Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER FOUR

Dan

The process of getting photographed and fingerprinted for the job had made Dannerman late leaving the observatory. It got even later; he got caught in the rush hour and the subways were running even slower than usual because of a bomb scare at the Seventy-second Street station. That meant the trains weren't allowed to stop there until the security police finished checking out whatever suspicious object was worrying them, so Dan Dannerman had to travel an extra stop north and make his way back on foot through the jammed sidewalk vendors along Broadway. The peddlers did their best to slow him down-"Hey, mon, here we have got tomorrow's top collectibles, get them today while the price is right!"-but Dannerman was interested only in food just then. By the time he'd picked up some groceries for his dinner and got home, all the other tenants had finished their meals. He had the condo's kitchen to himself.

He dumped his purchases on the kitchen table and began to cut up the vegetables for his stir-fry. While he was waiting for the rice to steam he tried to get some news on his landlady's old screen. All the stories looked very familiar. The only additions to the ones he'd heard on the subway were that a new serial killer seemed to be at large in the city, two senators were under indictment for embezzlement, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world had announced his plans to enter the priesthood, the President had received a ransom demand for his kidnapped press secretary and the time for the free-fire zone that the Law'n' Order Enforcers had announced for the Wall Street area had just expired, with only seven persons wounded. Nothing very interesting. Nothing about the possible bomb in the subway, even on the local menu; but then the services hardly bothered reporting that sort of thing anymore.

Stirring up the fry didn't take more than five minutes, but Rita Gammidge must have smelled it cooking from her room. "Evening, Danny," she said, appearing at the door as Dannerman was ladling it into his plate. "Um. Do I smell chorro sausages in there?"

Rita Gammidge was his landlady. Tiny, old, white-haired, quick and inquisitive, she owned the duplex condo where Dan rented his room-well, his half a room, if you went by the original layout. The condo was a valuable piece of property, originally eight big rooms and three baths; but Dannerman knew that the condo was also about the only thing Rita had saved out of what must once have been a considerable fortune before she, and a lot of others, were wiped out in the Big Devaluation. Dannerman did what was expected of him. "Join me," he invited. "There's plenty for two."

She hesitated. "If you're sure-?"

"I'm sure." There was. There always was; the rents Rita collected were barely enough to keep her ahead of the taxes and the maintenance charges, and so he made a point of cooking enough for both of them. He knew that the other thing she wanted from him was his day's rent, so they settled that before they began to eat.

"The good news," she said, ringing up her deposit, "is today's inflation adjustment was only two per cent."

He nodded, and remembered to tell her, "There's other good news. I've got a new job."

"Well, wonderful! Calls for a drink-let me supply the beer." She had unlocked the fridge and brought out a bottle from her private stock-one half-liter bottle for the two of them to share-before she thought to ask, "What was wrong with the job in import-export?"

"No future," he said. As was usual with most of the things he told people about himself, the statement was true enough; whatever future there had been with the importers had vanished when the colonel ordered him to drop it and try to hook on with his cousin. "The place I'm working for now is an astronomical observatory."

"Oh, boy! What, do you think there's money in looking for Martians?"

"There aren't any Martians, Rita, and anyway that isn't what we do." He explained to her, from his small and very recently acquired store of astronomical knowledge, that the Dannerman Observatory spent its time analyzing data about distant gas clouds and quasars, trying to puzzle out the origins of the universe. Then he had to explain why the observatory was called "Dannerman."

Rita approved of that. "It's good to have family, these days," she said, chewing wistfully. "You're close, you and your cousin?"

"Not really. She's not a blood relative. She was Uncle Cubby's wife's sister's daughter, and I was his younger brother's son."

"Even so," she said vaguely, and then commented: "You could have put a little more sausage in the fry."

"Nobody's making you eat it."

She didn't take offense. She didn't even seem to notice what he'd said. She went on dreamily, "We used to eat really well while Jonathan was alive-truffles, guinea hen, steaks you could cut with a fork. Oh, and roast beef, and rack of lamb, and three or four different wines at almost every meal. Dan, do you know we used to have as many as twenty-four at dinner some nights? We'd eat in the main dining hall-that's where the Rosenkrantzes and the Blairs live now-and we had the butler and the maids to hand everything around. If anybody wanted seconds, why, they could have as much as they wanted. There was plenty, and we didn't even mind when the servants took the leftovers home. And then, if the weather was nice, we'd go out on the terrace for coffee and brandy afterward."

"I don't have any coffee," Dannerman said, to keep her from getting her hopes up.

"Neither do I," she said, swallowing the last of her beer. "Thanks for dinner. I'll clean up-and, Dan? It's nice about your cousin, but this city's no place for a young man like you. You ought to get out of it while you can."

"And go where?" he asked. She didn't have any answer for that. She didn't even try.

