Frederik Pohl - Other End of Time

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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

Homegoing

Mining the Oort

Narabedla Ltd.

Pohlstars

Starhurst

The Way the Future Was

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 Key:

Preferred Risk

The Best of Frederik Pohl (edited by Lester del Rey)

The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (editor)

FREDERIK POHL

OTHER END OF TIME

BEFORE

WHEN THE FIRST MESSAGE FROM SPACE ARRIVED ON EARTH, five people who were on their way to the

eschaton were busy at their own affairs. For one, Dr. Pat Adcock was having a really bad day with

her accountant in New York. For another, Commander (or, actually, by then already ex-Commander)

Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin was on the lanai of his mother's estate on Maui, glumly running up his mother's

telephone bill with fruitless begging calls to every influential person he knew. Major General

Martin Delasquez had just been given his second star by the high governor of the sovereign state

of Florida. Doctorat-nauk (emeritus) Rosaleen Artzybachova was discontentedly trying to make the

time pass with chess-by-fax games against a variety of opponents from her boring retirement dacha

outside of Kiev. And Dan Dannerman was holed up in a seedy pension in Linz, Province of Austria.

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He was hiding from the Bundes Kriminalamt with a woman named Use, who was by profession an

enforcer for the terrorist Free Bavaria Bund, more commonly referred to as the Mad King Ludwigs.

(Dannerman himself was a mere courier in the same group.) Most of these five people had not even

met each other yet. Pat Adcock, being an astronomer by profession, might conceivably have had some

rough idea of how the message would affect all their lives-though even she couldn't have known

just how, or how very much. None of the others could have had a clue.

All the same, all five of them were, in varying degrees, startled, thrilled or frightened by the

message, because nearly everybody in the world was. What would you expect?

It was a major historical event. It was definitely the very first time that the patient

astronomers who tended the SETI telescopes, or for that matter anybody else, had received an

authentic, guaranteed alien message from an extraterrestrial source.

Of course, that left a lot of large questions. Not even the few dogged hangers-on in the nearly

extinct SETI program had been able to interpret what the message said, either, except for a few

fragments. The dits and dahs of the radio signal were not Morse code. They were certainly not in

English, either-were not, in fact, in any recognizable language of any variety; unless pictures

are considered to be a language of sorts. When the signals had been painstakingly massaged by some

of the world's biggest and fastest computers, which they naturally were very quickly, it turned

out that at least one chunk of the message wasn't in words at all. It was in pictures. When the

bits were properly arranged, what they displayed was an animated diagram.

In their hideout on the Bonnerstrasse, Dannerman and his girl watched it over and over on their

wall screen, Dannerman with curiosity, Use with only cursory attention. She was one of the very

few who didn't give a hoot in hell what the stars had to say. Even her cursory interest didn't

last, since whatever this bit of drek from space was meant to convey, she declared, it certainly

had nothing whatever to do with the unswerving determination of the Mad King Ludwigs to free

Bavaria from the cruel Prussian grip-to which liberation at any cost, she reminded him, they had

both agreed to dedicate their lives.

As a matter of fact, the diagram really wasn't much to look at. That didn't keep the channels from

repeating it endlessly, usually with some voice-over commentary provided by somebody who possessed

several scientific degrees and a passion for seeing himself on TV. The commentaries varied, but

the diagram was always the same. First the screen was dark, except for one tiny brilliant spot in

the middle of it. Then an explosion sent a myriad smaller, less bright spots flying in all

directions. The expansion slowed, followed by a general contraction as all the specks slowly, then

more rapidly, fell back to the center of the screen. Then the central bright spot reappeared . . .

and then the commentators took over.

"Unquestionably" there is much more to the message," one said-this one an elderly Herr Doktor from

the astronomy department of the University of Vienna, "but we cannot decipher the remainder as

yet. That is a great pity, since as you see the diagram by itself is quite uninformative in the

absence of the rest of the message. This segment, by itself, is no more than perhaps five per cent

of the total transmission, merely the first few seconds. We have not been able to decode the rest.

