Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Dan

So Dannerman had one more puzzle to add to his collection. He was certain he'd never mentioned Hilda Morrisey's last name, and the Bureau did not advertise the names of its personnel. And it was not information that could be picked up from the monitored broadcasts.

But Dopey had known it.

In fact, Dopey seemed to know quite a few of the things they had never spoken aloud. How? There was one easy answer to that: Someone might have been sloppy in concealing some of the notes as they read them or passed them around. But that didn't explain Hilda Morrisey, and Dannerman didn't believe it anyway. What he believed was that Dopey possessed sources of information they didn't know about.

Whatever those sources might be.

He snorted in disgust-muffled quickly, because he didn't want Pat, or any one of the Pats, to come over to see what was bothering him. That had happened twice already, and he had waved them away. He wished he didn't have to. He wanted badly to talk it over with the others, because someone else, Rosaleen maybe-well, any of them-might have a clarifying insight he had missed. But if even the eyes-only note-passing was compromised, they would simply be giving more information to Dopey, or Dopey's masters.

Would that matter? Would that sort of information be useful to them? Dannerman could form no satisfactory answer to that, either, but it was simple basic tradecraft to deny as much information as possible to the enemy, and-

His thoughts were interrupted by a new sound. Something had begun squealing shrilly, somewhere. When Dannerman raised his head he saw Patrice holding the helmet in her hand, looking puzzled. "I think it wants something," she said.

"It wants one of us to put it on, of course," Rosaleen said crossly. "Give it to me."

Evidently she was right. As soon as she had it settled on her head the beeping stopped. By then most of the others had converged around her, clamoring to know what she was hearing. Rosaleen didn't take the helmet off, only held up her hand and said, "Relax. It's basically the same message, but with a few- improvements. Give me a moment."

"Then this time we do it in alphabetical order, remember?" Pat reminded them. "Pat comes before Patrice or Patsy, so I get the first look."

Jimmy Lin emitted a long, exasperated sigh, Martin muttered something that sounded obscene. Dannerman only waited; he was as impatient as anyone, but he accepted the fact that it would go faster if they didn't argue. When all four women had had a look-each looking puzzled, even faintly disappointed, when they were finished-his turn came. As soon as the helmet was on his head and the eyepieces in place the figure of the French astronaut popped into being and began to speak. "Messieurs et mesdames, "it began, "je m 'appelle Colonel Hugues duValier, peut-etre vous me connaissez, et je suis-"And then the French language was drowned out by another voice, overriding the colonel with unaccented American English:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Colonel Hugues duValier. Maybe you know me; I am an astronaut at present in orbit on the astronomical satellite known as Starlab. I have a message of the greatest importance for everyone on Earth-"

It was the same message as before, but reworked to remove their objections. The colonel wasn't risking any distractions to his audience by speaking in many tongues; there was a simple voice-over, the same thing viewers heard on any newscast anywhere in the world. The phrase "Beloved Leaders" was still there, but modified to: "they are called 'Beloved Leaders,' but we can know them simply as the forces which have so far-and very successfully!-born the brunt of the attack." When Delasquez and Jimmy Lin had had their turns Dannerman asked about languages, just to clear up one final point. The answers were the same as before, Ukrainian for Rosaleen, American English for Dannerman and the Pats, Spanish for Delasquez and Chinese for Jimmy. "But this time," Rosaleen said, "the Ukrainian was all Ukrainian. They corrected some of the Russian words."

Dannerman nodded thoughtfully, but said only, "Fast work. Dopey must have real good production facilities."

When he stopped there, Pat gave him a perplexed, maybe even an unfriendly, look. "Is that all you have to say about it?"

