that is a good sign.'
At least they had a new topic of conversation to keep them busy for a while. In fact, they had two of them. One was the debate on what caused the tremor, why the power had seemed to fail and make the walls go all weird- some new questions, some just repetitions of the familiar ones about just what the hell was going on here, anyway. Whatever it was, it clearly was something that mattered to them. It made Dopey jittery and, no doubt, it threatened their own fragile security as well. But that particular discussion had nowhere to go; all anyone had to contribute was unanswerable questions and speculations, none of them very satisfactory.
The other area of discussion, Dannerman thought, was more productive. During that momentary lifting of the veil some of the captives had caught glimpses of what lay beyond the wall. None had had time for a clear view, but most had seen something. What they saw depended mostly on which way they happened to be facing. Patrice and Jimmy Lin were out of it, because they had been looking the wrong way and hadn't seen anything at all, but each of the others had at least a hazy impression to report.
It was Rosaleen Artzybachova who interrupted the hubbub with a suggestion. 'Listen, please. Each of us should do his or her best to draw what we saw before we forget. Then we can compare notes.'
Patsy bobbed her head at once. 'Good idea,' she said, reaching for Rosaleen's pen, and then paused long enough to give Dannerman a questioning look. 'Is it all right for us to do it this way? Or should we be trying to keep the drawings covered?' she asked.
Before Dannerman could respond Martin answered for him. 'Why do you ask Dannerman for permission?' he asked, giving Dannerman an unfriendly look. 'It is obvious that there is no point in hiding such drawings. Who can doubt that Dopey knows what is outside the wall far better than we do, so what information could he gain?'
Patsy was still looking expectantly at Dannerman. He shrugged. 'I guess that's true,' he said, though his own reasons had little to do with what Dopey already knew, and a lot with whether all their secretive note passing had served any useful purpose.
When they began drawing it turned out that Martin had seen the same metallic tower as Dannerman, though it was hard to recognize the thing in the man's crude, kindergarten-style drawings. Rosaleen, on the other hand, produced a workmanlike engineer's view of what looked as much like a row of file cabinets as anything else Dannerman had ever seen. ('They were tall, though,' she said. 'At least three meters, and there was something fuzzy that I couldn't make out on top of them.') Pat and Patsy had had the benefit of a year of art in college, and both provided neat sketches-an elongated, two-domed metal object for Pat, looking a little like a steel camel hunkered down to the ground; for Patsy a broad corridor between more rows of the file-cabinet objects, with something that might have been a vehicle a score of meters away. 'It wasn't moving,' she said, 'but I'm pretty sure it was some kind of a car. And there was somebody, well, something, standing outside of it.'
Patrice, looking on enviously, commented, 'You know, it looks a little like the way Dopey brought us in here.'
'I thought so too. And the person, or whatever, that was standing there-it could have been a Doc. Like die one you saw, Dan.'
He nodded abstractedly, his attention on the handful of drawings. Patsy was still watching him, her expression quizzical. 'Dan?' she said. 'Are you all right?'
He looked up. 'What? Oh, sure.'
'You're not talking much.'
That was the simple truth, not to be denied; but he wasn't yet prepared to say why. 'I've got something on my mind,' he said, truthfully enough; and then, when Patsy suggested maybe he should write it down, he could think of nothing better to say than 'Not yet.'
All three of the Pats were looking at him, the expressions on their faces less friendly than they had been. They thought he was being hostile, he knew, but could think of nothing useful to do about it. Rosaleen, who had been watching silently, felt the tension. She coughed. 'If I can propose something we ought to do?' she suggested. 'Each of you, which way were you looking when the wall went transparent? If we compare notes maybe we can make a kind of map of what's around us.'
It was a sensible proposal. As they all began trying to recall just which way they had been facing, they included Dannerman in the conversation civilly enough; but that was as far as it went. And when, some time later, Pat began to yawn, she didn't look toward Dannerman. All three of the Pats curled up close together, and Dannerman did not sleep that time with any warm and pleasing head on his shoulder.
By the time he woke up Rosaleen had completed making a fair copy of the map their collective glimpses had produced. Of course it wasn't complete. In the center Rosaleen had drawn the hexagonal cell they were in, with each side numbered counting clockwise from their main point of reference, the area they had set aside as latrine. Dannerman's tall tower was at Side Two. There was nothing at One or Three except Rosaleen's small, neat question mark; Four was the cabinet things she herself had observed, next to them at Five Patsy's broad corridor and at Six Pat's angular steel camel.
He handed the chart back to Rosaleen with gratitude. 'Good work,' he said.
She nodded, and forbore to ask any questions. She turned away-not hostile; simply accommodating his desire to be silent-and limped back to show it again to the others. Dan-nerman watched her go with a frown. How long had Rosaleen been limping? And how long would it be before this very old lady began to show other signs of distress? If a chance ever came for them to escape, would she be able to take it?
And if she couldn't, would they be able to leave her here?
They were not pleasant thoughts. It was a relief to be distracted from them when the helmet began its plaintive beeping cry once more.
By the time it was Dannerman's turn all four of the women had already heard the message, and in each case their expressions ranged from shock to incredulity. Pat, who went first, ordered everyone who followed to hold all comments until they'd all seen it; they grumbled, but they obeyed.
Then Rosaleen handed it to Dannerman, her face bleak, and when he put it on the colonel appeared at once.
'Mesdames et messieurs, ' Colonel duValier began, and once again the voice-over took up the message in unaccented American English:
'Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important message you will ever hear. Some of it will startle you even more than what you know already. Some of it you will find very difficult to believe. I found it so myself; but I was given proof that I could not deny, and our friends from space stand ready to give those same proofs to you.
'What it concerns is Heaven.
'That startles you at once, doesn't it? I'm sure that many of you believe in God and His Heaven, just as I do; and I'm equally sure that, like me, you consider that that sort of thing is a religious matter, not a scientific one. But what I now know is that it is both.
'What our friends from space have discovered in their scientific investigations-which are far more advanced than our own-is that at a time in the far future, a very long time from now, something very strange will happen. At that time every intelligent being who ever existed in the universe will come to life again, and then will live forever. In scientific terms that is called the 'eschaton.'
'There is also another name for it. It is what we ordinary people have been used to calling 'Heaven.' '
He paused, staring seriously at Dannerman. 'Yes,' he said, 'you heard me correctly. We are talking about Heaven. The very Heaven that priests and religious leaders of all kinds have told us about. You see, it's real, and our new allies have discovered definite scientific proof of this fact.
'I cannot explain all this to you now. I am not qualified, and there is no time. For our eternal life in Heaven is threatened, and the people who are threatening it are the ones I told you about earlier, the Horch. I warned that they intended to conquer the Earth. I did not say that their reason for doing so- just as it has been their reason for conquering, and often for wiping out, countless other intelligent races in the past-is so that when the eschaton arrives they, and they alone, can be the dominant race, who will be able to rule everyone else… forever.'
The colonel smiled sorrowfully, then waved a hand. A screen appeared, showing the second message from space: the expanding and contracting universe, with the scarecrow and the Seven Ugly Dwarfs. 'Do you remember this picture?' he asked. 'Probably you didn't understand it when you first saw it. Neither did I, but now it has been
