The Other End of Time Page 9

  Jarvas was predictable. As soon as he had escorted his charges back from lunch he made a beeline for the gun locker, then for a cubicle in the men's room.

  Ten minutes later Dannerman knocked on the lintel of the office where Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin was conferring with Pat Ad-cock. "Excuse me," he said. "Jimmy?-Commander Lin, I mean? I hate to bother you, but Mick Jarvas is acting kind of funny out here. He's a pretty big guy, and I wonder if you could give me a hand with him."

  That brought them both to the doorway, where they gazed incredulously at Jarvas. Who was dreamily waltzing up and down the corridor, pinching the ass of Rosaleen Artzybachova in passing, grabbing unsuccessfully at the breast of Janice DuPage. Rosaleen was laughing; Janice was only annoyed. As he neared Pat Adcock's office she found her voice. "Come in here, Jarvas!" she commanded.

  "Sure thing, sweet buns," he said amiably. "Hi, Danny. How's it going, China boy?"

  Pat looked bewilderedly at Dannerman as he was closing the door behind them. "What happened?"

  Dannerman shrugged. "My guess, he must've got his hands on some extra-powerful dope. You never know what they're going to be selling you on the street."

  The bewildered expression changed to anger. "Crap! Mick promised me he doesn't do drugs anymore. I couldn't have a doper for a bodyguard."

  "Oh? Well, why don't we just ask him to take his shirt off?"

  "Aw, Dan," Jarvas said, suddenly pouting. "I thought you and me were friends."

  Pat looked from one to the other, then made her decision. "Do what he says, Mick."

  "I don't have to. I got pers'nal privacy rights, don't I?"

  She turned to Dannerman. "Take it off him, Dan."

  Dannerman looked at Jimmy Lin, who spread his hands; evidently personal combat wasn't one of his specialties. It wasn't something Dannerman would have sought with somebody like Mick Jarvas, either; but the former kick-boxer was giggling. Apart from good-naturedly pushing at Dannerman's hands he hardly resisted as Dannerman pulled the tabs of his shirt loose, zip, and slid it down over his back.

  On Jarvas's rib cage, just under his right armpit, there was one of Hilda's inconspicuous, flesh-colored patches.

  Jimmy Lin chuckled. "Well, what do you know? He really is mellowed out."

  "Oh, shit," said Pat, too disappointed to be furious. "What am I going to do now? He can't escort me in that condition."

  Jarvas gave her a happy grin. "Course I can, hon. Little joy never hurt me. Just makes my reflexes sharper and all."

  He might as well not have been in the room; Pat, biting her lip, didn't even look at him. "I was counting on him," she told the air.

  It was the cue Dannerman had been waiting for, but Jimmy Lin forestalled him. "If you need a new bodyguard, Pat," he offered, "what's the matter with your cousin? He's handy enough with his fists, you tell me."

  "Danny? For a bodyguard!" Pat Adcock stared at him, then at Dannerman. "I guess you're big enough," she said thoughtfully. "What kind of gun do you carry?"

  "Twenty-shot spray with quick-change clips. Same as always."

  "Are you sure you know how to use it? Oh, right, you were rotsy in college, weren't you?"

  "Protsy, actually."

  She sighed and made up her mind. "I don't really have much of a choice, do I? All right, Dan-Dan, I guess you're about due for a promotion. How would you like be an astronaut for a While?"

  Not much work got done in the observatory that afternoon, either. At least not by Pat Adcock and her spacefarers. As soon as they'd sent Jarvas, sniveling, back to his home in the company of one of the larger postdocs, Pat declared herself through for the day. "Take me home, Dan. I've got to pack. You better take an overnight bag, too."

  "Sure thing, Pat. I'm new at this, though. What sort of stuff do you pack to go into space?"

  "How do I know? I've never done it before either. I guess they'll give us all the space stuff we need at the Cape, but we'll be gone five days, according to the mission plan, so take whatever personal things you think you'll need. And, oh, yes, don't forget your gun."

  "You're expecting trouble?"

  She didn't answer. Just, "Don't forget, I want you back at six A.M. to get us to the airport."

  Six o'clock, Dannerman thought dismally on the ride up to Pat's Yorktown condo. That meant getting up not much after four; it was a long way from Rita's Riverside Drive place to York-town. But at least he could make it an early night.

  As soon as he had reported his success to Colonel Hilda Morrisey he went looking for his landlady. "I'm taking your advice and getting out of town for a while, Rita," he told her.

  "Hey, great! Where are you going?"

  "Florida," he said, and stopped her lecture on how nasty the Floridians were since they got their own government by taking out his payment machine. "I'm not sure how long I'll be gone, so I'd better pay a week or so in advance. I don't want you throwing my stuff out into the street."

  "Oh, Dan! I wouldn't do that," she protested, "not even if you were away for even a month."

  "It won't be that long," he assured her. "I'm sure of that."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dan

  The captain's voice woke Dannerman as the plane was making its approach to the Jose Marti airport outside the Cape. He hadn't intended to sleep. He hadn't realized he actually was sleeping until he woke up, saw the red light on the seat back before him to show that the airbag had just been armed and saw Pat Adcock stirring beside him. "Look there," she said, yawning as she gazed out the window. "That's our Clipper." There it was, gleaming ceramic white, forty meters tall, with work trucks and people busy around it.

