Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Pat Adcock could have counted on the fingers of her two hands the number of times she'd visited anyone in a hospital. If you left out the visits to Pat Five, she probably could have done it on her thumbs; it was not one of her favorite ways of spending an hour.

Pat Five didn't make it any more appealing, either. She was thoroughly sick of her incarceration, and she let everybody know it. "I want some water," she informed Pat at once. "You'll have to hold it for me; I'm not supposed to lift anything."

Pat did as requested, holding the bottle with the flexible straw while Pat Five sipped. Then, thirst quenched, she spent five minutes explaining how she felt, which was weak and bored and wishing the whole damn business was over. Then she wanted to know how things were going at the Observatory, which was a gratifying change of subject. So Pat told her how hard it was to track the actual Scarecrow ship, and how Rosaleen seemed healthier and stronger than ever, thanks, it seemed, to whatever the medical Doc had done to her metabolism back when they were in the Scarecrow captivity, and how the two Docs seemed to have liberated themselves from Scarecrow control and were now helping with the reverse engineering of the things from Starlab.

"Yes, they're very good at taking things apart," Pat Five said bitterly.

Pat said-humbly, because she hadn't experienced what that taking apart was like for herself-"Well, it's not all their fault. They were under Scarecrow control; now they're not."

"I suppose so," Pat Five said, unconvinced. And then there didn't seem to be anything else to talk about.

When Pat finally got out of the sickroom there was still one other chore to take care of. She tracked Pat Five's doctor down as she stood at the nurses' desk, chatting with somebody who seemed to be a dietician.

When Pat asked after Pat Five's condition the doctor said, "Why don't you come into my office?" She was a slim, Oriental-looking woman, perhaps Bengali, but she spoke without an accent. Her office looked like a smaller, less expensive version of Pat's own. Instead of astronomical pictures the doctor's wall screen was running looped views of some kind of surgery-startlingly, not human surgery. The doctor noticed where Pat was looking and, slightly embarrassed, flipped the screen off. "It is the removal of the instrument from the Doc," she apologized. "Not my specialty, of course, but it is simply interesting to see that much of alien anatomy, even if only around the neck and skull. Would you like some tea? No?" Then she got down to business. "As to your-ah, sister," she said, for lack of a better word, "her condition is somewhat improved. The fetal heartbeats are good, but we may have to deliver early. It seems she evidently had some pretty rough-and-ready surgery before she became pregnant, as well as malnutrition and a bad time in general early in the pregnancy."

"That she did," said Pat One.

"Yes. It's a great pity. She's a little older than we usually see for a primapara, but if she'd had decent food and care, she could have a dozen babies without any trouble. She's built for it." Her expression was resentful, as though she were angry at Pat Five for not having taken better care of herself. "Well, as it is, there are some problems. We may have to do a C-section, when it comes to that, but the babies will be better off the longer the pregnancy continues. In any case, the prognosis is reasonably good, but we're watching her carefully. Did you have any specific questions?"

And when Pat couldn't think of any the doctor looked embarrassed again. She pulled a copy of Pat Five's chart out of her desk and displayed it hesitantly. On the margins were two signatures, both in Pat's own hand: Dr. Pat Adcock (Pat Five) and Dr. Pat Adcock (Patrice). "If you wouldn't mind-just for a souvenir-do you think I could have your autograph as well?"

In the taxi on the way back to the Observatory, her guard mercifully quiet beside her, Pat meditated on her sudden vicarious fame. Was it going to last? How would it affect her life-would she ever be able to have dates again like any normal human being? For that matter, shouldn't she be getting out more now? And-big question!-what was that the doctor had said about having been built to deliver a dozen babies? And if that was true for Pat Five, after all the things the Scarecrows had done to her, how about Pat herself, who shared the identical physiology?

It was a queer, scary-attractive thought. It made something inside her twitch, and she was glad when the cab ride was over and she had to attend to current reality. At the Observatory's reception desk, Jan-ice DuPage was talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Maureen Capobianco, the cruise companion Janice hadn't had. The cruise, however, hadn't been a total success. Capobianco told her they'd had some sort of accident as the ship approached Rio de Janeiro-engine trouble of some kind; they'd lain dead in the water for most of one night, with the antiroll pumps that shifted ballast around not working and the ship heaving uncomfortably in the Atlantic swell and everybody getting seasick. They finally limped into Rio twelve hours late. "So we had a day in Rio," Maureen told her, "but then they canceled the rest of the cruise and flew us home."

"And they're all getting some kind of a refund," Janice said bitterly, "but I got stuck for the whole thing, and I didn't even get to go. Pat? Is it all right if I go out to lunch a little early?"

Whether it was all right or not, Pat felt, she had to say it was- having made Janice miss her cruise because of the "emergency." Once in her own office it didn't take long to find that that emergency search for the Scarecrow scout ship had still produced nothing. On the other hand, it had pretty well ruled out any new spacecraft heading in toward Earth at any immediately worrisome distance, too.

