Frederik Pohl Other End of Time

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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
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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
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Freder...n%201%20-%20The%20Other%20End%
20Of%20Time.txt (36 of 122) [1/15/03 6:25:15 PM]
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0Other%20End%20Of%20Time.txt 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?"
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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." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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