Eschaton 02 The Siege of Eternity

by Frederik Pohl

  "Legibly, no. But the nurses help me, so just leave it. What's this about an object approaching the Earth? Is it the goddam Beloved Leaders?"

  Pat's strictest order from the doctors was not to excite the patient, so she said reassuringly, "People say it might be, but it's not coming anywhere near the Earth."

  "I don't trust the bastards," Pat Five said glumly.

  "Well, no one does." Pat cast around for a more cheerful subject. "You wouldn't believe the get-well messages that have been coming for you. From people all over the world. Everybody we've ever known, even our ex-husbands-and relatives we haven't heard from for years."

  "Sure, they think we might be coming into a lot of money."

  "Oh, not all of them," Pat protested. "There are a lot of people that just like you-us. And-wait a minute."

  It was her carryphone. She frowned as she answered it; she wasn't supposed to be called on the private line except in emergency. It was Patrice on the line. She said, "Pat? Get your ass back here. Don't say anything to Pat Five-but the damn thing has changed course, and it looks like it's going to impact the Earth."

  When Pat Adcock got back to the Observatory she saw the whole thing, from that first chance-caught burn on, because the news channels kept rerunning every sighting. At twenty-five Earth radii the object-no, damn it, Pat said fretfully to herself; call it a spacecraft, because there wasn't any more doubt that that was what it was-the spacecraft produced another great display of fireworks. When the burn was over and they calculated the new orbit-a stretched-out ellipse, with the spacecraft now on the descending leg-there wasn't any doubt. It was definitely going to impact the Earth. "Right on top of us," Patrice groaned as she inspected the oval of the expected footprint, swallowing up half of the western Atlantic and a lot of the bulge of South America. "They know we're all here, and they're after us."

  "If it's big enough," Rosaleen offered, "it doesn't much matter where it hits. Remember how the Scarecrows offed their enemies by dumping asteroids on them?"

  But it wasn't that big. Pat was sure of that much. What it was was another question entirely: supernuclear bomb? Bioweapons? Patrice, thinking along the same lines, said tightly, "I wonder if the government's going to try to evacuate the Eastern Seaboard."

  But if they did, where would they evacuate the people to? And how could they move a hundred million men and women out of the way, when they weren't sure just where the way was?

  The Earth is a sitting duck for all the floating bird shot that orbits the Sun. Thousands of meteorites strike its outer atmosphere every day, most of them so tiny that they burn up quickly and are not even noticed by Earth's people. Once in a while a slightly larger one-perhaps the size of a grain of sand-burns brightly enough to be seen as a "shooting star." More rarely one is large enough to reach the ground as a hot lump of pitted rock. Very seldom does one make a crater, and only a few times in a million years will one be large enough to do serious damage. But never before has one been seen to change its course by a rocket burn to make sure of hitting its target.

  – Newsweek

  The big telescopes were no use now; the thing was too close and moving too fast for them. But telescopes weren't necessary. Every news camera on Earth was scanning the skies, for there wasn't any other news that mattered at that moment. The lucky ones zoomed in on the Scarecrow spacecraft, and for a few minutes each was able to hold it-sometimes long enough to catch it as the thing plooped out a minor course-correction jet. On the dozen screens in the Observatory's conference room there were sometimes as many as eight or nine different shots of the spacecraft, flickering in and out as the harried operators in the network control rooms tried to keep abreast of the rapidly changing feeds.

  Then, abruptly, one screen switched to a wholly different scene: Eurospace's LuftBuran caught in its liftoff from Kourou. "Hell," Dannerman snapped. "They've launched ahead of schedule! Why would they do that?"

  No one answered; they were all too full of questions of their own.

  And then the spacecraft made a final burn, and turned into a sun-bright meteor as it entered Earth's atmosphere, plunging down.

  "It's going to miss us," Patrice breathed.

  "It's going to miss the land entirely," Pat corrected, as the footprint on one of the screens wobbled, shrank, finally turned into a point in the ocean.

