Eschaton 01 The Other End of Time Read online

  "An alien?"

  She looked pensive. "Probably not a living one, no. At least I hope not. More likely some sort of automated probe. But definitely some sort of technology that is not terrestrial in origin."

  A quick course correction spun their chairs around; the old lady grimaced and closed her eyes. Evidently she had finished her story.

  But Dannerman hadn't finished thinking about it. It sounded wholly preposterous, but this apparently sane woman seemed to give it credence. He cleared his throat. "Dr. Artzybachova?" And when she opened her eyes again, "I can see that new technology might be worth a lot of money. But what do you do with it when we find it?"

  "If we find it. But that I cannot say until we see it, of course. That is what I am along for, me and my instruments." She tapped one of the boxes with a toe.

  "I was wondering about them," he said.

  She smiled. "Of course. Did you think I could examine what we find-whatever we find-by smell, perhaps? Although it may be that none of these instruments will be of any use, since we have no data on what might be there."

  "But you must have some idea-"

  She raised her hand amiably. "But, Mr. Dannerman-Dan, may I? And please call me Rosaleen; it was a notion of my mother's when I was born. She was much taken with the wife of your American president and gave me a name as close to hers as she dared." She paused, then finished her thought. "But, Dan, I really don't know what will be on Starlab, you see. I only have hopes. I hope that there will be some useful-looking devices which I can remove and bring back for analysis. Do you know the term 'reverse engineering'? For that, so that perhaps they can be copied in some way. Will that happen? I don't know. Will there be anything alien in Starlab at all? I don't know even that much, either; it is all hopes. It is quite possible that, even if there is something there, it will be so unfamiliar that I will not dare to try to remove it. Or there may be nothing at all. In either case, we will have done all this for nothing."

  He looked at her. "Seems like a pretty long shot, the way you describe it."

  "Ah," she said softly, "but think of the payoff. If we win our bet there will be unimaginable benefits, and not just in money. I would not have left my comfortable summer place in Ukraine just for the money, only for the chance to learn." She looked pensive for a moment, then smiled. "Whatever it is, we'll find out for sure when we get aboard. Now, Dan, if you'll excuse me, we should be coming around toward North America again and I'd like to check the uplinks for news."

  Dannerman must have drifted off to sleep again, in spite of everything, because the next thing he remembered was Jimmy Lin's cheery hail. The astronaut was swinging weightlessly toward them, hand over hand, pausing to float in space upside down by Dannerman. "So how do you like micrograv?" he asked amiably; then, glancing at Artzybachova and lowering his voice: "Tell you one thing, if my great-great had ever gone into orbit he would've had to write three or four new books. You don't know what screwing is until you try it weightless."

  Rosaleen turned to him, her arms still waving in the graceful flow of tai chi. Ignoring the astronaut's remarks, she asked, "Are we getting close to Starlab?"

  "Not too far. That's why I'm going to the head now; if we have to wear those damn suits I won't want to need to pee. I recommend the same to you two, soon's I'm through. But don't stay out of your seats any longer than you have to, okay? And sing out when you're both strapped in again. The general claims he ranks me, so he's doing most of the piloting, and he has a heavy hand with the delta-vees."

  Dannerman's bladder was signaling to him with increasing urgency, but he didn't get his turn for a while. He deferred to Rosaleen Artzybachova out of politeness, and then to General Delasquez because he wasn't given much choice when the pilot came back and pushed his way past; then to his cousin out of politeness again. By then his fidgeting was becoming conspicuous. Dr. Artzybachova, observing it, did her best to distract him. "Have you seen?" she inquired, reaching over to adjust his screen. It was displaying something tiny and oddly shaped, but when she turned up the magnification it became a satellite with antennae and solar collectors poking out in all directions.

  "Starlab?" he ventured.

  That amused her. "No, of course not. It is simply a dead old orbiter, I think a military one, and probably Russian; but it is interesting, is it not?"