Still, I believe I can interpret what that fragment is intended to show. It is nothing less than a

description of the history of our universe, compressing to a few seconds a process which in fact

will require many tens of billions of years. The model begins by showing the tiny and-I must

confess, even to those of us who have given our lives to the subject-the quite incomprehensible

quantal-realm object that preceded the birth of the universe. Then the object explodes, in what is

called the Big Bang, and the universe as we know it begins. It expands-as we actually do see the

universe doing now, when we measure the red-shifts with our telescopes. Finally it contracts again

in what the Americans call the 'Big Crunch.'"

"Big Crunch! What nonsense. Come to bed now," Use said crossly. "You have seen all that a hundred

times at least, Walter."

"You don't have to call me by my party name here," Dannerman said absently, watching the screen.

The Herr Doktor had begun talking about Stephen Hawking's theory of repetitive universes, just as

he had the last three times Dannerman had watched that particular interview.

"Do not tell me what to do. You are a dilettante," she said severely, "or you would not say a

thing like that. It is basic doctrine, which you have not adequately studied: There is no security

ever unless there is security always."

"I suppose so," he said, his attention still on the screen. He switched channels until he found

the diagram on another newscast.

"You are impossible," she told him. "At least turn down that totally useless sound. I am going to

sleep."

"Fine," he said, but he did as she asked. He didn't look away from the wall screen, however, in

spite of the fact that he was beginning to be as tired of the damn thing as she. What Dannerman

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wanted was something different. He wanted her to go to sleep without him; and when at last her

gentle, ladylike snores assured him that that had happened he moved silently to the door,

collecting his down jacket on the way, and slipped out.

He wasn't gone long, but when he came back Use was sitting on the edge of the bed, arms crossed,

wide awake, greeting him with a glare. She was quite a pretty woman most of the time, but, in this

mood, not. "Where were you?" she demanded.

He said apologetically, "I just wanted some fresh air."

"Fresh air? In Linz?"

"Well, a change of scene, anyway. And, all right, I stopped in the bierstube for a drink. What do

you want from me, Use-I mean, Brunnhilde? I get tired of being jailed twenty-four hours a day in

this dump."

"Dump! Your words show your class origins, Walter. In any case, what I want from you is proper

dedication to our cause. Also, if you were seen you would become far more tired, because in five

minutes they would have you in a real jail."

"Hell, uh, Brunnhilde. The Bay-Kahs aren't looking for us in Austria, are they? Anyway, that was

part of the reason I went out. I wanted to see if anybody was watching the pension. Nobody is."

"And how would you know if they were, dilettante? Security is my task, not yours, Walter. Did you

telephone anyone?"

"Why would I go outside to telephone?" he asked reasonably. It wasn't a lie; Dan Dannerman

preferred not to lie when a simple deception would do.

"So." She studied him for a moment; then, "All the same," she said, softening slightly, "you are

not entirely wrong. I too would like to leave this place. It is in Bavaria that we are needed, not

here."

"We'll be there soon," he said, trying to make her feel better. The funny part was that he did

want her to feel better. All right, the woman was a criminal terrorist, a known killer with blood

on her hands, but he had to admit to himself that he was-almost-fond of her anyway. He had noticed

that about himself before. He often came to like the people he put in prison, though that didn't

keep him from putting them there anyway.

He reached for the control for the wall screen, and Use moaned. "Oh, my God, you are not going to

turn that on again? It is not of any importance to us."

"It's just interesting," he said apologetically.

"Interesting! We have no room in our lives for what is only 'interesting'! Walter, Walter.

Sometimes I think you are not a true revolutionary at all."

Of course, she did not know then just how right she was about that, and by the time she found out

much had happened. For one thing, the second message from space had arrived. That was the one that

showed the furry, Hallowe'en-grinning scarecrow creature with the twelve sharp talons on each fist

crushing the Big Crunch in his paw, and, one after another, the seven other aliens, picture-in-

picture like little cameos surrounding a central figure, that went with it.

No one knew quite what to make of it, though there were plenty of speculations. In their nightclub

routines the world's standup comics had a wonderful time with this brand-new material. It was one

of them who christened the seven peripheral aliens the "Seven Dwarfs," and another who claimed

that the whole message was either an alien political broadcast or part of some ET children's

horror animation film, inadvertently transmitted to all the billions of nonpaying viewers on

Earth. The more easily frightened scientists-plus every buck-hustling guru of every bizarre

religious cult in the world-thought it was more likely to be some kind of a warning.

They didn't know just how astonishingly right they were, either.

