The Other End of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  "To provide you with what you need" Dopey said firmly.

  "Well, we need clothes. Tell him, Dan," she said, but Dannerman was looking thoughtfully at the alien. It was Rosaleen who picked up on the question.

  "Clothing is a definite need for us," she declared. "We are not animals. We will be definitely harmed by prolonged exposure. Also there are items that we carried in our clothing which are essential to our survival-medications, for instance."

  Dopey hesitated, then did a curious thing. He jammed his little paws deep into the copper-colored muff; his eyes closed, he seemed to be listening to voices unheard by the others. Then his eyes opened and he declared, "The clothing will be brought."

  "That's more like it," Jimmy Lin said, his mouth full of something he had seized from the food supplies. "How about answering some questions for us, too? Where are we?"

  "You are in this pen. You do not require more information than that."

  "Well, then," Martin Delasquez tried, "at least tell us what you're monitoring? What do you want us to do?"

  "Simply to continue as you are," Dopey said, as though that should have been obvious. Then, as the walls opened and three burdened Docs came back in, he added sharply, "Do not touch your clothing yet!" It was not really a necessary order. They couldn't have, anyway; the three Docs had formed in a line between the captives and the pile of clothing. Dopey paid them no further attention, but began carefully examining each garment. As he finished with one he tossed it past the Docs to be claimed-a brassiere for Rosaleen Artzybachova, a single sock, a pair of men's under shorts claimed by Dannerman. The underwear came first, because, Pat thought, it was the easiest to check out. As Dopey came to the outer garments he was more thorough, investigating pockets, running his long, tapering fingers over seams to see if anything was concealed inside them. He was looking for weapons, it seemed. He found them, too: two guns and a bomb-bugger in Dannerman's effects, a gun and a knife in Martin's, more guns from the others, even two little switchblade knives from the garments of Rosaleen Artzybachova. "Christ," Pat said. "We were all ready to fight a war!"

  "I simply took routine precautions," Jimmy Lin said defensively, watching as Dopey pulled a sixty-shot sidearm out of his jacket.

  Rosaleen spoke up, to the Dopey: "That's just a pen! Please let me have it."

  The Dopey didn't respond, except to turn the pen over a few times, then take it apart. Evidently he decided it would not make a good stabbing weapon; he tossed it over and turned to everyone's shoes. That took longer. He ran his fingers inside each shoe, apparently measuring to see if there was enough thickness anywhere to conceal a weapon. On one of Jimmy's shoes he hit pay dirt: the heel unscrewed, and inside it was a coil of razor wire.

  "Hell," Jimmy said, and resignedly went back to getting dressed. They were all doing it, now. It was surprising, Pat thought, how much more formidable Martin Delasquez looked once he had his military camouflage jacket on again, gold braid with its embroidered general's stars. For Pat herself getting dressed again after so long bare was less pleasant than she had imagined. The waistband of the slacks was uncomfortably tight; the pantyhose unpleasingly constricting; and her feet seemed to have swelled, because it was an effort to get them into the shoes.

  The three Docs abruptly turned as one and left, carrying the confiscated weaponry; and it was only then that Pat realized that while they were dressing Dopey had slipped through the wall and was gone.

  "Damn it," Dannerman said. "I was hoping we could ask him some more questions."

  "Which he probably wouldn't have answered anyway," Pat said. "So let's eat!"

  The canned ham had been cold and greasy, the pita bread Pat ate with it dry and leathery, but her belly was full. Eating made a difference. Being clothed made a difference, too; Pat couldn't help feeling that things were taking a turn for the better. Maybe only a very small improvement, with a very long way still to go, but everybody seemed cheerier. Martin in uniform stood taller than before, and what they had received was not merely food and clothing. Dopey had returned all their pouches and belly bags. Pat was pleased to get her watch back and her rings, less pleased to have the packet of tampons that she always carried in case of emergency; it reminded her that her period would be coming along sometime soon, and that one pair of tampons would not be adequate to her needs.

  Rosaleen held aloft a small bottle. "My painkillers," she said exultantly.

