Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  Recorded at 1850 local time

  The legend disappeared and we were looking at the face of the TV newscaster known as Robin Maxwell. I knew who the man was. Everybody in the Bureau did. Maxwell had been on the Bureau's watch list for a long time because he seemed to have contacts in some dubious places.

  It looked like he had found himself a new contact now. "The spooks are at it again," he was telling his audience. "You know what they've got at the NBI now? They've squirreled away a Scarecrow submarine and a live Horch, would you believe it? Take a look." The face disappeared and we saw a picture of the sub, with Beert standing on top of it. "They don't want you to know about it, but hey, that's what Maxwell's for, telling you the things the big guys don't want told…"

  He kept on talking, but there wasn't any point in listening anymore. The thing that mattered had been said, and said on broadcast television which the Scarecrows were no doubt monitoring. So the secret was out.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  I never did get to my 1930. All Camp Smolley's schedules were disrupted for sure, because inside of an hour there were a hundred reporters battering at the gates of Camp Smolley, demanding to know everything there was to know about this Scarecrow submarine and actual living Horch that we were hiding from them, and why hadn't they been told about them before?

  The reporters didn't get in, of course. They didn't even get any answers. What they got was Daisy Fennell, sent out to face them down and tell them that: a, there was no truth at all to the rumor; b, those alleged pictures were obviously morphed fakes; and c, if any of Maxwell's story had been true, it would be an act of treason to the human race to report it, because the Scarecrows would hear. While inside the camp the deputy director was raging through the hallways, demanding that every living soul in the installation take a PET lie-detector test to find the criminal who had broken security.

  Whether any of the reporters believed Fennell, I couldn't guess. The funny thing was that part of what she said was true. The photos Maxwell showed weren't photos, they were morphs, probably made from descriptions he got from someone who had seen Beert and the sub but hadn't taken their pictures. Beert looked more like the hideous cartoon of a Horch the Scarecrows had showed us than his living self, and the alleged photo of the submarine got the handling machinery at its bow all wrong.

  It made a nice little no-win situation for the Bureau; they could easily prove Maxwell's pictures were fakes, but only by admitting that the sense of his story was true.

  So the media carried Daisy Fennell's denials, but that didn't solve the problem. Wrong as it was in detail, Maxwell's pictures clearly showed what the Scarecrows would instantly recognize as their missing sub.

  The question on everybody's mind was: what were they going to do about it?

  As far as anybody could tell, nothing. At least, not right away. Pirraghiz reported no special traffic to or among the Scarecrow submarine fleet.

  All the same, there was a lot of worrying going on around Camp Smelly. Even Hilda was snappish, and the deputy director was hemorrhaging wrath, blame and worry all over the installation. He had his own way of dealing with worry, and it took the form of starting a one hundred percent interrogation of everybody in sight, thirsty for the blood of the despicable traitor who had broken security. By "interrogation" I don't just mean questioning; he had four PET-scan machines flown in from Arlington for lie-detector tests.

  I didn't expect much from that. Position emission tomography is pretty good at sorting out facts from fantasy, because those two files seem to be stored in different parts of the brain, but it takes three or four hours to test a single subject. Marcus had not only the couple hundred people at Camp Smolley to test but all the ones at Hampton Roads as well. The good part of that was that it kept him out of my hair.

  And then even Hilda left me alone. When I finished my breakfast it was Dan M. who was waiting for me outside my room. "I'm your new shepherd, Dan," he told me wryly. "Hope that's all right with you. Hilda couldn't put her dialysis off any longer, so she's out of commission for the rest of the day."

  "Fine," I said, more or less meaning it. I still wasn't entirely easy in the company of this other myself, but as the day went on it got better. He wasn't just someone to talk to, he was that nearly ideal person for a conversation who was nearly ideal because he had the advantage of thinking exactly the way I did. As we moved from one appointment to another we chatted about what was going on around us, and if nothing new came out of any of the chat, at least it was useful to be able to talk, but then the world obtruded itself on us.

