Frederik Pohl - The Siege of Eternity

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BOOKS BY FREDERIK POHL
BIPOHL
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Drunkard's Walk
Black Star Rising
The Cool War
The HEECHEE SAGA
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
The ESCHATON SEQUENCE
The Other End of Time
The Siege of Eternity
Homegoing
Mining the Oort
Narahedla Ltd.
Pohlstars
Starburst
The Way the Future Was
(memoir)
The World at the End of Time
Jem
MIDAS World
Merchant's War
The Coming of the Quantum Cats
The Space Merchants (with
C. M. Kornbluth)
Man Plus
Chernobyl
The Day the Martians Came
Stopping at Slowyear
The Voices of Heaven
With Jack Williamson:
The Starchild Trilogy
Undersea City
Undersea Quest
Undersea Fleet
Wall Around a Star
The Farthest Star
Land's End
The Singers of Time
With Lester del Rey:
Preferred Risk
The Best of Frederik Pohl (edited by Lester del Rey)
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (editor)
Frederik Pohl
SIEGE OF ETERNITY
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either
fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY Copyright (c) 1997 by Frederik Pohl
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First Edition: November 1997 Printed in the United States of America 0987654321
With affection and gratitude this book is dedicated to my shipmates on the schooner Rembrandt van
Ryjn, who know why.
THE
SIEGE OF ETERNITY
BEFORE
THE WORLD WAS GOING ABOUT ITS EVERYDAY BUSINESS WHEN something happened that was
quite strange.
For one part of the world, that everyday business it was going about amounted to nothing more than
watching its television screens. Some of the world's people gazed at a prizefight in Kenya, some
watched cop shows and soap operas in the Americas, a tiny fraction sat somnolent before the finals
of the English National snooker matches. When those programs were interrupted for a news bulletin
that part of the world was seriously annoyed.
The bulletin that interrupted their programs quickly made the viewers forgive the annoyance-at
least, it did for that fraction of those viewers who believed it was real. The bulletin said that
a Genuine message from space had been received on a seldom used radio frequency. Most of the
message was indecipherable. A small portion was easier to decode and it turned out to be a crude
form of video. Before long the simple animated drawing it displayed filled all the world's
screens.
The animated sequence started with a dark screen, except for one tiny pinpoint of intense
brilliance. Then that spot exploded. Smaller, less brilliant spots of light flew in all
directions. That runaway expansion gradually slowed. Then it stopped entirely and reversed
itself as all the spots, first slowly, at increasing velocity, fell back to the center of the
screen.
That was it. That was all there was.
As entertainment, it was pretty poor stuff. But, after all, it did come from some off-Earth
source. The people at the radio telescopes sure of that; so the scientists and the newsmakers
began to try to figure out what the cartoon meant. Their best guess was that it represented a
condensed account of the life of the universe: beginning in the Big Bang, expanding as far as that
original impetus would carry it, then recollapsing into the Big Crunch as everything fell back
together again. So said the pundits. But not even they could think of any good reason why some
extraterrestrials would want to tell the human world about it.
However, that wasn't the end of it. A few months later there was another of the same. This one was
somewhat more interesting, too. It had people in it-well, sort of people, at least, though they
were not in any way human ones.
This second message ran a little longer than the first. It started with that same old birth-and-
death-of-the-universe bit, only this time a figure then appeared. The figure looked either comical
or terrifying, depending on how seriously you took it. The creature depicted was as skinny as a
scarecrow, and it had a head with a wide, toothed mouth that grinned like a Hallowe'en pumpkin.
Its "hands" were a forest of fingers, at least a dozen of them on each side; each digit ended in a
menacingly sharp talon, and what the creature was doing with them was pitilessly crushing the
bright coal that had been the universe. It wasn't alone, either. Around it appeared seven other,
smaller figures, each one uglier than the next. One had a beard. One had a stupid smile. One had
half-closed eyes. All were perfectly hideous, by the standards of any ethnic group on Earth.
That was it. A moment later the picture winked out. All that was left was the attempts of the
world's savants (and some of the world's nonsavants, who played it for laughs) to figure out what
it was all about.
