Eschaton 02 The Siege of Eternity

by Frederik Pohl

  The other human beings were all lightly dressed and clearly freezing in the cutting Canadian prairie wind-like Hilda herself. The director and her D.D. were softly debating high policy considerations, frowning, pausing to make hurried calls on their coded carryphones. They seemed impervious to cold. Hilda wasn't. She caught the eye of one of the Mounties, the one that looked to be the most senior officer around. "Any reason we can't get back in that bus?"

  U.S. President Reported in Ottawa Airport.

  Police sources confirm that the President of the United States arrived at the Ottawa airport early this morning for a top-secret meeting with the Prime Minister. The meeting is said to be related to the broadcast from the U.S. astronomical satellite, Starlab. No further information available at this time.

  – Toronto Star

  "Reckon not," he said, then took matters into his own hands. He hustled everyone into the bus-the Pat who had flown up from the Bureau's flight strip plus three (Hilda counted) additional Pat Ad-cocks, Dannerman and the bearded second Dannerman (apart from the beard quite indistinguishable to Hilda's eyes; if he was not the very Agent James Daniel Dannerman she had run in a dozen operations over the years, he was certainly so close that she couldn't tell the difference); the hired pilot from China named James Peng-tsu Lin, looking grouchy and, for some reason, upset…

  And three others.

  It was the three others that made a peculiar situation totally bizarre. The little one that looked like a turkey didn't actually look that much like a turkey, after all. The face didn't belong to any kind of poultry. It was more like that of some ill-tempered tiger cub, Hilda thought. The plume that decorated its tail was almost peacock in its colorful splendor, but it wasn't made of feathers at all. It was a display of something more like fish scales that changed color from moment to moment as its owner gazed around in displeasure.

  "Colonel Morrisey?" Hilda turned swiftly when she heard her name called, and wasn't surprised to find it was that ubiquitous junior agent, Tepp. The woman was pointing at the turkey, and her finger was shaking. "It's Dopey!"

  And, Hilda saw, yes, it was. Its picture had been part of the zoo of weirdos that had been displayed in one of those unexplained-or now beginning to be explained-lunatic messages that had arrived from space a year or two before. This was the one they called "Dopey," all right. It was not really comical in appearance, but it wasn't particularly scary, either… unlike the other two.

  Those were definitely frightening to took at. They were big. The bus sagged perceptibly on its springs as they entered. And they were sure-hell ugly: fish-belly skin, multiple arms, with a white-fluff beard over the lower part of their faces that was more like foam plastic than hair. Hilda decided they were the ones called "Doc." The Dopey-creature seemed quite at ease at being carried by one of the pale monsters. Even the six humans who had come out of the spaceship seemed to pay them little attention. The Earthbound ones in the welcoming party, though, kept a wary distance. One of the Mounties had dutifully interposed himself between the Docs and the humans, presumably in case these space monsters suddenly began ravaging and murdering, but he did not seem happy about it. And when the Dopey hopped down from the arms of his bearer and began to investigate the interior of the bus the Mounty said sharply, "Scoot! Get back there, you!"

  The man was waving his arms as though at an unfamiliar, but probably not really dangerous, stray animal. Dopey peered up at him.

  "But why?" he asked reasonably, and, to Hilda's surprise, in impeccable English. "I am simply curious about this crude vehicle."

  "Get back," the Mounty said, his tone still firm although his expression was distinctly uneasy. The little alien flicked its great spread of tail and sulkily obeyed.

  All this Colonel Hilda Morrisey was observing and trying to remember in every detail. She wasn't pleased. There should have been recording devices in place to catch every word and every movement for analysis later on. Those first few minutes after you got a suspect in custody were the most important; that was when some unguarded remark might slip out that you could pounce on later. She fretted over wasting opportunities. The sooner they got these-people-into Bureau custody, the sooner interrogation could begin.

  But she couldn't do it here. All she could do at this point was listen.

  There wasn't much to listen to. The human arrivals were obviously on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Dannerman and Dr. Pat Adcock- the real Dannerman and Pat Adcock-were trying to engage the new ones in conversation, but they were too wasted to respond much.