He shrugged; Jimmy Lin answered for him. "What's to say? We're just Dopey's damn test audience, aren't we? And we did our job for him. He listened to everything we criticized, and he changed the message around to suit. Now-" He turned and faced the wall, cupping his hands around his mouth. "-are you listening, Dopey? Okay, then listen to this. You got it right this time. It's fine the way it is, so don't bother us with any more revisions; just keep the food coming." He turned to Dannerman, grinning. "Does that about cover it? Because if it doesn't we could-"

He didn't get a chance to finish the sentence, because he was interrupted. Abruptly the ground began to tremble. Everyone who was standing suddenly began to reel; Jimmy grabbed Martin Delasquez's shoulder to steady himself, nearly bringing them both down. "Oh, hell," Jimmy grunted, his voice as shaky as the floor. "They're doing it again."

The odd thing, Dannerman thought, was that this time he hadn't heard any explosion, just the sudden uneasy twist and slide in the floor beneath him. But the tremor was a big one. Some cans of something or other on top of their stacks of supplies were jarred loose and clattered to the ground. Rosaleen sat down abruptly. There were yips of surprise from at least two of the Pats. Then it was over.

No. Not quite over. Just as everyone opened their mouths to tell each other that this one had been an unusually bad one, all right, something else happened. The mirror walls flickered and changed color. Jagged streaks of bright red danced around them like slow lightning flashes; that permanent diffuse pale glow from overhead darkened and their only light came from the radiant walls as they turned lurid orange in one spot, blotchy bright red in another. For a moment they seemed to go almost transparent, and through the nearest one Dannerman saw, or thought he saw, a shadowy ziggurat of bright metal. A Doc was standing there transfixed, all of its arms raised toward the sky in what looked like abject terror.

Then the colors faded. The faint visions from outside clouded and disappeared. The steady overhead glow returned, the walls became featureless mirrors again and everything was as it had been before. Everything but the prisoners, at least; but they were all shaken and bewildered. "What in the name of God was that?" Martin Delasquez angrily demanded of the room at large.

Rosaleen was the one who tried to answer. She was getting back to her feet, wincing, with one of the Pats helping her on either side. "I think it must have been some kind of a power failure," she said soberly. "I do not think that is a good sign."

At least they had a new topic of conversation to keep them busy for a while. In fact, they had two of them. One was the debate on what caused the tremor, why the power had seemed to fail and make the walls go all weird-some new questions, some just repetitions of the familiar ones about just what the hell was going on here, anyway. Whatever it was, it clearly was something that mattered to them. It made Dopey jittery and, no doubt, it threatened their own fragile security as well. But that particular discussion had nowhere to go; all anyone had to contribute was unanswerable questions and speculations, none of them very satisfactory.

The other area of discussion, Dannerman thought, was more productive. During that momentary lifting of the veil some of the captives had caught glimpses of what lay beyond the wall. None had had time for a clear view, but most had seen something. What they saw depended mostly on which way they happened to be facing. Patrice and Jimmy Lin were out of it, because they had been looking the wrong way and hadn't seen anything at all, but each of the others had at least a hazy impression to report.

It was Rosaleen Artzybachova who interrupted the hubbub with a suggestion. "Listen, please. Each of us should do his or her best to draw what we saw before we forget. Then we can compare notes."

Patsy bobbed her head at once. "Good idea," she said, reaching for Rosaleen's pen, and then paused long enough to give Dannerman a questioning look. "Is it all right for us to do it this way? Or should we be trying to keep the drawings covered?" she asked.

Before Dannerman could respond Martin answered for him. "Why do you ask Dannerman for permission?" he asked, giving Dannerman an unfriendly look. "It is obvious that there is no point in hiding such drawings. Who can doubt that Dopey knows what is outside the wall far better than we do, so what information could he gain?"

Patsy was still looking expectantly at Dannerman. He shrugged. "I guess that's true," he said, though his own reasons had little to do with what Dopey already knew, and a lot with whether all their secretive note passing had served any useful purpose.

