Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dan

It wasn't what he had expected. He hadn't expected Starlab to be so warm, but it was. That was passive heating, Rosaleen said, only sunlight. He certainly hadn't expected it to stink. But it did, a rancid, pervasive odor, part chemical, part almost like cinnamon. Was it the decaying body of the abandoned astronomer? Not likely. It wasn't really a spoiled-meat smell, and besides the mortal remains of the lost Manny Lefrik must have long since finished all the decay that was possible to him.

But that was not the greatest shock. Rosaleen Artzybachova had been right. It was all different. The views of the Starlab interior he had studied displayed gray metal cabinets, sunshine-yellow and warm red walls, patterned wall hammocks. Those things were still here, most of them, but to them had been added objects that the schematics had never displayed: green-flecked lumps of transparent matter, like lime Jell-O, with glittering sparks of gold and diamond light flickering within it; a great copper-colored pillar, six-sided, that gave out perceptible warmth; a huge cupboard sort of thing with a door that slowly swung closed when Dannerman tried to peer into it-things for which he had no easy name. There had been structural changes, too. Even some of the walls were gone. The partitioned space of the original had been opened up, and here and there, all about, stuck at crazy angles from the remaining walls, were the machines that were like nothing Dannerman had ever seen before. The more he looked the stranger they got. He saw some that were palely luminous, some velvet black; they were rounded or jagged-edged, some with brightly glowing dots on the surface that flickered and changed as he watched, some faintly crackling or humming. None of them looked normal.

"Jesus," he said. "I guess you were right, Pat. That's not any human stuff."

Pat's face was glowing in triumph. "Effing well right it isn't, Dan-Dan! It's alien. And it's ours!"

"But what do those things do?"

"What's the difference? My God, Dan," she said happily, reaching out to caress the pinkly glowing surface of one of the machines, "once we get this stuff back and figure out how it works-can you imagine what it'll be worth? We'll make a bundle out of this."

"If we can move it," Rosaleen Artzybachova muttered, trying to fasten her instrument box to a handhold on the wall while, like everyone else, she was distractedly staring at everything around her. "Pat, I recommend you do not touch anything until I have had a chance to study it. The rest of you, too."

Pat pulled her hand back; beside her, Jimmy Lin was doing the same thing. "What's the problem?" he asked.

"How do I know what problem there is? Perhaps there is no problem at all, or perhaps if you touch it it will fry you to a crisp. If you want to experiment I suppose it is your right, but I would prefer that you help me."

"Me, too?" Dannerman asked, trying to keep his own instrument box from bumping into anything; in the micrograv environment it weighed nothing, but its mass made it hard to handle.

"Oh, Dan," Rosaleen sighed, "what help could you be? At least the others have some experience with instrumentation. No. Go and explore."

"I'll go with him," Pat said suddenly.

"You also want to be a tourist? And, General Delasquez, is that what you are indicating, too, with that scowl? Well, why not? If there are too many unskilled helpers here it will be worse than none at all, so go. Look for old Manny's body; perhaps we can give it a decent burial in space while we are here."

"And maybe get rid of some of the stench," Martin Delasquez growled.

The old woman ignored him. "Or perhaps you will meet some interesting stranger, and then you will come back and tell us. If you can."

A few meters down the main transverse Pat stopped and consulted a scrap of paper from her pocket. The general gave her a suspicious look, but brushed past her to go off on his own. "Let him go," Pat muttered without looking up. "Maybe he'll see something we don't. Let's see, we follow this transverse to the second junction-"

Dannerman drew the obvious inference. "You're looking for something specific."

She glanced after Delasquez's disappearing form and lowered her voice. "Right you are, Dan-Dan. I want to see where that blister was attached, from the inside. Come on, I think I know where I'm going."

The way you got around in the effectively gravitationless Starlab was by pulling yourself along by the handholds spaced along the walls, or by hurling yourself like a slow-moving projectile from point to point. Neither Dannerman nor Pat was up to projectile standards, so progress was slow.

They didn't speak. Pat was concentrating on the chart in her hand, Dannerman thinking about the implications of Rosaleen's final remark. If artifacts had been added to Starlab, as they had, someone had to have put them there. And it was at least a reasonable possibility that that someone was still there.

Dannerman kept his eyes peeled as they drifted along the passages. Ears, too, but there wasn't much to hear. Even the chatter between Rosaleen and Jimmy Lin became inaudible after the first few turns. Apart from the cryptic noises that came from the alien machines, the only sounds Dannerman heard came from Pat and himself.

When Starlab's designers planned the satellite they allowed for weeks or months of occupancy by its observers. That meant they had to make arrangements for living quarters. So they did, but they were not lavish. The residents weren't given rooms. What they had-Dannerman perceived as he pulled himself through the square-sided passages of the observatory-was no more than coffinlike cubicles. The things were doorless, though fitted with stiff fabric panels to provide at least the illusion of privacy, and they were small-smaller than any broom closet Dannerman had ever seen, and not much more elaborate.

There was more of Starlab than he had expected. For Pat, too, it seemed-when, twice, she paused to look uncertainly around and when, once, she had to retrace her steps for half a dozen meters. Dannerman assumed she was lost, and the way she muttered to herself made that assumption plausible. "But it ought… ought to be… right here, "she murmured, touching a bare spot on the corridor wall; and then, "Hell! It isl"

Is what? Dannerman asked, but only silently. He didn't have to say it out loud because Pat was already demonstrating the answer. Her fingers traced the lines that made up a hexagonal shape on the wall; the lines were new, bright metal. "They cut a patch out here. Then they entered. Then they welded it up again."

"Who 'they'?" Dannerman asked.

She gave him a look of mild surprise. "The people who brought this new stuff aboard, of course."