  We were just entering the chamber where the techs waited when every screen in the area turned itself on at once, and when we saw what was on all those screens it took our minds right off the planned questions.

  The Scarecrows were talking to us again.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  At least the Scarecrows were no longer going to the trouble of faking the face of a human being to deliver their little homilies. The creature displayed on the screen was unquestionably a Dopey. He was squatting comfortably on a gold-colored cushion, his little hands busy in his belly bag. Behind his head was a pretty background landscape, distant hills and fleecy white clouds in a blue, blue and very Earthly sky. All faked, no doubt. The Dopey was doing his best to look amiable and trustworthy, not an easy job for a Dopey. When he spoke his voice had the cajoling quality of a late-night, golden-oldie disk jockey.

  "You know who I am," he said, the little cat eyes gleaming, his fan spread in glorious iridescence. "I have spoken to you before, bearing the generous messages of our Beloved Leaders, who know what is best for all of us and whose patience is great-but not without limit."

  His plume darkened and his voice became sorrowful. "But you are a willful species," he scolded. "You have betrayed the trust of the Beloved Leaders. You have wickedly stolen a vehicle which is their property. You have begun the construction of armed spacecraft. And you have done even worse. You have brought to your planet a representative of the despicable Horch.

  "The Beloved Leaders cannot permit this to go on.

  "Therefore they command you to take two steps. Within the next four days you must broadcast an invitation for representatives of the Beloved Leaders to come to your planet. And, as a token of good faith, you must rid yourself of this evil monster, the Horch. Kill him. Do so in a public place. Broadcast his execution. And when he is dead amputate all of his limbs and head. Let it be seen that this is done, so there can be no question of the sort of trickery you have shown yourself capable of."

  He raised himself on his little legs and peered sternly into the camera. "Four days!" he said sternly. "If you have not complied by that time, at that hour you and your entire race will die."

  He stood silent for a moment, then sank back on his cushion. The colors of his peacock tail brightened into soft pastels and his tone became wheedling.

  "You must understand," he said, "that the Beloved Leaders seek no personal gain from you. It is for your own good-indeed, if you force them to put an end to your lives, even that is for your good, since it will speed your way to the Eschaton.

  "The Beloved Leaders know that, in your present primitive state, this is frightening to you, for it is what you call 'death.' But death is only an incident. It will come sooner or later to each of you-the temporary death which all organisms experience. It is not to be feared. It is only the way which we must all pass, in order to reach that great eternity of the Eschaton.

  "Yet the Beloved Leaders do not wish to take this step unless you force them to it. It would be tragic if your entire species went prematurely to the Eschaton. You are a young race. You have not attained full development. You cannot ever achieve that on your own. That can only happen to you under the wise and benevolent guidance of the Beloved Leaders. That generous proposal is still open to you, but you must act now. Destroy that vile Horch. Invite our people to come to you. Accept the great gift that is offered you.

  "Remember, four days! And if you
have not done as instructed, at the very moment of the end of that time you and all your species will immediately perish."

  And the Dopey curled his lipless little mouth into what he might have thought of as a friendly smile, and his image faded from the screen.

  Next to me Dan M. was wearing the strangest expression I'd ever seen on his face, part anger, a lot confusion; mostly he looked as though he were either going to laugh or cry. "But, Dan," he complained, "how? The Pats guarantee that there's absolutely nothing in orbit that can get here in four days! Do you think he's bluffing?"

  I was staring at the blank screen, hardly hearing him. "No," I said, "I think it's worse than that. I think maybe we've been worrying about the wrong thing. I'd better talk to Hilda right away."

  CHAPTER FIFTY-T W O

  When I got to Hilda's room she was there, all right, but the medics didn't want to let me in. "She was sleeping," the doctor in charge told me. "We woke her up after we saw the message from the Scarecrows. She's watching a replay now, but she doesn't want any visitors while she's undergoing dialysis…"

  I didn't argue with the man. I just pushed him out of the way. As I opened her door I called, "Hilda? Sorry to break in on you, but-"

  And then I stopped, because I saw why Hilda Morrisey didn't want any visitors.

