Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER TWO

Pat

Dr. Pat Adcock's morning was pure hell-crises in the money problem and the Starlab problem, not to mention all the usual Hurry of regular observatory problems-but she took the long way from the bursar's office to Rosaleen Artzybachova's anyhow. I 'hat way passed by the reception room, and that let her get a quick look at her waiting cousin Dan.

She let him wait. She was impatient to hear what Rosaleen had to tell her about Starlab's instrumentation. Then the bursar had had no good news for her, and she needed to do a little thinking about that. She needed, too, to think about whether she wanted to go out of her way, at this particularly hectic time, to find some kind of spot on the staff for her job-seeking cousin. It was not a good time to be adding to the payroll. On the other hand-

On the other hand, family was family, and Pat wasn't displeased to have one of her few remaining relatives ask for a favor. Especially when the relative was Dan Dannerman. So she rushed through her meeting with Rosaleen Artzybachova, door closed and electronics off; the woman might be old but she was still sharp, and she was doing a good job of tracing the history of all the additions and retrofits Starlab had suffered in its observing career. "And there's nothing that would account for the radiation?" Pat demanded. "You're sure?"

The old lady looked up at her thoughtfully. "Are you getting enough exercise?" she asked. "You look like you could use some fresh air. Yes, I'm sure."

"Thanks," Pat said, not answering her question. But when she got back to her own office the first thing she did, even before she closed the door, was to study herself in the wall mirror. It wasn't really exercise she needed, she told herself. It was rest. A good night's sleep, for a start, and no worries. But what were the chances of that?

While Pat's office door was open the walls were displaying a selection of the major current projects of the observatory: the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, with its new gamma-ray bursters; the huge mass of neutral gas in Capricorn that Warren Krepps was investigating; and, just for the sake of prettiness, some particularly nice shots of nearby objects like Saturn, Phobos and the Moon. Those weren't really high-priority projects. The Dannerman Observatory didn't do much planetary astronomy, but the pictures were the kind of thing that impressed possible donors when, after leading them through the grand tour of the observatory, Pat took them into her office for the glass of wine and the kill.

When Pat closed her privacy door the display changed. Then what the walls showed was Starlab, and, on either side of it, like a portrait gallery, the images of the aliens from the space message. Pat didn't look at the freaks as she settled herself at her desk. She didn't need to; but she wanted them there, to remind her.

Time for Cousin Dan? She decided not; it wouldn't hurt him to sit a while longer, and there was still the business of the observatory to run. It took more than science to keep an enterprise like the Dannerman Observatory going.

After her name Patrice Dannerman Bly Metcalf Adcock was entitled to put the initials B.S., M.A., Ph.D., D.H.L. and Sc.D. Considering that she was still a young woman, not very much more than thirty (and looking younger still when she got enough sleep), that was quite a lot. To be sure, the last two degrees were honorary, being the kind of thing you got from small and hungry universities when you happened to be the head of an institution that might offer useful fellowships to underemployed faculty members, but she had truly earned all the rest.

The trouble was, they weren't enough. Why hadn't someone told her to slip a couple of economics and business-management classes in among the cosmologies and the histories of science? Her skills at reading a spectrogram were all very well, but what she really needed to understand was a spreadsheet.

And this morning, like most mornings, the problems were mostly money. Kit Papathanassiou was requesting twenty hours of observing time on the big Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Pat knew that Papathanassiou would make good use of the time, but the Kecks were a big-ticket item; she cut it to five hours. Gwen Morisaki wanted to hire another postdoc to help out with the Cepheid census in NGC 3821; but that job only amounted to counting, after all, and why did you need a doctoral degree for that? Cousin Dan? Probably not, Pat thought, and decided to offer Gwen an undergraduate intern from one of the local schools. That wouldn't save much money. You could hardly hire anybody for less than the average postdoc would gladly accept, but a dollar saved, plus its cost-of-living adjustment, was a dollar plus COLA earned. This month's communications bills were higher than ever; Pat reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was time for her to get on everybody's back again about keeping the phone bills down. She didn't look forward to it. Hassling the staff to watch pennies was not what she had earned all those degrees for. Maybe, if things got better-the way she dreamed they might, if the Starlab thing worked out…

But it was all taking so long.

That was a big disappointment. Pat had hoped that once the judge decreed that the feds were obliged to honor the contract Uncle Cubby had made with them-had to provide a Clipper spacecraft to take a repair mission to Starlab and, what's more, had to pay for putting the old spacecraft into working order- why, then, the whole thing should have been automatic. It wasn't. The feds and the Floridians were dragging their feet. Somehow somebody somewhere in their bureaucracies had begun to suspect that she knew something they didn't.

Well, she did. And it was none of their damn business.

She leaned back and studied the pictures on the wall. Not the Starlab itself. She didn't need to look at that again; with Rosaleen Artzybachova's help she had already memorized every centimeter of that. What she was looking at was the freak show from the space messages. There were eight of the aliens, starting with the universe-crushing scarecrow, and every one of them was ugly. One looked like Pat's idea of a golem, huge bipedal body with some arms like elephant limbs and some like limp spaghetti, and the bearded head with its glaring eyes; that was the one the comics called "Doc." Another-the "Grumpy"- looked a little like a sea horse with legs; a third, the "Dopey," had a whiskered kitten's head on a chicken's body; another might have been a huge-eyed lemur if it weren't for its own extra pairs of limbs, and she couldn't recall what nonsensical name it had been given.

Pat closed her eyes and sighed. She wished, as half the world wished, that she knew why the unidentified transmitter of these unpleasing pictures had wanted humans to see them. What were these creatures? Not a zoo; these were not animals; most of them wore clothing, some carried artifacts of one kind or another-some that looked unpleasantly like weapons.

Of course, the fact that they had weapons didn't mean they were killers. Everybody carried weapons. Pat kept one on her person whenever she left her office or her home-not counting whatever additional firepower her bodyguard carried-and she certainly wasn't intending to shoot anybody. Unless, of course, she absolutely had to.

Which raised the question of under what circumstances the freaks might think they absolutely had to; but she didn't want to think about that. Pat Adcock had considered the possibility that some of those alien creatures might be hanging around somewhere in Earth orbit, where the mission to Starlab might encounter them, and decided that the odds were strongly against. There wasn't any reason to reconsider that question now-most likely.

– She opened her eyes and looked at her watch.

Actually, she had kept Cousin Dan waiting long enough. She pushed the button that transformed her desk screen to a mirror, checked her hair and her face-yes, still not bad, in spite of what Rosaleen had said-then sighed, pushed the control that unlocked her door and restored her wall display to the one she was willing to let the world see and called the receptionist. "My cousin still out there, Janice? All right, then send him on in."