The Other End of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  "I don't care how difficult things have become."

  "But, you see, at present I am unable to reach the ones who could give permission. Just at present, that is to say."

  "Everything's 'just at present,' " Jimmy Lin sneered, and Dannerman, looking at the stack of food packages, had a comment of his own:

  "You must expect us to be here for a long time."

  "That is also not for me to decide, but the reason for the large quantity is that I do not know when I will be able to get more.

  I have said this. Now we must deal with the urgent matters. Do you have any questions about the announcement made by your Colonel duValier?"

  Dannerman was surprised that that was the "urgent" business, but it was Pat who spoke up. "We've got plenty of questions, but they're not about Colonel duValier. For instance, these 'Horch' the colonel talks about in what you transmitted to the Earth. Are they related to the problems you're having?"

  Dopey didn't answer immediately. Dannerman expected him to thrust his paws into the muff and go again into the thinking-it-over trance, but he merely looked pained-as much as a kitten face can look pained. Finally he announced, "There is a disjunction here. You are correct in one respect. The Horch are indeed responsible for our problems, because they are evil. They have performed acts of terrorism which have caused great hardship for us. You will understand what terrorists are like, Agent Dannerman, from your own experiences with Colonel Hilda Morrisey. The Horch are criminals in much the same way as your human terrorists, but far more dangerous than any you can imagine. However, you have made a false assumption."

  "Which is?" Dannerman demanded.

  "That message has not been transmitted. The reason for that is that Colonel duValier has not yet arrived on Starlab."

  "Hah!" Jimmy Lin shouted. "I knew it! It was a damn simulation."

  "The problem was not understood," Dopey admitted. "It will be corrected."

  Something was bothering Dannerman. He asked, "Why bother with simulating somebody who isn't there? If you wanted to send a message that seemed to come from a human being, why not use one of us?"

  Dopey hesitated again. "That would not be effective," he said, and would not say why. The only subject that he seemed willing to discuss was what their reactions had been to the message, and when they began asking questions in return-what would be in the second message? What other languages would it be delivered in?-he did not respond at all.

  Not until, at a venture, Pat asked, "Are we in personal danger from these Horch?"

  That made Dopey pause to think once more. "At this time, no," he said at length.

  "Oh, fine," Patrice muttered. "You're making me feel all cuddly warm and protected."

  "I understand you. That is sarcasm, meaning the opposite," Dopey said. "You will, however, be protected."

  "By you?"

  "I? No, of course not I. That protection will come from a far more advanced race than my own."

  "Meaning," Dannerman asked, "those odd-looking scarecrows we saw on TV?"

  Dopey winced. "That was an unfair picture our enemies transmitted. The Beloved Leaders come from a light-gravity planet and thus are rather frail in physique."

  He paused as Jimmy Lin made a sound of disgust. " 'Beloved Leaders,' " Lin sneered.

  Dopey looked inquiring. "Your tone of voice indicates disapproval," he said.

  "You damn bet it does! 'Beloved Leaders' is what the old Koreans called their dictators. That's not a good name, Dopey."

  "Thank you," the alien said. "That too is useful, although I am not sure that a change will be permitted. At any rate, because of their evolutionary heritage the Be-the persons in charge, that is, would not be on a planet of this mass."

  "So they're not really going to be around to save us?" Jimmy Lin demanded in alarm.

  But that was one question too many. Dopey evidently had what he had come for. Without farewell, he turned and disappeared into the mirror, which re-formed seamlessly behind him, like a puddle of mercury closing over a stone.

  Dannerman stared after him for a long minute, though there was nothing to see but his own reflection in the wall. He was puzzling over something, and it showed. "What's the matter?" Pat demanded. "You still wondering why he showed us that message?"

  "Actually no," Dannerman said. "I think that's pretty obvious now, isn't it? He's using us to be his sneak-preview film critics, getting our reactions before he puts the thing on the air. No, it's something else." He hesitated for a moment. Then, "Tell me something, Pat. When we were talking I mentioned Hilda to you, didn't I?"