  "Were you in pain?" Pat asked wonderingly.

  "Dear girl, at my age one is always in pain; exercise helps a little, but these are better-though they do not solve the real problem. May we not discuss it, please? I have a suggestion."

  There was something in Rosaleen's tone that made Pat anxious to hear more, but she didn't press the point. "Yes?"

  "Let us make an inventory of all our possessions. Dan, since you still have your screen, perhaps you can keep the tally."

  Her tone made Pat curious. "Dopey didn't return yours?"

  Rosaleen pursed her lips. "He probably thought it contained a weapon."

  Delasquez laughed. "And, of course, it did. What, simply a sharp little blade, for emergencies? He took mine too, for the same reason."

  "And left us no weapons at all," Jimmy Lin said. Something in his tone made Pat give him a closer look. But when she started to ask him, Dannerman cut in.

  "Hold it," he commanded. "Of course none of us have any weapons-but if we did"-he glanced meaningfully at the wall-"we had probably better not mention them out loud. Let's get on with the inventory, shall we?"

  It didn't take long. There was Rosaleen's multicolor pen (but nothing to write on with it but some coarse wrapping paper from the food larder) and a reading glass; a collection of key cards and IDs from all of them; a nail clipper; two pocket combs; some loose coins-very few, because hardly anyone carried cash. That was it. Most of them had left their more interesting gadgets in the lockers at the Cape. "No weapons there, anyway," Jimmy said ruefully. "I guess if we put all our coins and stuff in a sock we could make a cosh." Dannerman gave him a warning look, prompting him to add quickly, "Although there's not enough mass there to do any real harm to anybody anyway."

  Pat could restrain her curiosity no longer. "Rosie? What's this 'real problem' you're talking about?"

  Rosaleen shrugged. "I don't suppose there's any need to keep it secret; it is simply that there is nothing that can be done about it. Painkillers are not the only medication I need. I have a good many other troublesome conditions. They are well controlled by implants, but the implants need to be refreshed from time to time-beta blockers, polyestrogens, most of all the implant that helps to ward off Alzheimer's. I don't suppose any of you have anything like that on you?"

  General shaking of heads. Jimmy Lin, his mouth full of rice, offered, "I have allergy medicine. I don't suppose that would help?"

  Rosaleen shook her head, unsurprised. "Not at all. I doubt you'll need it, either; there may be allergens around here, but not the ones you've needed it for. So," she added, "I have some weeks at least, conceivably even some months, before the implants wear off, then- Well, let's look on the bright side. By then we may all be dead anyway."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Pat

  What Pat Adcock discovered-what millions of jailed men and women had discovered before her-was that prison reduced life to fundamentals. There were no decisions to make or crises to meet; the high spot of the day was eating.

  Their larder was a mixed bag. The fruit juices were good, once you mixed them with water-she could have wished for an ice cube or two, but they were certainly drinkable without. There was even real wine. It wasn't very good wine, but it came in little plastic cups, which could be rinsed out and used for other things. No beer, though, which annoyed Jimmy Lin, and the coffee was a disappointment. Not only was it at the same temperature as everything else they had, but it was the European kind of coffee, heavy on chicory and made from beans burned black. Only Martin and Rosaleen seemed to enjoy drinking it.

  Still
, things were looking up a little. Not counting the fact that she was tired of seeing herself reflected in the cell's walls no matter where she looked; if anything could make her crazy, she thought, it was those mirrors. Not counting the fact that Jimmy Lin had formed the annoying habit of following her around, brushing against her in a pretty unmistakable way; but at least now she had clothing.

  But none of it was good enough.

  Time was passing, and it was all wasted time. Pat Adcock had little practice in time-wasting. She was used to a world in which she always had something to do, usually more to do than she had time to do it in: work to get done, plans to make, social obligations to fulfill, amusements to seek. Here she had nothing. She even missed the annoying everyday flow of sales messages on her comscreen and the solicitations of street panhandlers. Pictures from her childhood flashed through her mind, the images of pacing polar bears and sullenly squatting gorillas from Sunday zoo trips with Uncle Cubby or her parents. The parallels hurt. "We're zoo animals. We have nothing to do" she complained. "It doesn't make sense."

