Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Pat

What Pat Adcock discovered-what millions of jailed men and women had discovered before her-was that prison reduced life to fundamentals. There were no decisions to make or crises to meet; the high spot of the day was eating.

Their larder was a mixed bag. The fruit juices were good, once you mixed them with water-she could have wished for an ice cube or two, but they were certainly drinkable without. There was even real wine. It wasn't very good wine, but it came in little plastic cups, which could be rinsed out and used for other things. No beer, though, which annoyed Jimmy Lin, and the coffee was a disappointment. Not only was it at the same temperature as everything else they had, but it was the European kind of coffee, heavy on chicory and made from beans burned black. Only Martin and Rosaleen seemed to enjoy drinking it.

Still, things were looking up a little. Not counting the fact that she was tired of seeing herself reflected in the cell's walls no matter where she looked; if anything could make her crazy, she thought, it was those mirrors. Not counting the fact that Jimmy Lin had formed the annoying habit of following her around, brushing against her in a pretty unmistakable way; but at least now she had clothing.

But none of it was good enough.

Time was passing, and it was all wasted time. Pat Adcock had little practice in time-wasting. She was used to a world in which she always had something to do, usually more to do than she had time to do it in: work to get done, plans to make, social obligations to fulfill, amusements to seek. Here she had nothing. She even missed the annoying everyday flow of sales messages on her comscreen and the solicitations of street panhandlers. Pictures from her childhood flashed through her mind, the images of pacing polar bears and sullenly squatting gorillas from Sunday zoo trips with Uncle Cubby or her parents. The parallels hurt. "We're zoo animals. We have nothing to do" she complained. "It doesn't make sense."

Dannerman shook his head. "No, you're wrong there. Everything makes sense to somebody."

"Even this?"

"Even anything. People used to talk about senseless crimes- like murdering some eighty-year-old guy on welfare to steal his shoes; they think it makes no sense to kill somebody for so little. But to the guy who did it, it made perfect sense. He wanted the shoes."

"Thank you for the lecture, Dr. Dannerman," Jimmy Lin said.

Dannerman said stubbornly, "I'm only saying that all this must make some kind of sense to Dopey and the others, from their point of view. All we have to do is figure out what their point of view is."

"It sounds like you're taking their side, Dannerman," Martin rumbled.

"Oh, hell, why are people always telling me that I'm taking the bad guys' side?"

"What people?" Martin asked, puzzled.

"Different people." He didn't elaborate. There was something there he didn't want to discuss, Pat was sure, though she couldn't imagine what. "Anyway," he said, "I'm just trying to understand what's happening. Probably they want to know more about us before they reveal themselves."

Pat asked, "How much do they have to know? Isn't that why Dopey was hanging out in Starlab all that time, eavesdropping on Earth?"

Martin said heavily, "Maybe that is not enough for them. I am remembering what the old sailing-ship explorers used to do when they encountered new indigenes. They would kidnap a few and take them aboard their ships to look them over. Your Christopher Columbus-" he began, and then stopped, scowling. They all heard it: a distant sound, almost like a shriek, faint and far away. "What the hell was that?" he demanded.

No one answered until Rosaleen shrugged. "If this is a zoo," she said, "we may not be the only animals on exhibit."

"It sounded human to me," Jimmy said uneasily. Dannerman said nothing, but he was frowning. Pat thought she knew why. The scream had sounded human to her, too. In fact, it had sounded a lot like the voice of Dan Dannerman.

The scream didn't come again. They listened; they tried to be as quiet as possible so that they might hear, but there wasn't much to hear. Dannerman reported that he had heard, might have heard, a faint hum that could have been distant machinery. Pat herself thought she caught a whisper of speech-of a voice of some kind, anyway. When she reported it Dannerman shook his head. "I didn't hear anything like that. Did it sound human?"

"How can I tell? I thought it sounded as though it were asking for something."

To her displeasure, Jimmy Lin took that to be a cue. He moved closer to her. "Perhaps it was asking for something which I too would like," he said, one hand casually resting on her shoulder.

The man was making her uncomfortable. She shrugged herself free. "Knock it off, Lin."

