Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER TEN

Dan

The flight started tamely. The takeoff thrust was not much worse than some of the high-speed scramjets Dannerman had taken to cross an ocean, but the Clipper was still being an airplane then.

He hardly noticed when the takeoff jets switched over to the higher-speed contoured flow, but then the time came when the scram cut over to rocket thrust, and he noticed that, all right. That was real acceleration. He was squashed into his seat for four long minutes. His belly sagged, his head drooped, he realized for the first time that even his eyeballs had weight on their sockets. Then he fell forward against his chest straps as the thrust cut; he was suddenly weightless, and they were on their way.

It was about then that Dannerman realized that space travel took a long time to happen… and that while it was happening there was nothing much to do. What he wanted to do was to get out of his seat and roam around the Clipper, but he had been warned against that. He quickly saw why. Every course correction brought another jolt, not nearly as violent as the first but unpredictable for either time or direction. Then the gimbaled seats tilted, the motors roared, and you were lucky if you didn't bite your tongue or bash your head.

A window, at least, would have been nice. He didn't have one. All he had was the tiny TV screen on his armrest, but all it showed was black, empty space. By his side Rosaleen Artzybachova sat with her eyes placidly closed, maybe even napping; well, spaceflight was nothing new to her. She could not have been comfortable; her feet rested on a pair of gray metal boxes, lashed to the seat supports, and so her knees were squeezed almost into her belly. Just ahead, but out of his sight, Pat was in the third-pilot seat, trying to talk to Delasquez and Lin at the controls; Dannerman couldn't make out the words, and if the pilots answered he couldn't hear.

In the seat next to him Artzybachova opened her eyes and gazed at him. "Are you all right?" When he nodded, she asked politely, "And how are you enjoying spaceflight? Is it what you expected?"

"Well, no. Not exactly. I thought we'd have to go through more training-"

She laughed. "Like high-G conditioning in those awful old centrifuges? Drills for emergency actions? Thank heaven, we don't do that anymore. We don't wear spacesuits, either."

"I noticed that." What Dannerman himself had on was the slacks and jacket he had put on that morning. Dr. Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin were wearing one-piece coveralls, General Delasquez the combat fatigues of the Florida Air Guard.

Dr. Artzybachova was still being grandmotherly. "Are you hungry? I brought some apples and I believe there are other things on board."

"Hungry? No."

"And you don't have to pee or anything? You should've gone before we took off."

"I don't," he said shortly, but she had put the idea in his mind. He quelled it, for there was an opportunity here to be taken. "Dr. Artzybachova? Can I ask you something? Is there something, well, peculiar about what we're doing?"

She gave him an amused look, pale eyebrows raised. "Define 'peculiar.' "

He chose his words with care. "This is supposed to be a simple repair mission, right? But there are all these rumors-"

"What kind of rumors?"

He spread his hands. "Something about some kind of radiation from Starlab that wasn't supposed to be there? I don't understand that very well, Dr. Artzybachova; I was an English major. And something about those messages with the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs?"

"You are very skilled at listening to rumors, Mr. Dannerman." It wasn't a compliment.

He pressed on. "I get the idea that that's really what this mission is about. Something alien on Starlab? Something that might be worth a lot of money. Pat wouldn't talk to me about it-"

"That is not surprising," the old lady observed.

"I guess not. Will you?"

Dr. Artzybachova studied his face for a moment, considering, while the Clipper rolled itself into a new position. "I suppose it could do no harm now. In a little while you will see what we all see-whatever that turns out to be. Or it will turn out that there is nothing worth seeing, and then we will simply try to determine what repairs might make Starlab function as originally designed again. So," she said, sighing, "yes, the rumors are true. Fifteen months ago your cousin's observatory detected a burst of synchrotron radiation from Starlab. No one else appeared to observe it, but then no one else was actively trying to reestablish communications with the orbiter. So she called me at my dacha. I flew at once to New York. We examined all the logs of instrumentation changes and, no, there simply was nothing on Starlab that could have produced that emission. So we performed a data check."

Dannerman pricked up his ears; this was new. "What kind of data check?"