For all of the persons involved, by that time a great deal had changed in their personal lives as

well. Dan Dannerman, having finished his assignment with the Mad King Ludwigs, was busily

infiltrating a dope ring in New York City. And Use, glumly marching around the exercise yard of

the maximum-security prison at Darmstadt, was cursing the day she'd ever met the man.

CHAPTER ONE

Dan

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When Jim Daniel Dannerman heard the WHEEP-wawp of the police sirens, he was on the way from his

family lawyer's office to his cousin's observatory to beg for a job. The sirens gave him a

moment's confusion, so that for the blink of an eye he could not remember which one he was going

to see, the autocratic career woman who was the head of the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory or

the five-year-old girl who had peed her pants in the tree house on his uncle's estate. He was also

already en route to the eschaton, though, to be sure, with a weary long way still to go. He didn't

know that was true yet, of course. He had never heard of the eschaton then, and after the first

moment he didn't pay much attention to the sirens, either. City people didn't. Cop chases were a

normal part of the urban acoustic environment, and anyway Dannerman was busy accessing information

that might come in handy on his new assignment. He had been listening to the specs of the

Starcophagus, the abandoned astronomical satellite that had suddenly seemed to become important to

the Bureau, when the shriek of the stop-all-traffic alarm drowned everything else out. Every light

turned red, and he was thrown forward as the taxi driver slammed on the brakes.

Every other vehicle at that intersection was doing the same thing, because the ugly stop-all

enforcer spikes were already thrusting up out of the roadway. In the front of the cab his driver

cursed and pounded the wheel. "Goddam cops! Goddam spikes! Listen, they blow one more set of tires

on me and I swear to God I'm gonna get rid of this crappy little peashooter I been carrying and

get me a real gun. And then I'm gonna take that gun and-"

Dannerman stopped listening before she got to the ways in which she was going to take the city's

police system on single-handed. He was watching the drama being played out at the intersection.

The car that was being pursued had tried to make it through the intersection in spite of the

spikes, and naturally every tire had been stabbed flat; the three youths inside had spilled out

and tried to get away on foot, dodging among the jam of stalled vehicles. They weren't going to

make it, though. Police were coming at them on foot from all directions. The running cops were

weighed down by radio, sting-stick, crowd-control tear-gas gun, assault gun and body armor, but

there were too many of them for the criminals. The police had the kids well surrounded. Dannerman

watched the fugitives being captured with mild professional interest-after all, he was in the law-

enforcement business himself, sort of.

His driver perked up a little. "Looks like they got 'em. Listen, mister, I'm sorry about the

delay, but they'll have the spikes down again any minute now-"

Dannerman said, "No problem. I've got time before my appointment."

It didn't placate her. "Sure, you've got time, but what about me? I'm stuck trying to make a

goddam living in this goddam town-"

The thing was, she had one of those Seven Stupid Alien figures hanging from her rearview mirror

and it was singing out of its picochip the whole time she was talking, a shrill obbligato behind

her hoarse complaints. That wasn't particularly odd. There were pictures of the aliens all over

the place. On the kids being arrested, belly-down on the pavement: the backs of their jackets

displayed little cartoon figures of the alien they called Sneezy-gang colors, those were; but even

his lawyer's secretary had had a coffee mug in the shape of another on her desk. The taxi driver's

singing good-luck piece was the fat one named Sleepy, for its half-closed eyes-well, there were

three of the eyes, actually, on a head that was maned like a lion's. It wasn't much like the

ancient Disney original, but then neither were the secretary's Doc or the gangbangers' Sneezy.

It was an odd thing, when you thought about it, that the hideous space aliens had become

children's toys and everybody's knickknacks. Colonel Hilda had had an explanation for it. It was

like the dinosaurs of a generation or two earlier, she told him on the phone: something so

horrible and dangerous that people had to translate it into something cuddly, because otherwise it

was too frightening. Then she had gone on to tell him that the space message might, or might not,

be relevant to his new assignment, but it wasn't his job to ask questions about it, it was his job

only to close out his assignment to the Carpezzios' drug ring and get cracking on the new job.

It wasn't the first time she'd explained all that to him, either, because that was the way it was

in the NBI.

That, of course, Dannerman didn't need to be told. After thirteen years in the National Bureau of

Investigation, he knew the drill.