  "Sure. Your boss in the Bureau. I remember."

  "But did I ever say her last name? No, I didn't think so. So how did Dopey know that it was Morrisey?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Dan

  So Dannerman had one more puzzle to add to his collection. He was certain he'd never mentioned Hilda Morrisey's last name, and the Bureau did not advertise the names of its personnel. And it was not information that could be picked up from the monitored broadcasts.

  But Dopey had known it.

  In fact, Dopey seemed to know quite a few of the things they had never spoken aloud. How? There was one easy answer to that: Someone might have been sloppy in concealing some of the notes as they read them or passed them around. But that didn't explain Hilda Morrisey, and Dannerman didn't believe it anyway. What he believed was that Dopey possessed sources of information they didn't know about.

  Whatever those sources might be.

  He snorted in disgust-muffled quickly, because he didn't want Pat, or any one of the Pats, to come over to see what was bothering him. That had happened twice already, and he had waved them away. He wished he didn't have to. He wanted badly to talk it over with the others, because someone else, Rosaleen maybe-well, any of them-might have a clarifying insight he had missed. But if even the eyes-only note-passing was compromised, they would simply be giving more information to Dopey, or Dopey's masters.

  Would that matter? Would that sort of information be useful to them? Dannerman could form no satisfactory answer to that, either, but it was simple basic tradecraft to deny as much information as possible to the enemy, and-

  His thoughts were interrupted by a new sound. Something had begun squealing shrilly, somewhere. When Dannerman raised his head he saw Patrice holding the helmet in her hand, looking puzzled. "I think it wants something," she said.

  "It wants one of us to put it on, of course," Rosaleen said crossly. "Give it to me."

  Evidently she was right. As soon as she had it settled on her head the beeping stopped. By then most of the others had converged around her, clamoring to know what she was hearing. Rosaleen didn't take the helmet off, only held up her hand and said, "Relax. It's basically the same message, but with a few- improvements. Give me a moment."

  "Then this time we do it in alphabetical order, remember?" Pat reminded them. "Pat comes before Patrice or Patsy, so I get the first look."

  Jimmy Lin emitted a long, exasperated sigh, Martin muttered something that sounded obscene. Dannerman only waited; he was as impatient as anyone, but he accepted the fact that it would go faster if they didn't argue. When all four women had had a look-each looking puzzled, even faintly disappointed, when they were finished-his turn came. As soon as the helmet was on his head and the eyepieces in place the figure of the French astronaut popped into being and began to speak. "Messieurs et mesdames, "it began, "je m 'appelle Colonel Hugues duValier, peut-etre vous me connaissez, et je suis-"And then the French language was drowned out by another voice, overriding the colonel with unaccented American English:

  "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Colonel Hugues duValier. Maybe you know me; I am an astronaut at present in orbit on the astronomical satellite known as Starlab. I have a message of the greatest importance for everyone on Earth-"

  It was the same message as before, but reworked to remove their objections. The colonel wasn't risking any distractions to his audience by speaking in many tongues; there
was a simple voice-over, the same thing viewers heard on any newscast anywhere in the world. The phrase "Beloved Leaders" was still there, but modified to: "they are called 'Beloved Leaders,' but we can know them simply as the forces which have so far-and very successfully!-born the brunt of the attack." When Delasquez and Jimmy Lin had had their turns Dannerman asked about languages, just to clear up one final point. The answers were the same as before, Ukrainian for Rosaleen, American English for Dannerman and the Pats, Spanish for Delasquez and Chinese for Jimmy. "But this time," Rosaleen said, "the Ukrainian was all Ukrainian. They corrected some of the Russian words."

  Dannerman nodded thoughtfully, but said only, "Fast work. Dopey must have real good production facilities."

  When he stopped there, Pat gave him a perplexed, maybe even an unfriendly, look. "Is that all you have to say about it?"