  Oh, it was interesting enough, as a souvenir of the days when wars were actually fought between nations, instead of between legions of police on one side, and on the other a horde of criminals and a few squads of slippery terrorists. He cast a longing look at the toilet, but Pat was still locked inside. "Well," he said to the Ukrainian woman, forcing jolliness into his tone, "was there any interesting news in the uplinks?" Dutifully she rehearsed the principal items for him: England's MI-5 had caught a dozen Welsh freedom fighters redhanded in possession of nuclear materials; some Sikhs at the Marseilles airport had machine-gunned Moslem pilgrims en route to Mecca; and in Washington the President had finally announced the death of his kidnapped press secretary. Hilda would be going crazy, he thought; but he didn't think it long. The door to the toilet was opening, and he was already unbuckling himself to go there.

  Pat was looking baffled when she finally came out, and when Dannerman got his chance at the toilet he saw why. The writing on the cubicle wall wasn't graffiti. It was instructions, a complete tech manual to the use of a micrograv toilet, and it took a bit of doing. As he was finishing up with the complex flush maneuver he heard squawking from outside. He hurried back to his seat, Rosaleen waving him on; and there, spinning slowly on the screen, was an orbiter that he recognized because he had spent so much time studying its pictures. There was no doubt about it. Just disappearing from view between the solar-collector struts and a communications dish was the blister that might, or might not, have come from outer space. The construction was immense.

  "So that's Starlab," he said.

  "Of course it is," Rosaleen said fretfully. "And, look, the optical mirror has been left uncovered all this time-who knows how much damage it's taken from microjunk impacts?"

  "There's a little ship attached to the side," Dannerman observed.

  "Yes, the ACRV-the Assured Crew Rescue Vehicle. It was supposed to take crew back to the Earth in an emergency, but poor Manny Lefrik never got a chance to use it."

  "Manny Lefrik?" Memory clicked the name into place: the astronomer who had died on Starlab. "Did you know him?"

  She sighed. "Of course I knew him. Very well, in fact, and on this very satellite; Jimmy was quite right about making love in microgravity." And then, noting the expression on his face, "Oh, Dan! Can you not believe that I was not always a million years old? But buckle yourself in quickly; there will be much maneuvering now. Hurry!"

  She was right about the maneuvering. Docking was tricky, with a lot of swearing in three languages from the pilots up ahead as they jockeyed the spacecraft to its port. But then there was a faint metallic crunch and a shudder, and a cry of satisfaction from Pat Adcock. The Clipper had mated with Starlab.

  Beside him, Rosaleen Artzybachova was busily removing the containment straps from her instrument cases. "Let me help you," Dannerman offered.

  She hesitated. "Yes, perhaps it would be better if you took one. But do be careful with it!"

  "Stay put, you people," Delasquez called from up front. "We're checking the life support."

  But Starlab's systems were apparently working, even after all these years; the internal pressure and. temperature were all right-a bit chilly, maybe, Jimmy Lin suggested, but they wouldn't need the suits. ("Thank God," Rosaleen muttered gratefully. "I hate trying to get in and out of those things.") Even the lights were working-some of them, anyway. Enough.

  Then the arguments started. Pat wanted somebody to stay behind in the Clipper, preferably one of the pilots. "For Christ's sake, why?" Jimmy Lin snarled.

  Just in case.

  "Just in case, screw that. Nothing's going to happen here, and anyway Dannerman can stay on board if
you want him to. I'm going in."

  And he did, Pat right behind him; even encumbered with one of the instrument boxes Rosaleen Artzybachova squirmed ahead of Delasquez, who was angrily stuck with going through the shutdown checklist. In spite of Lin's suggestion, Dannerman was not far behind. As he squeezed through the docking port, tugging his own massive toolbox, he heard Rosaleen's shocked voice-"Do your mother! Everything's all different."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dan

  It wasn't what he had expected. He hadn't expected Starlab to be so warm, but it was. That was passive heating, Rosaleen said, only sunlight. He certainly hadn't expected it to stink. But it did, a rancid, pervasive odor, part chemical, part almost like cinnamon. Was it the decaying body of the abandoned astronomer? Not likely. It wasn't really a spoiled-meat smell, and besides the mortal remains of the lost Manny Lefrik must have long since finished all the decay that was possible to him.