  Then all the ground-based scenes blacked out at once, and one by one each screen came on again, all of them showing a single picture. It came from a traffic-spotter plane belonging to a Puerto Rican TV station, urgently redirected by its control room as the Scarecrow ship's splashdown became predictable. The pilot was quick and the cameraman was good. They caught the fireball of the descending spacecraft from a distance, even saw the immense splash and clouds of steam when it struck. The pilot had piled on the coal, and they were closing in on it before the steam had dissipated, while Pat-and everyone else in the world-held their breath, awaiting the explosion…

  It didn't come. When at last the steam blew away a metal object, the size and shape of an old naval torpedo, was floating placidly in the ocean swell, and it wasn't exploding at all.

  Within half an hour there were a dozen other planes circling above the floating Scarecrow ship; within an hour, the first surface vessels began to arrive.

  There wasn't much to see, but no one in the Dannerman Observatory turned away from the screens. The ships were an oddly assorted lot: fishing vessels, fast cigarette speedboats, even a cruise ship that happened to be nearby and altered course to give its passengers an unanticipated thrill.

  When a Navy tug approached, flank speed ahead, a mustache of white foam curling away from its bow, the first thing it did was to put an officer on the loud-hailers and warn everybody else away. Then it slowly approached the floating hulk, circled it suspiciously a time or two, then stopped. A moment later a pair of frogmen went over the side.

  Then the tempo of events slowed down to a crawl. One of the frogmen paddled over to the floating object and gingerly touched it with some sort of metallic probe, while the other trod water a few meters away. They jabbered to each other, then one of them waved to the tug. A moment later deckhands flopped an inflatable raft overboard and a couple of others climbed down a rope ladder to get into it. Nothing happened for a moment, then some sort of metallic-gleaming equipment was lowered into the raft and its crew began to row it toward the Scarecrow object.

  "They're being pretty damn cautious," Pat grumbled. Rosaleen gave her an amused look.

  "Wouldn't you be?" she asked. And yes, Pat admitted to herself, she would. They still didn't know whether the thing was a bomb or not… or whether it might suddenly give anyone nearby one of those devastating electrical shocks… or even whether it might pop open and a horde of Scarecrows come charging out, weapons blasting.

  But nothing like that happened. Nothing much was happening at all, except that the sailors in the raft were gingerly touching the Scarecrow object with probes, frowning over their instrument readings, talking on their headsets to the command personnel on the tug about what they found… who in turn were, no doubt, talking to higher authority somewhere ashore at every step while someone decided what to do next.

  Pat grinned to herself. It was actually getting pretty boring, but neither she nor anyone else in the Observatory could tear herself away from the dozen identical displays on the screens…

  Until the display on some of them changed. A human face appeared, looking agitated. "A transmission has been received," it began to say, and then it froze; whatever it was saying was no longer heard as the audio portion of that transmission was replaced by the very transmission it had announced.

  How the Object Was Found

  The "Scarecrow" missile happened to be in Earth's daylight skies when it emitted the burn that changed its course. It was almost directly overhead, as seen from the islands of Hawaii, where a BBC crew was interviewing a group of astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii dome. A script girl, glancing up at the sky, saw the flare. When s
he yelped in surprise the BBC cameraman caught the object in his finder, and that was how the world first saw it.

  Within ten minutes every telescope in the world that could bear on the object was searching for it. Cerro Toledo was the first to locate it, once the burn was over. It was moving very rapidly, but the Chileans were able to hold it long enough to project a track, moving east by northeast. Using the Chilean data, telescopes in the little observatory in the hills over Rio de Janeiro picked it up and refined the orbit before it vanished over the Atlantic.

  Twenty minutes later telescopes in the Azores, and moments later on the European continent, had it, and since then it has been under constant watch.

