Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER THIRTY

Back in New York, Pat dithered for some time before reluctantly leaving Patrice in sole charge at the Observatory. That was where all the excitement was, but sisterly duty was compelling. At the hospital entrance Pat didn't have to go through the weapons search. The Bureau guard spoke to the hospital security man at the door, who listened, then reluctantly waved them through. He didn't even make the Bureau guard check her weapon, though Pat's own little derringer was taken away.

Pat Five was in a private room-really a suite-and paid for, the funny thing was, by the government of the People's Republic of China on behalf of the triplets' putative father. Pat Five's own guard was sitting on a straight-backed chair outside the door; alerted to their coming, she clapped her hands and the door opened.

Pat didn't see her semisister at first, because Pat Five's bed had pull-up sides to keep her from falling out, and they were hung with sheets to keep out drafts. Pat had to step right up to the bed and look down in order to show Pat Five the flowers she'd brought. "How are you doing?" she asked.

Pat Five opened her eyes to peer up at her. She looked like hell. Her face was blotchier than ever, and her auburn hair was sweated into clumps. She was not going to be able to take advantage of the comfortable sitting room next door, with its picture-window view of the city, or even the fully equipped bathroom that came with the suite. One of her arms was strapped down because of the IVs that were taped in place; pulse monitors were mounted on her throat and a respiration microphone on her right side. From under the light blanket that covered the lower half of her body inconspicuous tubes led to plastic waste bags, showing that she was still catheterized. "How am I doing?" she asked. "I'm doing lousy. Do you know they want me to stay flat on my back for the next six weeks?"

"Ah, honey," Pat clucked. The words weren't meant to convey information. It was only what you said when you had nothing better to offer. She thought of reminding Pat that this was all for the benefit of her unborn babies, but the last time she'd tried that Pat had talked fretfully of the attractions of a midterm abortion.

"Anyway," Pat said brightly, "I've got some news. Mr. Hecksher served all the papers, and he has an appointment to talk to the people at the UN this afternoon. He has a new paper for you to sign- something for the Chinese government, to say that you are accepting their financial assistance ex gratia, whatever that is, but without admitting any claim to the children. Can you actually sign?"

"Legibly, no. But the nurses help me, so just leave it. What's this about an object approaching the Earth? Is it the goddam Beloved Leaders?"

Pat's strictest order from the doctors was not to excite the patient, so she said reassuringly, "People say it might be, but it's not coming anywhere near the Earth."

"I don't trust the bastards," Pat Five said glumly.

"Well, no one does." Pat cast around for a more cheerful subject. "You wouldn't believe the get-well messages that have been coming for you. From people all over the world. Everybody we've ever known, even our ex-husbands-and relatives we haven't heard from for years."

"Sure, they think we might be coming into a lot of money."

"Oh, not all of them," Pat protested. "There are a lot of people that just like you-us. And-wait a minute."

It was her carryphone. She frowned as she answered it; she wasn't supposed to be called on the private line except in emergency. It was Patrice on the line. She said, "Pat? Get your ass back here. Don't say anything to Pat Five-but the damn thing has changed course, and it looks like it's going to impact the Earth."

When Pat Adcock got back to the Observatory she saw the whole thing, from that first chance-caught burn on, because the news channels kept rerunning every sighting. At twenty-five Earth radii the object-no, damn it, Pat said fretfully to herself; call it a spacecraft, because there wasn't any more doubt that that was what it was-the spacecraft produced another great display of fireworks. When the burn was over and they calculated the new orbit-a stretched-out ellipse, with the spacecraft now on the descending leg-there wasn't any doubt. It was definitely going to impact the Earth. "Right on top of us," Patrice groaned as she inspected the oval of the expected footprint, swallowing up half of the western Atlantic and a lot of the bulge of South America. "They know we're all here, and they're after us."

"If it's big enough," Rosaleen offered, "it doesn't much matter where it hits. Remember how the Scarecrows offed their enemies by dumping asteroids on them?"

But it wasn't that big. Pat was sure of that much. What it was was another question entirely: supernuclear bomb? Bioweapons? Patrice, thinking along the same lines, said tightly, "I wonder if the government's going to try to evacuate the Eastern Seaboard."

But if they did, where would they evacuate the people to? And how could they move a hundred million men and women out of the way, when they weren't sure just where the way was?

The Earth is a sitting duck for all the floating bird shot that orbits the Sun. Thousands of meteorites strike its outer atmosphere every day, most of them so tiny that they burn up quickly and are not even noticed by Earth's people. Once in a while a slightly larger one-perhaps the size of a grain of sand-burns brightly enough to be seen as a "shooting star." More rarely one is large enough to reach the ground as a hot lump of pitted rock. Very seldom does one make a crater, and only a few times in a million years will one be large enough to do serious damage. But never before has one been seen to change its course by a rocket burn to make sure of hitting its target.

– Newsweek

The big telescopes were no use now; the thing was too close and moving too fast for them. But telescopes weren't necessary. Every news camera on Earth was scanning the skies, for there wasn't any other news that mattered at that moment. The lucky ones zoomed in on the Scarecrow spacecraft, and for a few minutes each was able to hold it-sometimes long enough to catch it as the thing plooped out a minor course-correction jet. On the dozen screens in the Observatory's conference room there were sometimes as many as eight or nine different shots of the spacecraft, flickering in and out as the harried operators in the network control rooms tried to keep abreast of the rapidly changing feeds.

