Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

BEFORE

WHEN THE FIRST MESSAGE FROM SPACE ARRIVED ON EARTH, five people who were on their way to the eschaton were busy at their own affairs. For one, Dr. Pat Adcock was having a really bad day with her accountant in New York. For another, Commander (or, actually, by then already ex-Commander) Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin was on the lanai of his mother's estate on Maui, glumly running up his mother's telephone bill with fruitless begging calls to every influential person he knew. Major General Martin Delasquez had just been given his second star by the high governor of the sovereign state of Florida. Doctorat-nauk (emeritus) Rosaleen Artzybachova was discontentedly trying to make the time pass with chess-by-fax games against a variety of opponents from her boring retirement dacha outside of Kiev. And Dan Dannerman was holed up in a seedy pension in Linz, Province of Austria. He was hiding from the Bundes Kriminalamt with a woman named Use, who was by profession an enforcer for the terrorist Free Bavaria Bund, more commonly referred to as the Mad King Ludwigs. (Dannerman himself was a mere courier in the same group.) Most of these five people had not even met each other yet. Pat Adcock, being an astronomer by profession, might conceivably have had some rough idea of how the message would affect all their lives-though even she couldn't have known just how, or how very much. None of the others could have had a clue.

All the same, all five of them were, in varying degrees, startled, thrilled or frightened by the message, because nearly everybody in the world was. What would you expect?

It was a major historical event. It was definitely the very first time that the patient astronomers who tended the SETI telescopes, or for that matter anybody else, had received an authentic, guaranteed alien message from an extraterrestrial source.

Of course, that left a lot of large questions. Not even the few dogged hangers-on in the nearly extinct SETI program had been able to interpret what the message said, either, except for a few fragments. The dits and dahs of the radio signal were not Morse code. They were certainly not in English, either-were not, in fact, in any recognizable language of any variety; unless pictures are considered to be a language of sorts. When the signals had been painstakingly massaged by some of the world's biggest and fastest computers, which they naturally were very quickly, it turned out that at least one chunk of the message wasn't in words at all. It was in pictures. When the bits were properly arranged, what they displayed was an animated diagram.

In their hideout on the Bonnerstrasse, Dannerman and his girl watched it over and over on their wall screen, Dannerman with curiosity, Use with only cursory attention. She was one of the very few who didn't give a hoot in hell what the stars had to say. Even her cursory interest didn't last, since whatever this bit of drek from space was meant to convey, she declared, it certainly had nothing whatever to do with the unswerving determination of the Mad King Ludwigs to free Bavaria from the cruel Prussian grip-to which liberation at any cost, she reminded him, they had both agreed to dedicate their lives.

As a matter of fact, the diagram really wasn't much to look at. That didn't keep the channels from repeating it endlessly, usually with some voice-over commentary provided by somebody who possessed several scientific degrees and a passion for seeing himself on TV. The commentaries varied, but the diagram was always the same. First the screen was dark, except for one tiny brilliant spot in the middle of it. Then an explosion sent a myriad smaller, less bright spots flying in all directions. The expansion slowed, followed by a general contraction as all the specks slowly, then more rapidly, fell back to the center of the screen. Then the central bright spot reappeared… and then the commentators took over.

"Unquestionably" there is much more to the message," one said-this one an elderly Herr Doktor from the astronomy department of the University of Vienna, "but we cannot decipher the remainder as yet. That is a great pity, since as you see the diagram by itself is quite uninformative in the absence of the rest of the message. This segment, by itself, is no more than perhaps five per cent of the total transmission, merely the first few seconds. We have not been able to decode the rest. Still, I believe I can interpret what that fragment is intended to show. It is nothing less than a description of the history of our universe, compressing to a few seconds a process which in fact will require many tens of billions of years. The model begins by showing the tiny and-I must confess, even to those of us who have given our lives to the subject-the quite incomprehensible quantal-realm object that preceded the birth of the universe. Then the object explodes, in what is called the Big Bang, and the universe as we know it begins. It expands-as we actually do see the universe doing now, when we measure the red-shifts with our telescopes. Finally it contracts again in what the Americans call the 'Big Crunch.'"

