Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The bodies had been removed and the blood mopped up-carefully sponged up with sterile plastic pads, actually, at least the thin, pink stuff that had come out of the Docs, because Dr. ben Jayya demanded every atom of it for his endless lab work. Dan Dannerman, on his second wakeup pill, finally got a chance to reassure Anita Herman. When she saw his bandaged head she gasped in shock. He did his best to reassure her. "No, no, I'm fine. It's nothing. Just my car." And had to explain that it was just a little piece that was missing. Reattach it? Well, the Bureau surgeon had talked about that when he got there, he admitted, except that by then they couldn't find enough of it to bother with. Which produced another yelp of horror. "Honestly, it doesn't even hurt," he said, and tried to change the subject. "Have you talked to the people at the Observatory? How are things?"

Things at the Observatory were crazy. Rosaleen Artzybachova was upset; did Dannerman know that the Doc that got killed was the one that had saved her life? And was he sure that Patrice and Pat One were all right? And when-pleadingly-were they going to get out of this lousy place?

"As soon as I can," he promised. "Maybe tomorrow. I don't know. There's doing to be a court of inquiry and they want me to stick around for that. Trouble? No. I'm not in trouble. Nobody thinks Tin to blame; it's Daisy Fennell that's in trouble here, but I have to testify." He cast about for something more cheerful to say, and found it. He grinned at her. "Listen, one good thing. You wanted to know how you could tell us apart? That won't be a problem anymore. I'm Lop-Ear Dannerman now."

She was silent for a moment, thinking about that. Then she sighed. "All right, hon. Tell me one thing. I lave they found out why she did it?"

That was what the whole Bureau was working on at that moment, and their investigation had begun to bear fruit. Tepp's phone call was easily traced, and, since it had been made from a Bureau secure phone, it had been recorded. The receiving party was Mrs. Willa Tepp Borglund, widow lady living by herself in a little house near Roanoke, Virginia; and when the recording was played the conversation was brief and agitated. The actual words between Tepp and her Aunt Billie were trivial enough, but the tones were not. There was an undercurrent of strain and excitement that didn't match the words actually spoken. Well, it was obvious enough to Daisy Fennell. They were talking in code, and the old lady had given her niece the order.

Obvious enough-but too late to be much use.

When the Bureau raided the house of Mrs. Willa Tepp Borglund they found an armory of weapons and an iron-haired, iron-willed old lady who spoke not to them but to her God, praying in whispers every waking moment.

They checked her phones, of course, and found calls to places all over the country. Bureau agents in Wichita and Brooklyn and St. Petersburg and Spokane were pulled away from their smugglers and tax evaders and assembled into raiding parties-two dozen of them in all. It was a massive effort, typical of the wonders the Bureau could accomplish when it put its collective mind to a task.

Of course, it too came a little late.

When Dannerman got to see the deputy director, Pell flicked his screen on and fiddled with the pad until it displayed a picture of a dark-skinned man in a fringed leather jacket, stubbornly silent while he was being questioned by Bureau agents. "I thought you'd like to see," he said grimly. "This guy is one of Willa Borglund's phone chums, runs a souvenir shop in Navajo country. According to his phone records he has been making calls to a Chinese trade commission member at his home. Faxes, mostly, and they're all naturally encoded. But what it looks like to me," he said, sounding somber, "is that the damn nuts are all in touch with each other."

The keys to deciding whether the universe would ever slow down and recollapse were the Hubble constant-the rate at which the universe was presently expanding-and the associated value called "q-zero," or the rate at which that expansion was slowing down.

The best way to measure the Hubble constant was by studying the most distant observable type la supernovae, which, like the Cepheids formerly studied in the same way, could all be assumed to have the same intrinsic brightness, so the dimmer they seemed, the farther they were. The big advantage the supernovae had over the Cepheids was that they were about a million times as bright. Which meant they could be seen, and measured, about a million times as far away; and once you used that fact to estimate their intrinsic brightness and thus their distance, and contrasted that distance with what should be their distance as indicated by the redshift of their light, why then you could tell what the q-zero function said about whether the universe's expansion was slowing down.

There were other things you could measure as well, but they all seemed to give the same answer. The universe was not going to recollapse at all…

So what was it that the Horch and the Scarecrows knew that Earthly astronomers hadn't even guessed?

"So there really was a leak in the Bureau," Fennell breathed.

"Right. And her name was Merla Tepp."

If it was true that Merla Tepp was b tatting out Bureau secrets to half the world, it explained a lot-the way the Ukrainian nut cult knew exactly what the plans were for Rosaleen Artzybachova, for instance; the way the protesters always knew where to go. But it also meant that almost everything the Bureau had done since Merla Tepp arrived for duty, or at least everything that Hilda Morrissey might have known about and let her aide in on, was now compromised. And that meant-

That meant some long, hard weeks or months of cleanup and damage control. All of the Bureau's encryption programs would have to be changed. Every field operation would have to double-check personnel and contacts to see how far the leak had spread. Some good, hard administrative work was called for-the very thing that Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell was good at. As she went looking for Marcus Pell she was planning in her mind the series of orders and directives that would have to go out, this minute…

The deputy director didn't seem to want to hear. He was leaning over an assortment of scraps of paper littering Colonel Makalanos's desk, Adcock and Dannerman by his side. Even Dopey was in the room, waddling triumphantly around with the great bandage on his tail hardly hiding its blazing colors. Pell raised a hand to cut off what Daisy Fennell had to say. "Look at this," he said heavily.

There were a dozen of the sheets of paper, arranged in some sort of order. The first showed a recognizable drawing of the food ship. The second showed the ship again, but this time it was attached to a larger metal capsule. The third showed the capsule detaching itself, underwater, while the food container floated on the surface. The fourth showed that larger capsule with five or six others just like it all around it. The fifth showed one of the larger capsules drawn tiny in one corner, with a balloon encircling a host of aliens-a Dopey, several Docs, but three or four other species Fennell had never seen before.

She looked up, puzzled. "I thought there should have been more to that food ship!" Dannerman was grumbling, while Pat Adcock explained:

"Those other creatures are other races that work for the Scarecrows. The ones that look a little bit like Bashful? I think they're warriors."

"Warriors?" Fennell rocked back on her heels, regarding the deputy director. "Does all this mean what I think it means?"

"What I think it means," Pell said heavily, "is that some of their terminals came to Earth along with the food, and now they're making more of them-underwater, where we're going to have a hard time finding them." He shook his head. "We didn't understand those other drawings he made for us, did we? He wasn't thinking about the bugs in those people from the ships. He was trying to tell us that the Scarecrows had their people on Earth already, all around us."