Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER TEN

Whatever the little alien's belly bag had done to the guard, the man hadn't died of it. Mores the pity, Hilda told herself. If the damn fool had been dead, that would have been the end of it. His corpse could have been off-loaded and transported at leisure to the Bureau's autopsy facilities, where something useful might have been learned. Alive, he was a lot more trouble. He had to be personally escorted to the nearest emergency room, with a senior officer going along to make sure he didn't blab anything he shouldn't, and who was the lucky senior officer to get the job? Why, naturally it was Colonel Hilda Morrisey.

Infuriatingly the man was wide-awake and apologetic long before Hilda got him to the emergency room. The duty doctors were annoyed. "There isn't anything seriously wrong with this man," one said to Hilda. "He could stand to lose a few kilos, and I'd watch that liver, but he doesn't belong here. You say he had some kind of electric shock? Has he had medical treatment already?"

"No. Well, yes," she added, remembering that one of the golems had forced his way over to fiddle with the unconscious guard for several minutes. For all the good that could have done. "I guess you could say he had some first aid. But our plane was just landing, so we brought him right here."

When the doctor said it would probably be best to keep him overnight Hilda agreed, but required the privilege of saying a word or two in the patient's ear. When she was confident that he understood the importance of keeping his mouth shut about anything that had happened on the plane she left him. She hurried to the headquarters and one of the suites for visiting VIPs, and the first real sleep she had had in more hours than she wanted to count.

Hilda slept dreamlessly and woke herself early. She didn't need an alarm; it was a matter of will, and as soon as her eyes were open she knew where she was and what she had to do. First thing was to peek out into the suite's living room to make sure her uniform was back, cleaned and pressed overnight. It was. She retrieved it and headed for the bathroom, scooping up the underwear she'd washed and left to dry on the little line. While she was pulling her stockings on she called the Bureau's New York office on the secure line, voice only, and got the night duty officer. "Colonel Morrisey here," she told him. "I'm going to be stuck at HQ for a while. Any problems your end?" There weren't. All the ongoing operations were proceeding smoothly without her, the man said, and accepted her instructions to turn all her Studebaker files over to Major Geltmann. Then she made herself a cup of coffee from the little machine in the bathroom while she checked the situation reports.

As she expected, all four of the Pat Adcocks and both Danner-mans had been stowed away in a safe house, with plenty of Bureau security surrounding them. What was more surprising was that the aliens were squirreled away with them. That couldn't be permanent, if only, Hilda reflected, because the woman agent who ostensibly lived there would have a lot to say about the damage to her carpets.

The only other item that concerned her was that a meeting of the Ananias team was scheduled for 0900. Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell was to be in the chair, and Hilda herself was listed as one of the participants. But Marcus Pell was not, and when Hilda checked a little farther it turned out that he, too, was logged as remaining overnight in the safe house.

Well, that made sense. If there was anything important for the National Bureau of Investigation to investigate, the place to do it was where the Starlab people were. Hilda felt a brief sense of resentment. She should have been there herself. Would have been, if she hadn't been stuck with that damn guard.

But she wasn't there, and meanwhile she had time for some errands of her own. She checked her makeup, swallowed the last of the coffee and took the elevator up to the motor pool, because she did not intend to sleep another night in that borrowed T-shirt from the Bureau's women's bowling team.

Twenty minutes later she was parking at one of Arlington's shopping malls. She did not miss the fact that the valet who took her two-seater gave her one of those oh-you're-a-cop looks-not hostile exactly, and certainly not deferential, just wary. She got the same look from the half dozen sidewalk vendors who were peddling inflation-hedge knickknacks just outside the mall entrance. Even the two city cops who were interrogating a young woman against a wall- shoplifter? someone with a cause who had, perhaps, tried to plant a stink bomb in the food department?-paused to salute her, but their expressions were as stony as the perpetrator's herself.

It was the uniform, of course.

Yanqui Bureaucrats Refuse to Release Delasquez Alleged Death Data.

Once again the Anglo politicians in Washington have denied the official demands of the sovereign State of Florida for a full and complete account of the so-called "death" of the "other" General Martin Delasquez.

