been in charge of the Observatory during her enforced absence, asked stiffly, 'Which one is going to be the director?'
All four of them opened their mouths, but Pat was the first to speak. 'We all are,' she said. 'We're going to take turns being physically present here, but there'll only be one of us at a time. We drew lots, and Pat One will go first.'
'It sounds like a pretty lousy arrangement to me,' the ex-temporary director observed.
It sounded that way to Pat, too. She thought about it all the way home-alone, for a change; Pat Five had an appointment with her doctor, and Patrice with a beauty parlor. Then, when she arrived in front of her apartment house and got out of her Bureau-supplied limo with its Bureau-supplied armed driver and its Bureau-supplied personal guard, she found two men waiting on the sidewalk, bundled up against the snow.
They didn't look to her as though they were there by accident. They didn't look that way to the bodyguard, either. 'Wait a minute, please,' the bodyguard said to her, even before the men moved toward the car.
The driver leaped out to join her, his hands on his gun. For a moment Pat thought there was going to be a firefight right before her eyes, but the shorter of the men was holding up some sort of document. The two Bureau agents studied it, asked a few questions and muttered among themselves. Then the bodyguard turned to Pat. 'He's a diplomat,' she said. 'From China. He says he just needs to talk to you for a minute.'
Pat hesitated, but the two Bureau operatives had their guns in their hands now, and the waiting men showed no signs of hostility. Indeed, they had no violent intentions. 'Dr. Patrice Adcock?' the smaller one said. 'My associate has a summons for you. Thank you. That's all.'
They turned and walked away, leaving Pat holding a thick sheaf of folded paper. The man was a simple process server. And when Pat looked at the paper she discovered that she had been served with a suit. Commander James Peng-tsu Lin, plaintiff, was demanding of Dr. Patrice Adcock, defendant, that she proceed forthwith to the People's Republic of China so that the child she was carrying could be born as a citizen of his father's country.
She thought of telling them they had served the wrong, i.e., the nonpregnant, Dr. Pat Adcock, but what was the point? She sighed. 'Thank you,' she said politely to the Chinese. And to her bodyguards, 'It's all right. Let's go upstairs.'
There were too many of her for the apartment on the upper East Side, too. It had been comfortably roomy for Dr. Patrice Adcock, but with four Dr. Patrice Adcocks living there it was pretty damn cramped.
The Pats had done the best they could to resolve the difficulties. They'd drawn lots for sleeping quarters, and Pat considered she had done well on that draw. She hadn't got her 'own' bedroom, no. That was the one with the canopied bed and the hot tub, and it had gone to Pat Five as a courtesy to approaching motherhood. The two guest rooms had gone to Patrice and Pat One. Pat herself had the never-used maid's room. Small, yes; remote from the rest of the apartment, sure; but the maid's room not only had its own private little bath, it had a full-function screen monitor. The original purpose of that, Pat supposed, was so that the maid could do her meal planning and record- keeping without interfering with her employers.
But it worked.
So the fact that Pat couldn't be in the Observatory didn't mean that she couldn't do astronomy. As soon as she was out of the boots and heavy cold-weather slacks she made herself a cup of mint tea, sat down at her workspace and began digging into this crazy eschaton thing.
The Bureau had exerted pressure where it was needed. As a result some university library had messengered her its file copy of the Frank Tipler book, The Physics of Immortality. She opened it gingerly, for the book was packed in its own custom-built casing, with a note pasted to the front cover that said it was in delicate condition and should be handled with extreme care.
That was true enough. The old wood-pulp pages threatened to crack as she turned them, but she was able to read enough to remember the general argument of the book as prissy little Dr. Mukarjee had described it for his class in that ancient graduate-school seminar at Caltech. What Tipler called the 'Omega Point' Dopey's people seemed to call the 'eschaton.' But it was the same thing.
And, of course, it was unbelievable. The only thing going for it was that some pretty powerful beings, somewhere in space, seemed to believe it very much.
On Earth there was still a lot of disbelief around, even about the reality of Dopey and the Docs. For Pat, who had seen-and touched, and even smelled-the aliens from Starlab, there was no question. These were real extraterrestrials, all right. But most of the world had seen only the news broadcasts the Bureau had allowed, and a considerable fraction of that audience skeptically supposed they were nothing but another set of TV morphs.
That didn't bother Pat. What bothered her was the skepticism from her colleagues, notably the fiercely combative arguments that were coming from the Max-Planck Institut fur Extraterristriche Physik. The Germans weren't just skeptical. They were downright libelous.
Part of that particular fountain of hostility, Pat knew, was an old score being settled. The Germans had supplied some useful information which had helped to figure out what was going on on Starlab. They'd asked for information about her mission in return; she had refused to give it to them. Naturally they were going to piss all over anything connected with the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory; whoever said that scientists were never motivated by petty angers?
Invasion Near? What We Must Do!
This latest alarming communique from the space aliens emphasizes the need for immediate and affirmative action on the proposals of the Albanians in the United Nations. As the Nigerian representative to the UN, Mr. Albert Ngoro, said this morning in New York, 'The flight to the Starlab satellite must take place immediately so that we can begin to protect ourselves from a challenge that is sure to come.' Mr. Ngoro also added that the flight must be multinational, and that one of our fine Nigerian weapons specialists should be a major member of the crew.
-Daily Times, Lagos, Nigeria
But they had, or seemed to have, a point. What the Germans claimed was that there couldn't possibly be any eschaton, or Omega Point, or grand resurrection, because there wasn't ever going to be a Big Crunch. Everyone knew, they said loftily, that the universe was never going to recollapse, but would simply go on expanding forever.
Well, there was no doubt about it. They did have a point.
Thinking of forever reminded Pat to look at her watch, and what she saw surprised her. It was midafternoon. She had forgotten to eat lunch.
While she was microwaving the handiest thing in the freezer Pat Five came in, looking harried. 'Lunch? Yes, maybe so; what've you got there, meatballs? But I'll have to eat fast, because'-pausing to catch a glimpse of herself in the kitchen mirror and frowning-'I've got to go out again as soon as I change. Janice was right, damn her; this isn't my color, is it? I think I'll see what else we've got that might fit me now. Anyway, I've got an appointment