  But that was not the greatest shock. Rosaleen Artzybachova had been right. It was all different. The views of the Starlab interior he had studied displayed gray metal cabinets, sunshine-yellow and warm red walls, patterned wall hammocks. Those things were still here, most of them, but to them had been added objects that the schematics had never displayed: green-flecked lumps of transparent matter, like lime Jell-O, with glittering sparks of gold and diamond light flickering within it; a great copper-colored pillar, six-sided, that gave out perceptible warmth; a huge cupboard sort of thing with a door that slowly swung closed when Dannerman tried to peer into it-things for which he had no easy name. There had been structural changes, too. Even some of the walls were gone. The partitioned space of the original had been opened up, and here and there, all about, stuck at crazy angles from the remaining walls, were the machines that were like nothing Dannerman had ever seen before. The more he looked the stranger they got. He saw some that were palely luminous, some velvet black; they were rounded or jagged-edged, some with brightly glowing dots on the surface that flickered and changed as he watched, some faintly crackling or humming. None of them looked normal.

  "Jesus," he said. "I guess you were right, Pat. That's not any human stuff."

  Pat's face was glowing in triumph. "Effing well right it isn't, Dan-Dan! It's alien. And it's ours!"

  "But what do those things do?"

  "What's the difference? My God, Dan," she said happily, reaching out to caress the pinkly glowing surface of one of the machines, "once we get this stuff back and figure out how it works-can you imagine what it'll be worth? We'll make a bundle out of this."

  "If we can move it," Rosaleen Artzybachova muttered, trying to fasten her instrument box to a handhold on the wall while, like everyone else, she was distractedly staring at everything around her. "Pat, I recommend you do not touch anything until I have had a chance to study it. The rest of you, too."

  Pat pulled her hand back; beside her, Jimmy Lin was doing the same thing. "What's the problem?" he asked.

  "How do I know what problem there is? Perhaps there is no problem at all, or perhaps if you touch it it will fry you to a crisp. If you want to experiment I suppose it is your right, but I would prefer that you help me."

  "Me, too?" Dannerman asked, trying to keep his own instrument box from bumping into anything; in the micrograv environment it weighed nothing, but its mass made it hard to handle.

  "Oh, Dan," Rosaleen sighed, "what help could you be? At least the others have some experience with instrumentation. No. Go and explore."

  "I'll go with him," Pat said suddenly.

  "You also want to be a tourist? And, General Delasquez, is that what you are indicating, too, with that scowl? Well, why not? If there are too many unskilled helpers here it will be worse than none at all, so go. Look for old Manny's body; perhaps we can give it a decent burial in space while we are here."

  "And maybe get rid of some of the stench," Martin Delasquez growled.

  The old woman ignored him. "Or perhaps you will meet some interesting stranger, and then you will come back and tell us. If you can."

  A few meters down the main transverse Pat stopped and consulted a scrap of paper from her pocket. The general gave her a suspicious look, but brushed past her to go off on his own. "Let him go," Pat muttered without looking up. "Maybe he'll see something we don't. Let's see, we follow this transverse to the second junction-"

  Dannerman drew the obvious inference. "You're looking for something specific."

  She glanced after Delasquez's disappearing form and lowered her voice. "Right you are, Dan-Dan. I want to see where that blister was attached, from the inside. Come on, I think I know where I'm going."

  The way you got around in the effectively gravitationless Starlab was by pulling yourself along by the handholds spaced along the walls, or by hurling yourself like a slow-moving projectile from point to point. Neither Dannerman nor Pat was up to projectile standards, so progress was slow.

  They didn't speak. Pat was concentrating on the chart in her hand, Dannerman thinking about the implications of Rosaleen's final remark. If artifacts had been added to Starlab, as they had, someone had to have put them there. And it was at least a reasonable possibility that that someone was still there.

