Kiev hospital, where she had not been safe-Bogdan had said so himself. That was useful still, because he was the one who kept reporting to those who wanted to come and "interview" her that she simply was even now not well enough for that kind of stress. She trusted Bogdan. His grandfather had been the one who had tried to keep her own grandfather alive, in the camps of dreary memory. He had found the other zek children to guard her and wait on her-all descendants of men and women from the Gulag-Tamara, who was Bogdan's own niece, Yuri and Marisa from families his family and her own had known for generations. In the final analysis it was family that was important to Ukrainians-even to cosmopolitan Ukrainians like Rosaleen Artzybachova herself.

  Except that to certain Ukrainians, the ones who wanted to regain for Ukraine the imperial status it had had under the Grand Duke Cyril, it was the nation that was important.

  When, in April of 1986, the controllers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant managed to blow the thing up the resulting explosion spread a dusting of radioiodine, cesium-137 and hundreds of other radioactive isotopes over many thousands of square kilometers of the Ukraine and adjacent Belorussia. In much of that territory the human inhabitants stayed where they were, in spite of growing numbers of childhood cancers and shortened lives, because they had nowhere else to go. In the worst of it-the so-called "evacuated zone"-the people were moved out, but their livestock, and the wild creatures who shared the space, remained. The animals didn't disappear. They suffered their own cancers and mutations, but, without a human population to hunt or exterminate them, they multiplied.

  Rosaleen could not understand those people. To be Ukrainian, yes, that was a good thing; she felt that herself. To have lasting angers against the Russians, yes, that, too. From Soviet times, from czarist times before that, the Russians had shown contempt for Ukrainian customs, language-and people. (Who but the Russians would have sited that terrible Chernobyl plant where it could do so much harm?)

  But to want to make Russia a mere province of a greater Ukraine, as in the long-forgotten (but evidently not by everyone) day of Cyril, that was simply insane.

  Which did not mean that it wasn't real. If there was one thing about human nature that Rosaleen Artzybachova had learned in more than ninety years of life, it was that people frequently acted quite in-

  sane.

  Rosaleen was just getting out of her after-exercise shower when she heard the excited voices from outside. She grabbed for a robe and was still
tying the sash, dripping wet under the towel cloth, when she saw what was going on. Little Tamara was already in her fleece jacket, assault rifle in her hand, going out the door to take her post commanding the road; Yuri had turned the enabling switch for the mines buried under the pavement and had his hand hovering over the button.

  What they were looking at, out the great picture window, was a little electric car whining up the grade. It was Bogdan's car, but there were more people than Bogdan in it. He had, Rosaleen observed without surprise, found more than an untapped phone. Marisa was scrutinizing it through her glasses. "It's Bogdan driving," she reported, "but there are two other men and a woman in it. I know one of the men: Vassili. I don't know the others."

  "He's stopping," Yuri said.

  Marisa took the glasses away from her eyes to give him a nervous look. "You're not detonating the mines, are you?"

  Yuri didn't even look at her. He picked up the desk phone. "Tamara? They're supposed to get out of the car there. Keep them covered."

  If Tamara answered, Rosaleen couldn't hear her; but what Yuri said was happening. The little car's doors opened and Bogdan and a woman got out, followed a moment later by the other two men, squeezing their way over the front seats to exit through the only doors the car had.

  "I don't know them," Marisa reported, and Rosaleen clenched her teeth.

  "Give me the damn binoculars," she ordered; and, when she had them to her eyes, studied the people carefully. Then she set the glasses down.

  "I do," she said. "Two of them, anyway. Pat Adcock and Dan Dannerman. They were with me in captivity."