Before Dannerman unlocked the door to his own room he checked the telltales. They were clear. No one had entered while he was out; his stock of collectibles was still intact, and so were the more important items concealed among them. He locked the door behind him and began his evening chores.

After Rita finished partitioning the condo for lodgers, her original eight rooms had become fourteen. Dan Dannerman had a windowless chamber that had once been a kind of dressing room to the condo's master bedroom, now occupied by the Halverson family of four. His part got the huge marble fireplace, but it was the Halversons who got the direct entrance to the bath; when Dan wanted to use it he had to go down the hall.

All in all, Dannerman would gladly have traded with the Halversons. He couldn't use the fireplace, because of pollution regulations, so it was just an annoyance that took up wall space he could have used for his personal stock of inflation hedges.

Those were the goods that people with jobs bought from the pitiful sidewalk vendors, the fixed-income people or the noincome people who were reduced to selling off their possessions to stay alive. It didn't matter what you bought. With daily inflation running at two or three per cent, sometimes more, anything you bought was bound to be worth more than you paid for it if you just held it for a while. It was part of Dannerman's cover to be just like everybody else who had a little spare cash, but not enough to put it into the good inflation hedges like option futures. He spent his surplus on collectibles as fast as he could. In Dannerman's personal store he had glass paperweights, small items of furniture-all he had room for in the tiny chamber-a Barbie doll from the 1988 issue in nearly mint condition, old flatscreen computers, bits of costume jewelry, CDs, optical disks and even magnetic tapes of music of all kinds. Of course, the stock in his room didn't represent all of his real capital, but since he couldn't admit what his real capital was he couldn't draw on it; the Bureau would hand it over to him, fully inflated with whatever the then-current cost-of-living adjustment might be, when he retired. Meanwhile, in times of unemployment Dannerman, too, had had to protect his cover by setting up a booth along Broadway and selling ofif goods.

He checked his watch and noted that it was time to take care of his last bit of business with the Carpezzios. He dialed the number, let it ring once; dialed again for two rings; then dialed again and waited for an answer. "Nobody's here but me," said the voice of their main shooter and watchman, Gene Martin.

"Shit," Dannerman said. He wasn't particularly disappointed, and not at all surprised-he had timed it for when none of the bosses would be in-but that was just the way you started most sentences around Carpezzio amp; Sons Flavors and Fragrances. "So take a message. I can't come in, I have to go to the dentist, but tell Wally he'll have to do the meet tonight himself."

"He'll be pissed," sighed Martin. "You got a toothache?" "No, I just like to go to the dentist. See you later." And he would see him later, Dannerman thought, but not until it was time to testify at their arraignment, and they wouldn't be very sociable then.

That taken care of, he had chores to do. From behind a print-book set of Lee s Lieutenants-not a very good investment, really, but one of these days he intended actually to read the books-he pulled out his rods and cloths, turned on his room screen and switched his pocket phone over to the screen to check the day's messages while he cleaned his guns.

The messages were almost all junk, of course. That was what he expected; his pocket phone was set to record everything that came in as voicemail except for the ones from Hilda. He reminded himself to add calls from the observatory to the priority list, now that he had a job, and set himself to review the day's garbage accumulation. People wanted to cast his horoscope or sell him weapons. A men's-clothing store was inviting him to a private advance sale of the season's newest sportswear and impact-resistant undergarments. A real-estate office had forced-sale condos in Uptown to offer. A couple of news services urged him to subscribe; a finance company offered to lend him money at just one per cent over the COLA; in short, the usual. There were just two real calls. One was from the theater group in Brooklyn, and, although the caller didn't give a name, he recognized the voice: Anita Berman. The other was from the lawyer, Mr. Dixler. Both wanted him to return their calls, but he thought for a moment and decided against it. Dixler could wait. And Anita Berman-

Well, Anita was a separate problem, and Dannerman wasn't quite ready to deal with it. Thoughtfully he left the phone live, while he began cleaning his twenty-shot, considering the case of Anita Berman. She was a sweet lady; there was no doubt of that. She liked him very well, and that was for sure, too. But Hilda thought she was a security risk, and now with the new job Hilda was bound to think Anita was excess baggage.

That was going to be a pain, he thought, and then remembered that he still had homework to do. He put the cleaning materials back, coded the room screen for library access and, automatically wiping the sales messages as they came in in their little window at the corner of the screen, cued in the search he had begun in the taxi for data on astronomy, orbital instruments.

It took him only a moment to access once more the entries for the Dannerman Observatory's wholly owned satellite, Star-lab.

