Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  The telescopes were outside the satellite, lonely detached eyes peering into distances so great no mind could comprehend them. Inside, the astronomers worked with computers, with printouts, with pictures, and now and then stood beside the wide windows and gazed outward.

  Cluny looked until his eyes watered, and he wanted to look longer, as if he thought that if he could look long enough, hard enough, with the exactly right mental set, he would be transported through that glass wall, out there somewhere else.

  Space was blacker than any drawing had ever shown it, blacker than any camera had ever revealed. Space black was a new concept, never realized until now. In his mind the points of light began to move, some swelling into real shapes, with radiating points that pulsed in rainbow colors. Galaxies spun in a space dance to unheard music; he knew he would have to be out there, in that somewhere else, to hear the music, and he did not doubt that out there he would hear it.

  More than anything else, it was the size of space that held him before the windows day after day. Another new concept. No one who had not been here, had not stared into the depths as he and his fellow workers had done, could have any idea of the size of space, he knew. They had guessed, down there, and had come up with the word “infinity,” but without knowing what it meant, with no feeling for it, just an intellectualized symbol that stood for something they could not grasp. Only here could one understand what infinity meant.

  He remembered the first time he had looked through a good telescope, a twenty-inch reflector. It had been a cold January night, the sky flawless, without a shimmer of haze. While awaiting his turn he had spotted the Big Dipper, Polaris, Cassiopeia, Orion. . . . Then, looking through the telescope, the obscuring curtains of time and space had been rent and the sky was filled with stars. The Milky Way became a highway of light, beckoning, welcoming. . . . The Ring nebula became a smoke ring in space, tangible, graspable if only one could get close enough. The unrelieved blackness of the lesser coal sacks were chutes through eternity.

  Another memory came. He had been reviewing a series of photographs that had been analyzed already by the computer. He had thought, with a terrible longing, how wonderful it would have been to have counted the moons of Jupiter for the first time, to have been the first person to see the rings of Saturn, to have predicted and then found Pluto. He had looked at the astronomy laboratory then with hatred: one wall filled floor to ceiling with computer components; automatic film-processing equipment; the intricate computer-run camera mechanism and clock drives that aimed the giant eye, blinked, froze an image on film and went on, endlessly, tirelessly, without comprehension of the awful, compelling, terror-filled beauty out there.

  That had been his last week at the observatory. Back in school there had been more mathematics, more physics, more computer analyses and simulations, and somehow, somewhere in the years of work toward his degree, the image had been lost, the dazzling spectacle forgotten, replaced by theories and formulae.

  He had watched an interview with a pianist once, and although he no longer remembered the man, he recalled his words: “You have to be one with the music, feel it, concentrate on it, be it. The piano no longer exists. If you ever change your focal point of attention to the keys or your hands, you lose the music.”

  Somewhere back there, Cluny knew, he had changed his focal point and he had lost the stars. Here on Alpha he had recaptured the excitement and awe, and until now he had not realized he had lost it before. He had forgotten. It frightened him that not only had his mind erased the thrill and its memory traces, but also it had erased his awareness that once it had been his.

  “You can’t sleep?” Anna asked softly.

  He started as if from a dream and shook himself. “I’m okay,” he said. She nodded and returned to her work.

  For four months one of their tasks had been to measure cosmic radiations undistorted in any way, with the incalculable benefit of having intelligence direct the research. Here for the first time they could return to an area of puzzlement, linger over a particular segment of space if they could find no answers to their questions. The unmanned satellite observatories had been excellent as pointers, directing them with decades of preliminary work to probe here, then there. Finally someone was following up the clues, finding few answers, always more questions.

  Sid had said, joking, but not altogether clowning, “So a black hole is eating up the cosmic radiation, and that means a drought on Earth. So what do we do, go snare it and make it behave?”

  Not a theory, still a hypothesis only, or a suggestion even. And if they could find proof, could they reveal it, knowing as they did that there was nothing to be done about it?