"But why?" he asked reasonably. "I am aware that such things are better conducted in privacy. I would prefer it so myself, but what can we do? Modesty is pointless here."

"The point," she said, "is that I don't want to make love with you, Jimmy. If you're looking for a comfort woman, look somewhere else."

"Hey!" Rosaleen said good-naturedly. "Where do you want him to look, exactly? I've been out of the comfort business for forty years."

"But what else is there to do?" Jimmy Lin asked in a tone of reasonableness. "It is a perfectly natural thing, and also good for you. My honored ancestor said it all in his book. He said it was unhealthful to go for very long without sex, and all my life I have done my best to follow his advice."

Rosaleen said pleasantly, "If you need to masturbate no one will prevent you. If not, perhaps you won't mind if we change the subject."

He glowered at her. "To what?"

She hesitated before she spoke. "I've been thinking about those messages from space. You see, I think most of us took those pictures of aliens as some kind of a joke, perhaps some satellite controller with time hanging heavy on his hands. Very well, that was a mistake. Now we know better about that, but what about the rest of the message?"

"What rest?"

"The original pictures. The scarecrow creature crushing the universe at the time of the Big Crunch. What do you suppose that means?"

Dannerman said, "I asked one of the astronomers the same thing. He thought it meant that we were being warned against something that was supposed to happen after the universe has finished expanding, and fallen back and contracted again."

At least, Pat thought, they were on a subject she knew something about. But she frowned. "That kind of speculation doesn't make any sense. Nothing could happen after the Big Crunch. It's like wondering what the universe was like before the Big Bang. The answer is there wasn't any. That sort of thing isn't science, it's metaphysics."

Rosaleen shook her head. "You know more about that than I do, Pat, but even I know that some quite good scientists have speculated about the subject."

"Arm-waving. Smoke and mirrors," Pat said dismissively.

"But perhaps for the aliens it isn't."

Pat shrugged. It was true that cosmologists had built any number of pretty speculations about the origins and end of the universe-she had spent many boring hours learning about them in graduate school-but they had always seemed idle daydreaming to her.

Martin shared that opinion. He said impatiently, "There is no point in thinking about such things. The trouble is simply this: We have been kidnapped. That is not a speculation, it is a fact. Governments have considered such things an act of war."

Jimmy said, "Fine. Now, if you'll just let them know about it at the Pentagon, I'm sure they'll have a rescue fleet here right away."

Martin glared at him. "You are very good at sarcasm, Lin. Less good at taking action. We should do something."

Rosaleen attempted to defuse the antagonism. "Very well," she said, "since no one else seems interested in trying to interpret the meaning of those messages, I agree that Martin is right. We should do something else. What is available to us? When we were discussing what people in prison on Earth do I am afraid I distracted us with my reminiscences of life in the old Soviet Union. So let us try again. Is there some action that is possible for us to take?"

Jimmy said sourly, glancing at Dannerman, "Why don't you ask the expert?"

Pat frowned. "What do you mean, expert?" But Dannerman seemed unsurprised. He was already answering the Chinanaut.

"First thing," he said, "if I had any specific ideas, I don't think I'd say them out loud. Remember Dopey hears everything that goes on. But if you want general principles I don't see any harm in discussing them-just in the abstract, of course."

"Of course," Rosaleen said impatiently. "Well?"

"What prisoners do depends on what they want to accomplish. If their primary goal is to escape, they do things like digging tunnels, they hide themselves in bags of waste, they get weapons, or make them, and force a guard to take them outside. Or they take hostages for the same purpose. Or they go on a hunger strike-of course that only works if the people on the outside care whether they live or die."

Martin demanded, "Which would you recommend?"

"What I would recommend," Dannerman said, "is that we don't talk about this any more."

"Fine," said Jimmy Lin caustically. "Your advice is that we do nothing, then. Is that why you spooks couldn't even catch the guys who kidnapped the press secretary?"

Dannerman opened his mouth angrily, then glanced at Pat and closed it again. He didn't answer. He simply turned his back and walked over to survey the food store.

There was an undertone here that Pat couldn't identify. She wasn't enjoying it. "What's going on here, Jimmy?" she demanded.

