Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Pat didn't mind the joyous clamor with which Pat Five and Patrice welcomed Rosaleen. Well, didn't really mind it. After all, the three of them had shared a whole harrowing existence as captives of the Scarecrows that she herself had missed. She didn't even mind that Patrice hospitably insisted that Rosaleen come and live with them -"There's plenty of room, now that Pat One isn't here, and I'm afraid the place where you used to live must be long gone by now." That was the first Pat heard that Pat One had been drafted to Camp Smolley to keep Dopey company, along with her own personal Dannerman. There wasn't really what you would call plenty of room, either. In fact, Pat gave up her own little bedroom to Rosaleen; old bones needed a real bed, and so Pat found that she would be sharing a bed with Patrice.

That wasn't the end of the housing problem. There also were the guards. When this Brigadier Morrissey said they would be set free she hadn't mentioned that they would have a Bureau agent keeping them company, three shifts of agents for each of the Pats and for Rosaleen as well, night and day. The agents did their best to stay out of the way, slept each night on futons in the dining room. But there were so many of them.

"On the other hand," Pat Five said, looking at the bright side, "now we don't have to pay a personal bodyguard anymore, do we?"

"Besides," Patrice added, "they're pretty good about lending a hand for the scut work in the Observatory. And we can use all the help we can get."

Pat blinked at her. "For what?"

"For the search for the Scarecrow ship, of course."

"But," Pat said reasonably, "now they know where it is, don't they? I mean, they got a line on it from the transmission, so that's not our job anymore. The need is real telescopes and we don't have any-"

Patrice looked at Pat Five, then shook her head. "Oh, you don't know, do you? There's nothing there. The Scarecrows must've used some kind of relay to send their message, maybe a little drone too small to be picked up. The ship itself is somewhere else, so we're back to square one."

So, like every other observatory in the world, the Dannerman was officially commandeered for the Scarecrow hunt. The whole staff was put to work searching old plates- every plate every telescope in the world had taken, ever since that first observation of the comet-like object that was surely no comet, but the ship that had brought the Scarecrows to Earth's solar system.

Not all of the staff was happy about the new assignments. Gwen Morisaki didn't want to be taken off her Cepheid count, Christo Papathanassiou was, he said, on the very point of a breakthrough in his quanta! approach to cosmology, and he absolutely must have computer time now. Pete Schneyman was worse. He was already glum about Pat coming back-about so many Pats coming back-and reducing him once more to second-in-command (or fifth!), which was probably why he was so irritable when he complained that checking stock images for some serendipitous observation of possible comet-like objects was the kind of thing you turned over to a machine, or, if you didn't want to waste valuable machine time on it, then to some two-for-a-nickel postdoc. The only one who didn't seem to mind was their planetary astronomer, Harry Chesweiler. The solar system was his turf anyway; his only request was that he be allowed to confine his own searching to the plane of the ecliptic, where he might get some useful data for his own studies. Even Janice DuPage, the receptionist, was drawing lines in the sand. She was willing to do what the Pats told her to, especially because it was what the government wanted, but she warned that it better not last longer than a week or so because her vacation was coming up and she wasn't going to miss out on her cruise to the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro… not to mention that it didn't make any sense to treat her like some irreplaceable astronomical expert when, geez, Dr. Adcock, she wasn't really any kind of a real scientist anyway, was she?

To all of them the Pats turned a deaf ear. There would be no exceptions. Everybody, and every computer, was to be totally immersed in the hunt for the Scarecrow scout ship. They even impressed into service the Bureau agents, because even an untrained cop could lend a hand now and then.

In principle, the hunt was simple enough. You looked at a recent picture of a section of the sky-recent being defined as anything in the past couple of years, since the Scarecrow scout had dropped its probe off to leech onto Starlab. You compared it with an older frame of the same area, and what you looked for was to see if there was a dot in the new frame that hadn't been there before. There was nothing to it…

Notes and Comment

Since the time of the Babylonians at least, probably since the days of the Neanderthals, human beings have scanned the night skies for points of light unaccountably moving among the fixed stars. The first of the wanderers-they were called "planeten," in Greek-were the naked-eye planets, from Mercury to Saturn, as well as the brightest "hairy stars" or comets. With the invention of the telescope the number of wanderers multiplied beyond counting: new planets, from Uranus to Pluto; the myriad smaller rocks of the asteroid belt; comets by the thousand that never reached naked-eye brightness. The tally of bits and pieces of rock and snow that swing though space as part of the Sun's gravitational domain grew so huge that professional astronomers hardly bothered to count them anymore, much less give them names… until it became a matter of urgency to find the one faint dot among the anonymous millions that was neither asteroid nor comet, but something quite different, and far more worrying.

– The New Yorker

Except that there were some tens of millions of images that needed to be pulled up out of the world's astronomical archives and examined. Except that there were thousands and thousands of those little dots to be considered, since the space around Earth's Sun was crawling with comets and asteroids and bits of cosmic debris of every sort that were not the Scarecrow scout ship. Except that most of the plates had no precise equivalent and one had to be reconstructed.

The computers did the bulk of the work. They were quite good at taking one image of a quarter-degree square section of, say, the constellation Virgo and manipulating it to an exact match with another plate that included most, but not all, of the same stars. The computers were also quite able to identify a point of light in one that didn't exist in the other. The computers were even then able to sort through the infrared and radio images of the same area, if any existed, to see if there were spectrograms or other data that could identify its composition well enough to reject it as normal or flag it for further investigation.

But then it took a human being to decide about that identification, or to order new observations by some available telescope to clarify the point, and to try to figure out an orbit.

All this effort was bearing fruit-of a sort. Previously unidentified comets were being discovered every few minutes. So were new asteroids, if you could call some of those pebbly car-sized things real asteroids… but the Scarecrow scout ship remained elusive.

rat Adcock did her best to wake early in

the morning. The advantage of that was that you got the chance to jump right into the shower without waiting in line. Time was when one real bathroom and a closet-sized half bath for guests seemed perfectly adequate in the apartment, but that was before the new Pats and the Ukrainian visitor had come to share it.

On the third morning of the regime she missed her turn. Rosaleen had wakened earlier still, and was first in the shower-and the old lady did like to take long, long showers. While Pat Five had already preempted the half bath and showed no sign of coming out of it, either.

Grumpily Pat joined Patrice in the kitchen, putting together coffee and some sort of breakfast. Patrice inclined her head toward the half bath where Pat Five remained closeted. "Morning sickness again, I guess," she said. "Poor baby."

"Yeah, poor baby," Pat said, pouring herself a cup of coffee and taking it into the living room to drink in solitude.

But that was denied her, too, because there was a knock on the door. It was the Bureau guard who had remained outside all night long, and he was letting in a pair of uniformed people Pat couldn't identify. "They're from the United Nations. They claim they have official business with all of you," he said, but keeping one hand on his gun anyway.

The taller of the two pulled out a sheaf of blue folders. "Subpoenas from the United Nations," he said.

Pat giggled. "We already have them," she informed the man, but he shook his head.

"Not these. There's going to be a special committee-of-the-whole session of the General Assembly to look into the Starlab mission, and you're all ordered to testify."

Patrice looked incredulous. "All of us?"

"All of you and about twenty others," the UN man said. "They're even subpoenaing the space people. So brace yourselves for a long day."