"A fortunate coincidence: the Japanese were getting ready to replace one of their old weather satellites, so they did a census of everything in orbit-to select a safe slot for their satellite, you see. One of their instrument people was a former student of mine. From her I got all their obs of astronomical satellites- including Starlab. When we massaged the data it became clear that there was a steady flux of very low-level radiation coming from it, in several bands-none of it compatible with the presumed dead-board status of the satellite. In addition, optically, there was a blister on the side of the satellite that didn't belong there. Finally, just recently we got another indication. There was a comet-like object-"

"Yes, I know about the comet-like object."

She regarded him thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose you do."

"And what all this adds up to?"

"Oh, Mr. Dannerman," she said, sounding less patient, "I have no doubt that you know that, too. All the evidence taken together, there is strong reason to believe that something extraterrestrial has established itself on Starlab."

"An alien?"

She looked pensive. "Probably not a living one, no. At least I hope not. More likely some sort of automated probe. But definitely some sort of technology that is not terrestrial in origin."

A quick course correction spun their chairs around; the old lady grimaced and closed her eyes. Evidently she had finished her story.

But Dannerman hadn't finished thinking about it. It sounded wholly preposterous, but this apparently sane woman seemed to give it credence. He cleared his throat. "Dr. Artzybachova?" And when she opened her eyes again, "I can see that new technology might be worth a lot of money. But what do you do with it when we find it?"

"If we find it. But that I cannot say until we see it, of course. That is what I am along for, me and my instruments." She tapped one of the boxes with a toe.

"I was wondering about them," he said.

She smiled. "Of course. Did you think I could examine what we find-whatever we find-by smell, perhaps? Although it may be that none of these instruments will be of any use, since we have no data on what might be there."

"But you must have some idea-"

She raised her hand amiably. "But, Mr. Dannerman-Dan, may I? And please call me Rosaleen; it was a notion of my mother's when I was born. She was much taken with the wife of your American president and gave me a name as close to hers as she dared." She paused, then finished her thought. "But, Dan, I really don't know what will be on Starlab, you see. I only have hopes. I hope that there will be some useful-looking devices which I can remove and bring back for analysis. Do you know the term 'reverse engineering'? For that, so that perhaps they can be copied in some way. Will that happen? I don't know. Will there be anything alien in Starlab at all? I don't know even that much, either; it is all hopes. It is quite possible that, even if there is something there, it will be so unfamiliar that I will not dare to try to remove it. Or there may be nothing at all. In either case, we will have done all this for nothing."

He looked at her. "Seems like a pretty long shot, the way you describe it."

"Ah," she said softly, "but think of the payoff. If we win our bet there will be unimaginable benefits, and not just in money. I would not have left my comfortable summer place in Ukraine just for the money, only for the chance to learn." She looked pensive for a moment, then smiled. "Whatever it is, we'll find out for sure when we get aboard. Now, Dan, if you'll excuse me, we should be coming around toward North America again and I'd like to check the uplinks for news."

Dannerman must have drifted off to sleep again, in spite of everything, because the next thing he remembered was Jimmy Lin's cheery hail. The astronaut was swinging weightlessly toward them, hand over hand, pausing to float in space upside down by Dannerman. "So how do you like micrograv?" he asked amiably; then, glancing at Artzybachova and lowering his voice: "Tell you one thing, if my great-great had ever gone into orbit he would've had to write three or four new books. You don't know what screwing is until you try it weightless."

Rosaleen turned to him, her arms still waving in the graceful flow of tai chi. Ignoring the astronaut's remarks, she asked, "Are we getting close to Starlab?"

"Not too far. That's why I'm going to the head now; if we have to wear those damn suits I won't want to need to pee. I recommend the same to you two, soon's I'm through. But don't stay out of your seats any longer than you have to, okay? And sing out when you're both strapped in again. The general claims he ranks me, so he's doing most of the piloting, and he has a heavy hand with the delta-vees."

Dannerman's bladder was signaling to him with increasing urgency, but he didn't get his turn for a while. He deferred to Rosaleen Artzybachova out of politeness, and then to General Delasquez because he wasn't given much choice when the pilot came back and pushed his way past; then to his cousin out of politeness again. By then his fidgeting was becoming conspicuous. Dr. Artzybachova, observing it, did her best to distract him. "Have you seen?" she inquired, reaching over to adjust his screen. It was displaying something tiny and oddly shaped, but when she turned up the magnification it became a satellite with antennae and solar collectors poking out in all directions.

