Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The news about the bug in the cruise passenger's head caught Hilda Morrisey on the wing. She was halfway to Arlington. For a moment she thought of pulling rank, ordering the pilot to take her back to the scene of this unwelcome new glitch in New York. Reason prevailed. The New York Bureau people were dealing with it, and most of them had recently been her own people. She could leave that to them. Anyway, she could get a better picture at headquarters.

The picture refused to come clear. When all the questioning was done, nobody at the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory had any useful information about the late Maureen Capobianco. Neither did any of her friends and family once the Bureau had tracked them down. Nor did the X rays find a bug in any of them. It wasn't until they got a passenger list from the operators of her cruise ship that the Bureau struck pay dirt.

That was a break. A checker recognized two of the names on the list as his own neighbors. When the Bureau's people descended on them they were startled but cooperative… and the X rays told the story. They, too, were bugged. Both of them. So, when they were tracked down, were the members of a bridge club from Baltimore who had treated themselves to the cruise, all twenty-six of them. So was a barman from the cruise ship, furloughed to his mother's home in the District itself.

So was every last one they could find of the ship's 826 passengers and 651 crew members.

That wasn't all. Hilda Morrisey got the news first and brought it to the deputy director. "There were these six Ecuadorians from a fishing boat that had been near the splash site. They had it, too."

"Shit," Marcus Pell said dismally. "It's an epidemic. We should have anticipated this, Hilda; it's what the Doc was trying to tell us, with those pictures."

"I guess we thought he meant actual Scarecrows were coming."

"I guess we did." He sighed. "All right. Take off for Camp Smelly, Hilda. See if you can get anything out of that damn Dopey."

She stood up to go, then turned. Pell had not seemed all that surprised to hear about the Ecuadorians. "Is there anything else?"

He hesitated, then shrugged. "Keep it under your hat, but yes. We got a report from an asset in Vietnam. The Chinese are rounding up the whole crew of that submarine that went missing. The one where they executed the captain and the engineering officer?" He grimaced. "You know how they execute criminals, one bullet in the back of the neck-so the organs won't be spoiled for transplant. Well, the shot hit a bug."

"Jesus." A thought struck her. "I thought we had our own asset in the Chinese Navy, how come we had to get this from the Viets?"

"They shot our asset, too."

In the back of Brigadier Hilda Morrisey's mind she had been thinking of this as a good time for another recreational evening-a long soak, a light meal, the new dress with the skirt slits that made the best of her still very good legs, the address of a new bar that was highly recommended for good-looking men. It wasn't much to ask. She was fully entitled to it because, for God's sake, she was human.

But here she was at Camp Smolley again, and what was in the back of Brigadier Morrisey's mind stayed where it was. The camp was in an uproar. Daisy Fennell was there, giving Colonel Makalanos a hard time for imagined failings at getting more information out of the Docs. All three of the freaks were back at the biowar station, and security precautions were doubled. There was an armed guard at the door of the interrogation room, where the two Docs were vociferously mewing at Dopey. Whatever they were saying, they seemed to think it was urgent, but the little turkey was adamantly refusing to respond, his cat eyes squeezed shut, his little paws thrust firmly into that coppery belly bag. In a corner of the room Dannerman was having an agitated, low-voiced conversation with a woman; it wasn't until Hilda recognized the woman as Anita Herman that she knew which Dannerman it was. The linguistics team was on hand, doing their best to get a clue as to the Docs' language, but if they were making any progress at all, Hilda couldn't see how. It didn't seem that way to her.

Her first target was Dannerman. As she approached, Anita Berman was in the process of jumping up and delivering a final, scathing remark: "I don't care about the money, I don't care about the part, what I care about is getting you out of this crazy life you're leading!" She flounced away, leaving Dannerman peering after her. The funny thing was, he was actually looking pleased.

"What's that all about?" Hilda asked.

He shook his head. "Something I was worried about, that's all. Listen, is it true about all these bugs being found?"

"Damn straight it's true, but that isn't what I wanted to ask you. Have you had a chance to talk to Dopey about that drawing the Doc made?"

The fond smile evaporated from his face. "Uh, yes," he said reluctantly. "He said-well, he didn't say anything for sure, only maybe-"

"Damn you! Maybe what?"

He swallowed. "He said he didn't know anything really, but, after all, the Horch captured everything the Scarecrows had on that planet. Including the transit machine-the one that made copies of us? So if they wanted more copies of me, or anything else, there wouldn't be anything in the world that could stop them."

There was a goddam limit, Hilda Morrisey told herself, to the number of things she should have to worry about at one time. How many crazinesses were going to be thrown at her? She sat down, trying to collect her thoughts. Merla Tepp appeared from nowhere, silently bearing a cup of coffee, and when Hilda looked at the woman's face there was one more annoyance staring at her. The woman had the expression of someone more put-upon than was bearable-even more put-upon than Hilda herself, though perhaps for different reasons. (What was it with Tepp? It couldn't be just the fact that she loathed the aliens. Was there some personal problem? And if there was, who cared?) Hilda put her aide's problems out of her mind and concentrated on what was going on.