He jerked a thumb at Dannerman. "Ask him."

"Hell," she said, and marched over to Dannerman's side. "Dan, what's Jimmy talking about."

He stood up and popped a cup of wine before he answered. "How do I know?"

"I think you do know. Why does he call you a spook?"

Dannerman shrugged. "Maybe because I was in protsy in college-you know, the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps."

"Not good enough, Dan. That was a long time ago. What about now?"

He took a long pull of the beer before he answered. Then he sighed. "All right, Pat. I don't suppose it matters anymore, and it's the truth. I work for the National Bureau of Investigation."

It was no more than she had guessed, but she felt adrenaline shock flood through her body. "You're a spy!"

"I'm an agent of the Bureau, yes. I was ordered to find out what was going on with you and Starlab-"

"Dan!"

He looked remorseful-no, not remorseful; stubborn and sullen. "Well, Jesus, Pat, what did you expect? This was major stuff. As soon as the rumors got out, the Bureau had to find out what you were doing."

"Bastard!" she said, scandalized. "I wouldn't have believed it of you! You come to me with a hard-luck story about needing a job, and all the time you're a goddam spy. Honestly, Dan, what did I ever do to you? Are you still pissed off because you didn't get your share of Uncle Cubby's money?"

"It wasn't a personal matter. I had orders."

"Orders to do what? To steal whatever there was on Starlab for the damn Feds?"

He said uncomfortably, "Well, I suppose that's one way you could put it."

"Is there some other way? So tell me, just how far were you prepared to go for the good old Bureau, Dan? Liquidating me if necessary, for instance?"

"Oh, hell, no, Pat. What kind of a person do you think I am? I've only, uh, shot two people in my life, and I couldn't help that; both of them were doing their best to kill me at the time. Nobody ordered you liquidated."

"And if they had?"

"They wouldn't," he said stubbornly, and that was all he would say.

When Pat curled up on the floor with her face to the wall and her eyes shut tight, she didn't go to sleep. She wasn't planning to. She just wanted to be alone for a bit, as alone as you could get in this place. The National Bureau of Investigation! Everybody knew what that was all about- cloak-and-dagger stuff, with all too much emphasis on the dagger. Now her own cousin turned out to be one of them.

It wasn't just Dan Dannerman, she told herself, feeling abused. Every last one of her comrades had in some way betrayed her trust-Delasquez and Jimmy Lin trying to hijack the goodies on Starlab for another country, even Rosaleen Artzybachova hitting her up for a bigger share of the pie. If Pat Adcock had been a weeping woman she would have allowed herself a few tears of self-pity. As she wasn't, she simply went to sleep.

When raised voices woke her, nothing had improved. She lay with her back to the room, unwilling to turn around and join the others, while Martin and Jimmy Lin were arguing about the food. "But it is nothing but party leftovers," Jimmy Lin was complaining. "It's the stuff nobody wants to eat. What kind of people would have ordered all this stuff?"

Then there was Rosaleen's voice, patiently trying to keep the peace: "There were astronomers from a dozen different countries on Starlab in the early days. I imagine each chose the sort of menu they preferred."

"And ate all the good stuff, and left the remainders for us."

Then Martin's voice, deeper but equally irritated: "I am tired of breaking my teeth on bricks of filthy, uncooked Russian stew."

Rosaleen offered, "I've told you, if you do what I do and soak it for an hour or so it gets softer. A little."

"And then it is cold grease."

She didn't try to deny it. "Try the fruit compote, at least."

"I've had enough of the fruit compote," Jimmy Lin said. "Who knows how long this stuff has been in storage, anyway?" Pat turned away from the familiar bitch session. She had her own feelings about the dehydrated beef (or was it goat?) Stroganoff. She found herself thinking wistfully of a fried-egg sandwich, perhaps with a couple strips of crisp bacon, on whole-grain toast. Or a fresh salad, lettuce with the dew still on it, perhaps some slices of avocado, maybe even a few curls of green pepper…

There wasn't any help for it. She got up and headed for the food, ignoring her companions. That wasn't hard to do. Rosaleen had begun quietly exercising, off by herself, and Martin and Jimmy had moved away to whisper together over the water tank. Only Dannerman was by the larder, and he looked apologetically at her but didn't speak.