When they began drawing it turned out that Martin had seen the same metallic tower as Dannerman, though it was hard to recognize the thing in the man's crude, kindergarten-style drawings. Rosaleen, on the other hand, produced a workmanlike engineer's view of what looked as much like a row of file cabinets as anything else Dannerman had ever seen. ("They were tall, though," she said. "At least three meters, and there was something fuzzy that I couldn't make out on top of them.") Pat and Patsy had had the benefit of a year of art in college, and both provided neat sketches-an elongated, two-domed metal object for Pat, looking a little like a steel camel hunkered down to the ground; for Patsy a broad corridor between more rows of the file-cabinet objects, with something that might have been a vehicle a score of meters away. "It wasn't moving," she said, "but I'm pretty sure it was some kind of a car. And there was somebody, well, something, standing outside of it."

Patrice, looking on enviously, commented, "You know, it looks a little like the way Dopey brought us in here."

"I thought so too. And the person, or whatever, that was standing there-it could have been a Doc. Like die one you saw, Dan."

He nodded abstractedly, his attention on the handful of drawings. Patsy was still watching him, her expression quizzical. "Dan?" she said. "Are you all right?"

He looked up. "What? Oh, sure."

"You're not talking much."

That was the simple truth, not to be denied; but he wasn't yet prepared to say why. "I've got something on my mind," he said, truthfully enough; and then, when Patsy suggested maybe he should write it down, he could think of nothing better to say than "Not yet."

All three of the Pats were looking at him, the expressions on their faces less friendly than they had been. They thought he was being hostile, he knew, but could think of nothing useful to do about it. Rosaleen, who had been watching silently, felt the tension. She coughed. "If I can propose something we ought to do?" she suggested. "Each of you, which way were you looking when the wall went transparent? If we compare notes maybe we can make a kind of map of what's around us."

It was a sensible proposal. As they all began trying to recall just which way they had been facing, they included Dannerman in the conversation civilly enough; but that was as far as it went. And when, some time later, Pat began to yawn, she didn't look toward Dannerman. All three of the Pats curled up close together, and Dannerman did not sleep that time with any warm and pleasing head on his shoulder.

By the time he woke up Rosaleen had completed making a fair copy of the map their collective glimpses had produced. Of course it wasn't complete. In the center Rosaleen had drawn the hexagonal cell they were in, with each side numbered counting clockwise from their main point of reference, the area they had set aside as latrine. Dannerman's tall tower was at Side Two. There was nothing at One or Three except Rosaleen's small, neat question mark; Four was the cabinet things she herself had observed, next to them at Five Patsy's broad corridor and at Six Pat's angular steel camel.

He handed the chart back to Rosaleen with gratitude. "Good work," he said.

She nodded, and forbore to ask any questions. She turned away-not hostile; simply accommodating his desire to be silent-and limped back to show it again to the others. Dan-nerman watched her go with a frown. How long had Rosaleen been limping? And how long would it be before this very old lady began to show other signs of distress? If a chance ever came for them to escape, would she be able to take it?

And if she couldn't, would they be able to leave her here?

They were not pleasant thoughts. It was a relief to be distracted from them when the helmet began its plaintive beeping cry once more.

By the time it was Dannerman's turn all four of the women had already heard the message, and in each case their expressions ranged from shock to incredulity. Pat, who went first, ordered everyone who followed to hold all comments until they'd all seen it; they grumbled, but they obeyed.

Then Rosaleen handed it to Dannerman, her face bleak, and when he put it on the colonel appeared at once.

"Mesdames et messieurs, " Colonel duValier began, and once again the voice-over took up the message in unaccented American English:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important message you will ever hear. Some of it will startle you even more than what you know already. Some of it you will find very difficult to believe. I found it so myself; but I was given proof that I could not deny, and our friends from space stand ready to give those same proofs to you.

"What it concerns is Heaven.

"That startles you at once, doesn't it? I'm sure that many of you believe in God and His Heaven, just as I do; and I'm equally sure that, like me, you consider that that sort of thing is a religious matter, not a scientific one. But what I now know is that it is both.