  Dannerman kept his eyes peeled as they drifted along the passages. Ears, too, but there wasn't much to hear. Even the chatter between Rosaleen and Jimmy Lin became inaudible after the first few turns. Apart from the cryptic noises that came from the alien machines, the only sounds Dannerman heard came from Pat and himself.

  When Starlab's designers planned the satellite they allowed for weeks or months of occupancy by its observers. That meant they had to make arrangements for living quarters. So they did, but they were not lavish. The residents weren't given rooms. What they had-Dannerman perceived as he pulled himself through the square-sided passages of the observatory-was no more than coffinlike cubicles. The things were doorless, though fitted with stiff fabric panels to provide at least the illusion of privacy, and they were small-smaller than any broom closet Dannerman had ever seen, and not much more elaborate.

  There was more of Starlab than he had expected. For Pat, too, it seemed-when, twice, she paused to look uncertainly around and when, once, she had to retrace her steps for half a dozen meters. Dannerman assumed she was lost, and the way she muttered to herself made that assumption plausible. "But it ought… ought to be… right here, "she murmured, touching a bare spot on the corridor wall; and then, "Hell! It isl"

  Is what? Dannerman asked, but only silently. He didn't have to say it out loud because Pat was already demonstrating the answer. Her fingers traced the lines that made up a hexagonal shape on the wall; the lines were new, bright metal. "They cut a patch out here. Then they entered. Then they welded it up again."

  "Who 'they'?" Dannerman asked.

  She gave him a look of mild surprise. "The people who brought this new stuff aboard, of course."

  "Then where they?"

  There was less surprise this time, but more visible worry. "Yes, that's the question all right, isn't it? Probably there wasn't a living 'they' at all, Dan, just some robot probe machinery."

  Dannerman made a neutral sound. In his view, the word "robot" did not exclude some mean-tempered clanking thing that could be quite as unpleasant to meet as any of the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs. "One thing, though," he said.

  "What?"

  "If all the machinery we've seen came on the thing that looks like a blister-probably from the CLO, I guess-how did it all fit?"

  Pat opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Obviously it was a hard question. The amount of unfamiliar gadgetry in Starlab could easily have filled a dozen objects the size of the blister. Some of them were far too large to have been squeezed through the space traced on the wall, as well.

  "I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe-"

  But whatever the "maybe" was going to be, Dannerman never heard it. She stopped in midsentence, turning toward a sound that came from one of the corridor openings; and so did Dann
erman, his hand on his twenty-shot.

  What appeared in the corridor wasn't an alien. It was General Martin Delasquez-who also had his hand on his gun, and a look of alarm on his face.

  His expression cleared. "Oh, it's only you," he said. "I thought it might be whatever's been eating the corpse."

  "The corpse?" Dannerman repeated.

  "The dead astronomer, Manny something? I found his body."

  "Well, that's not so surprising; we knew that he died here, so his body had to be somewhere around."

  "Sure you did. But did you also know that his head was missing?

  Rats," Rosaleen Artzybachova informed them. "A headless corpse? Of course it is rats. They go wherever human beings go. It is not surprising that some managed to get aboard Starlab somewhere along the line, or that they would mutilate a corpse."

  "And then disappear," Jimmy Lin suggested sardonically.

  "And then die of starvation," she corrected him, "or of plague, or whatever. Or possibly they have not disappeared at all but are still aboard. Rats are excellent at avoiding attention."

  "But-" Pat began, unconvinced.

  "But," Rosaleen overrode her, "in any case they are not our problem. Our problem is merely to detach some of these artifacts and stow them on the Clipper."

  Pat nibbled her lower lip in silence. Martin Delasquez, looking at the single cobalt-colored metal lever that Rosaleen had so far detached, said, "You aren't doing very well at that, are you?"

  Rosaleen Artzybachova swung around to confront him. "You have some criticism? Would you like to do this yourself? No? That does not surprise me. It is much easier for someone like you to complain than to try to understand how these things are interconnected, or what will happen if we separate them."

  "But someone like me," Delasquez said, "does not claim to be an expert on instrumentation. You do, do you not? Isn't that why you are here?"