  Except for one of the new Pats, who was looking thoughtfully from one Dannerman to another. When she caught the "real" Dannerman's eye she smiled, got up and sat down again beside him and began a low-voiced conversation. Eavesdropping, Hilda was startled to hear the woman begin a cozy conversation- "They call me Patrice-saves confusion. Well, it saves a little of the confusion, anyway. Listen, I'm sorry about the way I look…"

  Hilda raised an eyebrow. That was pickup-bar talk! The woman was actually, incongruously, making a move on Dannerman! While the other Dannerman and one of the other Pats were already sound asleep in a shared seat, the man's arm lovingly around the woman.

  Horny little devils, Hilda thought wonderingly, and looked outside. The firemen were slowly trundling their trucks away, no longer necessary and a bit disappointed, while a tractor was nuzzling up to the spacecraft to haul it somewhere. The director was standing by the little ship, talking to a man in the doorway with a Bureau tag hanging from his jacket. Not far away the three ambulances were parked, with all the medics clustered around the vehicle where the old lady had been taken. As Hilda watched, that one moved off, siren blasting. A pair of the other medics came trotting over to the bus and climbed in, asking, "Anyone here need medical attention?"

  The other Dannerman, roused by the sound of the sirens, looked up. Yawning, he pointed to one of the other Pats. "Better check Pat Five over. She's pregnant."

  The real Pat Adcock gasped. Hilda stared at the new Dannerman. "You dog," she said, half-admiringly.

  He gave her a weary shake of the head. "It wasn't me that done it, Hilda," he said. "But that's a really long story."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The situation wasn't that Pat Adcock-the real Pat Adcock, or so she couldn't help thinking of herself-had nothing to say to these three new selves. It was the other way around. She had too much. She had so many questions to ask and so many things she needed to express that she didn't know where to begin.

  The real shocker was that one of her was actually getting ready to have a baby. That took a lot of getting used to. Pat Adcock had never been pregnant, had never really wanted to be-oh, sure, maybe now and then there had been a fleeting wistful notion, quickly gone away. Who had the time for bringing up a child? So now she sat mute in the bus while they waited to be told what to do, then stood mute in the doorway of the deputy director's plane while the D.D. and five or six others wrangled over Jimmy Lin. This Jimmy Lin. The one who had just returned from somewhere in space. The one who now was adamantly refusing to go anywhere at all until he had a chance to talk to the Chinese consul in Vancouver. The one, most amazingly of all, who turned out to be the father of this other Pat's child.

  That was really hard to believe.

  Down on the ground voices were raised in anger. The argument seemed to be between the deputy director and the RCMP officer, and the deputy director was losing. The Mountie was shaking his head firmly. Significantly, a dozen other Mounties were standing silently behind him.

  Clearly the deputy director didn't want a major confrontation. He turned and stormed up the steps. "Canadian bastards," he was muttering. "First they take the old lady away from us, now it's the Chinese. Well, it isn't worth a war." More loudly, to the people in the doorway: "Get your asses on board. We're going home."

  As soon as they were airborne it started. The agents unstrapped themselves, heedless of the fact that the "Fasten Seat Belts" lights were still on. Colonel Morrisey reseated herself at
a little desk by a window and pulled out a keypad. She tapped swiftly, then nodded to the other spook. "Recording has commenced," she said.

  "Right," said the other female spook. "I'm Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell. I don't think we met before, because I flew in on the director's plane, but now I need to ask you some questions. You first, Agent Dannerman-" turning to the Dannerman with the beard. "I want you to begin at the beginning, starting with your launch to the Starlab satellite-"

  But the new Dannerman was shaking his head. "First we have to eat," he said.

  The vice deputy raised her voice and lowered its temperature. "Agent Dannerman," she began frostily, "you will do as I-"

  He stood his ground. "Have a heart! You don't know how it is with us. We've been eating crap for months and we are damn starved."