  He left the observatory, and finally climbed the steps to his own room. Because there were only fifty-seven scientists in this section, each had a separate room, spacious enough for two or even three when the station became fully operational. He closed his door and looked around to see if he could detect anything out of order. He never could, but he always made that one quick, almost involuntary survey. Out of fifty-seven people, no one knew how many were intelligence first, science second. He had papers on a small desk, a computer terminal, his single bed, two chairs. Better living accommodations than most people on Earth had right now, he thought, and was sorry the Earth had intruded again. His problem, he decided, was that he missed Lina so much it had become a physical ache, like a toothache that was not acute, but did not go away either. With each new turn of the head, it became manifest; allowing himself to think of her now made the pain flare, like probing the tooth with an icicle.

  He sat on the side of his bed and stared at the papers on his desk. It was a long time before he was ready to sleep.

  Two days later Alex and Cluny were in the common room, talking about the coexistence of infinite alternate worlds. As always they took sides, arguing heatedly, contentedly.

  One of the Americans on Alpha beckoned to Cluny. “Hey, do you know how long the Edsel was in production?” Benjamin Rausche was in the astronomy division; he was twenty-four, a Ph.D. for three years already. Alex lifted his eyebrows expressively and excused himself as Benjamin continued. “Sid is trying to collect on a bet with nine months. I think he’s confusing it with childbirth.” Alex was laughing as he moved away and sat down with a different group, where a chess game was being kibitzed.

  “More than that,” Cluny said, and he marveled at the light tone he managed to bring to the words. Edsel was their signal that something was amiss. “Where is he?”

  “In his room, playing it cool, feet up, music on, a cognac in his fist. . . .”

  “Come along, children,” Cluny said. “No public bickering, no fistfights, no brawls. We gotta maintain class.”

  He left with Benjamin and Joe O’Brien, who was in space geology with Sid. Outside the common room he glanced at Joe, but was met with a slight frown. Benjamin continued to talk about Edsels.

  Sid was playing Scott Joplin very loud on his tape recorder. “Hell,” he said over the music as the three men entered, “You think I’d let Cluny be the arbiter?”

  Benjamin and Joe went to one side of the room and talked about Fords and Edsels as Sid handed Cluny a sheet of paper with a handwritten message on it:

  “Joe found this in orbit today. Don’t say a word. He smuggled it back and I haven’t left it a second since.”

  With a flourish he pulled back his bedcover and revealed a slender cylinder that gleamed like gold. He motioned Cluny closer, then twisted the end of the cylinder and removed it and withdrew a tube which also gleamed like the finest Egyptian gold. He unrolled the tube reverently to reveal a scroll with figures, symbols, something embossed on the surface.

  Cluny sat down hard on the bed, no longer hearing the inane conversation taking place behind him, or the ragtime piano, no longer aware of Sid, or anything else.

  Sid sat down and put the scroll between them, and slowly Cluny reached out to touch it. His hand trembled. How beautiful it was! The figures, all curved lines, wer
e precise, unlike anything he had ever seen before. The edges of the scroll had been polished, the corners rounded slightly; there was no sharpness anywhere. It was uncanny, perfect, alien. He stared until the curved lines shifted: raised, sunken, raised. . . . His vision blurred. He felt the gold sheet between his fingers, flexible, yielding, warm, no thicker than heavy vellum stationery.

  Stationery fit for a god, he thought. We built a tower in the sky, and this time we got a message back. Alex was wrong to scorn; he was premature. Not from God, but a message from someone out there.

  But why like this? he wondered suddenly and withdrew his hand from the scroll. Why would anyone leave a message out here? Why not on Earth? Why a message, why not a real contact? He heard the Joplin rag again, and the continuing discussion about cars,‘and he looked up to see Sid regarding him soberly. Is it authentic? he mouthed. Sid lifted his eyebrows and shrugged. A hoax? Cluny looked again at the scroll. Now he saw it as very human, just different enough to raise the possibility . . . But gold? His thoughts raced back and forth and he knew there was no way he could decide. What if they announced it, only to have it revealed as a tremendous hoax? Or what if they hid it, only to learn it was real? What if it contained a threat? A doomsday warning? Who should announce it? He began to frown; Sid was nodding grimly.