"Starlab?" he ventured.

That amused her. "No, of course not. It is simply a dead old orbiter, I think a military one, and probably Russian; but it is interesting, is it not?"

Oh, it was interesting enough, as a souvenir of the days when wars were actually fought between nations, instead of between legions of police on one side, and on the other a horde of criminals and a few squads of slippery terrorists. He cast a longing look at the toilet, but Pat was still locked inside. "Well," he said to the Ukrainian woman, forcing jolliness into his tone, "was there any interesting news in the uplinks?" Dutifully she rehearsed the principal items for him: England's MI-5 had caught a dozen Welsh freedom fighters redhanded in possession of nuclear materials; some Sikhs at the Marseilles airport had machine-gunned Moslem pilgrims en route to Mecca; and in Washington the President had finally announced the death of his kidnapped press secretary. Hilda would be going crazy, he thought; but he didn't think it long. The door to the toilet was opening, and he was already unbuckling himself to go there.

Pat was looking baffled when she finally came out, and when Dannerman got his chance at the toilet he saw why. The writing on the cubicle wall wasn't graffiti. It was instructions, a complete tech manual to the use of a micrograv toilet, and it took a bit of doing. As he was finishing up with the complex flush maneuver he heard squawking from outside. He hurried back to his seat, Rosaleen waving him on; and there, spinning slowly on the screen, was an orbiter that he recognized because he had spent so much time studying its pictures. There was no doubt about it. Just disappearing from view between the solar-collector struts and a communications dish was the blister that might, or might not, have come from outer space. The construction was immense.

"So that's Starlab," he said.

"Of course it is," Rosaleen said fretfully. "And, look, the optical mirror has been left uncovered all this time-who knows how much damage it's taken from microjunk impacts?"

"There's a little ship attached to the side," Dannerman observed.

"Yes, the ACRV-the Assured Crew Rescue Vehicle. It was supposed to take crew back to the Earth in an emergency, but poor Manny Lefrik never got a chance to use it."

"Manny Lefrik?" Memory clicked the name into place: the astronomer who had died on Starlab. "Did you know him?"

She sighed. "Of course I knew him. Very well, in fact, and on this very satellite; Jimmy was quite right about making love in microgravity." And then, noting the expression on his face, "Oh, Dan! Can you not believe that I was not always a million years old? But buckle yourself in quickly; there will be much maneuvering now. Hurry!"

She was right about the maneuvering. Docking was tricky, with a lot of swearing in three languages from the pilots up ahead as they jockeyed the spacecraft to its port. But then there was a faint metallic crunch and a shudder, and a cry of satisfaction from Pat Adcock. The Clipper had mated with Starlab.

Beside him, Rosaleen Artzybachova was busily removing the containment straps from her instrument cases. "Let me help you," Dannerman offered.

She hesitated. "Yes, perhaps it would be better if you took one. But do be careful with it!"

"Stay put, you people," Delasquez called from up front. "We're checking the life support."

But Starlab's systems were apparently working, even after all these years; the internal pressure and. temperature were all right-a bit chilly, maybe, Jimmy Lin suggested, but they wouldn't need the suits. ("Thank God," Rosaleen muttered gratefully. "I hate trying to get in and out of those things.") Even the lights were working-some of them, anyway. Enough.

Then the arguments started. Pat wanted somebody to stay behind in the Clipper, preferably one of the pilots. "For Christ's sake, why?" Jimmy Lin snarled.

Just in case.

"Just in case, screw that. Nothing's going to happen here, and anyway Dannerman can stay on board if you want him to. I'm going in."

And he did, Pat right behind him; even encumbered with one of the instrument boxes Rosaleen Artzybachova squirmed ahead of Delasquez, who was angrily stuck with going through the shutdown checklist. In spite of Lin's suggestion, Dannerman was not far behind. As he squeezed through the docking port, tugging his own massive toolbox, he heard Rosaleen's shocked voice-"Do your mother! Everything's all different."