  So it wasn't a dream. It was real. That was the ship that was going to lift Dannerman and the others right off the solid planet they had been born to, and all those childish fantasies would become fact.

  "Are you scared?" his cousin asked him, giving him a searching look.

  "Oh, no. Well, not really scared. Are you?"

  "Certainly not," she said. "Going into space isn't what worries me. Uncle Cubby brainwashed me pretty well, you know; it was his dream, only he never could pass the physical to make it on his own, and I guess he infected me. That's not what's bothering me."

  He looked at her with new interest. "But something else is?"

  "Well, yes." She squirmed around to look back at Jimmy Lin and Rosaleen Artzybachova, in their own seats a few rows back. "For one thing, I don't know if I can trust Lin," she said moodily as she straightened again. "Delasquez, either. That's why I want you along, Dan. Keep an eye on those guys while we're up there."

  "But they're the pilots you picked," he said reasonably.

  She shrugged. "I had to take what I could get. Just be careful about them, okay?" She peered up and down the length of the plane. "Do you suppose it's too late to go to the can?" she asked.

  It was. The stews were cruising the aisle, checking seat belts and picking up empty glasses. He said consolingly, "We'll be on the ground in a moment."

  "Yes? And then what?"

  He said, surprised, "Then there'll be a chance to get to the ladies' room right away."

  She gave him a pursed-lips look. "That's right, you've never been in Florida before, have you?"

  He hadn't understood what Pat had meant by that, but as soon as they were off the plane it became clear. The passengers were not permitted to step off the plane and go freely about their business. The passengers were immediately herded into long lines for customs inspection- well, it wasn't called "customs," exactly, since Florida wasn't really an exactly independent country, however determinedly they insisted on their own laws and practices. The processing was just.is thorough, though, and the first step was that one of the agents collected everybody's carry weapons. Dannerman hated to give up his twenty-shot, but all the more seasoned Florida travelers seemed to take it as a matter of course. The agent tagged each gun and gave the owner a claim check-"So you can redeem it, senor, when you leave our beautiful Free State." Then another set of agents searched methodi
cally through everyone's bags and pockets. For a moment Dannerman thought they might even insist on a body-cavity search as well, but it didn't come to that. It was bad enough, though; the inspector gasped in outrage when she patted him down and found his ankle weapon.

  She held the gun in her hand and gave him a severe look. "This is contraband weapon," she announced. "It is conceal. This is not permit in the Free State of Florida. It must be confiscate." She beckoned to a state policeman, who patted his own gun to make sure it hadn't fallen out of its holster as he strolled toward them.

  The cop waved all four of the party over to a little quarantine ghetto while the customs agent and her supervisor debated the matter in Spanish. Pat was irate. Rosaleen Artzybachova waited patiently for a resolution to the problem. Jimmy Lin showed amusement. "Danny, Danny," he said reproachfully, "don't you know any better than that? When you go to Florida you leave your own gun at home. Nobody brings a gun to Florida. You don't need it. You can always pick up another on the street-there's not a block in the state where you can't buy anything you want."

  Dannerman didn't answer. He did know better; he just hadn't wanted to part with his service special.

  "It's all right," Pat announced, waving in relief to a tall man who had appeared at the customs desk. Although he was wearing a different uniform this time, gleaming dress whites with clusters of ribbons at his chest, Dannerman recognized General Martin Delasquez. He spoke rapidly to the customs agents, then approached them, looking grave.

  "What a pity, Dr. Adcock," he said to Pat, ignoring Dannerman. "Your man has attempted to break our law. Therefore he is forbidden admission to our state. However, I believe that we can avoid the legal penalties. I have arranged that he will be placed on the first return flight to New York, and the rest of you may proceed to the staging area."

  "Oh, no!" Pat Adcock exclaimed. "I want him with me."

  Delasquez shook his head politely. "But it is impossible, you see?" he said reasonably.

  "Maybe not," Dannerman said. He had been watching Delasquez carefully. The general looked at him for the first time.

  "You spoke?" he asked, his tone frosty.

  "Yes, I did, General. You know what I bet? I bet you have enough authority to get us all through these bureaucrats, don't you, General?"

  Delasquez said coldly, "It is apparent that you do not understand the gravity of your situation."

  "I bet I do. For instance, I bet I know what would happen next. I bet while I was waiting for the next plane the cops would ask me a lot of questions. I wouldn't want to lie to them, either. And if the subject of our first meeting came up I'd have to tell them anything they wanted to know-you know, like the articles I delivered to you in New York?"

  Delasquez did not respond for a moment. He studied Dannerman in silence, then turned to Pat Adcock. "Who is this man?" he demanded.

  She shrugged. "He's my cousin."

  "And do you know what trouble this could cause?" She didn't answer, only shrugged again. Then Delasquez smiled. "Well, what harm can it do? It is only a technical violation, after all. I think I can persuade the authorities to let you pass."

