The Siege of Eternity

The keys to deciding whether the universe would ever slow down and recollapse were the Hubble constant-the rate at which the universe was presently expanding-and the associated value called "q-zero," or the rate at which that expansion was slowing down.

The best way to measure the Hubble constant was by studying the most distant observable type la supernovae, which, like the Cepheids formerly studied in the same way, could all be assumed to have the same intrinsic brightness, so the dimmer they seemed, the farther they were. The big advantage the supernovae had over the Cepheids was that they were about a million times as bright. Which meant they could be seen, and measured, about a million times as far away; and once you used that fact to estimate their intrinsic brightness and thus their distance, and contrasted that distance with what should be their distance as indicated by the redshift of their light, why then you could tell what the q-zero function said about whether the universe's expansion was slowing down.

There were other things you could measure as well, but they all seemed to give the same answer. The universe was not going to recollapse at all. ...

So what was it that the Horch and the Scarecrows knew that Earthly astronomers hadn't even guessed?

"So there really was a leak in the Bureau," Fennell breathed.

"Right. And her name was Merla Tepp."

If it was true that Merla Tepp was b tatting out Bureau secrets to half the world, it explained a lot-the way the Ukrainian nut cult knew exactly what the plans were for Rosaleen Artzybachova, for instance; the way the protesters always knew where to go. But it also meant that almost everything the Bureau had done since Merla Tepp arrived for duty, or at least everything that Hilda Morrissey might have known about and let her aide in on, was now compromised. And that meant—

That meant some long, hard weeks or months of cleanup and damage control. All of the Bureau's encryption programs would have to be changed. Every field operation would have to double-check personnel and contacts to see how far the leak had spread. Some good, hard administrative work was called for-the very thing that Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell was good at. As she went looking for Marcus Pell she was planning in her mind the series of orders and directives that would have to go out, this minute....

The deputy director didn't seem to want to hear. He was leaning over an assortment of scraps of paper littering Colonel Makalanos's desk, Adcock and Dannerman by his side. Even Dopey was in the room, waddling triumphantly around with the great bandage on his tail hardly hiding its blazing colors. Pell raised a hand to cut off what Daisy Fennell had to say. "Look at this," he said heavily.

There were a dozen of the sheets of paper, arranged in some sort of order. The first showed a recognizable drawing of the food ship. The second showed the ship again, but this time it was attached to a larger metal capsule. The third showed the capsule detaching itself, underwater, while the food container floated on the surface. The fourth showed that larger capsule with five or six others just like it all around it. The fifth showed one of the larger capsules drawn tiny in one corner, with a balloon encircling a host of aliens-a Dopey, several Docs, but three or four other species Fennell had never seen before.

She looked up, puzzled. "I thought there should have been more to that food ship!" Dannerman was grumbling, while Pat Adcock explained:

"Those other creatures are other races that work for the Scarecrows. The ones that look a little bit like Bashful? I think they're warriors."

"Warriors?" Fennell rocked back on her heels, regarding the deputy director. "Does all this mean what I think it means?"

"What I think it means," Pell said heavily, "is that some of their terminals came to Earth along with the food, and now they're making more of them-underwater, where we're going to have a hard time finding them." He shook his head. "We didn't understand those other drawings he made for us, did we? He wasn't thinking about the bugs in those people from the ships. He was trying to tell us that the Scarecrows had their people on Earth already, all around us."

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