  I had never seen Hilda like that before. It was bad enough trying to get used to her white-enameled box. This was worse. She was out of her steel-enamel shell, but she still didn't look anything like the Hilda I used to know. She was lying flat on an airbed, with tubes going into her in a dozen places and a sort of steel corset surrounding her upper body. The thing pulsed rhythmically, because it was doing Hilda's breathing for her. Apart from that, all she was wearing was one of those inadequate hospital shifts, and she looked smaller, older and more defenseless than I had ever imagined her before. The sheet that had been thrown over her didn't hide the fact that there wasn't much left of Hilda Morrisey.

  But she spoke right up as soon as she saw me. "It isn't going to be a comet, is it, Danno?" she demanded. "It's something to do with the subs, isn't it?"

  She had put her finger right on it; it was what I had picked up on as soon as I heard the Dopey speak.

  The fact that Hilda was ahead of me again didn't surprise me; she often was, which was what made her bearable as a boss. Her voice did surprise me, though. It was the voice of the authentic Hilda Morrisey. I guess most of the toxins must have been dialyzed out of her blood by then. She still looked terrible, but not pathetic anymore. I said, "I think so, yes. But I want to get something settled first." I hesitated, then got to the point. "We aren't going to kill Beert for them, Hilda. No matter what. I won't let that happen, and that's definite."

  She gave me a Hilda Morrisey stare. "Are you giving me orders, Danno?"

  "I'm telling you that we can't afford to. He can help us figure out just what the Scarecrows are up to. And," I added, "we'll need that robot of his; it has a lot of information Beert doesn't. So get it flown in from Arlington right away, will you?"

  She made a face. "Christ. Marcus will have a fit. All right. I'll give that order, and then I'll tell Marcus about it."

  I didn't want to let it go at that, so I insisted. "And you'll tell him not to get any ideas about stalling the Scarecrows by wasting Beert in front of the cameras."

  She gave me an opaque look. "Not right away, anyway. Now get the hell out of here so they can take all this crap off me."

  Then it got crazy.

  While Hilda was getting a team together I took a quick run to the sub. There was only one Doc on listening duty, and it was Foozh. He was jabbering at the duty guard as I came through the hatch, and mewed and whined at me twice as fast as soon as he saw me. Of course I couldn't understand a word, but I could hear the meows and growls that were coming from the speaker. Lots of them. They were busy out there, and when Pirraghiz and Mrranthoghrow got there she began translating at once.

  The subs were doing something, all right. They weren't traveling very far; they were pausing at discrete points along the various continental shelves, then moving no more than a kilometer or two and pausing again. Pirraghiz said it sounded like they were depositing things on the sea bottom. What things? She had no idea; the orders from the scout ship never said. For what purpose? She didn't know that, either.

  But I had no doubt that it was bad news.

  An hour later we had a kind of a task force gathered-me and Been and his Christmas tree, plus eight or nine Bureau specialists. Hilda was there, back in her box, and so was the deputy director; he had taken time out from his witch hunt to bring the robot in person-and also to let me know that this was all my fault, because if I had let him hide Beert away in Arlington, the way he wanted to, nobody would have known he was there.

  He was wrong about that, of course-whoever leaked the story would have known about the sub, anyway, with or without Beert. I didn't argue. I spoke to Beert, ignoring everybody else. "Something the Greatmother said has been nagging at me, something about the Others killing off rebellious races by poison gas. Do you remember what it was?"

  "Of course, Dan," he said promptly. "It is part of our history. What do you wish to know?"

  "What kind of gas? How do they get it to the planet?"

  He waggled his neck at me. "It isn't necessary to do that, Dan. On most planets like your own, such poisons are already there in the oceans. They need only to be released."

  And when I translated all that, the yelling began. There was no poison gas in the oceans, the experts insisted. There certainly was, Beert said stoutly, because the Greatmother of the Great-mother had said so. All right, snapped the experts, what poison are you talking about?