  He shrugged; Jimmy Lin answered for him. "What's to say? We're just Dopey's damn test audience, aren't we? And we did our job for him. He listened to everything we criticized, and he changed the message around to suit. Now-" He turned and faced the wall, cupping his hands around his mouth. "-are you listening, Dopey? Okay, then listen to this. You got it right this time. It's fine the way it is, so don't bother us with any more revisions; just keep the food coming." He turned to Dannerman, grinning. "Does that about cover it? Because if it doesn't we could-"

  He didn't get a chance to finish the sentence, because he was interrupted. Abruptly the ground began to tremble. Everyone who was standing suddenly began to reel; Jimmy grabbed Martin Delasquez's shoulder to steady himself, nearly bringing them both down. "Oh, hell," Jimmy grunted, his voice as shaky as the floor. "They're doing it again."

  The odd thing, Dannerman thought, was that this time he hadn't heard any explosion, just the sudden uneasy twist and slide in the floor beneath him. But the tremor was a big one. Some cans of something or other on top of their stacks of supplies were jarred loose and clattered to the ground. Rosaleen sat down abruptly. There were yips of surprise from at least two of the Pats. Then it was over.

  No. Not quite over. Just as everyone opened their mouths to tell each other that this one had been an unusually bad one, all right, something else happened. The mirror walls flickered and changed color. Jagged streaks of bright red danced around them like slow lightning flashes; that permanent diffuse pale glow from overhead darkened and their only light came from the radiant walls as they turned lurid orange in one spot, blotchy bright red in another. For a moment they seemed to go almost transparent, and through the nearest one Dannerman saw, or thought he saw, a shadowy ziggurat of bright metal. A Doc was standing there transfixed, all of its arms raised toward the sky in what looked like abject terror.

  Then the colors faded. The faint visions from outside clouded and disappeared. The steady overhead glow returned, the walls became featureless mirrors again and everything was as it had been before. Everything but the prisoners, at least; but they were all shaken and bewildered. "What in the name of God was that?" Martin Delasquez angrily demanded of the room at large.

  Rosaleen was the one who tried to answer. She was getting back to her feet, wincing, with one of the Pats helping her on either side. "I think it must have been some kind of a power failure," she said soberly. "I do not think that is a good sign."

  At least they had a new topic of conversation to keep them busy for a while. In fact, they had two of them. One was the debate on what caused the tremor, why the power had seemed to fail and make the walls go all weird-some new questions, some just repetitions of the familiar ones about just what the hell was going on here, anyway. Whatever it was, it clearly was something that mattered to them. It made Dopey jittery and, no doubt, it threatened their own fragile security as well. But that particular discussion had nowhere to go; all anyone had to contribute was unanswerable questions and speculations, none of them very satisfactory.

  The other area of discussion, Dannerman thought, was more productive. During that momentary lifting of the veil some of the captives had caught glimpses of what lay beyond the wall. None had had time for a clear view, but most had seen something. What they saw depended mostly on which way they happened to be facing. Patrice and Jimmy Lin were out of it, because they had been looking the wrong way and hadn't seen anything at all, but each of the others had at least a hazy impression to report.

  It was Rosaleen Artzybachova who interrupted the hubbub with a suggestion. "Listen, please. Each of us should do his or her best to draw what we saw before we forget. Then we can compare notes."

  Patsy bobbed her head at once. "Good idea," she said, reaching for Rosaleen's pen, and then paused long enough to give Dannerman a questioning look. "Is it all right for us to do it this way? Or should we be trying to keep the drawings covered?" she asked.

  Before Dannerman could respond Martin answered for him. "Why do you ask Dannerman for permission?" he asked, giving Dannerman an unfriendly look. "It is obvious that there is no point in hiding such drawings. Who can doubt that Dopey knows what is outside the wall far better than we do, so what information could he gain?"

  Patsy was still looking expectantly at Dannerman. He shrugged. "I guess that's true," he said, though his own reasons had little to do with what Dopey already knew, and a lot with whether all their secretive note passing had served any useful purpose.