The funny thing was that Dannerman had never set out to be a spook. When the college freshman Jim

Daniel Dannerman signed up for the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps he was nineteen years

old, and the last thing in his mind was the choice of a career. What he was after was a couple of

easy credit hours, while he went about the business of preparing himself for a career in live

theater. He hadn't read the fine print. All the way through his undergraduate program and even in

graduate school it had meant nothing but a couple of hours a week in his reserve uniform, plus a

few weekends; By the time he did read it-very carefully, this time-it was his last day of graduate

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school, and he had just received his orders to report for active duty.

By then, of course, it was a lot too late to change his mind. But it hadn't been a bad life. When

you worked for the Bureau you went to interesting places and you got to meet a lot of interesting

people. The downside was that sometimes you had a pretty good chance of getting killed by some of

those interesting people, but so far he'd been lucky about that.

The other downside was that when you had to go under cover there was always the problem of

remembering all the lies about who you were and where you'd been all your life. That was one of

the things that made the new assignment look pretty good. As the colonel had explained, the only

identity he had to assume was his own. Indeed, the fact that he was a sort of relative of the

person under investigation was what made him the best choice for the job.

Dannerman snapped off the portable and leaned back, closing his eyes. He hardly noticed when the

traffic jam began to dissolve, because he was working out just what he wanted to say in the

interview with his cousin. There wasn't much doubt that he would get the job he was going to apply

for-the lawyer had all but promised that. Dannerman was pretty sure the old man meant it, if only

because he had a little bit of a guilty conscience over Dannerman's lost inheritance. But it would

be embarrassing if he was turned down. He was surprised when the taxi stopped. "Here you are,

mister," the driver said, friendlier now when tipping time was near. She pulled the slip with the

ten-o'clock fare update out of the meter and handed it to him, peering over his shoulder at the

plaque over the building door. "Hey. What's this T. Cuthbert Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory

business? I thought telescopes were, you know, like on the top of a mountain someplace."

Dannerman glanced at the midtown skyscraper that housed the observatory and grinned at the woman.

"Actually," he said as he paid the bill, "until this morning, so did I."

Time was, indeed, when astronomers shared the night with the bats and the burglars, huddling their

freezing buns in drafty domes on the tops of snow-clad mountains. If they wanted to peer far into

space, they had no choice. That was where the telescopes were. That was time past. In time present

the camera had made the all-night vigils unnecessary. The spread of electronic communication and

control exempted the astronomers from having even to show up anywhere near their telescopes-and

the best of the world's telescopes, or at least the ones of that kind that were still working,

weren't where they were easy to visit anyway. Like the Starcophagus, they were in orbit. But

wherever the data came from, they arrived-processed, enhanced, computerized, and digitalized- at

an observatory comfortably located in some civilized place.

Uncle Cubby's final gift to the world of astronomy occupied the top floors of the building, but of

course there were turnstiles and guards between the street door and the elevators. Danner-man

presented himself at the lobby desk and announced his name. That drew interest from the guard.

"You a relative?" he asked.

"Nephew," Dannerman admitted. "Mr. Dixler made an appointment for me to see Dr. Adcock."

"Yes, sir," the guard said, suddenly deferential. "I'll have to ask you to wait over there until

someone can show you to Dr. Adcock's office. It'll just be a moment."

It wasn't just a moment, though. Dannerman hadn't expected that it would be. The observatory's

private elevator doors opened and closed a dozen times before a large, sullen man came out and

lumbered over to the holding pen. He was not deferential at all. "You the guy from Dixler, J. D.

Dannerman? Show me some ID." He didn't offer to shake hands. When he had checked the card he

passed Dannerman through the turnstiles and into an elevator, and only then introduced himself.

"I'm Mick Jarvas, Dr. Adcock's personal assistant. Give me your gun."

Dannerman took his twenty-shot from his shoulder holster and passed it over. "Do I get a receipt?"

The man looked at the weapon with contempt. "I'll remember where I got it, don't worry. Who's this

Dixler?"

"Family lawyer."