Some people, especially the people who made their living as the world's stand-up comics, took it
to be a joke. It didn't take some of the comedians very long to identify the scarecrow as the one
from Oz, and not much longer than that to give Identities to the seven others. They mixed up their
children's classics, to be sure. But the one with the beard they called Doc, the dumbly smiling
one Dopey, the drowsy-eyed one Sleepy: why, they were the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs, though there
was no Snow White anywhere to be found.
Not everyone was amused. The world's terrorist crazies were getting particularly active around
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then, and some people thought the message might have something to do w/'tft that. Others took it
to be a warning of some modern-day Armageddon about to happen, or perhaps an advance notice of the
Second Coming of Christ.
It wasn't any of those things, though. As it turned out, it was a whole lot worse.
CHAPTER ONE
Uptown traffic was terrible and there was an abandoned vehicle on the Henry Hudson Elway at Sixty-
first Street that everybody was afraid to approach until the bomb squad got there. Colonel
Morrisey's driver had to detour all the way over to Broadway. It was snowing enough to slow
everyone down, and the traffic went from terrible to worse.
10 A.M. Traffic Advisory
The New Jersey Turnpike is mined between Exits 14 and
15 southbound. One lane is open during mine-removal activities.
An abandoned car, presumed booby-trapped, is in the
northbound Henry Hudson Elevated Highway at Sixty-first
Street and traffic is diverted.
The Lenni-Lenape Ghost Dance Revengers have declared a free-fire zone within four hundred meters
of the World Trade Center from 4:00 to 4:30 P.M. today.
No other warnings currently in effect.
Fortunately they wouldn't be coming back that way, because a plane would be waiting near the yacht
basin on the river. But the woman who was on her way to arrest, or rearrest, her favorite agent
was getting short-tempered. Her name was Hilda Jeanne Morrisey. She had kept that name unchanged
all her life, even through her two marriages-both of them brief, ancient and (as she now thought)
pretty damn stupid, since there were so many less troublesome ways of having sex. Hilda Morrisey
stood a hundred and sixty centimeters tall and weighed fifty kilograms, give or take a kilo or so.
That weight also had not changed since her long-ago days as a police cadet, although it was true
that it seemed to take more and more effort to keep it so. Her rank in the National Bureau of
Investigation was full colonel. It had taken a lot of work on her part to keep that unchanged,
too. Colonel Morrisey was long overdue for the promotion that the Bureau's higher brass kept
trying to force on her.
The thing about that promotion wasn't that Hilda Morrisey objected to either the higher pay or the
higher rank. What she minded was the consequences. Being promoted one step higher would
automatically move her to a desk in the NBI headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and Hilda hated
desk jobs.
The place where she felt at home was in a communications truck in, say, Nebraska, commanding a
raid on their rad-right religious militias, or flying high over the Sea of Marmara to listen to
the furtive, coded reports of the agent she had run into the Kurdish command post somewhere on the
slopes of Mt. Ararat. Or, for that matter, her present assignment in New York, which was
recruiting bilingual Japanese-Americans to penetrate the car factories in Osaka, who were
apparently violating the trade agreements by using New Guinea-made parts in their allegedly all-
Japanese cars.
Anywhere, in short, but in a desk job. A brigadier's star was hers by right of seniority, but
accepting it would cost her all those fun jobs. True, Bureau policy was "Up or Out," but not for
Hilda. She had been beating that rule for years. When the personnel people got too antsy about her
status they always had to buck the question up to the director himself. Who always said, "Hilda
won't take Up, and she's just too damn good for Out. Give the silly bitch another waiver." And
they always did.
The other thing about Colonel Hilda was that, even at nevermind-how-old, she was still a pretty
neat-looking woman-which is to say one who had very little trouble in attracting any man who
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attracted her. Like, for instance, the man friend of the moment, Wilbur Carmichael, who-once this
distasteful job was complete-she had every intention of giving a call that evening.
But the other thing about those jobs she liked so well was that every once in a while they had a
bad spot. Like the present one, which required her to do something she really hated, namely to
arrest-or rearrest-one of her own.
