Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Patsy

There was a story Patsy remembered about a lion in a zoo. For ten years that lion had paced restlessly back and forth in his cage, snarling at the bars. Then, one day, the keeper was careless. He went away and left the door open. When the keeper was gone, the lion padded over to the door, and sniffed at the air of freedom for a moment… and then turned and lay down in the farthest corner of his cage, his head on his paws, his eyes squeezed shut, until at last the keeper came back and closed the door.

That's you, Dr. Pat-known-as-Patsy Adcock, she told herself. You've been pissing and moaning about wanting to get out of here ever since you arrived. Now you've got your big chance. There's nothing to stop you walking out of here whenever you like. Well?

But she hesitated.

So did everyone else, all of them staring apprehensively at the vista around them, strange machines and distant gleams of light and, from somewhere, a pall of smoke drifting over them. No one moved… until Jimmy Lin, glancing wildly back at the rest of them, took a deep breath, then carefully stepped over the little puddle of his own recent urine and walked through the space where the wall had been. Not far. Just a step or two, actually, before he stopped to stare around. But he was definitely outside.

That did it for Patsy Adcock. If Jimmy Lin could do it she certainly could. She turned and marched resolutely out into the space she had never seen before. Behind her Pat called worriedly, "Hey, watch it, hon! What're you going to do if the power comes back on and you're stuck out there?"

That stopped Patsy, frozen on one foot, until she remembered. "No, it isn't like that," she called back. What she remembered was how it had been when Dopey brought them to the cell. It was a one-way wall. They hadn't even seen the thing as they approached from outside, had simply walked into the space where the others were clustered, and had then been astonished to see the wall of mirrors bright and impenetrable behind them.

Everyone was staring after her. She saw Rosaleen, her face still gray, crossing herself, and Martin standing with his mouth open, and Dannerman experimentally poking his own arm through the space where the wall had been. And she took a deep breath, looking at the bizarre structures around her, and said to herself, Okay, sweetie, now you've got your freedom. Use it!

Or (the echo sounded in her mind) lose it.

Things were happening in that outside world, now revealed to them. Patsy sniffed acrid smoke, heard distant, and sometimes not so very distant at all, crashes and pops from whatever it was that was going on just out of sight. Jimmy Lin, greatly daring, had ventured, a step at a time, five or six meters down the broadest of the passages, Patrice close behind him and Martin and Rosaleen peering after them. Dannerman and Pat were on their knees at the margin of their cell, poking at something on the floor. When Patsy drew close she saw that where the base of the mirror wall had been there was now only a shiny line of alternating coppery and colorless segments, each less than a centimeter long. "It wasn't real," Pat marveled, looking up at Patsy. "The wall, I mean. It wasn't solid. It was just some kind of projection, and when the power went off it just disappeared."

"And so did the floor," Dannerman added. "Not just our floor. Look outside here." The floor on the other side of the boundary was the same metal mesh as inside, or most of it was. But a few meters away there was a section that looked as though it had been repaired with ordinary cement-not recently, either; the patch was stained and potholed. Actually, everything looked pretty helter-skelter to Patsy. Some of the machines looked naked, as though they had been meant to have some sort of case or cover. (The mirror walls they'd seen on the way in? Maybe so, Patsy thought, because she could see the same buried hexagonal lines as surrounded their cell.) Some looked very old, corroded with time.

"It's a mess," Jimmy Lin reported, returning. "There's a machine out there that looks as though it ran itself to destruction- bearings scorched, housing popped off-like a car engine that ran out of oil."

"I don't think they used oil," Patrice said.

Rosaleen said thoughtfully, "I wouldn't be surprised if they used some kind of energy to reduce friction-like maglev, you know? Or something like the balls the cooker moved on, and when the power went off-"

"The cooker!" Jimmy Lin interrupted, looking stricken. And when they put it to the test it was what they had feared. The packet of chili Pat dropped in sat there at the bottom of the well, unwarmed.

"Oh, hell," Jimmy said, contemplating another period of uncooked food. And of worse; at a sudden thought he picked up the helmet and tried it on, then morosely set it down again. "No power there, either," he said. "What do we do now?"

Dannerman had a prompt answer. "I think," he said, "that somebody ought to go out and see what's going on."

"Are you volunteering?" Pat asked. "Because if you are, I'll go along."

Dannerman looked pleased, then frowned. "Better not," he said reluctantly. "I won't go far, and it's easier if I do it alone."

"Don't you want to eat something first?" Rosaleen asked.

"Put some in to soak," he ordered. "I'll eat it when I get back." And turned and left without looking at Pat again.

When Dannerman was out of sight Pat stared after him for a moment, then sulkily took over the job of opening packets and filling them with cold water to soften. Patsy looked at her with compassion. She was pretty sure that exploration hadn't been the only thing on Pat's mind, or on Dannerman's, either; if ever she had seen two people with a strong compulsion to get off by themselves it was they. But Dannerman, Patsy thought, had been right; he had the skills of his Bureau training and Dr. Pat Adcock did not. Score one for responsibility in the face of temptation.

She joined Pat at the task of preparing food. It wasn't a job she really enjoyed, but it had one great advantage: it was a task she was confident she could handle. And confidence in dealing with everything else in this challenging new environment was absent from her frame of mind. Were the others as stunned- well, say the word: as frightened-as she was? She couldn't tell. They didn't seem to show it if they were… but on the other hand, she told herself, probably she wasn't showing that total interior terror either.

By the time her job was done the others were clustered at the base of the things that looked like file cabinets (though if they had drawers, nothing any of the captives could do had managed to open one). As she joined them she heard Rosaleen say, as she stood with one hand on Martin's shoulder, "Listen. Am I wrong or have the explosions mostly stopped?"

"There aren't very many now, anyway," Martin agreed, looking up at the top of the cabinets. "I wish I could get up there. I might be able to see something useful."

"You can't," Pat said positively. "You're too big to lift. But I'm not. If you guys give me a hand I think I can make it to the top."

It turned out that, indeed, she could-not easily, and not without a couple of near misses that threatened to drop her to the floor. But she did it. Stepped from Jimmy Lin's crouching back to Martin's hunkered-down shoulders. Braced herself with her palms against the cabinets as the general slowly rose. Got her arms across the top of the cabinets and, with both men pushing from beneath, scrambled on.

Patsy heard a faint sound of crunching as Pat got to her feet, examining the legs of her slacks. "It's a mess up here," she reported, panting. "There's scratchy stuff all over, like spun glass, but not that hard; there are big balls of it on some of the tops, but a lot is just broken into powder."

"I think that might be what I saw before," Rosaleen called. "Is it orange? And luminous?"

"Orange, yes. Luminous, no." Pat raised herself on tiptoe, shading her eyes to gaze in the direction the others had gone. "No sign of Dan. I can see where the smoke's coming from, though; it's a fire-I can see the flames-but not very big, and a long way off. And around in the other direction"-as she turned-"there's-hey! There's sunlight! Real sunlight, I'd bet a million dollars on it, and-oh, my God-trees!"

"Trees?"

Patsy couldn't say which of them had incredulously repeated the word-maybe it was all of them-but Pat was positive. "You damn bet they're trees, and not too far away, either. Closer than the fire." She appeared at the edge of the cabinet, peering down. "Do you think some of us should go take a look?"

"No," said Rosaleen firmly. "Not now. Wait till Dan comes back." Because, she didn't say, Dan was the only one of them who seemed to have an actual plan-or, Patsy thought, if not a real flan, at least the determination to keep trying to find things that would be useful to them.

And then she thought what it would be like if Dan didn't get back, and shuddered.