  The vice deputy opened her mouth to speak again, but Colonel Morrisey stood up quickly. She murmured something to the other woman, then said, "I'll take care of that. But you start talking while you're waiting for the food, Danno."

  "That'll be fine," he said, "if it's not too long." The look Hilda Morrisey gave him as she left was reproachful, but also amused, Pat thought.

  "Begin," the older woman commanded. "You approached the satellite in orbit."

  Dannerman nodded. "The first thing we saw was that there was some kind of blister on the side of the satellite that didn't belong there, and-"

  Pat couldn't help herself. "But we didn't! I was looking for it; I'd seen it on the remote, and it just wasn't there."

  "That'll do," Vice Deputy Fennell cut in. "You'll get your chance to talk later; now I'm taking Agent Dannerman's statement."

  The new Dannerman looked at Pat quizzically, then went on. As soon as they entered Starlab, he said, they'd seen at once that it had been changed radically. New machines. Big ones. Strange ones. "The orbiter was full of them," he said, "and all the time we were there I had the feeling we were being watched…"

  It went on and on, Dannerman telling these incredible stories-these untrue stories, by Pat's own recollection!-while the three other Pats nodded agreement. But it hadn't happened that way!

  Or had it? Had something gone really wrong with her own memory?

  She hardly noticed when the food began to arrive, but all four of the returned people leaped at it.

  And, as a matter of fact, when she absentmindedly took some for herself she discovered that it was an impressive meal, a tribute to the deputy director's airborne kitchen. There was a huge salad, the lettuce crisp enough to crackle, the cucumber slices neatly trimmed of skin, a few curls of a red onion and five different kinds of dressing in silver boats. It didn't go to waste. Before the steaks came-half-kilo steaks, beautifully marbled, still sizzling as the stew set them down- the three Pats and the recently arrived Dannerman (the other one had taken off for the deputy director's private office as soon as they were in the air) had finished the salad, every scrap, as well as the quarter-liter glasses of milk she kept refilling for them. The debriefing paused briefly for eating, and Pat took advantage of the chance. "Dan?" she asked. "I don't remember any of that!"

  "No, of course not," he said kindly. "Dopey blanked out your memories."

  "Who did what?"

  Dannerman started to grin, but the Pat next to him tugged at his arm. He suppressed the smile. "It isn't your fault, Pat. They have all kinds of tricks-oh, what's this?"

  What the stews were offering was fruit salad, and all four of the returnees cried a unanimous, "No!"

  "Surprise us," one of them added. "Something that can't be freeze-dried or canned or irradiated, okay?" And then, looking at Pat, "We've been living on old stores from Starlab for months, so this is pure heaven-or would be, anyway, if this plane had a spare bathtub."

  The Pat next to the real, or beardless, Dannerman apologized. "We've been a little short of that kind of thing for a long time, too. Especially poor Pat Five over there. At least Patrice and I managed to get a swim in a few days ago-oh, you want to know about the names? They were Rosaleen's idea. I'm Pat One. This is Patrice. Our pregnant one is Pat Five. What shall we call you?"

  "Call me?" It was a problem Pat had not expected to face. What she was called was Pat or Dr. Adcock; that was an immutable given in her life, and there had never been a reason to think about it at all. Until now, when there were three others entitled to the same name.

  "Anything but Patsy, please," said Patrice. "We had a Patsy, but- she died."

  The Pat bit her lip; some interior struggle was going on. "Oh, hell," she said unhappily, "we'll talk about that later. Anyway, maybe I'll be big about this. You stay with Pat. I'll be Pat One."

  "Well, thanks," Pat said, a little bit grateful, still a lot puzzled, just as a pair of stews made their entrance, carrying plates of hot apple pie with ice cream.

  "Sorry we took so long," one of them apologized, "but those weirdos are in the galley, trying to find something they can eat. Christ but they take up a lot of room!"

  "And they stink," said the other one, just as the real Dannerman came in from the front of the plane.

  He seemed cheerful. "Hey, I'll take a piece of that, too. And some coffee. And then maybe a beer."

  "A beer!" the other Dannerman said reverently.