Neither did she. She was not yet ready to talk to the duplic-itous spy, Dan Dannerman. Ignoring him, she took her time studying the available choices, reading labels, peering at the foods that were visible through glass or plastic. None of them looked attractive, but there were many she hadn't yet tried. She settled on a packet of irradiated chili; at least it would not require soaking to be chewable.

Martin had been right; cold, it was fairly nasty. She had turned her back on Dannerman as she ate, but was not surprised to hear his voice. "Are you still mad?"

She didn't answer. "Because," he said, "I'll apologize if you want me to."

She didn't answer that, either, and apparently he gave up. When she finally peeped around he was over with Rosaleen, doing his best to learn some of her exercises. That was another annoyance for Pat. It had been on her mind to do the same thing, because she could feel herself gaining fat on their preposterously unbalanced diet, but how could she do that while he was there?

The worst part was that it seemed all four of them had decided that Pat was in a bad mood and better left alone. As long as they were ignoring her how could she effectively shun them? She went back to the larder, for lack of anything better to do… and was glad when, while she had almost decided to try some more of the damned fruit compote, the patch on the wall suddenly fuzzed and bulged and Dopey came in, oddly without Docs. He was pushing ahead of him a thing that looked like a portable top-loading washing machine. It moved easily on spherical bearings. "This device is to heat your food, as you wish," he said. "If you put things into it they will become hot. This is not the device from your Starlab, however. That object was far too primitive to be of any use here."

They all clustered around while he demonstrated the use of the cooker. Pat hadn't forgotten that she wasn't speaking to any of the others, but put that matter on hold for a while. Operating the cooker looked simple enough. You put things in from the top and left them for a while, and in a minute or two they were hot. When Rosaleen reached to take the container of spaghetti and meatballs out Dopey stopped her. "No, be careful! You will do yourself harm if you put a part of your body into the device. Use these." He plucked a pair of sticks from under one arm and showed them how to lift the packets out without putting their hands in the cooker. Rosaleen eagerly popped the packet open and sniffed the steam that was coming out of it. "I think it's actually too hot to eat!" she said happily.

"It will cool if you wait for a moment," Dopey informed her. "In any case, this instrument will be useful when you have renewable food supplies in the next phase."

Dannerman was suddenly alert. "What next phase? What's going to happen?" Silence. "Well, when will it happen?"

Dopey looked evasive-or simply uncertain; how could you tell with a kitten-faced chicken? "That is unclear. That sequencing is not my decision to make. There are also-" He hesitated. "-some technical problems which have hampered communications."

Pat asked the question for all of them. "What technical problems are you talking about?"

Dopey turned his large kitten eyes on her, then did again the thing with the muff: jammed his hands into it, gazed vacantly into space for a moment, then said, "There are bad people who would harm our project. I may not say more at this time."

"What kind of bad people?" No answer; only that continued stare. Pat bit her lip. The alien was at least answering some questions now, but she was running out of the right questions to ask and Dopey was volunteering little. Nor was she getting much help from her fellow prisoners. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Delasquez and Jimmy Lin, though they seemed to be listening intently, were strolling slowly around behind the alien. It crossed her mind that they were up to something.

Not in time.

By the time she began to guess what that something was, and long before she had even begun to decide what, if anything, to do about it, Dopey was turning to leave. The wall began to cloud, preparatory to letting him through.

He didn't get that far. "Grab him!" Delasquez shouted, hurling his weight against the milky place in the wall. Lin did as ordered-threw himself on the alien, who squawked once in astonishment and then was still.

If Delasquez was trying to escape, he failed. The wall was not deceived. He struck against it and was hurled violently back into the cell, as the wall turned mirror-bright again against him. Delasquez didn't walk away; he was catapulted backward, staggering into the pile of Dopey and Jimmy Lin on the floor. He sat down heavily on top of them and gasped dismally, "Mother of God, that hurt!"