There was a lot about Starlab that Dannerman had no need to retrieve from the databanks, because he clearly remembered when it had been launched. He had been only nine at the time, but his mother had taken him to Uncle Cubby's grand compound on the Jersey shore for the launch party. The whole family was there to watch the launch on television, Cousin Pat and her parents included, as well as a dozen famous astronomers and politicians, but while the astronomers and the politicians were thoroughly enjoying the party, Dannerman's mother had been a lot less thrilled. It was Uncle Cubby's fortune that paid for the satellite, as it was also Uncle Cubby's fortune that endowed the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory a little later; and, while Starlab and the observatory were undoubtedly great contributions to astronomical science, what they represented to Uncle Cubby's heirs was a considerable depletion of the remaining fortunes they might someday expect to inherit.

Still, there was no doubt that Starlab had done great things for astronomy in its time. When it was built there was still money around to spend on pure science. It was designed to house a few actual living astronomers for weeks at a time as they took their spectra and their shift measurements. That part had been abandoned early, when it became too expensive to ship human beings up to orbit; the last of the visiting astronomers had died up there, and was still there. No one had been willing to spend the money to reclaim his body. But Starlab's instruments had gone on working for more than twenty years-

Until, three years earlier, they stopped. Just stopped. The transmissions ceased in the middle of a Cepheid count, and the satellite did not respond to commands from its surface controllers.

Dannerman put the screen on hold and got up to get a beer of his own from his private cooler. It all seemed pretty straightforward: satellites went out of commission every day, and the money to fix them got scarcer. Why was this one particularly interesting?

He meditated over that for a moment, sipping the beer and wiping the new messages as they arrived-until one came in, voice only but definitely the voice of a female, that said flirtatiously, "Hey, Danno! I hear you got a new job. Give me a call and let's see if we want to celebrate."

There wasn't any name on that one, either, but there didn't need to be. No one called him by the code name "Danno" but Colonel Hilda Morrisey.

A call from the colonel was not one he could answer on the open lines. Dannerman pulled down an old flatscreen converter from its place on his shelf and jacked it into his modem. Then he dialed the number he knew by heart. His screen instantly showed a bewildering fractal pattern of wedges and wriggling lines, until he cut in the 300-digit-prime synchronized-chaos decoder.

Then Colonel Hilda Morrisey was looking out at him, plump, dark, bright-eyed-just like always.

"Evening, Colonel honey," he said.

She didn't acknowledge the greeting. She didn't waste time on congratulating him on getting the job, either. "All right," she said, "cut the crap. Have you done your homework?"

"I sure have, Colonel honey, all you gave me, anyway. Star-lab went out a few years ago so the observatory applied for a repair mission to fix it. Naturally nothing happened. The red tape-"

"Don't tell me about the red tape."

"Anyway, the application wasn't moving. There's no public support for space missions. Let's see, I think the latest polls show about seventy-four percent opposed to spending another dollar on it anywhere. How much of that is Bureau dirty tricks, do you suppose?"

"Never mind."

"Anyway, now, all of a sudden, my cousin Pat got hot. She took the government to court, and she won, but it still don't move. So now she's doing a lot of wheeling and dealing on her own."

"And spending serious money, right. Okay, look. I had hoped to have background checks for you on the people you'll be working with but, right now, with this President's press secretary thing, it's hard to get any action out of Washington. So far it looks like two of them are dirty-not counting your cousin. One's a bruiser named Mick Jarvas-"

"I've met the man."

"He's a doper; that might be useful. He used to be a professional kick-boxer, now he's your cousin's bodyguard; he stays with her wherever she goes, so he knows what she does outside the office. The other one's a Chink named Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin. He's an astronaut, or was until the People's Republic privatized its space program and he went freelance. He got in some political trouble in the People's Republic, too, but I don't know exactly what yet. That's all I've got so far. Any questions?"

"Matter of fact I do have one, Hilda. Mind if I ask how the Carpezzio case is going?"

"You're not on the Carpezzio case anymore, Dannerman. That's just a routine drug bust and we'll handle that."

"You shouldn't do it yet," he said, as he'd said before-knowing that it was useless. "If you'd just wait two weeks till the major guys from Winnipeg and Saginaw get in-"

"Can't do it. You're needed on this one."

"But you'll just be getting low-level dummies-"

"Danno," she sighed, "are you empathizing again? You damn near blew the Mad King Ludwig operation because you didn't want to get your girlfriend Use in trouble."

"She wasn't my girlfriend," he protested. "Exactly. I just thought she was basically a decent human being." And, for that matter, the Carpezzios weren't that awful, either; sure, they sold drugs, but they were loyal to their people and he was going to miss some of those all-night parties in the loft with its constant aroma of room freshener and oregano that they hoped would keep any stray police dog from detecting the more interesting scents from their merchandise.

"Your kind heart does you credit, but forget it. What you're on now is a number-one priority from the director himself. Don't screw around with anything else, you hear? Check it out; see what you can get. And I want you to report in every night about this time."

"You're not making it easy for me. Do you want to tell me what I'm looking for, exactly?"