  When they began drawing it turned out that Martin had seen the same metallic tower as Dannerman, though it was hard to recognize the thing in the man's crude, kindergarten-style drawings. Rosaleen, on the other hand, produced a workmanlike engineer's view of what looked as much like a row of file cabinets as anything else Dannerman had ever seen. ("They were tall, though," she said. "At least three meters, and there was something fuzzy that I couldn't make out on top of them.") Pat and Patsy had had the benefit of a year of art in college, and both provided neat sketches-an elongated, two-domed metal object for Pat, looking a little like a steel camel hunkered down to the ground; for Patsy a broad corridor between more rows of the file-cabinet objects, with something that might have been a vehicle a score of meters away. "It wasn't moving," she said, "but I'm pretty sure it was some kind of a car. And there was somebody, well, something, standing outside of it."

  Patrice, looking on enviously, commented, "You know, it looks a little like the way Dopey brought us in here."

  "I thought so too. And the person, or whatever, that was standing there-it could have been a Doc. Like die one you saw, Dan."

  He nodded abstractedly, his attention on the handful of drawings. Patsy was still watching him, her expression quizzical. "Dan?" she said. "Are you all right?"

  He looked up. "What? Oh, sure."

  "You're not talking much."

  That was the simple truth, not to be denied; but he wasn't yet prepared to say why. "I've got something on my mind," he said, truthfully enough; and then, when Patsy suggested maybe he should write it down, he could think of nothing better to say than "Not yet."

  All three of the Pats were looking at him, the expressions on their faces less friendly than they had been. They thought he was being hostile, he knew, but could think of nothing useful to do about it. Rosaleen, who had been watching silently, felt the tension. She coughed. "If I can propose something we ought to do?" she suggested. "Each of you, which way were you looking when the wall went transparent? If we compare notes maybe we can make a kind of map of what's around us."

  It was a sensible proposal. As they all began trying to recall just which way they had been facing, they included Dannerman in the conversation civilly enough; but that was as far as it went. And when, some time later, Pat began to yawn, she didn't look toward Dannerman. All three of the Pats curled up close together, and Dannerman did not sleep that time with any warm and pleasing head on his shoulder.

  By the time he woke up Rosaleen had completed making a fair copy of the map their collective glimpses had produced. Of course it wasn't complete. In the center Rosaleen had drawn the hexagonal cell they were in, with each side numbered cou
nting clockwise from their main point of reference, the area they had set aside as latrine. Dannerman's tall tower was at Side Two. There was nothing at One or Three except Rosaleen's small, neat question mark; Four was the cabinet things she herself had observed, next to them at Five Patsy's broad corridor and at Six Pat's angular steel camel.

  He handed the chart back to Rosaleen with gratitude. "Good work," he said.

  She nodded, and forbore to ask any questions. She turned away-not hostile; simply accommodating his desire to be silent-and limped back to show it again to the others. Dan-nerman watched her go with a frown. How long had Rosaleen been limping? And how long would it be before this very old lady began to show other signs of distress? If a chance ever came for them to escape, would she be able to take it?

  And if she couldn't, would they be able to leave her here?

  They were not pleasant thoughts. It was a relief to be distracted from them when the helmet began its plaintive beeping cry once more.

  By the time it was Dannerman's turn all four of the women had already heard the message, and in each case their expressions ranged from shock to incredulity. Pat, who went first, ordered everyone who followed to hold all comments until they'd all seen it; they grumbled, but they obeyed.

  Then Rosaleen handed it to Dannerman, her face bleak, and when he put it on the colonel appeared at once.

  "Mesdames et messieurs, " Colonel duValier began, and once again the voice-over took up the message in unaccented American English:

  "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important message you will ever hear. Some of it will startle you even more than what you know already. Some of it you will find very difficult to believe. I found it so myself; but I was given proof that I could not deny, and our friends from space stand ready to give those same proofs to you.

  "What it concerns is Heaven.

  "That startles you at once, doesn't it? I'm sure that many of you believe in God and His Heaven, just as I do; and I'm equally sure that, like me, you consider that that sort of thing is a religious matter, not a scientific one. But what I now know is that it is both.