  – Sky amp; Telescope

  "Do not be afraid," a mellow, reassuring voice said. "Our intentions are friendly. The lander you are approaching is not dangerous. It simply carried a cargo of food to supply the needs of our loyal associates presently on your planet. As you see, the Beloved Leaders care for those who cooperate with them. We will care for you, too, if you wish it. And most of all, we will help you defend yourselves against the forces of the evil Horch. We suggest that you examine our lander and its contents to reassure yourself we mean no harm, and when you have had an opportunity to do so we will speak to you again…"

  "Just food?" Pat said incredulously. "They scare the pee out of us just to give Dopey some, food?"

  "Hold it," Dannerman said, listening, because the voice was going on-not quite as mellow, now; almost sounding agitated:

  "But we must warn you against your foolish attempt to visit your Starlab! The mechanisms it contains are highly dangerous! Recall your spacecraft at once! Do not enter the Starlab! The consequences will be very grave!"

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Long before Starlab was in sight the word had come over the Luft-Buran's radio that the "missile" was a dud. That did not appear to make Colonel duValier feel any safer. When they came within docking range of Starlab he brought the old rocket to relative rest for half an hour while he studied the exterior of the orbiter centimeter by centimeter. The French female astronaut had unbuckled herself and swum up to confer with him-endlessly; in French, and pitched too low for anyone else to hear.

  She was the only one allowed freedom of movement. Everybody else was ordered to remain strapped in their seats in case the colonel decided to get out of there in a hurry. Hilda did her best to be patient, though little twinges in her belly reminded her that a lot of people got spacesick in this kind of microgravity… even without the odor of the Doc that filled the vessel.

  Then the colonel reached a decision. "Check your weapons, everybody," he ordered. "I am going to dock."

  That was a little better, though the odd, slippery-slidey motion of the LuftBuran as duValier twitched it to mate with the Starlab port caused Hilda to swallow nervously. But then he announced the docking secured. Everyone unstrapped and took their places by the door- well, almost everyone. The great pale alien remained lashed to the cradle that had been built for him, of course, and one of the Germans remained by him to release him when Colonel duValier gave the order.

  Which the colonel was taking his time about doing. He was obviously mulling something over in his mind-perhaps trying to find the proper historic words to speak before ordering his crew to enter, Hilda thought sourly. But what he said at last was, "You all know your orders. I will be the first person to board Starlab. You will then follow in the order assigned, except for Capitaine des Esseintes. She will remain in the LuftBuran, in constant radio contact with those of us in the boarding party. This will be done as a precaution. If anything goes wrong, she will undock at once, until the problem is cleared up."

  And if the problem weren't cleared up? Hilda tried to imagine what it would be like if the Frenchwoman took it into her head to decide they had all been taken over by the Scarecrows, and then pulled the LuftBuran away for a return to Earth. It was not an attractive prospect. If it were a false alarm, they would all be marooned there for an indefinite period. And if it weren't a false alarm…… No, Hilda didn't want to think about that at all.

  The colonel was speaking to his controllers on Earth, presumably to announce that he was ready for his historic task. But he suddenly frowned and lost his composure. He spat rapid-fire French into the microphone, too fast for Hilda to follow, listened again, then looked up. "There has been a development. There is a message from these Scarecrows, and they warn that we must not enter Starlab. This is- This causes-" Then he shook his head and was silent.

  He was the only one silent. Everybody else was shouting at once- "Warning of what? What do they mean?"-everyone but Hilda. She had a different concern. It wasn't so much what the Scarecrows had said as the fact that they had said anything about entering Starlab at all. For that meant that they weren't thousands of light-years away. They were close enough to see what was going on. And that meant-

  That was another thing Hilda didn't want to think about.

  Another hour went by while everyone jabbered to everyone else, with many more exchanges between Colonel duValier and the ground controllers. Then the colonel shrugged and pulled the lock door open with a crash. "Allons!" he said hollowly; and the troops stormed the citadel.