  Dannerman shook his head. "No, you're wrong there. Everything makes sense to somebody."

  "Even this?"

  "Even anything. People used to talk about senseless crimes- like murdering some eighty-year-old guy on welfare to steal his shoes; they think it makes no sense to kill somebody for so little. But to the guy who did it, it made perfect sense. He wanted the shoes."

  "Thank you for the lecture, Dr. Dannerman," Jimmy Lin said.

  Dannerman said stubbornly, "I'm only saying that all this must make some kind of sense to Dopey and the others, from their point of view. All we have to do is figure out what their point of view is."

  "It sounds like you're taking their side, Dannerman," Martin rumbled.

  "Oh, hell, why are people always telling me that I'm taking the bad guys' side?"

  "What people?" Martin asked, puzzled.

  "Different people." He didn't elaborate. There was something there he didn't want to discuss, Pat was sure, though she couldn't imagine what. "Anyway," he said, "I'm just trying to understand what's happening. Probably they want to know more about us before they reveal themselves."

  Pat asked, "How much do they have to know? Isn't that why Dopey was hanging out in Starlab all that time, eavesdropping on Earth?"

  Martin said heavily, "Maybe that is not enough for them. I am remembering what the old sailing-ship explorers used to do when they encountered new indigenes. They would kidnap a few and take them aboard their ships to look them over. Your Christopher Columbus-" he began, and then stopped, scowling. They all heard it: a distant sound, almost like a shriek, faint and far away. "What the hell was that?" he demanded.

  No one answered until Rosaleen shrugged. "If this is a zoo," she said, "we may not be the only animals on exhibit."

  "It sounded human to me," Jimmy said uneasily. Dannerman said nothing, but he was frowning. Pat thought she knew why. The scream had sounded human to her, too. In fact, it had sounded a lot like the voice of Dan Dannerman.

  The scream didn't come again. They listened; they tried to be as quiet as possible so that they might hear, but there wasn't much to hear. Dannerman reported that he had heard, might have heard, a faint hum that could have been distant machinery. Pat herself thought she caught a whisper of speech-of a voice of some kind, anyway. When she reported it Dannerman shook his head. "I didn't hear anything like that. Did it sound human?"

  "How can I tell? I thought it sounded as though it were asking for something."

  To her displeasure, Jimmy Lin took that to be a cue. He moved closer to her. "Perhaps it was asking for something which I too would like," he said, one hand casually resting on her shoulder.

  The man was making her uncomfortable. She shrugged herself free. "Knock it off, Lin."

  "But why?" he asked reasonably. "I am aware that such things are better conducted in privacy. I would prefer it so myself, but what can we do? Modesty is pointless here."

  "The point," she said, "is that I don't want to make love with you, Jimmy. If you're looking for a comfort woman, look somewhere else."

  "Hey!" Rosaleen said good-naturedly. "Where do you want him to look, exactly? I've been out of the comfort business for forty years."

  "But what else is there to do?" Jimmy Lin asked in a tone of reasonableness. "It is a perfectly natural thing, and also good for you. My honored ancestor said it all in his book. He said it was unhealthful to go for very long without sex, and all my life I have done my best to follow his advice."

  Rosaleen said pleasantly, "If you need to masturbate no one will prevent you. If not, perhaps you won't mind if we change the subject."

  He glowered at her. "To what?"

  She hesitated before she spoke. "I've been thinking about those messages from space. You see, I think most of us took those pictures of aliens as some kind of a joke, perhaps some satellite controller with time hanging heavy on his hands. Very well, that was a mistake. Now we know better about that, but what about the rest of the message?"

  "What rest?"

  "The original pictures. The scarecrow creature crushing the universe at the time of the Big Crunch. What do you suppose that means?"

  Dannerman said, "I asked one of the astronomers the same thing. He thought it meant that we were being warned against something that was supposed to happen after the universe has finished expanding, and fallen back and contracted again."