– El Diario, Miami

Hilda Morrisey was proud of the uniform. It marked her, and everyone who wore it, as part of that group that was charged with protecting all these people-from themselves, often enough. But there were times when she didn't want to advertise what she did for a living. If she were going to stay in this area for a few days, away from the closets of her little New York City flat…

So once she had picked up the necessities she spent another half hour picking out things she could wear off duty. Some of them nice things. The sorts of things that made her look like the kind of woman a man, some man, might want to know better. Some man to replace Wilbur, who evidently wasn't going to be handy for a while.

On her way back with her acquisitions Hilda allowed herself a pleasant little reverie about that some man she had not yet met, idly switching on the news, half-listening to the garbled stories and wild speculations over the amazing reports from Calgary.

The message light flashed on the car screen.

She hit the display button. What turned up was an extract from die orders of the day. It said: Col. MORRISEY, Hilda J. Reassigned Arlington HQ. Promoted brigadier.

That took care of news, Wilbur and idle speculations. "You bastard, "she said to the air, switched over to manual drive and whipped the car around in the direction of the safe house and Deputy Director Marcus Pell.

The safe house had sixteen rooms and seven baths, not counting the Jacuzzi and the pool in the backyard. It needed them all. It was crowded, with four Pats, two Dannermans, two Docs, the Dopey, the deputy director and a couple of his interrogators-and eleven, count 'em, eleven guards in and outside the house, plus about half a dozen maids, cooks and cleaners. Who were, of course, also guards, even if they didn't flaunt their weapons quite as conspicuously as the ones in uniform.

The guard at the gate wasn't uniformed; he was dressed in overalls, and he held what looked like a leaf blower. (Bad cover, Hilda noted. The thing wasn't a real leaf blower, of course; it was something a lot more effective against any possible trespasser-but a leaf blower? In December, with patchy snow still on the ground?) He looked briefly at Hilda's uniform and the ID she flashed at him, then waved her on to the next guard. Or, actually, guards. There were two of them here, this time in uniform and standing at a checkpoint with stop-'em-dead spikes in the driveway just past their post. Hilda's rank wasn't enough to get her past them. She had to sit in the car, fuming, until the deputy director himself came strolling down from the safe house. He gave the guards a nod of the head, and waited until they had taken themselves out of earshot before he spoke. "Morning, Hilda," he said pleasantly. "I bet I know why you're here."

"I bet you damn well do, Marcus," she snarled. "I'm here to tell you that I'm quitting, and as soon as I get to a secure terminal you'll have it in writing."

He shook his head patiently. "No," he said, "I won't. Calm down, Hilda. You know this business is too big for you to sit out. Jesus!" he went on, his expression changing. "You wouldn't believe what kind of technology these people have! I was up half the night with that Dopey creature, and he talked straight through. My God, how he talked! Matter transmitters. Jail walls the keepers can walk through but the inmates can't pass. Weapons-oh, Hilda, the weapons they've got! You're not going to want to miss all this-"

"The hell I'm not!"

"-but," he finished, not missing a beat, "even if you did, you don't have the choice. The President has declared a national emergency, so no resignations are going to be accepted." He gave her a tolerant pat on the shoulder. "So you'll be with us for the duration, Hilda, and as long as you're here you might as well come in and get in on the fun. And by the way-congratulations on your promotion!"

Colonel-now Brigadier-Hilda Morrisey never allowed herself to waste time on resentment. That didn't mean she wasn't capable of carrying a grudge; sooner or later, she thought darkly, she would find a way to pay Marcus Pell back for all this. But that could wait.

Meanwhile, she had to admit that, yes, she really did want to be in on this bizarre affair. Pell led the way to a large room where most of the people from Starlab were gathered, the human ones, anyway. The room appeared to be the mansion's library, since the walls were lined solidly with cases of books, but no one was reading. A screen was displaying the Dopey creature, sulkily describing some other weird creatures who were involved with his "Beloved Leaders" in one way or another, but no one in the library was paying much attention to that, either. They were mostly eating. The room smelled of recent bacon and eggs, and there were pitchers of coffee and juice and remnants of toast and fresh fruits on the low tables. It looked to Hilda like the sort of breakfast pigout you might find the morning after a high-schoolgirl sleepover.

There was a Bureau interrogator sitting alertly in a straight-backed chair, but he wasn't interrogating. Sensibly enough, Hilda thought, he was simply listening as they talked among themselves, while his recorders were capturing everything that was said.