  “What now?” he mouthed, barely whispering the words.

  “We have to decide.”

  Cluny looked again at the cylinder. It was too smooth, too clean. “Why isn’t it pitted?”

  “Exactly,” Sid said.

  For the next hour, mouthing words in a hushed whisper, they tried to decide their next move. Finally they agreed that Sid should snip off a few grains of the scroll and the cylinder, that Cluny, who was due for a rest period in ten days, should take the samples back with him, and photographs of the message, and let Zach Greene, an undersecretary of the Space Agency, go on from there. No one suggested the secretary himself should be told yet.

  “Where can we hide it?” Cluny asked then. There were no places to hide anything on Alpha. Fifty-seven men and women-here and only the four of them who could trust each other with this, he thought bitterly. And he was not absolutely certain about Benjamin Rausche, who had a case of hero worship now, but who could outgrow it at any time, and afterward be an unknown factor. No room was safe; they all knew various intelligence agents entered and searched freely. No one had mentioned it ever, but it was as certain as the sunrise.

  “Back where we found it,” Sid said finally. “Six hundred kilometers from the station. Or back in one of the other areas that have been gone over and recorded.”

  Reluctantly they nodded. There was no other place for it. Sid’s group was making a detailed study of orbiting junk— old satellites, orbiting rocks, abandoned space monitors of all sorts. At least only nine people were likely to come across it out in space, better odds than fifty-three.

  The next ten days were a nightmare to Cluny. He knew he gave himself away to Alex many times over. He became morose and noncommunicative, hoping his dark mood would make others shy away from him. Alex joked about it. “So close yet so far from the beautiful Mrs. Cluny,” he said. “One might think you worried about the reunion. Ah, three months with nothing to do except love, exercise, rest. I don’t blame you, my young friend. I would be edgy also.”

  No matter how much Cluny learned about space flight and the mechanics of the shuttle, he knew it fell to earth and at the last possible moment spread its wings to brake the fall. He was terrified of the landings. This time was no better than any of the others he had experienced. He knew his face was green, and his legs too stiff, his voice too controlled when he got up to leave the ship. The pilot laughed openly at him, then waved good-bye and busied himself in the cabin. Others departing also looked frightened, but Cluny felt none of them had been as afraid as he had been and the thought was shaming to him.

  An Air Force plane flew him to Washington, and he was debriefed by a pair of security agents for the Space Agency. Then he reported to Luther Krohmeier, the secretary, a politician who had not looked inside a book of science since the ninth grade. He was a thick-set man with a small head that was exactly the circumference of his neck. Caricaturists loved him.

  “What’s this nonsense about a black hole?” he demanded.

  “It’s not firm, sir. Probably nothing at all to it. We’re trying to account for the decrease in cosmic radiation that has been apparent for the past ten years or so. Someone suggested that a passing body could have screened some of it. We’re investigating that also.”

  “What about the black hole?”

  They always kept harking back to that, Cluny thought impatiently. Because it sounded mysterious, and God knew it was mysterious, but also because it wakened something slumbering in the minds of everyone who heard it. There was always someone who felt compelled to make a big show of denying them as phenomena, the way some people denied ghosts.

  “Someone suggested that possibly a black hole in this neighborhood of space might be responsible. Its gravitational pull could be capturing a portion of the cosmic radiation.” Krohmeier laughed rudely. “Crap! Show me one and I’ll believe in it, boy. Until then, no more talk about black holes and cosmic radiation theft. No talk with reporters or anyone else. Information comes out of this office, nowhere else. And we have a statement from you all ready to go. You’re resting; keep it that way.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cluny said.

