Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dan

There was one job remaining for Dannerman to do that day. It was a fairly nasty one, and not one he looked forward to, but it was best to get it over with. So at quitting time Dannerman went looking for the Cypriot astronomer, Christo Papathanassiou. The man was standing over the screens in his office, preparing to shut them down for the day. When he saw Dannerman in the doorway he gave him a quick, apprehensive look. "Sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to you for a minute," Dannerman said. "I've got a problem."

Papathanassiou sat down again, stiffly waiting. "See, Dr. Papathanassiou, I'm in a little trouble with my cousin, and I don't want to make it worse. When I went down to the lobby to get something for Dr. Chesweiler that man was there and he started up again."

The astronomer still didn't speak. He didn't look surprised at what Dannerman was saying, only sadly resigned.

"And now," Dannerman went on, "I'm really worrying about not telling my cousin about it. You see, what the man says- well, he says you've been mixed up with some bad business. You have a brother-I think he said the name was Aristide? Yes. And this Aristide was implicated in an assassination on Cyprus. A Turkish tax collector, I think he said. Shot in the back as he was opening his own front door."

Papathanassiou stirred. "I know of this case, yes. A very sad business. But it was long ago, more than five years, and Aristide is only my half-brother. My father's youngest son, by his third wife. We were never close, so what has that to do with me?"

"Well, Aristide's on Interpol's wanted list, and it seems they have some idea you helped him get away."

Papathanassiou nodded somberly. "I was aware they had that idea. I was questioned at the time, of course. That is all. Never since. But how does it happen, Mr. Dannerman, that you know so much about Interpol?"

"Who, me? Oh, I don't know anything about Interpol," Dannerman said quickly. "That's just what the man said. But if Pat finds out I knew about this and didn't tell her she'll be even madder."

"Madder about what?" Papathanassiou inquired.

"Well, that's where I have this problem. She wanted me to get some data for her, and I said I'd already done it. Actually I hadn't. And now I can't remember the specs for what she wanted, and I can't ask her, because I'd have to admit I lied about doing it already, and I can't look them up because they're in her secure file. So what I wanted to ask you, Dr. Papathanassiou-"

The old man held up his hand. "Permit me to guess," he said. He didn't seem angry or surprised, only sorrowful. "I imagine what you want is for me to give you the access code for the secure file. Simply so you can carry out Dr. Adcock's orders, of course. And then, I imagine, you will no longer feel it necessary to tell her about this other matter."

"Well… yes. That's about it," Dannerman agreed, and did not enjoy the expression on the astronomer's face.

It was a long subway ride to Coney Island, and at rush hour the trains were packed. It hadn't taken long, after Papathanassiou left-without saying good-bye, Dannerman remembered-to access the secure file and dump it all into a coded transmission for the National Bureau of Investigation office. But it hadn't left time for anything like a leisurely dinner-at least, not if he wanted to get to the theater early. The best Dannerman could do was to pick up some falafel and a juice box, figuring he could stave off starvation on the way, and then there just wasn't enough elbow room in the standing-room-only subway car to eat them. They were at lower Manhattan before he was able to squirm his way to the corner of the car. He managed to eat his dinner there on the long stretch under the East River, doing his best to avoid spilling hummus on the luckier seated passengers around him, but he took no pleasure in it. For one thing, all that congested body heat had caused all the high-tech micropores in the garments of his fellow passengers to open, and the collective odor was not appetizing. More than that, there was the depressing business with Christo Papathanassiou. Dannerman could not help empathizing with what the old man must be feeling. Hilda was right about one thing anyway, Dannerman admitted to himself. He had the bad habit of letting himself feel what his victims went through. In a way, it was an asset for a professional spook. It had certainly made it easier for him to get along with, for instance, Use of the Mad King Ludwigs, not to mention even the Carpezzios. But sometimes it made him feel, well, guilty.