  Naturally, Beert's words meant nothing when he answered. Nor did the robot's, when asked, but the robot had a better way of communicating. It drew pictures for us. A big dot with a little dot near it. A cluster of a dozen big dots, some filled in, some just circles, with six little dots near it.

  It was the Bureau's chemical-warfare specialist who figured it out: "They're diagrams of elements! Hydrogen and carbon!" And when the robot said there were four of the second diagram for every one of the first in this poison, the chemist blinked and smote her forehead with her hand and said, "Of course!" It was the first time I had heard the word "methane."

  PART ELEVEN

  Methane

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  All right, I admit it. I should have thought of it before. Call it fatigue, call it too much going on-no, just call it that I screwed up. That's certainly what Hilda told me. It was what the deputy director told me, too, but he didn't waste any time. Two hours later he and Hilda and I, pumped up with the Bureau's wake-up pills, were watching the sun rise on the landing pad, where an oceanologist was tumbling off a VTOL from New Jersey. His name was Samuel Schiel, and he came from the Lamont-Doherty Institute-well, actually he came from his bed, because the deputy director's summons had come in the middle of the night- and he barely had time to catch his breath before Marcus Pell had whisked him into a conference room and the questioning had begun.

  Pell didn't even sit down. He stood behind the big chair at the head of the table and turned on the man. "You, what's your name, Schiel? Is this methane thing possible?"

  Schiel was unfazed. He took a seat halfway down the long table, next to me, across from Hilda, looking around the room with interest. "Possible?" he repeated ruminatively. "Yes, in principle, Mr. Pell. Methane is a very common compound. It's the first member of the alkane hydrocarbons, a very simple molecule, and there's a great deal of it around in the form of clathrates, at least ten to the fifteenth cubic meters-Pardon? Oh." He moved his lips for a moment, doing arithmetic. "At least ten thousand million million cubic meters of the stuff, that is. Probably more. Much of it's locked up in permafrost in Asia and North America, but there's a tremendous amount on the sea bottoms. If you'd care to look-I asked my staff to transmit a map of the main deposits to me on the plane-"

  He did something
to the control for the screens at each place. While we were looking at them he investigated the coffee jug at his place, found it was full, poured himself a cup and waited for us to see what he was talking about.

  I swallowed when I saw where the main deposits were: some of the biggest along the Atlantic Coast of the Americas, along the Pacific shore of Panama, the Bering Strait-I knew those areas well. "That's exactly where the subs are concentrating," I said.

  Pell gave me a shut-up look; he had obviously figured that out for himself. "How come you know all this?" he demanded, looking at Schiel.

  Schiel put down his coffee cup. "Why, the methane beds have been investigated quite thoroughly; there was some hope of tapping them as a replacement for petroleum resources. Methane is a very good, clean-burning fuel, but some of the best deposits are a kilometer deep or more, and they're not easy to exploit. Perhaps I should explain their physical nature?"

  Pell sighed, reconciling himself to being lectured at by an expert but seeing no way out of it. "Perhaps you goddam should," he grumbled.

  Schiel nodded briskly and went on. "The methane content of the clathrates is hydrated," he said. "That means that each methane molecule is surrounded by a sort of cage of water molecules, in the form of ice under pressure. If the temperature rises or the pressure decreases, the clathrate disintegrates. When samples are trawled up from the sea bottom they begin to bubble and sizzle and fall apart even before they reach the surface, often quite explosively. Worse, there is some evidence that any attempt to exploit these resources for fuel may be quite dangerous. You see, under the clathrate beds there are trapped bodies of gaseous methane. When the crust is broken through, the methane gas can escape. In great volume, Mr. Pell. In which case it appears capable of turning the ocean itself into a sort of froth which is no longer dense enough to float a vessel. A Soviet drilling ship which was mysteriously lost many years ago is thought to have sunk when that happened, and there have been conjectures that such events, off the coast of the Carolinas, may have been responsible for some of the alleged disappearances in the so-called Bermuda Triangle." He looked around the room. "Is that what you wanted to know, Mr. Pell?"