"Huh. Okay. Wait here. Janice'll tell you when you can go in." That ended the conversation, and

Dannerman was left to sit in the waiting room. It didn't bother him. It gave him a chance to see

what a modern astrophysical observatory was like. This one wasn't like the mountaintop domes he

remembered from his childhood. It was full of people glimpsed down corridors, elderly men talking

to young dark-skinned women in saris, groups drinking Cokes or herbal tea out of the machines, a

couple of people sharing the waiting room with him and improving their waiting time by talking

business on their pocket phones. What interested him most was the big liquid-crystal screen behind

the receptionist's desk. It was showing a great pearly mural that he recognized as a picture of a

galaxy, some galaxy or other; switched to a picture of what he took to be an exploding star;

switched again to a huge photograph of an orbiting observatory. He had no trouble recognizing

that. It was the one he had been studying on the way over; it was also, he was aware, the gift

that had eaten up half of Uncle Cubby's fortune before he died. The observatory was Starlab-

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sometime uncharitably called Starcophagus, for the dead astronomer who was still orbiting inside

it. Starlab was the ancient, biggest and best-but unfortunately no longer operational-astronomical

orbiter of them all.

Dan Dannerman's only previous experience of an astronomical facility had been when he was four

years old and his father had taken him to visit Uncle Cubby in the old optical observatory in

Arizona. Starlab was quite different, and all the engineering specs he'd been able to dig out of

the databank didn't make it real for him. Getting up, he strolled over to the reception desk and

cleared his throat. "Janice? I mean, I don't know your last name-"

"Janice is good enough," she said agreeably. "And you're Mr. Dannerman."

"Dan. I noticed you were showing the Starcophagus on the wall a minute ago-" She had begun shaking

her head. "Is something wrong?"

"Dr. Adcock doesn't like us ever to use that word here. It's the Dannerman Astrophysical Starlab.

Mostly we just call it Star-lab."

"Thanks," he said, meaning it; it was a useful bit of information for someone who was about to ask

the boss for a favor.

"It used to be the Dannerman Orbiting Astrolab," she went on, looking him over, "but Dr. Adcock

changed that. Because of, you know, the initials."

"Oh, right," he said, nodding. "DOA. I see what you mean. I guess nobody wants to be reminded

about the dead guy up there. Anyway, I was wondering if you could fill me in a little bit. I

understand, uh, Dr. Adcock's trying to get a mission flown to reactivate it."

"There's talk," she admitted cautiously.

"Well, when's that going to happen, do you know?"

"No idea," she said cheerfully. "You'd have to ask Dr. Adcock about that-wait a minute." She

paused, squinting as she listened to the voice in her earpiece, and paid no further attention to

him.

He went back and sat down. Evidently he was to be kept waiting for a while, as was appropriate for

someone who wanted to ask a favor. He didn't mind. It was what he had expected from a cousin-by-

marriage he hadn't seen for years, and wouldn't be seeing now if the Bureau had not taken a sudden

and serious interest in just what the woman was up to.

CHAPTER TWO

Pat

Dr. Pat Adcock's morning was pure hell-crises in the money problem and the Starlab problem, not to

mention all the usual Hurry of regular observatory problems-but she took the long way from the

bursar's office to Rosaleen Artzybachova's anyhow. I 'hat way passed by the reception room, and

that let her get a quick look at her waiting cousin Dan.

She let him wait. She was impatient to hear what Rosaleen had to tell her about Starlab's

instrumentation. Then the bursar had had no good news for her, and she needed to do a little

thinking about that. She needed, too, to think about whether she wanted to go out of her way, at

this particularly hectic time, to find some kind of spot on the staff for her job-seeking cousin.

It was not a good time to be adding to the payroll. On the other hand-

On the other hand, family was family, and Pat wasn't displeased to have one of her few remaining

relatives ask for a favor. Especially when the relative was Dan Dannerman. So she rushed through

her meeting with Rosaleen Artzybachova, door closed and electronics off; the woman might be old

but she was still sharp, and she was doing a good job of tracing the history of all the additions

and retrofits Starlab had suffered in its observing career. "And there's nothing that would

account for the radiation?" Pat demanded. "You're sure?"

The old lady looked up at her thoughtfully. "Are you getting enough exercise?" she asked. "You

look like you could use some fresh air. Yes, I'm sure."

"Thanks," Pat said, not answering her question. But when she got back to her own office the first

thing she did, even before she closed the door, was to study herself in the wall mirror. It wasn't

really exercise she needed, she told herself. It was rest. A good night's sleep, for a start, and

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no worries. But what were the chances of that?