From beneath him Lin, breathless and equally dismal, begged, "Get off me." He struggled to his feet and backed away, Delasquez at his side, the two of them looking apprehensively at the alien.

Dannerman gave them both a hard look, but said nothing as he knelt by Dopey's side. "Is he breathing?" Martin asked.

"I don't know. It didn't feel like it," Jimmy Lin said uneasily.

"Maybe he just had the breath knocked out of him," Martin offered, but Dannerman looked up and shook his head.

"Knocked out of him for good, I'm afraid. I don't know much about his anatomy, but there isn't much doubt about it. He's really dead."

Ever since they had been taken captive there had been no times for Pat Adcock that she could think of as really good, but there had never before been one quite as bad as this. She had a pretty good idea of what was done to zoo animals who murdered their keeper. Was it going to be done to them?

Dannerman was saying, "Well, that was stupid," and even Rosaleen was looking reproachfully at the two, Jimmy Lin shamefaced, Martin belligerent but-crossing himself? Pat couldn't be sure. The general's right hand was fingering the left shoulderboard of his uniform jacket as he answered.

"It was your suggestion, Dannerman," Delasquez said.

"Bullshit! I never said anything about attacking Dopey!"

"You spoke of taking hostages. Well, we decided to try it. The other part, trying to crash out, that was my own idea, I just thought of it at the last minute."

"Obviously it wasn't a real good idea," Dannerman said. "Taking a hostage wasn't much better. That only works if you don't kill the hostage."

"His death was simply an accident. How could we know the thing was so delicate? In any case, it's done. And we have an opportunity." The general reached down to the corpse-but with his left hand, Pat saw in puzzlement; his right hand was still close to his lapel. He was trying to pick the coppery metal-mesh muff from Dopey's slack hands.

"Wait!" Dannerman cried warningly, but too late. As soon as Martin's hands touched the metal he screamed, jolted erect and fell unconscious to the floor.

"Damn fool," Dannerman snarled, leaping to his side. But ancient Rosaleen was there before him, her ear pressed to the general's chest.

"No breath. No pulse," she reported. "Electrical shock, I think. Dan, do you know CPR?" She didn't wait for an answer, simply bent her mouth to the general's for artificial respiration. Dannerman didn't speak, either, as he dropped to his knees and began pounding a fist rhythmically on Martin's chest. Beside Pat Jimmy Lin was muttering to himself, but it was Pat who caught the first flicker of a reflection in the mirror wall. "Watch out!" she cried as a pair of the great, ungainly Docs came lumbering in. But the creatures paid no attention to their prisoners. If there was any expression on their white-bearded faces Pat could not identify it; they were strictly businesslike. They bent down to Dopey's body, disentangled his fingers from the coppery muff and bore it away through the wall without a sound, leaving the corpse abandoned behind.

Rosaleen had paid no attention, continuing to breathe for the general. Pat watched, nervous, unsure of what to do; she knew what CPR was, of course, but she had never seen it done before, had not expected it to be so violent. Beside her Jimmy Lin was glumly watching. "What do you guess they'll do to us now?" he asked the room in general. No one answered.

It was a good question, Pat thought dismally, shifting from one foot to another. The two Docs had shown no punitive intention, but then the Docs never spoke, never seemed to show any independent thought or emotion at all.

Then Dannerman sat back on his heels, regarding the patient. He placed one finger at the base of Martin's neck and held it for a moment. "It's irregular, but it's beating," he informed Rosaleen; and then, as she lifted her head for a moment, Martin gasped and coughed and opened his eyes, staring wildly about. He struggled to sit up, but Dannerman pushed him back. "Stay put," he ordered.

"What- What-" Martin tried.

"You got yourself killed, Martin," Dannerman informed him, "Lie still for a while. I think you'll live, but don't push it." He tested the pulse with a finger again; then, Pat was puzzled to observe, Dannerman's fingers moved to the lapel of Martin's uniform jacket, as though feeling for something. When he stood up he looked almost amused, but all he said was "Keep an eye on the walls for me while I see if Dopey had anything we can use." He walked over to the corpse of the alien and looked down at it. The slack mouth was open, so were the eyes; the peacock tail, half erected, seemed to have lost some of its scales.