  “Snead will give you a copy of the statement to read. If anyone asks about it, you have no comment, period. Right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Doing fine work up there. Real fine work. Nice seeing you again. Keep in touch.”

  The assistant gave Cluny the statement, in which he was quoted as saying there was definite hope that the work being done on the station, focusing microwaves on the Arctic ice packs, would alleviate the drought in the very near future.

  He handed it back to Snead without comment and stalked away, not looking up Zach Greene now, knowing everything he did and said within the building would be watched and noted.

  He was free to go home. He was aching with fatigue, his legs throbbing. He had called Lina already and told her to expect him before midnight. An Air Force plane would take him there. They would go to Bermuda, he thought, or Brazil, someplace where there were no refugees, no Newtowns, no space agency goons. He turned in at Murray’s office. Murray had been denied space. He was an overweight medical risk with high blood pressure and a heart that did tricks now and then. But his efforts had not gone unappreciated; he had been given an office and a staff, and absolutely nothing to do, he complained bitterly. Actually he was Zach Greene’s top aide, and they ran the agency while Luther Krohmeier drew the salary and put in the public appearances that went with the office.

  Cluny was waved in by Murray’s secretary. He always had a drink with Murray when he was in town; they had been expecting him.

  Murray bounded across his office and grabbed Cluny in a bear hug. “You son of a bitch! I thought you’d be in the air flying home by now, under your own power if the plane was held up. How’re you? How’s Sid? How’s everything?”

  “Great, not so good, great. Sid’s having a running fight with Joe O’Brien over trivia, things like how long the Edsel was in production. Come on, let’s grab a quick drink before I take off. Might not have another chance for three months.”

  Murray’s face changed subtly. The beaming smile altered, vanished, and returned so fast that no one not looking for a change would have caught it. Now the smile he wore was his stage smile; his eyes were hard and probing. He opened the door behind Cluny, took his arm, and walked through the reception room. “Anyone calls, tell ’em I’m out getting drunk with my old friend Arthur Cluny. Hope the President calls,” he added, winking at his secretary. His hand was very hard on Cluny’s arm.

  Cluny’s legs were so weak he had trouble keeping up with Murray’s near trot down the corridor, then out to the street, a block to a d
im bar. He was breathing heavily by the time they were seated in a dark corner. He waited until they had drinks before them, and his heart had subsided, and his breathing was less labored. He felt like a rabbit being watched by a snake, he thought suddenly, and he told Murray about the cylinder and scroll.

  “I don’t believe it,” Murray said softly, showing relief in the way he changed again; he lifted his drink and took a long draught from it. Now he looked like a benevolent uncle out with his favorite nephew. He grinned at Cluny and shook his head. “You’ve been taken, kiddo.”

  “Maybe. I almost hope so. But it’s a complication that’s got to be handled. Sid thinks it’s dynamite.” By the way Murray’s eyes narrowed and a frown suddenly creased his forehead, he knew his friend had started the same line of thought that he and Sid had covered. He became silent, waiting.

  “It’s got to be a plant,” Murray muttered a few seconds later.

  “We think so too, but we’ve got to make sure. We have to get those samples to a good metallurgist who’s also safe. We didn’t know what else we could do. And I’ve got to deliver the film to Zach. How can I see him?”

  “You can’t. Forget that. Luther’s so paranoid, if he knew you’d been talking to Zach alone, he’d shit his pants. And probably fire Zach. I don’t count; we’re just drinking buddies from way back. Let’s think.”

  Neither spoke; the waiter drifted back, left again. Cluny sipped his Scotch then, but Murray was using his glass to make circles on the table.

  Finally he looked up. “Where’s the stuff now?”

  “On me. It’s been on me ever since that day.”

  “Keep it on you. Look, take Lina up to New York—shopping, the shows, the sights, the whole bit. I’ll get Zach up there and we’ll get in touch.”