They all looked a lot cleaner than they had on the aircraft, and the ones from Starlab were wearing fresh clothes from the safe house's stores. They looked as though they'd had some sleep, too-not necessarily alone, Hilda thought, noting the way the Dannerman with the beard and the Pat who seemed to be affixed to him were cozily sharing a bowl of strawberries in one corner of the room.

Tipler's thesis was that when the expansion of the universe finally ran out of steam and the whole thing fell back into that bizarre point in space that had exploded into the Big Bang-the "Big Crunch," as they called that ultimate collapse-everybody who had ever lived would live again. Tipler called it "the Omega Point." That even more bizarre creature, Dopey, called it "the eschaton." But it was the same basic idea.

When she checked around they seemed to be one Pat short. "A couple of doctors are checking Pat Five over," the one called Patrice explained. "Want some coffee? There are clean cups over there."

She took some. So did the deputy director, looking pleased with the way things were going. Dopey, who was in the next room, had been telling his interrogators all kinds of things about the mass of high-tech materiel on Starlab. Pell nodded. "We're going to have to go back up there to get it. The director's getting that set up now."

Hilda looked skeptical. "How are you going to know how to make it work?"

But that wasn't a problem, Patrice explained. Dopey himself didn't know how to operate most of it – he had admitted as much, evidently somewhat amused at the thought – but he didn't have to. One of the creatures Dopey called his "bearers" was a specialist in that sort of thing. He could operate any of it, and show the Bureau's people how.

Hilda looked incredulous. "The golem can do that?"

"One of them can. The other's a kind of biological-medical handyman; he's the one who fixed up the guard last night."

"And he fixed Rosaleen up, too," Dannerman-beard called from across the room. "Between the two of them they can do all kinds of things, if Dopey tells them to."

They sounded like pretty handy gadgets to Hilda. She opened her mouth to say as much to the deputy director, but he wasn't paying any attention to the conversation. He was scowling at the screen, on which Dopey was complaining one more time to his interrogators about how desperately they needed their real food. It clearly was not what Pell wanted to hear from the alien; he got up and headed for the door to the other room.

But as he opened it Dopey caught sight of Hilda just behind Marcus Pell. "Stop now," Dopey said peremptorily, waggling his plumed tail in reproof. "I do not require much rest, but I must have some. I will answer no further questions for the next – " he twiddled his little paws in his belly bag – "twenty-five minutes." He didn't wait for a reply but hopped off his perch on a coffee table and brushed past the deputy director as he entered the library room.

He advanced on Hilda. "My dear Brigadier Morrisey, I appeal to you as a woman. Please relieve our distress! See that the foodstuffs are delivered to us at once!"

Hilda Morrisey was not used to being appealed to as a woman. Actually, she thought it rather quaint, but she shook her head. "I have nothing to say about that, Dopey."

The little alien sighed. "In that event I will sleep for the remainder of the twenty-five minutes." And he squatted down on the floor, under a dictionary stand. As he closed his eyes the great fan of his tail bent forward, covering him from the light, and he was still.

The deputy director glared around the room, looking for someone to blame. Then he shrugged. "You're in charge," he snapped at Hilda, and hurried out of the room-on his way, Hilda supposed, to find a secure screen so he could check in with headquarters.

Being in charge was nice, Hilda thought, but it would have been even nicer if she knew what she was supposed to do. For starters she nodded at the guards and interrogators. "You can all take ten," she said. As they left gratefully she peered at Dopey. "Is that the way the thing sleeps?"

Patrice answered for all of them. "I don't know. We never saw him sleep before."

"Urn," Hilda said, and then got down to business. "All right. Tell me what you've found out so far," she ordered, looking at her own Dannerman.

He looked rebellious. "Christ, Hilda! They've been talking for hours! It's all on the tapes, anyway."

It was a reasonable answer, so she tried a different tack. "Then let's get to something they haven't talked about. Don't you have any questions that haven't been answered yet?"

Pat spoke up for him. "Well, I do," she said, sounding tentative, turning to the other Pats. "You said something about another one of us who died?"

The two other Pats looked at each other. Patrice sighed. "Yes, that was Patsy. We were swimming and these other creatures-they looked sort of like seals-"

"More like a hippopotamus," Pat One corrected.