While Pat's office door was open the walls were displaying a selection of the major current

projects of the observatory: the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, with its new gamma-ray bursters; the

huge mass of neutral gas in Capricorn that Warren Krepps was investigating; and, just for the sake

of prettiness, some particularly nice shots of nearby objects like Saturn, Phobos and the Moon.

Those weren't really high-priority projects. The Dannerman Observatory didn't do much planetary

astronomy, but the pictures were the kind of thing that impressed possible donors when, after

leading them through the grand tour of the observatory, Pat took them into her office for the

glass of wine and the kill.

When Pat closed her privacy door the display changed. Then what the walls showed was Starlab, and,

on either side of it, like a portrait gallery, the images of the aliens from the space message.

Pat didn't look at the freaks as she settled herself at her desk. She didn't need to; but she

wanted them there, to remind her.

Time for Cousin Dan? She decided not; it wouldn't hurt him to sit a while longer, and there was

still the business of the observatory to run. It took more than science to keep an enterprise like

the Dannerman Observatory going.

After her name Patrice Dannerman Bly Metcalf Adcock was entitled to put the initials B.S., M.A.,

Ph.D., D.H.L. and Sc.D. Considering that she was still a young woman, not very much more than

thirty (and looking younger still when she got enough sleep), that was quite a lot. To be sure,

the last two degrees were honorary, being the kind of thing you got from small and hungry

universities when you happened to be the head of an institution that might offer useful

fellowships to underemployed faculty members, but she had truly earned all the rest.

The trouble was, they weren't enough. Why hadn't someone told her to slip a couple of economics

and business-management classes in among the cosmologies and the histories of science? Her skills

at reading a spectrogram were all very well, but what she really needed to understand was a

spreadsheet.

And this morning, like most mornings, the problems were mostly money. Kit Papathanassiou was

requesting twenty hours of observing time on the big Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Pat knew that

Papathanassiou would make good use of the time, but the Kecks were a big-ticket item; she cut it

to five hours. Gwen Morisaki wanted to hire another postdoc to help out with the Cepheid census in

NGC 3821; but that job only amounted to counting, after all, and why did you need a doctoral

degree for that? Cousin Dan? Probably not, Pat thought, and decided to offer Gwen an undergraduate

intern from one of the local schools. That wouldn't save much money. You could hardly hire anybody

for less than the average postdoc would gladly accept, but a dollar saved, plus its cost-of-living

adjustment, was a dollar plus COLA earned. This month's communications bills were higher than

ever; Pat reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was time for her to get on everybody's back

again about keeping the phone bills down. She didn't look forward to it. Hassling the staff to

watch pennies was not what she had earned all those degrees for. Maybe, if things got better-the

way she dreamed they might, if the Starlab thing worked out. . .

But it was all taking so long.

That was a big disappointment. Pat had hoped that once the judge decreed that the feds were

obliged to honor the contract Uncle Cubby had made with them-had to provide a Clipper spacecraft

to take a repair mission to Starlab and, what's more, had to pay for putting the old spacecraft

into working order- why, then, the whole thing should have been automatic. It wasn't. The feds and

the Floridians were dragging their feet. Somehow somebody somewhere in their bureaucracies had

begun to suspect that she knew something they didn't.

Well, she did. And it was none of their damn business.

She leaned back and studied the pictures on the wall. Not the Starlab itself. She didn't need to

look at that again; with Rosaleen Artzybachova's help she had already memorized every centimeter

of that. What she was looking at was the freak show from the space messages. There were eight of

the aliens, starting with the universe-crushing scarecrow, and every one of them was ugly. One

looked like Pat's idea of a golem, huge bipedal body with some arms like elephant limbs and some

like limp spaghetti, and the bearded head with its glaring eyes; that was the one the comics

called "Doc." Another-the "Grumpy"- looked a little like a sea horse with legs; a third, the

"Dopey," had a whiskered kitten's head on a chicken's body; another might have been a huge-eyed

lemur if it weren't for its own extra pairs of limbs, and she couldn't recall what nonsensical

name it had been given.

Pat closed her eyes and sighed. She wished, as half the world wished, that she knew why the

unidentified transmitter of these unpleasing pictures had wanted humans to see them. What were

these creatures? Not a zoo; these were not animals; most of them wore clothing, some carried

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