The Other End of Time

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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. 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.

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