  At least, Pat thought, they were on a subject she knew something about. But she frowned. "That kind of speculation doesn't make any sense. Nothing could happen after the Big Crunch. It's like wondering what the universe was like before the Big Bang. The answer is there wasn't any. That sort of thing isn't science, it's metaphysics."

  Rosaleen shook her head. "You know more about that than I do, Pat, but even I know that some quite good scientists have speculated about the subject."

  "Arm-waving. Smoke and mirrors," Pat said dismissively.

  "But perhaps for the aliens it isn't."

  Pat shrugged. It was true that cosmologists had built any number of pretty speculations about the origins and end of the universe-she had spent many boring hours learning about them in graduate school-but they had always seemed idle daydreaming to her.

  Martin shared that opinion. He said impatiently, "There is no point in thinking about such things. The trouble is simply this: We have been kidnapped. That is not a speculation, it is a fact. Governments have considered such things an act of war."

  Jimmy said, "Fine. Now, if you'll just let them know about it at the Pentagon, I'm sure they'll have a rescue fleet here right away."

  Martin glared at him. "You are very good at sarcasm, Lin. Less good at taking action. We should do something."

  Rosaleen attempted to defuse the antagonism. "Very well," she said, "since no one else seems interested in trying to interpret the meaning of those messages, I agree that Martin is right. We should do something else. What is available to us? When we were discussing what people in prison on Earth do I am afraid I distracted us with my reminiscences of life in the old Soviet Union. So let us try again. Is there some action that is possible for us to take?"

  Jimmy said sourly, glancing at Dannerman, "Why don't you ask the expert?"

  Pat frowned. "What do you mean, expert?" But Dannerman seemed unsurprised. He was already answering the Chinanaut.

  "First thing," he said, "if I had any specific ideas, I don't think I'd say them out loud. Remember Dopey hears everything that goes on. But if you want general principles I don't see any harm in discussing them-just in the abstract, of course."

  "Of course," Rosaleen said impatiently. "Well?"

  "What prisoners do depends on what they want to accomplish. If their primary goal is to escape, they do things like digging tunnels, they hide themselves in bags of waste, they get weapons, or make them, and force a guard to take them outside. Or they take hostages for the same purpose. Or they go on a hunger strike-of course that only works if the people on
the outside care whether they live or die."

  Martin demanded, "Which would you recommend?"

  "What I would recommend," Dannerman said, "is that we don't talk about this any more."

  "Fine," said Jimmy Lin caustically. "Your advice is that we do nothing, then. Is that why you spooks couldn't even catch the guys who kidnapped the press secretary?"

  Dannerman opened his mouth angrily, then glanced at Pat and closed it again. He didn't answer. He simply turned his back and walked over to survey the food store.

  There was an undertone here that Pat couldn't identify. She wasn't enjoying it. "What's going on here, Jimmy?" she demanded.

  He jerked a thumb at Dannerman. "Ask him."

  "Hell," she said, and marched over to Dannerman's side. "Dan, what's Jimmy talking about."

  He stood up and popped a cup of wine before he answered. "How do I know?"

  "I think you do know. Why does he call you a spook?"

  Dannerman shrugged. "Maybe because I was in protsy in college-you know, the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps."

  "Not good enough, Dan. That was a long time ago. What about now?"

  He took a long pull of the beer before he answered. Then he sighed. "All right, Pat. I don't suppose it matters anymore, and it's the truth. I work for the National Bureau of Investigation."

  It was no more than she had guessed, but she felt adrenaline shock flood through her body. "You're a spy!"

  "I'm an agent of the Bureau, yes. I was ordered to find out what was going on with you and Starlab-"

  "Dan!"

  He looked remorseful-no, not remorseful; stubborn and sullen. "Well, Jesus, Pat, what did you expect? This was major stuff. As soon as the rumors got out, the Bureau had to find out what you were doing."

  "Bastard!" she said, scandalized. "I wouldn't have believed it of you! You come to me with a hard-luck story about needing a job, and all the time you're a goddam spy. Honestly, Dan, what did I ever do to you? Are you still pissed off because you didn't get your share of Uncle Cubby's money?"