When they reached the corner of Jim Daniel Dannerman's block Sergeant McEvoy had to slam on the
brakes to avoid hitting the overflow from a minor riot going on. Two sidewalk vendors were having
an argument in the snow. It had got violent. Punches were being thrown, and one of them had
overturned the other's tray of inflation-beating collectibles. Tarot cards and genuine guaranteed
simulated Confederate currency were all over the sludgy, gray-black snow at the curb. The
bystanders had joined in, and two street cops were doing their best to cool everybody down. When
they caught sight of Master Sergeant McEvoy's uniform they hastily cleared a path for the Bureau
van.
In front of Dannerman's apartment building Hilda unbuckled herself and looked over at the
sergeant. "Target status?"
Sergeant McEvoy already had his head down over his instrument panel. "He's back in his room. He
got himself one of those gyro sandwiches at the place on the corner and took it back to his room
to eat."
"I hope he eats fast," Hilda said, stepping out into wet slush.
A little man was waddling hastily toward her. He wore a fleece jacket, a wool cap and an armband
that said Neighborhood Watch and he was shaking of all things, a golf club at her. A golf club!
Obviously one of those nuts who had some sort of airy-fairy objection to carrying a gun like
everybody else. He was belligerent enough for anybody, though. "Move it, lady!" he barked. "No
double-parking today; you got to leave room for the plows to get through." Then, as he caught
sight of the sergeant stepping out of the other side of the van- Sergeant Horace McEvoy, in full
Federal Police Force uniform, big as a house and with his hand on the butt of his shotgun, the man
added, "Oh." He didn't look impressed. He just looked surly, but he backed out of the way.
As Hilda got out of the elevator on Dannerman's floor she saw the landlady peeking at her out of
one of the rooms. Clearly the woman recognized Hilda Morrisey. She didn't say anything, though she
was looking surly, too.
The colonel let herself into Dannerman's room with her own key, and caught him in the act of
taking off his wet socks. He was sober, if unshaved. He didn't look like the agent she had
commanded through a dozen tough assignments, but then no one could look like an agent when he was
wearing a house-arrest radio collar. "Oh, shit, Hilda," he said, wearily but unsurprised. "Don't
you ever knock? I could've been doing something private."
"You don't have anything private anymore, Danno," she told him. "Did you sign that release yet?"
He touched his spy collar. "You know damn well that I didn't."
She nodded, since it was the truth, but only said, "Then put your socks back on. They want you in
Arlington. You can eat your lunch on the plane."
Dannerman didn't ask any questions-not in his room, not in the car that took them to the VTOL pad
by the river, not on the way to Arlington. He chewed away at his cold and congealing lamb sandwich
with full attention. He didn't even ask for anything to drink with it. When the sandwich was all
swallowed and its paper wrappings neatly stowed in the seat back Dannerman closed his eyes. He
kept them that way until the plane circled the Washington Monument, preparing to set down at the
Bureau's pad across the Potomac. Colonel Morrisey approved. It was precisely the way she would
have comported herself if, unimaginably, she had ever found herself in his position.
Hilda Morrisey was as fond of Dannerman as she ever let herself get of any of the field agents she
was charged to run. She certainly didn't spoil them, but they were-well-family. As long as they
remembered that she was the head of their family, with the power to punish or, occasionally,
reward, Hilda gave them her unflinching support and even a little bit of as much as she had to
give in the way of affection. Dannerman, now, had had quite a lot of both. The man was often a
pain in the ass, and irritatingly likely to go off on tangents of his own, and at such times he
needed to be brought back in line. But he generally got the job done.
Hilda's affection for Dan Dannerman wasn't sexual. At least it wasn't exactly sexual, though at
rare times when she had nothing better to do she had let herself daydream a little about Danno as
a stud. She certainly wasn't sexually jealous of him. She knew that he was currently banging some
actress in that little theater group in Coney Island he played around with, plus God knew how many
other previous women, now and then, when he was out in the field-well, God knew, but He wasn't the
only one who knew. So did Hilda, because it was her business to know that sort of thing. She had
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sometimes even felt a little hostility toward the other women she knew Dannerman bedded, like that
Kraut terrorist bimbo who had put him in the hospital. Hilda had to admit she'd enjoyed putting
the cuffs on that one.
