dark again by the time they took off.
Dannerman saw Pat cast one yearning look at the beds, but then she resolutely turned her back on them. She had no time to sleep because she was busy at one of the screens, checking databases for information on the Tipler person for the deputy director. Dannerman wasn't sleeping, either, but the reason was different. The prospect of seeing this man who claimed to use his own name and spoke with his own voice had pumped him full of adrenaline. He used his screen on and off, sometimes to kill time by watching news summaries, sometimes to try to find answers to some of the questions that inflamed his thoughts. Perhaps some of the answers were there, but Dannerman didn't have enough clearance to penetrate these particular systems.
He was seriously considering trying out one of the beds after all when Pat made a small grunt of conditional satisfaction. She sat back, watching the printer squirt out hard copy.
'Did you find what you wanted?' Dannerman asked.
'I hope,' she said, standing up, evidently getting ready to take the printout to Marcus Pell. 'It's weird. You can read it for yourself on the screen.'
'Weird how?'
But she was gone. He shifted to her seat and scrolled the screen, beginning to read.
Dr. Frank Tipler was a highly respected cosmologist until he published the book called The Physics of Immortality. In it Tipler predicted that the universe, currently expanding, sooner or later would fall back to what is called 'the Big Crunch,' reproducing the conditions of the Big Bang, but in reverse. At that time, Tipler said, everyone who had ever lived anywhere in the universe would be reborn to live again as an immortal. Most of Tipler's colleagues laughed at his idea, but there were two significant groups who shared his opinion, though Tipler had never heard of either.
'Weird' was the right word. This Frank Tipler had published a book, back in the closing years of the twentieth century. It was called The Physics of Immortality, and what it was about was Tipler's theory- only he didn't call it a theory; he claimed it was fact, and offered a hundred pages of equations to prove it-that the universe, after expanding as far as it could, would contract again into what he called 'the Omega Point'… and then some very strange things would happen.
The first part of it wasn't surprising. That was what the messages from space had described, years before: the Big Bang and the universe's expansion, the recollapse into the Big Crunch. The surprising part was the consequence that was predicted in Tipler's book. According to Tipler, at that Omega Point or Big Crunch, whichever you chose to call it, everybody who had ever lived would inevitably be brought to life again-in perfect health, at the peak of their powers- and would go on living forever.
It was, Tipler said, the scientific reality that underlay all the ancient human yearnings for a Heaven after death.
Dannerman scrolled the report again; just to make sure he hadn't missed something-like the reason why this alleged other Dan Dannerman wanted the Bureau to know about this Tipler person. He hadn't. That was all there was.
That was typical of the way the Bureau was run. Nobody told any inferior anything until they absolutely had to. Dannerman had a cynical theory about that. It was turf protection. The more information the higher-ups hung on to for themselves, the harder it was for some lower-down to leapfrog above them in the chain of command. Of course, that kind of secrecy never worked for long. Sooner or later some one person in the know would see a tactical advantage for himself in telling Dannerman what was up…
Might, for instance, at least tell him where they were going. When they boarded the plane Pell had said they were going to meet the people from Starlab, and that was all. Dannerman craned his neck to peer out the window, but that didn't help. It was starry dark out there, no Sun or Moon to give him at least a clue about their direction of travel. The only thing he could be sure of was that they had io be heading generally west or north. Had to be; because otherwise they'd be out over ocean by now, and they weren't. He could catch glimpses of lights on the ground far below.
Resigned, he decided to get a little sleep.
As it turned out, it was very little. He had hardly closed his eyes when Pat Adcock returned from Pell's private quarters forward in the plane. She was holding a partly full cup of coffee, trying not to spill.my, and she looked annoyed. 'Oh, listen,' she said, setting the cup down, 'I got this from one of the stews, but I didn't stop to think about whether you might want some.'
Eschatology, which is the study of last things, is a fundamental part of nearly all of Earth's religions. Buddhism speaks of the eternal bliss called Nirvana, while the Biblical Book of Revelations describes the eschaton in more specific and concrete terms: 'And death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more.' It is what some religions call 'Heaven.' As it turned out, there were other parties who didn't think of that state as religious. For them it was a strategic objective, and they were prepared to fight for it.
– NBI briefing document
'I'd rather sleep. What's all this Omega Point stuff?'
She gestured toward the screen, which still displayed her report. 'All I know is what it says there. I think somebody once mentioned Tipler and his idea in one of my seminars, but nobody took it very seriously, and I don't remember anything else about it.'
'And you gave the report to the D.D.? What'd he say?'
She grinned. 'He was asleep. I woke him up when I came in and what he said was, 'Shit.' That was all. Then he waved at me to get out, but I didn't go.'
'You didn't?'
'Well, I had some questions I wanted answered-like what I was doing on this plane. So I asked him. I said I knew they wanted you along to confront this other Dannerman, but what did they want from me?'
Dannerman, who had been wondering the same thing, asked, 'So why did they?'
'He didn't exactly say. He just said he'd rather I saw for myself.'
'Saw what?'
She shrugged. 'He didn't say that, either. Then when I stopped for coffee on the way back the stew told me that we were going to start coming down for a landing pretty soon, so we better strap ourselves in. Oh,' she added, fumbling for her seat belt, 'there was one other thing. You want to know where we're going? It's Canada. They ordered the escape vehicle from Starlab to come down at someplace called Calgary.'
Calgary turned out to be really cold, and when Dannerman left the warm plane for the freezing dark outside an unexpected memory struck him. He had been there before. It had been a summer when the girl he was involved with at the time had made up her mind to go off on a fossil dig in the Alberta bone beds. Somewhere or other among his scattered possessions-most likely in one of the Bureau's warehouses for storing the things an agent couldn't carry around with him-he probably still had a souvenir of her. It was a pair of neckbones of some terrier- sized hundred-million-year-old dinosaur. She had had them made into cufflinks for him, just before she told him she was marrying her paleontology professor.
Dannerman didn't remember Calgary very well, but something he had been told about its airport had stuck in his mind. It possessed a hellish long runway, because at one time it had been designated as an alternate emergency landing site for the old Space Shuttle.
Which, of course, was just what was needed for Starlab's Assured Crew Return Vehicle.
Another plane was coming in, also a big one. It looked to Dannerman like a troop transport. He strolled over to where Colonel Morrisey was watching it land, close enough to the deputy director so he could find her if he had orders for her, far enough away not to intrude. 'Okay, Hilda,' Dannerman said, keeping his voice down, 'explain something to me. I understand the return ship from Starlab probably needs a lot of landing strip, but why in Canada, for God's sake?'
She didn't look at him. 'Security, what do you think? Everybody in the world is watching Starlab now, and they've seen the ACRV detach itself to come down. There'll be people waiting at every possible airport in the States.' She gave him a sidelong glance, almost affectionate. 'Don't worry. It's all worked out with the Canadians;