By the time the train had come out of the ground and begun to run on the old elevated tracks, Dannerman even found a seat. He took advantage of the time to run through his messages, none of which mattered to him, and then did what most of his fellow passengers were doing: stared blankly into space, or watched the advertisements as they circled around the display panels just under the ceiling of the car. What caught his eye was a commercial for a soft drink with a mild tetrahydrocannabinol content-the obligatory surgeon general's warning ran in inconspicuous type under the prancing cartoon figures, along with the legend "Not to be sold to anyone under 14." The figures, comically struggling with each other for the soda, were the seven aliens: the Sleepy with its red-shot eyes and pursy little three-cornered mouth, the Happy with its ominous shark-toothed grin, the Bashful, the Doc-all of them, in their sanitized and anthropomorphized Disney-like forms. As cartoons, the creatures were funny and not at all threatening. But suppose, Dannerman thought, suppose the real creatures were somewhere not far away, possibly as close as Starcophagus. Suppose the messages from space had in fact been warnings. Suppose the creatures were actually a clear and present danger that the world really needed to be warned about. Dannerman remembered the little song the taxi driver's Grumpy doll had sung-"Hi-ho, hi-ho, to conquer Earth we go, we'll steal your pearls and all your girls, hi-ho, hi-ho." But it might not be a joking matter.

Dannerman dismissed the notion; it was simply too fanciful, and, besides, he had nearer concerns. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and thought about just what it was that he was going to say to Anita Berman.

There were a million ways of breaking off a relationship. The trouble was that they all started from the same point: you had to want the relationship to be broken off, and Dannerman was a long way from being certain of that. It was the job that mandated the break, not his personal wishes. Although the life of an NBI agent was surely full of interesting incidents, there was a part of Dan Dannerman that sometimes thought wistfully about what it would be like to live a more settled existence. To have, a home of his own, for instance. In something like a four-room apartment somewhere in the outer suburbs, with a regular job that didn't require him to move somewhere else on short no-i ice. A home that he could share with someone else on a more or less permanent basis. With someone, for example, who was, a lot like Anita Berman…

That wasn't a useful speculation, either. He wasn't going to resign from the Bureau, for what else would he do with his time? By the time he got to the stop for Theater Aristophanes Two he had managed to bury that line of thought along with imaginings about the aliens and the memory of his conversation with Christo Papathanassiou, and was only looking forward to an evening that was all his own.

The people who got out with him were a mixed lot; Coney Island wasn't the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it wasn't the best either. It was not what you would consider a natural place for a theater, but the old Ukrainian Orthodox church they had converted into Theater Aristophanes Two had one great advantage. It was cheap. It was a sound building, too, because the Ukrainians had done their best to make the area livable-built a church, tore down the worst of the burned-out tenements, turned some of the vacant lots into vegetable gardens. But when the Ukrainians moved out and the immigrating Palestinians, Biafrans and Kurds moved in, the neighborhood went sour again. The new people apparently didn't go in for farming-maybe there weren't any farms in Palestine or Iraq? Anyway, now there was little behind the chain-link fences but burdock and trash, and the church had lost its congregation. The theater group had been able to pick it up for a nominal rental and a lot of sweat equity-it needed the sweat work, because it had been looted twice and flooded three times in Atlantic hurricanes. On warm evenings it still smelled a little like low tide at the beach. It wasn't very big, either. Maximum seating capacity was not quite two hundred. That had its good aspects; it was easier to fill than a bigger house, and most of all it kept the theatrical unions from bothering the group… even though it also meant that Theater Aristophanes Two had no chance at all of ever turning a profit.

But that, of course, wasn't what they were there for. The members of the group were there because theater was in their blood-or because it was what they were trained for and nothing better offered itself.

Dannerman arrived early. The lobby doors were locked; but when he knocked the "manager," Timmi Trout, peered out of the ticket window and came out to let him in. "Dan," she said, pleased, "hey, we thought we'd lost you. I should've known you'd be here for the opening, anyway. They're still rehearsing- it's a mess, because we open in an hour, and that idiot Bucky Korngold's out of the cast because he got himself arrested yesterday on some damn drug charge. Can you imagine?"

Dannerman could imagine very easily. Practically everybody in the group had a day job, of course. Bucky Korngold's had been dealing drugs; he was one of the people Dannerman had been investigating in the Carpezzio matter. He said, "Mind if I go in and watch?"

