Frederik Pohl - Other End Of Time

by Other End of Time [lit]

  But, as it turned out, that wasn't an option. Somebody had forgotten to tell the bureau's arm-breakers that Jarvas was left-handed; and when Dannerman put his card in the turnstile at the observatory entrance the next morning his cousin Pat was ahead of him, and beside her, punching out the combination to summon an elevator, was Mick Jarvas, a translucent cast on his right arm.

  "Morning," Dannerman said, trying not to grin.

  "And good morning to you," his cousin said, smiling. She reached over to touch him on the shoulder-not affectionately, exactly, but a lot more amiably than before. "You surprised me yesterday, old Dan. For an English major, I mean," she said. "Listen, come see me this afternoon. I've got an errand for you to run."

  "Sure thing, Pat." He might have asked what kind of an errand, but he didn't get the chance. As they stepped out of the car at their floor she almost bumped into a large, sand-colored man with short black hair who was waiting there.

  "Why, Jimmy," she said. "I didn't expect you so early."

  "I just dropped off some of my stuff. I have an appointment downtown to check in at the embassy in half an hour," the man said, holding the elevator door open.

  "Well, I won't keep you," Pat said. "You know Mick Jarvas, of course? And this is my cousin, Dan Dannerman. Commander Jimmy Lin."

  Dannerman hadn't had any clear idea of what he expected a Chinese astronaut to be like, but Jimmy Lin wasn't it. The man was taller than he had imagined, and a lot huskier; he wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt, and shoes that, Dannerman was pretty sure, would have cost him a month of his observatory pay. "Glad to know you, Commander," Dannerman said, automatically extending his hand.

  But the People's Republic astronaut obviously didn't share the pleasure. He didn't accept Dannerman's hand. He didn't even speak to him. He gave him a long, hard look, then turned to Pat Adcock. "I'll be back before lunch," he said. "We can talk then."

  "I've got a lunch date; make it this afternoon," she said, gazing after Lin as he let the elevator door close behind him. Then she turned to Dannerman with a mildly puzzled look. "He's usually chummier than that. You didn't forget to shower this morning, did you?" He shrugged. "Well, let's get to work; you can sort that out later."

  Dannerman would have to sort that out, somehow, if he was going to carry out the colonel's orders, but it was going to be harder than he'd thought. He hadn't expected that kind of unprovoked hostility from Lin; and he was going to have to come up with something better than a broken wrong arm to get Jarvas out of the way. And then, as he checked his weapon with Jarvas, there was another curious thing. The bodyguard gave him a long look, partly abashed, partly pugnacious, but, though he seemed to want to say something, he didn't get it out.

  There was one thing Dannerman could do, though. Hilda had kept her promise and transmitted the background packets on the observatory employees who had turned up in the sin file. Two of them were unlikely to help: the astrophysics grad student three weeks past her period and frantically sending faxes to her boyfriend, now in Sierra Leone; Harry Chesweiler, identified as a former member of the Man-Boy Love Association. But the packet on Christo Papathanassiou did look good. The old man had got himself picked up for questioning about a terrorist assassination back in the old country. That, Dannerman thought judiciously, could be made to work-whether or not Papathanassiou was actually guilty of anything.

  Dannerman couldn't do anything about it for the first couple of hours that morning, because he was kept busy with his nominal observatory duties. And then, when he went looking for the Cypriot, Papathanassiou was nowhere to be found. He wasn't in his office. He wasn't in with Pat, or in the room of number crunchers all the scientists used to set up their mathematical models. When Dannerman looked into Rosaleen Artzybachova's cubicle he wasn't there, either, and the old lady herself was, incredibly, doing push-ups on the floor. "You want me?" she called, looking up at Dannerman.

  "Actually I was looking for Dr. Papathanassiou."

  "Try the canteen," she said; and that was where Dannerman found him, attacking a wedge of some unfamiliar kind of pastry smothered in heavy cream.

  He looked defensive. "One has to keep one's blood sugar up," he said.

  "Good idea," said Dannerman. "Mind if I join you?" And when he had a dish of sherbet for himself he said, "I was kind of hoping I'd run into you, Dr. Papathanassiou. I was looking at those tapes from space again last night-"

  "Those odd-looking alien creatures? Yes?"

  "And I just didn't understand about this Big Crunch."