Federal Reserve Inflation Bulletin
The morning recommended price adjustment for inflation is set at 0.37%, reflecting an annualized
rate of 266%. Federal Reserve Chairman Walter C. Boettger predicts continuing moderation in the
inflation rate for the next sixty days.
But it didn't pay to think that way about Dan Dannerman. Not only could she not afford to get
sexually involved with anyone in that much deep shit, but he was her property. The Bureau had
strict rules about that. And so did she.
Dannerman opened his eyes at last when the sound of the plane's engines changed. They were
switching to hover mode; they had arrived. While the plane was depositing itself on the landing
pad by the three-story structure that was the visible part of the Bureau's headquarters Hilda
peered outside. Three people were waiting in the cold drizzle. It wasn't until they were out of
the aircraft and Sergeant McEvoy and the two headquarters guards were hustling Dannerman away that
Hilda realized that the third of the waiting men, his face obscured by the rain hood, was Deputy
Director Marcus Pell himself.
Pell didn't offer to shake hands, and Colonel Morrisey didn't bother to salute. "Good to see you
again, sir," she said, electing to be a little more deferential than usual. "Now, unless you've
got something you need me here for, I guess I'll just catch the return flight."
He gave her the smile she specially disliked, the one that said he was about to give her an order
she didn't want to hear. "Not today, Hilda. I want you to sit in on the Ananias team briefing
before we interrogate your boy again."
"Sir! I've got this Japanese car-parts thing-"
"Screw the Japanese car parts. Don't look so unhappy; we've got some lunch for you, if you haven't
eaten yet? Fine. Let's go."
There was no use arguing, but she hesitated. "What about Dannerman?"
"Well, what about Dannerman? He can sweat for a while. Do him good."
The Operation Ananias team had expanded since the last time Hilda visited Arlington. A dozen
people waited in the deputy director's private briefing room, half of them strangers. As promised
there was a small salad and a plate of sandwiches at each place on the blond-oak table, and big
ceramic coffee jugs scattered handily about. Some people were eating, and that was good enough for
her. As soon as she was seated she began to follow their example.
The deputy director, in no hurry to get started, was thoughtfully sipping at a cup of coffee while
keying through his notepad. The men and women around the table were murmuring to each other or
staring into space-except for the woman across the table, who was signaling for Hilda's attention.
It was Pell's vice deputy, Daisy Fennell. She was pretending to scribble with one hand on the palm
of the other, looking at Hilda with a questioningly raised eyebrow. Hilda got the message. She
shook her head: no, Dannerman hadn't signed. Fennell pantomimed a sigh of resignation and went
back to her own notepad.
Hilda chewed methodically (lettuce crisp, good; but whoever had had the idea of putting fruit-
flavored dressing on it needed reeducation) as she sorted out the people on the team. The screen
ID'd the civilians at the table for her and the Bureau personnel were mostly easy: Daisy Fennel,
two of the staff psychologists, the elderly Asian woman who was in charge of electronic
operations. That left one she couldn't quite place; a Bureau man, she was sure, but what was his
specialty?
She got no help from Marcus Pell, either. As he refilled his coffee cup, he said, "Might as well
get going. All you Bureau people know each other, of course, and I guess the rest of you have
introduced yourselves around already. The colonel here is Hilda Morrisey, who has been Agent
Dannerman's keeper. Hilda, this is Dr. Xiang-li Hou, from the Naval Observatory-" And went around
the table, repeating what the screen had already said. The stout black woman in the paisley dress
turned out to be a cerebrospinal surgeon from Walter Reed; the two youngish women with the
careworn looks were legislative liaison from, respectively, the Senate and the House, and one of
them, surprisingly, had her senator sitting next to her: Alicia Piombero, the black woman from
Georgia. (Not the worst of the senators, Hilda knew, but still the enemy: the damn Congress was
always trying to mess around in Bureau business.) The aggressively trim-looking man with the
obvious hair transplant was a brigadier general from the Pentagon; the one who looked like a
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prosperous corporation lawyer was. Was some kind of a lawyer, at least, though his specialty
wasn't given. He wasn't a bad-looking man, though. He might almost have been a somewhat older
edition of Wilbur Carmichael, whom- Hilda glanced at her watch-if this damn meeting ever got
itself over with, she might still get a chance to see that evening.