"What our friends from space have discovered in their scientific investigations-which are far more advanced than our own-is that at a time in the far future, a very long time from now, something very strange will happen. At that time every intelligent being who ever existed in the universe will come to life again, and then will live forever. In scientific terms that is called the 'eschaton.'

"There is also another name for it. It is what we ordinary people have been used to calling 'Heaven.' "

He paused, staring seriously at Dannerman. "Yes," he said, "you heard me correctly. We are talking about Heaven. The very Heaven that priests and religious leaders of all kinds have told us about. You see, it's real, and our new allies have discovered definite scientific proof of this fact.

"I cannot explain all this to you now. I am not qualified, and there is no time. For our eternal life in Heaven is threatened, and the people who are threatening it are the ones I told you about earlier, the Horch. I warned that they intended to conquer the Earth. I did not say that their reason for doing so- just as it has been their reason for conquering, and often for wiping out, countless other intelligent races in the past-is so that when the eschaton arrives they, and they alone, can be the dominant race, who will be able to rule everyone else… forever."

The colonel smiled sorrowfully, then waved a hand. A screen appeared, showing the second message from space: the expanding and contracting universe, with the scarecrow and the Seven Ugly Dwarfs. "Do you remember this picture?" he asked. "Probably you didn't understand it when you first saw it. Neither did I, but now it has been explained to me. The diagram shows the universe expanding, then contracting again as it reaches its maximum growth and then falls back. It is at that point at the end of the final contraction, when the Big Bang has been replaced by the Big Crunch, that the eschaton will occur.

"You see, the message that picture tried to convey is true- that part of it, at least. But one part of it was a lie. It was sent to you by the Horch, in order to deceive you. It is the Horch, not our friends from space, who want to dominate the eschaton. And they are ruthless enough to subjugate or destroy every living thing that stands in their way.

"That is all I have to say to you at this time, except for one thing. It is now up to you, the people of Earth, to decide whether you want to invite our friends to come to Earth. If you do, they will display for you all the proofs I have mentioned. They will do more than that for you if you wish; they will give you freely of their immense store of knowledge.

"However, first you must, of course, have time to think all this over. Then I will speak to you again, and tell you what they propose. Until then, au revoir."

The figure went to black. Slowly Dannerman removed the helmet. "Wow," he said, and handed the helmet to Delasquez. Obviously everyone who had already seen the new message was burning to have something to say about it, but they managed to keep quiet until Jimmy Lin, at the bottom of the list, had his turn.

Then they all began to talk at once. "What a load of bullshit," Jimmy Lin said scornfully. "Heaven, for Christ's sake!" And Martin complained:

"It is blasphemous to talk of Heaven in that way!" And Patsy began:

"Yes, sure, but-listen, Dan-Dan, ever since I heard it there's something I've been trying to remember. Pat? Patrice? Didn't we have something in college about-"

But by then Dannerman knew what he had to do. "Hold it!" he ordered. "All of you! Don't say another word."

That was more than Martin Delasquez could stand. He said angrily, "Who are you to be giving us orders, Dannerman? I have had enough of being bossed around by you!"

But Rosaleen put her hand placatingly on his arm. He was fuming, but he listened to her. "Please, Martin," she said. "I'm sure Dan has a reason for this. Let's listen to what he has to say."

Martin looked darkly suspicious, Jimmy Lin looked only hostile, but both of them kept quiet. So did the Pats, waiting while Dannerman thought out what to do.

After a moment he nodded, satisfied. "Here's the point," he said. "Evidently Dopey wants information again. He must think we have some, or he wouldn't go to this trouble, and I guess we do. But let's not give it away."

He raised a hand to prevent questions, then turned and faced the mirror wall, just as Jimmy Lin had done earlier. "Dopey," he called. "You hear us. None of us is going to say or write another word about that message until you agree to our terms. If you want us to tell you everything we know or think-I mean tell you out loud; no more secrets; we'll talk it over in your presence, and you can ask as many questions as you like-if that's what you want, then come here and let's talk. But it's going to cost you, because this time we aren't going to do it for nothing!"