"Are you going to search the body?" Pat asked.

He gazed at her for a moment. "Unless you'd rather do it yourself? Don't worry. I've done it before, though of course the others were at least human."

"Be careful," she begged. He nodded and knelt beside Dopey's corpse. The creature had worn only the one garment, and, though Dannerman poked at it-diffidently at first, then with more assurance as there was no punishing electrical shock-it seemed to have no pockets. It did have some sort of decoration, things like glassy buttons sewn on it; Dannerman tugged at them experimentally. The Dopey had also worn a bangle over the base of its tail, and a wristlet of the coppery metal, but Pat caught only a glimpse of them as Dannerman completed his search of the corpse.

He sat up and shrugged. "I guess he carried everything he had in that muff," he said. "At least, I can't find anything."

"Maybe he carried some stuff internally," Jimmy Lin offered.

"Good thinking, Jimmy. Do you want to give him a body-cavity search? Because I don't think I'd like to."

"I wonder why the Docs didn't take his body away?" Rosaleen mused, squatting beside the semiconscious Martin.

Dannerman shrugged. "Maybe they'll come back for it. Maybe we'll wish they would, because I imagine it's going to decay pretty rapidly."

Rosaleen nodded, then checked herself, staring at the body. "Perhaps not," she said. "Look at that!"

Pat peered at the dead alien, and saw what Rosaleen meant. Something was happening to the corpse. The bottom of it, where it touched the floor, was soaked with a dark brown liquid, and Pat noticed a sharp, nasty smell, as of some foul brew cooking on a stove.

Dannerman knelt for a closer look. "The floor's dissolving it away," he announced incredulously.

"Please, Dan, don't get too close to it," Pat pleaded.

"Don't worry," he said dryly. "Although it's kind of interesting. That's a great waste removal system; I bet if I lay down right next to Dopey the floor would leave me alone-but, no, I'm not going to try it." He stood up and looked around. "How's the patient doing?"

Rosaleen was supporting Martin's head while holding a cup of water to his lips. "Seems to be improving. He opened his eyes and looked at me."

Dannerman nodded. "So the question now," he said, "is what we do when, and if, somebody takes a dim view of this. Do we just take our punishment, whatever it is? Or do we try to fight back?"

"What have we got to fight with?" Pat demanded.

He looked at her quizzically. "Whatever we can find," he said.

From her post by the patient Rosaleen called, "I do not think that fighting back would be advisable. Not now, anyway."

"I think you're right," Dannerman agreed. "After all, if they want to hurt us they wouldn't have to get into hand-to-hand combat. They wouldn't even need weapons. The easiest thing would be just to leave us here until we run out of food and starve. Speaking of which," he said, "why don't we see what cooking can do for some of those rations?"

Pat stared at him unbelievingly. "You want to eat now?" she demanded. "With this dead body turning into mush right here?"

"Well," he conceded, "maybe we might as well wait until it's gone. It seems to be going pretty fast right now, anyway."

Indeed it was, Pat saw, as she gazed down on it, holding Dannerman's arm for reassurance; more than half of Dopey had already turned liquid and been sucked away. The smell was still there, but no worse than before; and actually, Pat admitted to herself, Dannerman was right. The process was kind of interesting to watch, not to mention that it implied a kind of technology she had never before imagined. "Just one more damn thing," she murmured to Dannerman, "that would have been worth a fortune if we could have taken it back to Earth."

Dannerman looked down at her, seeming almost amused; tardily she remembered that she wasn't speaking to him. She looked away. Dopey's body was nearly gone, one of the little arms sticking up and then collapsing into the general mulch. Pat frowned. Something was missing. What had happened to the wristlet? "Dan?" she asked. "Did you notice-"

But he was giving her a scowl and a quick headshake. Puzzled, she opened her mouth to complete her question… just as the wall turned milky again.

They all spun around to face it as another Dopey walked in- this time not alone. Two of the golem-like Docs followed him and stood silently protective behind him as the Dopey glanced incuriously at the almost disappeared remains of his own body, and then said in reproach, "You should not have done that."