She looked up at Pell as he finished. "So now we all knew each oilier, and I'd like to thank all
of you from outside the Bureau for volunteering your time to-I beg your pardon, Dr. Evergood?"
Morning Report
To all National Bureau of Investigation units
Subject: Current terrorist alerts
Welsh Nationalist Dawid ap Llewellyn, sought in connection with the British Museum firebombing,
has been reported in Mexico City, presumed en route to a United States destination. Scotland Yard
requests Bureau assistance in apprehending this fugitive.
The Rocky Mountain Militia Command deadline for amnesty for convicted assassins in federal custody
expired at midnight. The threatened release of anthrax agents in the Missoula, Montana, water
supply has not occurred, but emergency measures are still in force.
All standing alerts remain in effect.
The surgeon had raised her hand. "I said, 'Who volunteered?' It was put to me as an order."
"Which makes us even more grateful to you, Dr. Evergood," the deputy director said, smiling
tolerantly. "What we're here for is a matter that urgently affects the national interest. You
probably know some of the background, but I'm going to ask Vice Deputy Fennell to fill in some of
the details. Daisy?"
The vice deputy didn't miss a beat. "You all remember the messages from space that came in two
years ago. Many people thought they were a hoax. A few did not. One of those was an astronomer
named Dr. Patrice Adcock, head of the Dannerman Observatory in New York City, who believed they
came from an abandoned astronomical satellite called Starlab. Dr. Adcock, by the way, is on the
premises and you will be seeing her later."
Hilda suppressed a grin as she translated for herself: what "on the premises" meant, of course,
was "in one of our confinement cells." Daisy Fennel was as slick as the deputy director himself;
she had come a long way since she was Hilda's own field manager, back when Hilda was a junior
agent and the quarry of the moment was the man who had placed a bomb in the Smithsonian. And Daisy
hadn't aged very much in the process. She hadn't gained a gram, and, Hilda observed, hadn't
touched her sandwiches, either.
"Dr. Adcock," the V.D. was going on, "discovered some astronomical evidence that an unidentified
object had entered our solar system and conjectured that it had dropped a probe which attached
itself to the Starlab satellite." She glanced at the man from the Naval Observatory. "Dr. Hou?"
The astronomer stirred himself. "Yes. At Mr. Pell's request I made a study of that comet-like
object. The data are sparse but consistent with what you just described, although I saw no probe
being dropped."
"Neither did Dr. Adcock," Daisy agreed, "but she came to believe that one had been, and that there
might be some sort of extraterrestrial technology on Starlab. So she asked the space agency to
provide her with a spacecraft to visit the satellite, ostensibly with the purpose of repairing it
and putting it back in service; she believed she had the right, under the original contract when
Starlab was launched. The space agency was unable to grant her request-"
The translation of that, Hilda knew, was we leaned on them to slow her down until we found out
what the hell she was up to.
"-because, among other reasons, no American space pilots were available. However, Dr. Adcock
recruited two other pilots: one was a Floridian, General Martin Delasquez, the other a Chinese
national, Commander James Peng-tsu Lin. She obtained a court order requiring the agency to provide
a Clipper spacecraft to carry out the mission. In addition to herself and the two pilots, she had
obtained the services of a Ukrainian national, Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova, an instrument specialist
who had helped design Starlab in the first place; Dr. Artzybachova was to go along to study
Starlab's present instrumentation."
The V.D. paused. "At this point," she said, "the Bureau had become aware that Dr. Adcock's purpose
was not to repair the satellite, but to see if there was indeed some alien technology now present
on It, which she conjectured might be worth a lot of money."
Marcus Pell held up his hand; now that they were coming to the good part he was taking over.