  In Hilda Morrisey's eighteen years with the Bureau she had stormed into enemy territory often enough, guns blazing, people getting killed. This wasn't like that. For one thing, rushing a target when your feet were firmly on the ground and things dropped to the floor when you let go of them was one thing. This microgravity business was something else entirely. They didn't storm the Starlab. They damn well floated in through the lock, one after another, as easy a collection of big, slow targets as ever graced any church-carnival shooting gallery. If there had been actual enemies inside, they would have had no problem picking the invaders off, one at a time, as they floundered and soared.

  Well, there weren't any waiting sharpshooters. There was nobody in sight at all. Hilda caught a confused glimpse of rows and clusters of odd colors and bizarre objects, looking like some mad interior decorator's going-out-of-business sale; but then Martin Delasquez thumped into her from behind, propelling her into one of Colonel duValier s flying feet; and all her attention was taken up with the job of trying to grab on to something solid. Her interior ear canals were complaining about it, too; her queasiness got worse, to the point where she seriously thought she was going to toss her cookies right into the lap of the Chinese guy, Lin. And it was not helped by the smell of the place: something like spice, something like decay, a lot like a nastily rasping kind of chemical smoke.

  The chemical part at least had an explanation. "It's the transporter," Jimmy Lin gasped, hauling himself up Martin Delasquez's leg to clutch a wall bracket. "Dannerman shot it up to keep the Scarecrows from following us. Outside of that, the place is just the way we left it."

  Federal Reserve Inflation Bulletin

  The morning recommended price adjustment for inflation is set at 3.21%. Acting Federal Reserve Chairman L. Dwight German, replacing the late Walter C. Boettger, issued a prepared statement demanding that all banks immediately adhere to the recent eighth increase in interest rates. "Dr. Boettger's suicide should be a warning to us all," he said in the statement. "If we do not pull together, we can expect financial anarchy, which will cause great harm to our democratic institutions in this time of public unrest."

  Maybe so, Hilda thought, but she hadn't forgotten what had happened when this same Jimmy Lin and the others made their first landing on Starlab. It had looked innocent enough then, too; and then, without any foreplay, they'd found themselves captives of the Scarecrows.

  The colonel evidently had the same thoughts. He ordered a thorough search of the orbiter, and so the landing party dragged itself through the corridors of the orbiter, looking for-looking for what, exactly? Hilda asked herself. God knew there was a lot to see, for the satellite was full of inexplicable machines and gadgets. The things came in all colors and textures. Some looked like lime Jell-O, some were silver-brigh
t. There was one huge copper-colored thing, like a huge, metal, six-sided pillar, that seemed to be emitting a sullen heat. Some of the objects clicked and whispered to themselves, some glowed, some were silent and dark, and what any of them were for Hilda could not guess.

  Still, it could have been worse. The one thing that they feared to find was not there: no living creature, no Docs or Dopeys nor anything else out of the Scarecrows' menagerie of oddities. And when Colonel duValier was quite sure of that, he got on the radio and commanded, "Bring the beast in," and the expedition began to earn its pay.

  it that point most of the people aboard Starlab became extraneous, which meant that they were free to follow their private agendas, whatever those were. General Delasquez pulled out a camera and, without a word to anyone else, methodically began to photograph everything in sight. Hilda herself retraced her steps around the Starlab, looking for those particle-beam weapons the Scarecrow troops were supposed to have. There weren't any visible. The Chinese astronaut, Commander Lin, had a priority project of his own; he had stationed himself by the charred wreck of the machine that had brought them there, with his weapon still in his hand. When Hilda came near he pointed the gun at her face. "Back off. Nobody comes near this thing," he announced. "I'm not taking any chances on letting it get fixed."

  Hilda looked at him curiously. "How would I know how to fix it?"

  "I don't know," he admitted, "and I don't care. Maybe the Scarecrows have some way of making you do it-same as they made us forget all this stuff?"

  "Then they could just as well do it to you, Lin," she pointed out.

  He scowled. "Stay away. And keep the Doc away from here. I swear, if he tries to touch this thing, I'll blow his damn head off."