"Anyway, they had some kind of electric shockers. Like electric eels, I guess. And they lived in the water and- Well, things went sour, and one of them killed Patsy. Do we have to talk about this now? It was bad."

"I'm afraid you do," Hilda informed her-not cruelly, but not particularly sympathetically, either. Making people talk about things they didn't want to talk about was basic to her job description. "You have to talk about everything. Now, these animals with the electric shockers-"

"They weren't animals," Dannerman-beard corrected her. "They were fellow prisoners, just like us."

"Anyway, all that's on the tapes already," Patrice said. "There were lots of different kinds of-people-from different planets there and- Oh, hi!" she said, turning to greet Pat Five as she entered.

"Hi," Pat Five said, looking belligerent. She spotted the table with the coffee cups and headed toward it.

"Come on," Pat One coaxed. "Don't keep us in suspense. What did the doctors find out?"

"They found out I was pregnant," Pat Five said, pouring a cup and adding four or five spoonfuls of sugar. "They wanted me to go into a hospital here for observation. I told them screw that. There are plenty of hospitals in New York and I want to go home. And then I want to get back to work."

"So do I," said Patrice eagerly. "I was thinking about it all the time we were in that damn cell…" Then her face fell. "Oh, hell," she said. "I didn't think. How in the world are we ever going to sort that out?"

"Sort what out?" Hilda demanded.

Pat-the real Pat-answered for them all. "Sort out which of us is going to run the Observatory, of course." They were all silent for a moment, then she added gloomily, "I don't think it'll be me, anyway."

Patrice gave her a curious look. "Why not you?"

Canada's Rights in "Starlab" Technology Unquestionable.

We must not forget that Canada has a special interest in the Starlab venture, since it was on Canadian soil that the first returnees from Scarecrow captivity reached the Earth.

– Globe and Mail, Toronto

She glanced bitterly at Hilda. "Because these people tell me I'm goddam prey, that's why. I've got this damn lump of something in my head, and according to them somebody's likely to grab me and saw my head off to get at it."

"Oh," Patrice said, nodding, "you mean the bug. I've got one, too."

Hilda snapped to attention. "You do?"

"Sure. So did Patsy-the one of us who died. And, of course, all the ones who went back to Earth-you two"-nodding at the Earthly Pat and Dannerman-"and Jimmy Lin, and Martin, and Rosie. It's a spy thing."

Dannerman, frowning, opened his mouth, but Hilda was in command. "Tell me exactly what you mean, 'spy thing,' " she demanded.

And was astonished to hear the answer. The bugs in the head were little transmitters-well, no surprise there; everyone had guessed that much. But these weren't simple sound-only bugs. You put on a kind of helmet that acted as a receiver, Patrice said, "And then you were the other person. The other you. I saw that jail cell you were in, Pat. Through your eyes. Just like I was there."

The bearded Dannerman confirmed what she said. "I was in your head once when you were waking up with a hangover, Dan. And Martin said he was at Kourou, and Jimmy Lin was back in the Chinese space center; in fact I think one time when our Jimmy was listening in the one of him that was in China was getting laid. He said it was just like being there. You could see, hear, taste, smell, feel-it was virtual-reality stuff, only better than anything I've ever seen."

Then they were all talking at once, waking Dopey. "You people are very noisy," he complained, peering out from under his great plume, but no one paid attention to him.

"You mean," Pat said shakily, "you could feel and see everything I did? Everything?"

"Well, just when we had the helmet on," Pat One said consolingly. "And we could only receive ourselves-Patrice and Patsy and I could tune in on you, Dan-Dan on the other Dan and so on. Dopey had a way of tuning in on everybody-that's why they put the bugs in your heads in the first place. But he never let us do that."

Pat was shaking her head. "Thank God I wasn't doing anything very interesting," she said. "But now I really do want to get this damn thing out."

"Even if it kills you?" Dannerman asked.

Dopey yawned a little cat yawn. "You people concern yourselves over such trivial things," he complained. "Why should that procedure kill you? The device no longer serves any useful purpose, since you have destroyed the relay channel on your Starlab. My medically trained bearer can remove it without harm to you."

Pat sat up, openmouthed. "You're sure?"

"Of course I am sure. Was it not he who installed the devices in the first place?"