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"Which it damn well would be, of course. As well as being of great national interest to this
country. So we took a hand. We arranged for one of our agents, James Daniel Dannerman, to go with
her. This is not public information, and I caution you all not to discuss it with anyone outside
this team. Go on, Daisy."
"So," she said, "the five of them-Adcock, the two pilots, Artzybachova and our agent-launched to
the orbiter and came back. They reported that nothing had changed-no alien technology-and the
satellite was not repairable. And that seemed to be the end of it."
She looked inquiringly at the deputy director, who nodded. "That's when it got hairy," he said.
"Dr. Artzybachova was ill when they landed, I guess because of the stress of the trip-she was,
actually, a very old lady. She returned to her home, near the city of Kiev, Ukraine, and died
shortly thereafter."
He paused to look around the table. "I caution you again that what you are about to hear is highly
classified, and not under any circumstances to be discussed except within this team.
Starlab, one of the largest and best of the world's astronomical satellites, was the property of
the T. Cuthbert Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory. It was designed to house visiting astronomers
for weeks or months at a time, in the days when passenger launches to Low Earth Orbit were merely
very expensive, not preposterous. Then it was called the Dannerman Orbiting Astrolab-the DOA for
short- until the last scientist to use the place, a condensed-matter physicist named Manfred
Lefrik, had the bad judgment to die there. By the time the automatic monitors reported to Earth
what had happened it was far too late to save his life and, in view of the declining interest in
space exploration, not worth the trouble to send up a ship to rescue his body. What the
Observatory did, however, was to rename the satellite "Starlab," because they thought "DOA"
sounded too apt. Still, some people preferred to call it the Starcophagus.
"There is an organization of Ukrainian nationalists who think Ukraine should be ruling Russia, the
way it used to like a thousand years ago, instead of the other way around, the way they claim it
is now-I don't know enough about Russian-Ukrainian history to get the details straight. And don't
want to, actually. Anyway, this group wants to take over Russia, and they're willing to use
terrorist tactics to make it happen.
"Of course, that's a local matter. Normally the Bureau wouldn't consider it an American concern.
But, like a lot of these cockamamie terrorist groups, they've got cells here and they get a lot of
their financing from Ukrainian-Americans. So the Russians asked us to lend a hand. And one of our
assets in place in the Chicago cell passed on a report that the Ukrainians had autopsied the old
lady... and found something weird.
"Take a look at your screens."
It wasn't necessary to do anything to comply. The pop-up screens were rising again at every place,
and what they displayed was a sort of X ray of a human skull. Where skull joined spine there was a
fuzzy object the size of a hazelnut.
"This is a slice of a PET scan," Pell said. "It shows the thing the Ukrainians found in Dr.
Artzybachova's head. And this other one"- click-"comes from the head of our agent, Dan Dannerman.
There's one just like it in Dr. Patrice Adcock's head-and, we think, though we can't get at them
to check, in the heads of Commander Lin and General Delasquez as well. Nothing like it has ever
been found in the heads of anybody else we've examined, just in the people that went to Starlab
and came back."
He paused there, gazing amiably around the table, until Senator Piombero couldn't contain herself
any longer. "Well, what is it, Marcus? Some kind of a tumor?"
The D.D. shook his head. "No, it's not a tumor. We have a copy of the Ukrainian report on the
object they took from Dr. Artzybachova's body. It's metal. It does not resemble any human
artifact. It appears to have been implanted in them while they were on the orbiter." He paused,
giving the group a sort of half smile-not so much a smile as the grimace of somebody who had
bitten into something really foul. "Now we come to Operation Ananias. There seems to be a lot of
lying going on. Both Dannerman and Dr. Adcock deny that anything of the sort happened. The
Floridians haven't been very cooperative, but we've established that General Delasquez denies it,
too; we haven't been able to get much out of the Chinese about Commander Lin.
"But what it is, definitely, is a piece of that extraterrestrial technology that Dr. Adcock went
looking for. We want to find out why one of our senior agents is lying to us, not to mention that
we damn well need to know exactly what the implant thing is." He glanced at his watch, seemed
about to add something but changed his mind. "There's more, but let's leave it at that for the
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