  "Ah," Papathanassiou said, gratified, "but really, it's very simple. The universe is expanding; in the future it will collapse again; that's all of it. Of course," he went on, "the mathematics is, yes, rather complex. Actually it was the subject of my dissertation in graduate school, did you know that?" Dannerman did, but saw no reason to say so. "It was necessary to use symplectic integrators to predict the next fifty quadrillion years of motion in only our own galaxy. You've heard of the three-body problem? What I had to solve was the two-hundred-billion-body problem."

  He tittered. Dannerman pressed on. "But what I don't understand is, when the universe collapses again, what does it collapse to?"

  "Ah." The astronomer ruminated for a moment, licking cream off his upper lip. "Well, you see, when everything has come together again great velocities and pressures are involved. First all matter is compressed. Then the atomic nuclei themselves are compressed. They become a new form of very dense matter which is stable-well, temporarily stable. Are you following me so far?"

  Dannerman nodded, not entirely truthfully.

  "Excellent. Interestingly, some workers once thought that sort of thing might happen in a particle accelerator. They called that state 'Lee-Wick matter,' and they feared it would be so dense that it would accrete everything else into it. Perhaps, do you see?, even turning the whole Earth into Lee-Wick matter." He wiped his lips with a napkin, grinning. "They were incorrect. No accelerator can reach those forces, though at the Crunch-"

  "Yes?"

  "Why, then," Papathanassiou said, nodding, "yes, perhaps it could be possible. Not in the form of Lee-Wick matter, no; one is pretty confident now that that doesn't exist after all. Rather it would be in the form of strange matter. That's to say, matter made from quarks-do you know what a quark is? Well, never mind; but strange matter would be very dense indeed, and it would keep on getting denser and denser. You cannot imagine how dense, Mr. Dannerman."

  "Like a black hole?" he hazarded.

  "Far denser than even a black hole. It would encompass the entire universe, you see, for as soon as it began to form it would transform everything around it into strange matter. Do you know our story of King Midas and his touch of gold? Like that. But only for a tiny fraction of a second, because such matter has a net positive charge-no electrons, you see-and so it tries to fly apart, like a bomb. Have I answered your question?"

  "Well, yes." Dannerman cleared his throat. "That part of it, anyway. But it's funny you should mention a bomb."

  Papathanassiou's cheerful expression faltered. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Someone was asking about you," Dannerman lied. "He mentioned bombs? And a brother?"

  The astronomer's smile was gone. "I don't understand. Who was this person?"

  "I don't know. Greek, I think. You know that bar downstairs? 1 was having a cup of coffee, and he sat down next to me and asked if I knew you. Do you think I should mention it to Dr. Adcock?"

  "Dear God, no!"

  "I mean, so she can find this man and make him stop. He said some very unkind things about you, Dr. Papathanassiou."

  "No! Please, no," the astronomer begged.

  "Well," Dannerman began, then paused as his communicator beeped at him; there was an incoming call on the observatory system. In any case, he thought, that was a good place to stop; the hook had been planted, and it would be worthwhile to let Papathanassiou worry for a while. "I'd better take my call," he said. "Anyway, I won't say anything to her today. But I need
to think this over; maybe you and I can talk again tomorrow? Here? I think that would be a good idea-and, oh, yes, thank you for explaining to me about the Big Crunch."

  The call turned out to be Gerd Hausewitz from the Max-Planck Institut again, and he was looking aggrieved. "You promised to supply the specs for the Starlab mission," he reminded Dannerman.

  "I know, Gerd. I've requested them."

  "It is only that we supplied the data you asked for at once."

  "I know you did. What can I tell you? I don't know how it is in your place, but here it takes time to get people to move."

  "Yes, of course, Dannerman, but-" He looked over his shoulder and spoke more softly. "-my superiors are quite interested in this matter. They were not pleased that I delivered your material without at once receiving what we asked in return. This could be difficult for me here."

  "I'll do what I can."

  "Please, Dannerman."

  "Yes, I promise," Dannerman said, half turning as he cut the contact. Someone was at his door and, surprisingly, it was the Chinese astronaut, PRC Space Corps Commander James Peng-tsu Lin.

  He was wearing a propitiatory smile. "Hey, Dan," he said. "I owe you an apology."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "No, really. I was pretty rude this morning, and I didn't mean to be-had to get down to the embassy and all that red tape, had a lot on my mind. So let's start over, okay?"