  "And get our guns back for us, too, please," Dannerman added.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dan

  The flight started tamely. The takeoff thrust was not much worse than some of the high-speed scramjets Dannerman had taken to cross an ocean, but the Clipper was still being an airplane then.

  He hardly noticed when the takeoff jets switched over to the higher-speed contoured flow, but then the time came when the scram cut over to rocket thrust, and he noticed that, all right. That was real acceleration. He was squashed into his seat for four long minutes. His belly sagged, his head drooped, he realized for the first time that even his eyeballs had weight on their sockets. Then he fell forward against his chest straps as the thrust cut; he was suddenly weightless, and they were on their way.

  It was about then that Dannerman realized that space travel took a long time to happen... and that while it was happening there was nothing much to do. What he wanted to do was to get out of his seat and roam around the Clipper, but he had been warned against that. He quickly saw why. Every course correction brought another jolt, not nearly as violent as the first but unpredictable for either time or direction. Then the gimbaled seats tilted, the motors roared, and you were lucky if you didn't bite your tongue or bash your head.

  A window, at least, would have been nice. He didn't have one. All he had was the tiny TV screen on his armrest, but all it showed was black, empty space. By his side Rosaleen Artzybachova sat with her eyes placidly closed, maybe even napping; well, spaceflight was nothing new to her. She could not have been comfortable; her feet rested on a pair of gray metal boxes, lashed to the seat supports, and so her knees were squeezed almost into her belly. Just ahead, but out of his sight, Pat was in the third-pilot seat, trying to talk to Delasquez and Lin at the controls; Dannerman couldn't make out the words, and if the pilots answered he couldn't hear.

  In the seat next to him Artzybachova opened her eyes and gazed at him. "Are you all right?" When he nodded, she asked politely, "And how are you enjoying spaceflight? Is it what you expected?"

  "Well, no. Not exactly. I thought we'd have to go through more training-"

  She laughed. "Like high-G conditioning in those awful old centrifuges? Drills for emergency actions? Thank heaven, we don't do that anymore. We don't wear spacesuits, either."

  "I noticed that." What Dannerman himself had on was the slacks and jacket he had put on that morning. Dr. Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin were wearing one-piece coveralls, General Delasquez the combat fatigues of the Florida Air Guard.

  Dr. Artzybachova was still being grandmotherly. "Are you hungry? I brought some apples and I believe there are other things on board."

  "Hungry? No."

  "And you don't have to pee or anything? You should've gone before we took off."

  "I don't," he said shortly, but she had put the idea in his mind. He quelled it, for there was an opportunity here to be taken. "Dr. Artzybachova? Can I ask you something? Is there something, well, peculiar about what we're doing?"

  She gave him an amused look, pale eyebrows raised. "Define 'peculiar.' "

  He chose his words with care. "This is supposed to be a simple repair mission, right? But there are all these rumors-"

  "What kind of rumors?"

  He spread his hands. "Something about some kind of radiation from Starlab that wasn't supposed to be there? I don't understand that very well, Dr. Artzybachova; I was an English major. And something about those messages with the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs?"

  "You are very skilled at listening to rumors, Mr. Dannerman." It wasn't a compliment.

  He pressed on. "I get the idea that that's really what this mission is about. Something alien on Starlab? Something that might be worth a lot of money. Pat wouldn't talk to me about it-"

  "That is not surprising," the old lady observed.

  "I guess not. Will you?"

  Dr. Artzybachova studied his face for a moment, considering, while the Clipper rolled itself into a new position. "I suppose it could do no harm now. In a little while you will see what we all see-whatever that turns out to be. Or it will turn out that there is nothing worth seeing, and then we will simply try to determine what repairs might make Starlab function as originally designed again. So," she said, sighing, "yes, the rumors are true. Fifteen months ago your cousin's observatory detected a burst of synchrotron radiation from Starlab. No one else appeared to observe it, but then no one else was actively trying to reestablish communications with the orbiter. So she called me at my dacha. I flew at once to New York. We examined all the logs of instrumentation changes and, no, there simply was nothing on Starlab that could have produced that emission. So we performed a data check."

  Dannerman pricked up his ears; this was new. "What kind of data check?"

  "A fortunate coincidence: the Japanese were getting ready to replace one of their old weather
satellites, so they did a census of everything in orbit-to select a safe slot for their satellite, you see. One of their instrument people was a former student of mine. From her I got all their obs of astronomical satellites- including Starlab. When we massaged the data it became clear that there was a steady flux of very low-level radiation coming from it, in several bands-none of it compatible with the presumed dead-board status of the satellite. In addition, optically, there was a blister on the side of the satellite that didn't belong there. Finally, just recently we got another indication. There was a comet-like object-"

  "Yes, I know about the comet-like object."

  She regarded him thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose you do."

  "And what all this adds up to?"

  "Oh, Mr. Dannerman," she said, sounding less patient, "I have no doubt that you know that, too. All the evidence taken together, there is strong reason to believe that something extraterrestrial has established itself on Starlab."

  "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."