Then, abruptly, one screen switched to a wholly different scene: Eurospace's LuftBuran caught in its liftoff from Kourou. "Hell," Dannerman snapped. "They've launched ahead of schedule! Why would they do that?"

No one answered; they were all too full of questions of their own.

And then the spacecraft made a final burn, and turned into a sun-bright meteor as it entered Earth's atmosphere, plunging down.

"It's going to miss us," Patrice breathed.

"It's going to miss the land entirely," Pat corrected, as the footprint on one of the screens wobbled, shrank, finally turned into a point in the ocean.

Then all the ground-based scenes blacked out at once, and one by one each screen came on again, all of them showing a single picture. It came from a traffic-spotter plane belonging to a Puerto Rican TV station, urgently redirected by its control room as the Scarecrow ship's splashdown became predictable. The pilot was quick and the cameraman was good. They caught the fireball of the descending spacecraft from a distance, even saw the immense splash and clouds of steam when it struck. The pilot had piled on the coal, and they were closing in on it before the steam had dissipated, while Pat-and everyone else in the world-held their breath, awaiting the explosion…

It didn't come. When at last the steam blew away a metal object, the size and shape of an old naval torpedo, was floating placidly in the ocean swell, and it wasn't exploding at all.

Within half an hour there were a dozen other planes circling above the floating Scarecrow ship; within an hour, the first surface vessels began to arrive.

There wasn't much to see, but no one in the Dannerman Observatory turned away from the screens. The ships were an oddly assorted lot: fishing vessels, fast cigarette speedboats, even a cruise ship that happened to be nearby and altered course to give its passengers an unanticipated thrill.

When a Navy tug approached, flank speed ahead, a mustache of white foam curling away from its bow, the first thing it did was to put an officer on the loud-hailers and warn everybody else away. Then it slowly approached the floating hulk, circled it suspiciously a time or two, then stopped. A moment later a pair of frogmen went over the side.

Then the tempo of events slowed down to a crawl. One of the frogmen paddled over to the floating object and gingerly touched it with some sort of metallic probe, while the other trod water a few meters away. They jabbered to each other, then one of them waved to the tug. A moment later deckhands flopped an inflatable raft overboard and a couple of others climbed down a rope ladder to get into it. Nothing happened for a moment, then some sort of metallic-gleaming equipment was lowered into the raft and its crew began to row it toward the Scarecrow object.

"They're being pretty damn cautious," Pat grumbled. Rosaleen gave her an amused look.

"Wouldn't you be?" she asked. And yes, Pat admitted to herself, she would. They still didn't know whether the thing was a bomb or not… or whether it might suddenly give anyone nearby one of those devastating electrical shocks… or even whether it might pop open and a horde of Scarecrows come charging out, weapons blasting.

But nothing like that happened. Nothing much was happening at all, except that the sailors in the raft were gingerly touching the Scarecrow object with probes, frowning over their instrument readings, talking on their headsets to the command personnel on the tug about what they found… who in turn were, no doubt, talking to higher authority somewhere ashore at every step while someone decided what to do next.

Pat grinned to herself. It was actually getting pretty boring, but neither she nor anyone else in the Observatory could tear herself away from the dozen identical displays on the screens…

Until the display on some of them changed. A human face appeared, looking agitated. "A transmission has been received," it began to say, and then it froze; whatever it was saying was no longer heard as the audio portion of that transmission was replaced by the very transmission it had announced.

How the Object Was Found

The "Scarecrow" missile happened to be in Earth's daylight skies when it emitted the burn that changed its course. It was almost directly overhead, as seen from the islands of Hawaii, where a BBC crew was interviewing a group of astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii dome. A script girl, glancing up at the sky, saw the flare. When she yelped in surprise the BBC cameraman caught the object in his finder, and that was how the world first saw it.

Within ten minutes every telescope in the world that could bear on the object was searching for it. Cerro Toledo was the first to locate it, once the burn was over. It was moving very rapidly, but the Chileans were able to hold it long enough to project a track, moving east by northeast. Using the Chilean data, telescopes in the little observatory in the hills over Rio de Janeiro picked it up and refined the orbit before it vanished over the Atlantic.

Twenty minutes later telescopes in the Azores, and moments later on the European continent, had it, and since then it has been under constant watch.

– Sky amp; Telescope

"Do not be afraid," a mellow, reassuring voice said. "Our intentions are friendly. The lander you are approaching is not dangerous. It simply carried a cargo of food to supply the needs of our loyal associates presently on your planet. As you see, the Beloved Leaders care for those who cooperate with them. We will care for you, too, if you wish it. And most of all, we will help you defend yourselves against the forces of the evil Horch. We suggest that you examine our lander and its contents to reassure yourself we mean no harm, and when you have had an opportunity to do so we will speak to you again…"

"Just food?" Pat said incredulously. "They scare the pee out of us just to give Dopey some, food?"

"Hold it," Dannerman said, listening, because the voice was going on-not quite as mellow, now; almost sounding agitated:

"But we must warn you against your foolish attempt to visit your Starlab! The mechanisms it contains are highly dangerous! Recall your spacecraft at once! Do not enter the Starlab! The consequences will be very grave!"