Hilda Morrisey had presided at plenty of interrogations in her career, but never one like this. This time the subjects were doing their best to spill every last thing they knew. In fact, they were doing it nonstop, their mewing voices sometimes plaintive, sometimes yowling mad, but what they were carrying on about no one could say.

It was the translator who was the problem. Dopey was not cooperating. Occasionally he mewed irritably back at the Docs, mostly he merely sat huddled silently on his perch, eyes closed in suffering, tail plume dull and dejected. From where the observers sat on the other side of the one-way glass they could see Patrice, in the interrogation room with the subjects, where she had been for the last hour. She was expostulating with Dopey, but he was ignoring her as well.

Patrice sighed and came out. "I need a break," she said, looking at the linguistics team as they hovered over their frequency analyzers and screens. "You guys getting anything?" she asked.

The head of the team shook her head. "Can't te\\."Well, Hilda thought, theirs was a pretty forlorn hope to begin with. A language was not like a cipher, and all the computers in the world were not likely to solve the translation problem.

While, infuriatingly, the finest translation system the world had ever known was sulking on his perch not a dozen meters away, and refusing to help. "If we could just get a few sentences that were in both languages to match up, we might make a start," the woman said pensively. "Like the Rosetta Stone, you know."

"Damn the Rosetta Stone and damn that goddam freak," Daisy Fennell said. "Don't we have any way to make the little bastard cooperate?"

Patrice Adcock looked almost amused. "What would you suggest? Threaten his life, maybe? But he isn't worrying about dying. He thinks he'd get brownie points with the Scarecrows if he died doing something in their service-like refusing to translate for the Docs."

Technology Analysis, NBI

Agency Eyes Only

Subject: "Virtual energy" and tachyon transport

According to quantum theory there is no such thing as a "vacuum" anywhere in the universe. Everywhere-at the heart of a star, on a planet like the Earth, even in the great "voids" between clusters of galaxies-every volume of space, however tiny, is constantly seething with a boil of "virtual" subatomic particles, particles which appear spontaneously, interact with others, are mutually destroyed by canceling each other's charges out and disappear-so rapidly that they are impossible to detect.

But-theory suggests-they don't always disappear. In fact, the birth of the universe in the "Big Bang" can be best understood as a sudden explosion of such particles which somehow are not annihilated, but survive, and increase- and, indeed, become everything we see in the vast universe around us.

Is it possible to reproduce this process artificially? If so, can the generated particles be the ones needed to create particular atoms? And, if this is also so, can this be the way the Scarecrows' tachyon transporter builds the raw materials to make its copies?

"Who said anything about dying? He can feel pain, can't he?" "Oh, no," Patrice said, shaking her head. "Put that idea right out of your mind. I've told you. He's too fragile for us to beat it out of him. You know we actually killed a Dopey, back when we were captives. Didn't take much, either. Martin Delasquez fell on him, and he died." She thought for a moment, then added, "That time it seemed not to have mattered particularly, because another Dopey popped up right away. But now-"

Hilda knew the answer to that. Now they had only the one Dopey, with no magical mystery transporter box to create another if they wasted this one. Hilda appreciated the difficulties of the situation. She appreciated, too, the fact that Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell was here to carry the can. That was a break. If anyone was going to be associated with a failed enterprise, she didn't want it to be herself.

She became aware that her aide was clutching the back of her chair. "What is it, Tepp?"

The woman looked even more haggard than usual, her face strained, her demeanor peculiar-in fact, Hilda thought, Tepp had been acting even more than ordinarily strange ever since they got there. "Nothing, ma'am," she said thickly.

Hilda glared at her. "Nothing, my ass. Are you going to puke again?"

Tepp seemed frightened. "Oh, no, ma'am, I don't think so. But that smell-"

Hilda sighed, resigned. The time had come. She said crisply, "You're relieved. Get out of here. Go back to Arlington for reassignment."

"Ma'am!"

"Go!" Hilda ordered, and turned her back on her former aide. Not for long. When she heard a pathetic throat-clearing from behind her, she turned back, now angry. "You still here?"

Tepp held her ground. "Yes, ma'am. I'm going, ma'am, but there's one thing-"

"For Christ's sake, what now?"

"It's my aunt. I promised I'd come and see her tonight, and I didn't get a chance to call her before we left the headquarters. She's sick. If I could just have permission to use a phone for a minute-"

Hilda shrugged. It wasn't exactly giving permission, but it wasn't a flat rejection, either. As Tepp hurriedly left the little viewing room Hilda didn't even look after her. Merla Tepp was now a dead issue.

She turned to Patrice Adcock. "Didn't Dopey say anything at all when you told him about all the bugs?"

"He was delighted to hear about it," Patrice said sourly. "He asked me half a dozen times if we were sure it was the same kind of bug I had. The Docs were doing their best to ask him what was going on. He mewed something at them, but then he paid no attention to them at all. Then he said to me, 'You'll see,' and went back to not talking. I took that as a threat. I think-"

"Wait a minute," Makalanos said suddenly. He turned to the linguistics crew. "Did you get that? See if you can check what he said to the Docs right then, the first thing after Dr. Adcock told him about the bug."

"Hey," said the linguist, coming alive. "Good point! It might help." And indeed it might have, but not right then. That was when the interrogation came to an abrupt halt, and it was Merla Tepp who halted it.