She flipped on the news screen to see if anything else was happening, but the only fresh items that came up had mostly to do with things like the thousands of religious fanatics at that moment demonstrating before the White House, demanding that the President do something-which particular something they wanted done varying from group to group, who were, as usual, fighting among themselves.

She was checking the latest summaries from the "Scarecrow Search" site when, belatedly, she remembered to make an announcement in everybody's mail about Pat Five's condition. A moment later Rosaleen peered in.

"But she's all right?" she asked.

"Hope so. What've you got there?"

The old lady was carrying a hard-copy printout. "Nothing useful," she said. "I've been going over what's been published about the artifacts from Starlab. The people at Camp Smolley have started disassembling the green object."

"Disassembling? But I thought they weren't supposed to do that yet.

"Yes, of course," Rosaleen said impatiently. "You thought they would wait until observers could be present, or some such thing. You have always been quite naive, dear Pat. In any case, I'm damned if I can figure out what that thing is supposed to be doing, much less how it does it. I'd love to get my hands on it-"

"Talk to Dan. Maybe he can arrange it," Pat suggested. "You're one of the best instrument people in the world."

"I'm one of the best instrument people in the world who unfortunately also happens to be a Ukrainian national," Rosaleen pointed out.

"You could at least ask."

Rosaleen grunted. "Maybe. Listen, I've been thinking about how that transporter works."

Pat looked puzzled. "I thought we knew that. It doesn't transmit anything material, only a kind of blueprint of whatever's involved- people, machines, whatever, and then the thing gets constructed at the receiver."

Technology Analysis, NBI Agency Eyes Only Subject: Tachyon transfer

The so-called "matter transporter" which is used for communications and travel at speeds faster than light does not transport any matter. The device analyzes whatever is to be transported and transmits a sort of "blueprint" by means of the radiation called "tachyons" by some American scientists. (Until the arrival of the aliens, tachyons were known only in theory; none had ever been detected.) There at the receiving station an exact copy is made. Even living creatures may be transported in this way.

There are two unanswered questions about this device. 1, how is the object or person to be transmitted analyzed and encoded? 2, what is the copy made from? It was at first conjectured that the receiver took all the necessary elements from its surroundings and used them to construct the copy. But that does not seem to be the case. According to statements of the human and extraterrestrial witnesses, there does not appear to be any depletion of matter in the vicinity of the receiver, no matter how much mass is transmitted.

"Right. Out of what?"

"What do you mean, out of what?"

"I mean," Rosaleen said patiently, "suppose you want to transmit a human being. The raw materials in the human body are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium and about fifty other elements. What if some of those elements don't exist at the receiving station?

"Urn," Pat said, seeing the difficulty.

"Right. So I was talking to Pete Schneyman about it. Do you know what a virtual particle is?"

"Sure. Well," Pat qualified, "sort of."

"Yes, well, I don't remember that quantum stuff all that well, either, and it's been a lot longer for me than for you. So I asked Pete, and he began talking about the Big Bang. First there was nothing, then particles began to be generated spontaneously-"

"I do know about the Big Bang," Pat said.

"Of course you do. But that spontaneous generation of particles goes on all the time, only they don't last: they appear and disappear in tiny fractions of picoseconds. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes they last for a long time-like our universe."

Pat frowned, trying to remember those long-ago graduate-school classes. "You think that's how the Scarecrows do it? Making things out of virtual particles?"

"Pete does. Well, at least he thinks that's possibly how they do it."

"But the virtual particles always come in pairs, particles and antiparticles, and they annihilate each other. What would they do with the antiparticles?"

Rosaleen sighed. "Yes," she admitted, "Pete said that was where the problem was. But Pat-I wish I could be there and help them figure it all out."

"Um," Pat said, just as the phone rang. She pushed the phone button. "All right, what is it?"

But what it was was a woman in a nurse's uniform. For one scary second Pat thought it was the hospital she had just left, with something terribly wrong with Pat Five.

But it wasn't. Different nurse, different hospital, and the person she was calling about was Janice DuPage. Who had got herself in the way of a drive-by shooters' car-

"Janice has been shot?" Pax asked, uncomprehending.

"No, no. She was hit by the car; it was being chased by police and it seems to have run onto the sidewalk where she was walking." The nurse was peering in bewilderment into her own screen, no doubt catching sight of Pat One in the background, and realizing, for the first time, who she was talking to. "She asked us to call."

"Is she-?"

The nurse shook her head. "She'll be all right. She's got, let me see, a fractured right tibia and a good many lacerations and abrasions. She had head injuries, but the skull is intact and it seems to be only a minor concussion. But the woman she was with"-the nurse consulted her screen-"Maureen Capobianco, that is. She's still in surgery. I'm afraid the prognosis for her isn't as good."