  "Glad to, Commander Lin-"

  "Just Jimmy, all right? Listen, what I was thinking, are you free for lunch? Looks like we're going to be working together for a while, and I like to get to know new people when they come to work here. Especially if they're Pat's cousin. They tell me there's some pretty fine ethnic food just around the corner-?"

  "That'd be fine," Dannerman said, with pleasure. Whatever had turned Lin around was a mystery, but it was also a break: you didn't often get a subject volunteering to let you interrogate him. "I'll get my stuff and meet you at the elevator."

  And then, as he picked up his twenty-shot weapon from Mick Jarvas, another little mystery solved itself. Jarvas was in the men's room, but when he came out he looked almost cheerful until he saw Dannerman waiting for him. Then he gave Dannerman that peculiar look again as he handed over the gun. He didn't let go of it.

  "Is there something you want to say to me?" Dannerman asked, holding the barrel while Jarvas held the butt-he was glad to see the safety was firmly on.

  Jarvas's eyes were on the ground, but Dannerman thought he muttered something. "What did you say?"

  Jarvas looked up angrily. As he let go of the gun at last, he managed to get it out. "About that business in the street yesterday? I just said thanks."

  Jimmy Lin was in the waiting room, busily chatting up the receptionist. In the elevator he said appreciatively, "I have to say your cousin Pat doesn't mind hiring other good-lookers. How'd you like to do the Twin Dragons Teasing the Phoenix with that Janice lady?"

  "The what?"

  The astronaut guffawed. "The Twin Dragons Teasing the Phoenix. It's an old Chinese expression. It's like, well, like when a lady has two gentleman paying attention to her at once." He grinned sidelong at Dannerman. "Just a joke, you know. Phew, what a mob." He led the way along the block to turn the corner, moving rapidly. When he noticed that Dannerman was lengthening his stride to keep up with him he said apologetically, "Sorry, I guess I'm always in a hurry. It's a genetic fault; my dad was the same way-except with the ladies, of course. Anyway, here's the place."

  To the surprise of Dannerman, who had been preparing himself for Chinese food, the ethnic restaurant was not Oriental at all. What it was, was Tex-Mex. The place was almost as crowded as the sidewalk, but Lin had a whispered conversation with the waiter and money must have changed hands; they got an immediate table. "I hope you like this stuff, Dan. I guess I got an appetite for it in Houston. First time I was there this lady from El Paso introduced me to it, then I introduced her to the Jade Girl Playing the Flute. Aw," he said, grinning, lowering his voice as he glanced at the waitress who was hovering just out of earshot, "that doesn't mean anything to you, does it? It's another of those old Chinese expressions. One of these days I'll show you some books that were written by my great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats granddaddy, Peng-tsu. I got my middle name after him; the old man's kind of famous, in some circles, anyway. He was a Taoist sage two thousand years ago-I'd have to say, a pretty horny Taoist sage-and he wrote some dandy books on what he called 'healthful life.' His idea of health, though, was to prong the ladies as often as he could and make up a list of all the ways there are of doing it. Well, enough of my sordid family history. Let's go ahead and order, we don't want to keep that good-looking little cowgal over there waiting, and then you can tell me all about Dan Dannerman."

  And that was the way it went. It didn't take Dannerman long to realize that the astronaut was as interested in pumping him as he was in finding out about the astronaut. They didn't talk shop. They talked the way long-lost friends talk when they catch up on each other's lives after years of separation. Jimmy Lin wasn't reticent about himself. Garrulous would've been more accurate; in the first half hour Dannerman learned that the Lins were a wealthy old Hong Kong family who moved to Beijing after the reunification and got even richer there, as the People's Republic discovered the wonders of entrepreneurialism. Jimmy Lin himself had been educated in America, of course. That, along with the fact that he spent a lot of his spare time in his father's place on Maui, accounted for his accent-free American English. Then, instead of going into the family business, he'd been accepted for astronaut training. "But," he said, sighing, "I'm no credit to my ancestors. The top brass fired me out of the astronaut corps a year ago-they had some damn political charge." He looked ruefully embarrassed. "What they called it was 'left-wing, right-wing zigzag deviationism,' if you can imagine that. But actually about half the corps got dumped at the same time for one pretext or another. My opinion, they just decided there wasn't any money to be made in space anymore, so they cut back. So now I have to scratch for work." But after every little datum he supplied about himself he paused inquiringly to give Dannerman a chance to supply a little quid for his quo. He was fascinated by Dannerman's interest in the little theater in Brooklyn. ("Coney Island! Wow! That's really what you call Off-Off-Off Broadway, isn't it? I didn't think anybody went to Coney Island anymore!") He was searching about Dannerman's years in Europe-Dannerman was glad he'd been thorough about covering his tracks with the Mad King Ludwigs-and sympathetic about the fact that, although Dannerman and Pat Adcock had inherited the same amount from Uncle Cubby, Pat had actually got hers and Dannerman's had shrunk to invisibility through inflation before he collected it.