"Big Crunch! What nonsense. Come to bed now," Use said crossly. "You have seen all that a hundred times at least, Walter."

"You don't have to call me by my party name here," Dannerman said absently, watching the screen. The Herr Doktor had begun talking about Stephen Hawking's theory of repetitive universes, just as he had the last three times Dannerman had watched that particular interview.

"Do not tell me what to do. You are a dilettante," she said severely, "or you would not say a thing like that. It is basic doctrine, which you have not adequately studied: There is no security ever unless there is security always."

"I suppose so," he said, his attention still on the screen. He switched channels until he found the diagram on another newscast.

"You are impossible," she told him. "At least turn down that totally useless sound. I am going to sleep."

"Fine," he said, but he did as she asked. He didn't look away from the wall screen, however, in spite of the fact that he was beginning to be as tired of the damn thing as she. What Dannerman wanted was something different. He wanted her to go to sleep without him; and when at last her gentle, ladylike snores assured him that that had happened he moved silently to the door, collecting his down jacket on the way, and slipped out.

He wasn't gone long, but when he came back Use was sitting on the edge of the bed, arms crossed, wide awake, greeting him with a glare. She was quite a pretty woman most of the time, but, in this mood, not. "Where were you?" she demanded.

He said apologetically, "I just wanted some fresh air."

"Fresh air? In Linz?"

"Well, a change of scene, anyway. And, all right, I stopped in the bierstube for a drink. What do you want from me, Use-I mean, Brunnhilde? I get tired of being jailed twenty-four hours a day in this dump."

"Dump! Your words show your class origins, Walter. In any case, what I want from you is proper dedication to our cause. Also, if you were seen you would become far more tired, because in five minutes they would have you in a real jail."

"Hell, uh, Brunnhilde. The Bay-Kahs aren't looking for us in Austria, are they? Anyway, that was part of the reason I went out. I wanted to see if anybody was watching the pension. Nobody is."

"And how would you know if they were, dilettante? Security is my task, not yours, Walter. Did you telephone anyone?"

"Why would I go outside to telephone?" he asked reasonably. It wasn't a lie; Dan Dannerman preferred not to lie when a simple deception would do.

"So." She studied him for a moment; then, "All the same," she said, softening slightly, "you are not entirely wrong. I too would like to leave this place. It is in Bavaria that we are needed, not here."

"We'll be there soon," he said, trying to make her feel better. The funny part was that he did want her to feel better. All right, the woman was a criminal terrorist, a known killer with blood on her hands, but he had to admit to himself that he was-almost-fond of her anyway. He had noticed that about himself before. He often came to like the people he put in prison, though that didn't keep him from putting them there anyway.

He reached for the control for the wall screen, and Use moaned. "Oh, my God, you are not going to turn that on again? It is not of any importance to us."

"It's just interesting," he said apologetically.

"Interesting! We have no room in our lives for what is only 'interesting'! Walter, Walter. Sometimes I think you are not a true revolutionary at all."

Of course, she did not know then just how right she was about that, and by the time she found out much had happened. For one thing, the second message from space had arrived. That was the one that showed the furry, Hallowe'en-grinning scarecrow creature with the twelve sharp talons on each fist crushing the Big Crunch in his paw, and, one after another, the seven other aliens, picture-in-picture like little cameos surrounding a central figure, that went with it.

No one knew quite what to make of it, though there were plenty of speculations. In their nightclub routines the world's standup comics had a wonderful time with this brand-new material. It was one of them who christened the seven peripheral aliens the "Seven Dwarfs," and another who claimed that the whole message was either an alien political broadcast or part of some ET children's horror animation film, inadvertently transmitted to all the billions of nonpaying viewers on Earth. The more easily frightened scientists-plus every buck-hustling guru of every bizarre religious cult in the world-thought it was more likely to be some kind of a warning.

They didn't know just how astonishingly right they were, either.

For all of the persons involved, by that time a great deal had changed in their personal lives as well. Dan Dannerman, having finished his assignment with the Mad King Ludwigs, was busily infiltrating a dope ring in New York City. And Use, glumly marching around the exercise yard of the maximum-security prison at Darmstadt, was cursing the day she'd ever met the man.