Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

By the time the Docs were successfully debugged-and by the longer time it took for Dr. Marsha Evergood to be convinced that they were fit to travel-it was too late for Dannerman to catch the night courier flight home. When he called Anita Berman to tell her he'd be late the tracker found her waiting for him at the Observatory. She sounded excited. She didn't complain when he told her his resignation hadn't been accepted. "No, I guess it wouldn't be, would it? We've been watching the news-I even caught a glimpse of you, hon. I think. Anyway, I talked to Zigler again and he's got a new idea. He's thinking about doing your life story."

Dannerman grunted in surprise. "My life story?"

"And with you and me playing our own parts, if the Bureau will let you. And the Pats, too. Which reminds me, Patrice wants to talk to you."

What Patrice wanted to talk about was some papers she needed to get Pat One to sign, and as long as he was staying over, would he mind picking them up from the morning courier plane and taking them out to Camp Smelly? "Just as a favor from one movie star to another," she coaxed. And Dannerman was too dazzled to refuse.

He was still dazzled when he woke the next morning. But the place where he woke was in one of the VIP suites in the deep-down headquarters of the National Bureau of Investigation, where he had cadged a room from the duty officer. A quick breakfast in the canteen sobered him up. Having his life story made into a major production was an intoxicating fantasy. Now he faced reality. The Bureau would never allow it. And besides- Well, something seemed to have changed between Anita Berman and himself. He couldn't blame the woman for wanting to be a star, even if it was happening only because she was riding on someone else's coattails. Namely his. It didn't mean that she didn't love him, he told himself. Certainly she'd put up with any number of broken dates and unexplained advances, when there was no advantage at all in it for her except her affection for Dan Dannerman.

But she did seem to be pushing pretty hard for this.

He put it out of his mind and headed for breakfast, where he discovered his luck wasn't all the way out. In the canteen he found an old acquaintance, Sherry Walton, once his contact person when he was with the Scuzzhawks. Over their basically flavorless miso soup and their limp toast Dannerman got a chance to catch up on some of the Bureau gossip. A Chinese submarine had gone lost after being driven off from the Scarecrow landing area, and though it had been found again, the Chinese had shot most of its officers. Activity among the world's terrorist bands seemed to have dwindled to a ten-year low. The deputy director was pressuring the President to denounce the United Nations agreement about sharing the Scarecrow technology. And the Bureau's more sporting staffers were getting up a pool on when the next Scarecrow missile would arrive-a less benign one. "Crap," Dannerman said positively. "If they were going to bomb us, they would have done it already."

"Maybe they didn't have time," Walton offered, pouring herself another cup of weak coffee.

"Of course they had time. They sent the food capsule, and the message with it."

"Ah-ha," she said, nodding, "the message. I was talking to some of the experts about that. Did you notice the second part seemed sort of improvised? Like they'd already sent the capsule and timed the message to arrive when it did, and then they found out we were getting ready to board the Starlab? They could be a really long way away, you know. They can't use that instant-transport gadget of theirs without a terminal, so they probably have to use rockets… and what if they've already fired off a rocket, and it just hasn't had time to get here yet?"

A Space Future for India

When India signed Part Three of the Non-Proliferation Treaty it carried out all of its obligations, including scrapping all of its missiles and bases and, like most nations around the world, abandoning its fledgling space program. It now seems that was an error. As recent developments have shown, the conquest of space is now urgent. The nations which have retained some sort of rudimentary space capability-the Europeans, the Americans, the Chinese-are now confronted with unparalleled economic opportunities and, very possibly, grave military responsibilities. As the second most populous nation on Earth, we should join them forthwith.

– Hindustan Times, New Delhi

There was something new at Camp Smolley. The Bureau guards were still in place, so were the rain-soaked protesters across the road, but now there was also a company of blue-helmeted United Nations troops, fully armed, deployed all around the perimeter, and a detachment of the same at the checkpoints. They were thorough. After they put Dannerman through the electronic search and stripped him of his weapons, all his weapons, they had just begun. Two of them opened the little satchel of documents Dannerman had picked up from the courier flight, talking to each other in Spanish-these particular UN troops were Chileans, it seemed. They turned every page, one turning while the other held a lamp that pulsed blue, green, white, orange-looking for some suspicious kind of fluorescence, Dannerman supposed-before they gave them back to him and let him proceed. Two more guards, one Bureau and the other UN, convoyed him to an office and took their posts outside the door.

Pat One was waiting impatiently inside. She wore a quarantine gown and quarantine gloves, and there was a transparent visor hanging loose under her chin. She looked tired. "All this damn paper, "she complained when Dannerman handed her the packet. "Couldn't you get us a lawyer that had ever heard about electronics?"

"I got you a lawyer who's going to make you rich," Dannerman pointed out. And while she was signing he looked around. Half a dozen wall screens were displaying interesting things-a news screen by the door, next to it one that showed one of the Docs disassembling a Scarecrow gadget while half a dozen experts stood by, a third screen that showed the other Doc mewing and gesturing as he drew pictures for another group of experts. Pat One looked up. "Those guys are mostly linguists," she said. "We can't talk to the son of a bitch, you know. They're trying to figure out what they call the deep structure of his language, but all he wants to do is draw pictures."

"Can't they get Dopey to help? He's supposed to be a real hotshot with languages."

Pat One shook her head. "He won't help us. He's not even eating, he's so shook up. He won't even tell us what that thing is they're taking apart, he just says the Beloved Leaders are going to punish us all for this."

Dannerman thought uneasily of his breakfast conversation with Sherry Walton. "Did he say how?"

"Not him. Maybe the Doc's trying to tell us something about that, only we can't figure out what. Maybe-" She thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I don't know if I'm supposed to let you see this stuff, but, what the hell, you're a spook yourself, aren't you? Wait a minute. This is Priam Makalanos's office, and I don't know all the systems, but- Here."

She finished playing with the controls on Makalanos's desk, and the pictures on the wall screens changed. They were drawings, done in the Doc's neat draftsmanship. The first one showed the UN Building in New York, then Beijing's Forbidden City, the Arc deTriomphe in Paris, India's Taj Mahal-one after another, the most celebrated sights on Earth. And in all of them there was something that didn't belong there: Scarecrows. Walking around. The pictures weren't photographs, but they were neat and unmistakable drawings of the pumpkin-headed creatures. They were showing Scarecrows present in all the major cities of Earth.

Dannerman frowned at the pictures and shook his head. "It beats me," he said. "It can't mean what it looks like. If there were that many Scarecrows here, we would have seen some trace of them, wouldn't we?"

"It beats me, too," Pat One said somberly. "But I'm sure of one thing. It isn't good."