  But of the repair mission to Starlab he would say nothing at all. "The thing is, Dan," he said, all good-natured candor, "I'm in line to fly that bird. Provided I don't screw up with your cousin and, well, she just doesn't want it talked about yet." He glanced at his watch. "Well, this's been great, but we better get back to the office. I hear Pat's got a job for you to do this afternoon."

  When Dannerman was summoned to his cousin's office, though, the first thing she said wasn't about the errand. It was "What the hell did you promise the Germans?"

  He shrugged, less interested in the question than in the fact that Mick Jarvas was standing there beside her desk, looking truculent again. "They asked for information about the Starlab repair mission."

  "They can't have it."

  "All right," he said agreeably, "but can I give them a reason?"

  "No. Well, hell, I guess you have to say something. Tell them we've got a problem, you don't know exactly what it is, but it'll all be cleared up in a week or so."

  It seemed to Dannerman that his cousin had a lot in common with the colonel. He ventured, "Meaning when you get back from your Starlab trip?"

  She glared at him. "Who told you I was going to Starlab? Just do your job," she ordered. "No, wait a minute, I didn't mean for you to go. I need something delivered to the
Florida embassy. You're going to take it, and it's important. I'm sending Mick along with you, just in case."

  Jarvas stirred. "I can handle it all by myself," he muttered.

  She ignored him. To Dannerman she said, "Give me your belly bag." When he unsnapped it and handed it over, puzzled, she dumped the entire contents on her desk.

  "Hey!" he said. There was personal stuff there, his cash card, his ID, the key cards for the office and the condo.

  "Shut up," she said. She unlocked a drawer of her desk and took out a small, soft-sided leather satchel. She stuffed it into his belly bag; it fit, but just barely. She thought for a moment, then put his ID back.

  "You can pick up the rest of your stuff when you get back, Dan. What I want you to do, take this bag to the Floridian embassy and give the bag to General Martin Delasquez personally. Nobody else, understand? No matter what they say. It's to be hand-delivered, and he's expecting it. Wait for him while he checks it out, and when he says it's okay you can come back here. Mick, give him his gun."

  "Right, Pa-Dr. Adcock," the bodyguard rumbled, pulling the weapon out of his pocket. "Come on, Dannerman."

  In the elevator he was fidgety, glaring at Dannerman. Just before they reached the ground floor he asked, "Do you know what this is about?"

  "Don't have a clue."

  "Neither do I. Listen. Maybe you're not as big a prick as I thought you were, but my orders are that that package stays in your belly bag until you hand it over to the guy it's meant for. No peeking. I don't want to have any trouble with you."

  "You won't," Dannerman said, meaning it. He didn't want to cross Jarvas just when the man was being nearly human. In any case, he was hoping that the subway ride would give him a chance to engage Jarvas in conversation.

  But that didn't happen. Jarvas was working at the business of being a bodyguard. He stayed close to Dannerman, keeping anyone else from touching him even on the subway, his good hand always near his own weapon, and he wasn't talkative. When the train speeded up to pass what some terrorist had done to the Fourteenth Street station, all lightless and covered in dark green radiation-proof foam, Jarvas crossed himself awkwardly with the arm that was in a cast. Dannerman considered mentioning to him, as a conversation opener, that he really had nothing to worry about, the residue from the terrorists' nuclear satchel bomb was no more dangerous than the general atmospheric levels-as long as you didn't linger there, of course. But as soon as he opened his mouth Jarvas gave him a warning scowl.