"Of course not." She hesitated. "Anita's going to be real glad to see you, you know. She's been kind of worried about you… hut, hey, you'll talk to her yourself. Go on in."

He did, and took his seat in a back row as inconspicuously as possible. The cast wasn't so much rehearsing as shouting at each other for missing cues and stepping on each other's lines-normal enough for a final rehearsal at Aristophanes Two-and he saw Anita Berman at once. For one thing, she was the prettiest woman on the stage: slim, tall, red-haired, with a deep, carrying voice that was perfect for unmiked theater (and of no use at all in the heavily enhanced productions on Broadway).

She saw him right away, too. When she caught sight of him at the back of the theater she looked startled, then perplexed, then gave him a tentative, not quite forgiving, see-you-in-a-minute wave. And it wasn't much more than a minute before the director abandoned his attempts to get the performance running like clockwork. "Go back for makeup, all of you," he ordered. "A bad dress rehearsal means a good show, they say. Maybe you can take comfort in that. I know I will."

And Anita Berman jumped down from the stage and ran up the aisle to meet Dannerman. It was clear she'd made up her mind for forgiveness. "I'm real glad you're here," she said, putting up her face to be kissed.

She clung to him for a moment, then pulled back to look at his face. "I guess we've kind of been playing telephone tag."

"I'm sorry about that," he said, meaning it-meaning at least the "sorry" part. "I've got this new job and it keeps me really on the jump."

"I figured it was something like that. I guess you're making a lot more money there-?"

"Maybe soon, anyway," he said vaguely. "But it takes all my time. Matter of fact, I'll have to be going out of town pretty soon."

"Ah," she said. "For very long?"

"I don't know that yet."

She was silent for a moment, then said, "Dan, dear, listen. I've been thinking about us. I know some men still like to be in control, and maybe-well, if you think I was rushing things, talking about moving in together-"

"That's not it," he said uncomfortably. "Look, you need to get ready for the performance and we've got a lot to talk about. How about if I meet you after the play?"

She gave him a sudden smile. "That'll be fine, Dan. Come backstage and we'll go to the cast party. You can tell me all about the new job and your trip. I'll be waiting for you."

So Dannerman had the whole duration of the play to decide on a story about where he was going on the trip he had invented on the spur of the moment, and how long he would be away.

There was a funny thing about that, if only he had known it. It was part of Dannerman's tradecraft as an NBI agent to tell selected fragments of truth in order to deceive. For a change, this time it was the other way around. Although he didn't know it yet, the deception was truth. He was indeed going away, in fact very much farther away than he could ever have imagined.

Fidgeting in his seat while waiting for the curtain to go up, Dannerman was trying to decide what to do about Anita Berman. He didn't have to break up with her. Well, not just yet, anyway. Sometime, yes, because a permanent, committed relationship was out of the question for anybody in Dannerman's line of work. The worrisome part was that, he was pretty sure, the longer he waited the worse it would be for her when the break did come; and how bad was he willing to make it for sweet, pretty Anita Berman?

When the play began, he was glad to put that question out of his mind; what was happening on the stage held his interest. Maybe the old adage was right; the blunders of the rehearsal had disappeared and the cast was flawless in the first act of The Subway. Anita was beautiful even in her 1920s bargain-basement flapper costume, and whoever the actor was who had taken over for poor Bucky Korngold, he didn't miss a beat.

Even the play itself was going well with the audience. The Subway was definitely one of Elmer Rice's more squirrelly works, and Dannerman was the one who had first urged it on the group. It was ideal for them. It was short. It used a large cast- always an asset for an Off-Off-Off-Broadway theater, when everybody involved wanted to get on stage where some slumming big-time media critic might just possibly think their performance worth a few seconds' commendation in a review. The play was cheap to produce, since it only required one impressionistic-and therefore inexpensive-set. Most important of all, The Subway was just about totally forgotten. No major company had given it a production in close to a hundred years, and so the troupe didn't have a million library tapes floating around out there to compete with.