  The real one was grinning. "We're missing all the fun," he said.

  "The whole world's arriving in Calgary now. The Ukrainians are after Dr. Artzybachova, the Chinese are taking Jimmy Lin off in a hell of a hurry. Even the Floridians are complaining that you didn't bring their General Delasquez back."

  Backgrounder

  NBI contacts file

  LIN, James Peng-tsu, Cdr, PRC Spaceforce

  Commander Lin has a somewhat shadowy background. A full commander in the People's Republic Spaceforce, he was dismissed from the service for reasons variously given as "political unreliability" and "sexual misconduct"; research has not definitively established which. If the misconduct was sexual, one account has it that Lin is given to reenacting the exploits of his remote ancestor, an ancient Chinese sage named Peng-tsu, who wrote a book extolling the necessity and varieties of frequent sexual experience. An alternative report, however, suggests that Lin is homosexual and the alleged heterosexual activity is a. cover for what, in PRC eyes, is a serious crime.

  Lin was hired as pilot by Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) in her mission to Starlab. There are now two of him, one who came back with the first batch of returnees from Starlab (this one bugged); the other with Agent J.D. Dannerman and the extraterrestrials. The second one is said to be the artificial-insemination father of the unborn child of the Dr. Adcock known as "Pat Five" (see backgrounder file.)

  "Martin's dead," Dannerman-with-a-beard said between bites. "We think he is, anyway."

  "Yeah, well, I hate to second-guess the boss, but maybe moving the landing site to Canada wasn't the best idea he ever had."

  Pat shushed him and turned to Pat One. "What do you mean, Martin's dead?"

  It was a short question, but it had a long

  answer and not a cheery one. The Floridian pilot Pat had hired for her mission, General Martin Delasquez, had stayed behind to cover the rest of them while they escaped. Escaped from what? Well, there was a sort of a war going on. A big one. How big? Well, as far as they could tell, it seemed to involve the whole damn universe.

  Vice Deputy Fennell sighed. "How weird is this going to get? Let's get back to the beginning, from where you all entered Starlab."

  If what these people were saying was true-and Pat realized that she didn't have any choice anymore about believing them-they had been through a hell of an ordeal. Taken captive on Starlab by the creature they called Dopey and his Docs-by them, but not for them; they were only subject races, doing their masters' bidding.

  And who were these masters? Why, all the newcomers agreed, the whole thing had been organized by that scarecrow creature from the space messages, a race of superbeings who chose to be called "Beloved Leaders," though why anyone should love them Pat could not
imagine. Certainly their human captives had no reason to. They had been kept penned for weeks in a cell no larger than the airborne drawing room they were in, but without any of its amenities-without any amenities at all, even toilets!

  That struck Pat as nasty. Then she heard a good deal nastier.

  At least the original band of captives had been allowed to live intact, as a sort of control group of humans to be studied. But the aliens had other studies in mind as well, and those had been far worse. The aliens had made additional copies of their captives for anatomical research. Nearly all of those unfortunates had died during the experimentation, generally, Pat Five said, in considerable pain. She herself had been lucky. She had been the one who was chosen, pretty much at random, to become pregnant so the aliens could discover how human beings produced their young. Romance was not involved, nor even actual sexual intercourse. She had been artificially inseminated with sperm-from, she thought, one of the Jimmy Lins, though she couldn't be positive even of that-and so she alone of that group had survived.

  Backgrounder

  NBI contacts file

  DELASQUEZ, Martin, Maj. Gen. Florida Air Guard

  General Delasquez qualified for astronaut training in the U.S. NASA program, but never went into space due to the defunding of the program. When the State of Florida declared itself sovereign in its own territory, Delasquez became part of its Air Guard, rising to the rank of major general. He was attached to the Florida mission to the United Nations, stationed in New York City, when Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) hired him as copilot on her mission to Starlab. He returned with the others and was subsequently found to be bugged.

  He was then hired by Eurospace as a consultant on Star-lab when they proposed to fly their own mission to the satellite, in which capacity he served for some months at the Eurospace facility in Kourou, Guyana.