"Then where they?"

There was less surprise this time, but more visible worry. "Yes, that's the question all right, isn't it? Probably there wasn't a living 'they' at all, Dan, just some robot probe machinery."

Dannerman made a neutral sound. In his view, the word "robot" did not exclude some mean-tempered clanking thing that could be quite as unpleasant to meet as any of the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs. "One thing, though," he said.

"What?"

"If all the machinery we've seen came on the thing that looks like a blister-probably from the CLO, I guess-how did it all fit?"

Pat opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Obviously it was a hard question. The amount of unfamiliar gadgetry in Starlab could easily have filled a dozen objects the size of the blister. Some of them were far too large to have been squeezed through the space traced on the wall, as well.

"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe-"

But whatever the "maybe" was going to be, Dannerman never heard it. She stopped in midsentence, turning toward a sound that came from one of the corridor openings; and so did Dannerman, his hand on his twenty-shot.

What appeared in the corridor wasn't an alien. It was General Martin Delasquez-who also had his hand on his gun, and a look of alarm on his face.

His expression cleared. "Oh, it's only you," he said. "I thought it might be whatever's been eating the corpse."

"The corpse?" Dannerman repeated.

"The dead astronomer, Manny something? I found his body."

"Well, that's not so surprising; we knew that he died here, so his body had to be somewhere around."

"Sure you did. But did you also know that his head was missing?

Rats," Rosaleen Artzybachova informed them. "A headless corpse? Of course it is rats. They go wherever human beings go. It is not surprising that some managed to get aboard Starlab somewhere along the line, or that they would mutilate a corpse."

"And then disappear," Jimmy Lin suggested sardonically.

"And then die of starvation," she corrected him, "or of plague, or whatever. Or possibly they have not disappeared at all but are still aboard. Rats are excellent at avoiding attention."

"But-" Pat began, unconvinced.

"But," Rosaleen overrode her, "in any case they are not our problem. Our problem is merely to detach some of these artifacts and stow them on the Clipper."

Pat nibbled her lower lip in silence. Martin Delasquez, looking at the single cobalt-colored metal lever that Rosaleen had so far detached, said, "You aren't doing very well at that, are you?"

Rosaleen Artzybachova swung around to confront him. "You have some criticism? Would you like to do this yourself? No? That does not surprise me. It is much easier for someone like you to complain than to try to understand how these things are interconnected, or what will happen if we separate them."

"But someone like me," Delasquez said, "does not claim to be an expert on instrumentation. You do, do you not? Isn't that why you are here?"

"I'm earning my way," Rosaleen said grimly. "And I'm not getting paid for my services twice."

Delasquez looked insulted. "Are you referring to the gems I was given? But those were not for me! They were to make it possible to get clearance on such short notice for this flight."

The quarrel distracted Pat Adcock from her thoughts of corpse-eating creatures. "Oh, hell," she said, "what are you fighting about? There's plenty to go around, just as we agreed."

Jimmy Lin cleared his throat. "I think not," he said politely. "You know what I think, Pat? I think we're going to have to re-figure all that."

"The hell with that!" she said sharply. "We made a deal, and we're sticking to it. Remember, Starlab's my satellite! Well, the observatory's," she qualified, "but as far as you're concerned that's the same thing. Starlab was built and launched with my uncle's money, so it's private property. Mine."

Lin gave her a long, bland look. Then he shrugged-not in the manner of someone who is convinced, only in the manner of someone who has decided not to pursue the question for the moment.

However, Dannerman decided as he watched the squabble, Lin was not going to put it off forever. Then there was General Delasquez, silently listening. He was another who was presumably looking forward to renegotiating their arrangements.

Pat Adcock was taking charge. "Right, then. Rosaleen, what do you think? How long will it take you to get this stuff detached?"

"First I have to figure out what it is, Pat."

"Well, damn it, do it!"

The old lady pursed her lips. "I kind of agree with Jimmy," she said. "Why don't we talk about how we're going to split it up?

"Rosaleen! Not you, too!" Pat bit her lip, then surrendered. "All right. We can settle this after we land. What we have to do now is pick out the likeliest items and shift them to the Clipper. When we land in California I've got a crew-" Rosaleen interrupted her sharply. "California?" Pat said apologetically, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, Rosie. We couldn't go back to the Cape, though, could we? The vultures would be waiting to snatch it all away. Anyway, it's all arranged. I've got a crew and a chopper waiting in California. We'll offload as fast as we can and get the stuff to a safe place, and then-"

"We're not landing in California," General Delasquez said.

"Damn it, Martin! You agreed!"

"I have reconsidered the question. We will return to the Cape."

Dannerman sighed softly, because he knew what was coming. The four of them were regarding each other like stray tomcats, paying no attention at all to him.

Pat gave the general a sour look. "Don't be foolish. The arrangements are all made," she said crossly.

Delasquez shook his head. "No. I have also made arrangements. The State of Florida can make good use of this technology. We have suffered under Yanqui tyranny long enough; with this we can have full independence at last."

With the gun in his hand Dannerman spoke up. "And a little something extra for you personally, Martin?" he inquired politely.

That was when it all got rough. Delasquez fumbled for his own gun, tangled in the incongruous gilt-leather holster. Jimmy Lin was also reaching for something, no doubt a weapon of his own, but he didn't get very far. Rosaleen was perched just behind him, still holding the rod of blue metal; she didn't stop to speak but swung it and caught Lin on the side of the head.

"Oh, no, you must not," said a new voice.

Dannerman barely registered the fact that the voice was unfamiliar; he had Delasquez in the sights of his twenty-shot.

Then there was something like a flash-a tingle-a sudden sense of falling, and the weapon never did get fired.