He had also vowed to the group that some critics, at least, would be sufficiently intrigued by a long-lost classic of "modern" American theater to make the long run out to Coney Island to see its revival. He was happy to see that he had been right about that. He was pretty sure that at least six or eight of the audience members were actual critics. None of them were smiling, but he didn't expect that. Critics didn't smile. The important thing was that they weren't walking out, either.

Then, when the first act ended, at least two of them were actually clapping. Well, the whole audience was enthusiastic in its applause-not surprising, since a good half of its members were in some way related to one of the actors-but it was a good sign. In the intermission crowd that packed the lobby-once the vestry, when the place had been a church-Dannerman attached himself, as inconspicuously as possible, to a woman he was nearly sure was a TV talk-show host, trying to overhear what she was saying to her companion. But she was only commenting on the buskers on the sidewalk outside: two Arab kids tap-dancing while a third, in an "I LOVE Allah" T-shirt, worked the intermission crowd for cash. He started for another potential critic and was annoyed when someone touched his arm. He turned to face a short, plump woman who was placidly gazing up at him. "Why, Danno," she said, "it really is you, isn't it? Nice to run into you like this. Why don't we step outside for a little air?"

"Damn it, Hilda," he said. "What the hell are you doing here?"

She didn't answer that, but then she didn't need to. She simply steered him firmly out of the doors and around the corner to where a large truck was parked at the curb. The liquid-crystal display on its side glittered with the words NIITAKE BROS. MOVING amp; STORAGE, but Dannerman knew it was not going to be any ordinary moving van.

It wasn't. It turned out to be a complete mobile NBI surveillance station, with a Police Corps master sergeant saluting smartly as Colonel Hilda Morrisey brought him in.

"It's time for us to do a little business," she said cheerfully. "Take a pew, Danno. Want some coffee? A beer? We're pretty well stocked here, and Horace'll get you anything you want."

"What I wanted was to be left alone for one damn evening with my friends."

"Another time, Danno. How's it going?"

"As well as can be expected, considering you picked Korngold up the day before the opening."

"Not me. They," she corrected. "They picked everybody in the operation up, but I wasn't involved. I've been off the Carpezzio business as long as you have, because your cousin's is more important. Let's have your report."

She absorbed the news about the Floridian general and the diamonds without comment, but winced when he told her that the "muggers" had broken Mick Jarvas's wrong arm. "We'll have to do that another way," she said resignedly. "You've got to get his job, because she's going out to Starlab and you're going to have to go with her."

He goggled at the woman. "Into space? Nobody goes into space anymore!"

"She does; that's what she was bribing the general for. And she would've taken Jarvas along for muscle, but we'll have to change that."

"You want me to go into space?" he said again.

"Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Lots of people have gone into space."

"Not the Bureau! And not recently for almost anybody."

"Well, until recently the Bureau didn't have a reason."

He looked at her more carefully. "Something's happened," he said.

"That data from your cousin's file happened, Danno," the colonel said triumphantly. "I knew there'd be something there. You know what it was? Synchrotron radiation!"

He said impatiently, "Cut the crap, Hilda. I don't know what that is."

"Well, neither do I, exactly. But that's what started your cousin off. Seven or eight months ago the observatory was trying one more time to reactivate the satellite, and they detected a burst of this synchrotron radiation coming from it."

"But you said to check into gamma radiation."

"I know what I said. The agent who passed the word along must've gotten it wrong; anyway, the word is it's definitely synchrotron, not gamma. There wasn't much of it. It lasted just for a few seconds. But it was definite, according to your cousin's analysis, and the thing is, there isn't supposed to be anything on Starlab that could cause it." She paused, studying his face. "So you know what that means? Something's been added to Starlab."

"Are you going to tell me what that is?"

"I'll show you, as much as we know. Horace? Will you start the simulation now, please?"

The sergeant touched one button, and the inside of the truck body went dark; touched another, and the simulation tank at the front of the body lit up with a picture of Starlab, sailing along in its perpetual fall toward Earth, with its ruff of solar panels soaking up photovoltaic power to run the instruments that were no longer responding, and its huge collector eyes staring un-seeingly out at the universe.

"As you can see," Hilda instructed, "it's big. That's because it was designed to let astronomers live there for weeks at-"

"I've seen all this, Hilda. It's no secret. Christ, they've got a model of the thing in the observatory waiting room."

"Don't rush me, Danno. We're coming to what you haven't seen. This is stuff we got from your cousin's observatory records. She had this whole segment deleted from the public bank-decided to keep it a secret, I guess-but once our technicians knew what to look for they had no trouble retrieving it. This is enhanced imaging, otherwise you couldn't see anything at all. Watch that little thing coming in from the upper right."

"I see it." It was a nearly featureless lump, by comparison with the huge Starlab no bigger than a football. It slipped past the great solar vanes and gently caressed the sheathing of the main body of the satellite. It didn't bounce away. It stuck where it touched. Then, while Dannerman watched, the object draped itself to the curvature of the shell. In a moment it was almost invisible again, except as a nearly imperceptible swelling of the hull.

"So what the hell is it?" Dannerman demanded. "Space junk?"

"Did that look like junk? It didn't crash into the satellite, did it? Looks to me like it docked with the son of a bitch."

"What then?" As the idea struck him: "Does it have any connection with the CLO?"

"Good question," she said approvingly. "I ran that past the experts as soon as they dug out the clip on the object. They said no. They said this thing was way too small to be taken for a comet, although they couldn't turn up any later observations of the object; lost it somewhere, I guess. But they didn't exclude the possibility that this thing had come in on the CLO and been dropped off."

"Like a probe?"

"I guess. Anyway, they're pretty sure it is some kind of an artifact."

"Well," he said reasonably, "if it's an artifact somebody would have to put it in orbit. Who's been launching spacecraft lately?"

"Nobody. Not openly, anyway."

"Some terrorist bunch?"

"God, I hope not. If there's some kind of technology that can launch an artifact without anybody detecting it we need to know about it. If terrorists got hold of it… well, can you imagine what it would mean if the Mads or the Irish or the goddam Basques could put up their own satellites?" She shrugged expressively, then added, "But maybe that would be better than the other possibility, at that. Your cousin seems to think it's extraterrestrial."

"But that doesn't make any sense, Hilda! If she thought that, why would she keep it a secret?"

"Money," she said shortly.

"From what, damn it?"

"Oh, Danno," she sighed, "you know what your trouble is? You just don't think like a normal human being. You aren't greedy enough. Think about it: some kind of technology that can produce synchrotron radiation where there isn't supposed to be any. The brains tell me that it can't be done without a big particle accelerator-those things that run out of subway-tunnel kind of things, fifteen or twenty miles long. So that means there has to be some pretty hot hardware up there. If it's alien, it's worth money to whoever finds it. For us, on the other hand, it doesn't matter whether it's from some weirdo ET or somebody on Earth; we want it."

"So let the Bureau send a mission up to get it," Dannerman said reasonably.

She shook her head. "That's one option, sure. But maybe we can't. It's tricky. Starlab's private property; your uncle paid for it out of his own pocket. Maybe we could get around that- that's what we've got lawyers for, for God's sake-but then there's the other problem. We don't want to alert other people to what's going on. The goddam Europeans might send up a mission of their own if they knew we were after something; they can move faster than NASA, and you know there's no security there. And anyway the goddam Floridians still control the launch facilities."

"So?"

"So-probably-the final decision hasn't been made, because too many of the top people are all tied up with the press-secretary thing-so probably we want to let her go ahead, but send one of our own along to make sure we get first crack at whatever's there."

"Ah," said Dannerman glumly. "Like me, you mean."

"Exactly like you, Danno, so you have to take Jarvas's place. I've got an idea about that. Sergeant? Kill the display and let's have some light again while we brief Agent Dannerman on what he's going to do for us."

As she turned to get something out of a locker, Dannerman tardily remembered the other thing that had been on his mind. He sneaked a look at his watch.

It was late. The play would be long over before he got away from the colonel. And so he wouldn't be keeping his promise to meet Anita backstage; which meant that probably that particular problem had already settled itself.