The Far Shore of Time e-3

by Pohl Frederik

  Well, to whom?

  And what about security?

  The sub’s display was really great stuff. I could see the wide-open mouth of the bay, Coney Island on one side, Sandy Hook on the other; I could see little splotches that had to be Ellis Island and Liberty Island; I could even see the long old piers that stuck out into the Hudson from every side. And I could also see objects moving around that I supposed were tankers and cruise liners and excursion boats, and what was I going to be doing about them? Not to mention any U.S. Coast Guard stuff that might be patrolling against just such a Horch sub as ourselves; no doubt the human race had figured out that the Beloved Leaders had sneaked in underwater vessels that had given them the opportunity to kidnap and bug a lot of mariners.

  According to Wrahrrgherfoozh, the Horch stealth capabilities were a lot more effective than any primitive human sonars. But I didn’t want to take the chance of being depth-bombed by some jumpy lieutenant in a Coast Guard corvette.

  I studied the display. “Change of plan,” I said.

  Both Beert and Pirraghiz turned to me, Pirraghiz’s expression wondering, Beert’s merely resigned.

  “I don’t think we’d better get into all that traffic,” I told them. “Better if we can find some quiet bay somewhere along the shore. Show me what’s down-here.”

  I put my finger on the barrier island that began around the Highlands and went south. Why did I pick there? I don’t know. Maybe I thought we might just pull in at Uncle Cubby’s old boat dock and knock on his door.

  I didn’t think it long. Uncle Cubby was long dead. I had no idea who owned his house, and didn’t want to investigate. “There’s a bay,” I said, pointing between the Sea Bright barrier island and the shore. “Let’s take a look.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  It wasn’t a bay. It was the mouth of a river that I had forgotten about, but that was just as good.

  Slowly and carefully the Christmas tree piloted us upstream on this nice, wide river with no boats visible anywhere on its surface. I never took my eyes off the display. Not far ahead I saw something that stretched clear across the river, which worried me for a moment. A dam? So we’d have to go back and try again?

  But it was a bridge. And off to one side of it was a system of docks with small objects moored to them: a boat basin,

  “That’ll do,” I said, hoping I was right.

  In fact, it did very well. The Christmas tree brought us to the surface, the robot opened the hatch and I climbed out into a cold, wet-but Earthly!-drizzle.

  I saw lights up on the road. I found a little driveway that led up to them, and when I was at street level, there, right across the road, was a large and lighted seafood restaurant.

  When I was inside the cashier gave me a thoroughly funny look-reasonably enough; I was tattered, unwashed and long unshaven-but she pointed me to a telephone anyway. There was a scattering of diners in the place, curiously, most of them in uniform. They were staring at me, too. I turned my back on them.

  Naturally I had no encryption facilities. I didn’t even have a payment card, and the restaurant’s smells of good, hot human food were driving me crazy. But I managed to get a collect call through to the Bureau in Arlington.

  The duty officer must have thought I was crazy, too, but she listened as I talked: “This is Senior Agent James Daniel Dannerman calling. I’m the one that-ah”-I tried to figure out how to put it-“the one you haven’t seen for quite a while because I’ve been away. A long way away. Relay this information immediately to Colonel Hilda Morrisey or Deputy Director Marcus Pell. I require immediate pickup and a full squad to take charge of important assets.”

  There was a moment’s silence while she thought that over. “I thought Brigadier Morrisey was dead,” she said doubtfully.

  I don’t know which shook me up more, Hilda dead or Hilda a brigadier. But I didn’t have time to think about it. “Tell somebody in authority at once,” I ordered, and got the restaurant cashier to tell me where I was so I could pass it along. “And most of all,” I finished, “tell them no shooting.”

  I guess she did pass the word along, because in about twenty minutes half the helicopters in the world seemed to be jockeying to land in the restaurant parking lot, and I could hear sirens coming toward us from the highway.

  It’s amazing what the Bureau can do when it puts its mind to it. Although the gaggle of Bureau people who popped out of the first two choppers claimed to be from the New York office, I didn’t know a soul among them. But they knew me. “Jesus, Dannerman, how the hell many of you guys are there, anyway?” one of them asked wonderingly, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind. Let’s get some damage control going here.”

  They did. Faster than I would have believed possible, the next few choppers of federal police and the co-opted local cops had the place sealed off. They blocked the bridge at both ends, with roadblocks on our side to keep anybody from getting near the boat basin. A couple of uniformed noncoms were going from table to table in the restaurant to tell the late diners that everything was all right, they just couldn’t leave just yet because (showing a lot of imagination) there was a boat down there with a leaky fuel tank and they didn’t want anybody hurt in a possible explosion. They were erecting screens around the sub itself, and a Bureau colonel named Makalanos, this one by then already up from Arlington, was on the phone to arrange for a Navy submarine to tow the Horch ship to a secure place, underwater.

  It was this Colonel Makalanos who got back into the sub with me.

  I don’t know what he had expected to find, but his eyes popped when he saw the Dopey, the Docs, the Horch machines ... and Beert. “Mother of God,” he whispered, and then pulled himself together. “Tell the Meows and those other things what’s going on, Dannerman,” he ordered. “They’ll all go with the sub, and I’ll put a couple of guards on board, too. You? No, not you, Dannerman. I’m taking you straight to Arlington so you can explain all this to the deputy director.”

  I don’t know what Beert had expected, either. He didn’t say. He just listened while I told him what the colonel wanted, his neck down around his midsection, his head tipped upward to regard me sorrowfully. “I’ll come back to you as soon as I can,” I promised. “Just don’t let the machines do anything, all right?”

  He didn’t answer that. He had stopped looking at me and was staring at the four husky Bureau people who were climbing in, their weapons at the ready.

  “Ah, Beert,” I said. “Listen, everybody’s going to be really grateful to you for your help against the Others. It’ll be all right.”

  He twisted his neck to look at me again. “I hope that is so,” he said.

  PART NINE

  Home at Last

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the Bureau’s efficiency, because they had spent those hours very efficiently questioning me. They did it in relays, three or four of them at a time, and they questioned me hard. They didn’t give up a thing in return, either, no matter how much I begged to be told what was happening here on Earth. Or what they were doing with Beert and Pirraghiz or the sub. Or anything.

  It took me right back to those good old days with the Christmas trees and the helmet. This time my interrogators weren’t causing me any actual physical pain, true. But, you know, interrogation is interrogation whoever does it. If the interrogators are really serious about it, it’s no fun at all for the party being interrogated.

  The place I was in was what we called “the Pit of Pain,” one of the Bureau’s interrogation chambers. They had me and the interrogators down in the bare little working space where the action took place: a table and a few straight-backed chairs and nothing else. I knew there were people observing us in the gallery seats that surrounded the pit, but I couldn’t see them. They were hidden behind the one-way mirror walls.

  The first question the Bureau’s goons asked me was, “What’s that thing on your neck?” They didn’t like the look of it, and
they didn’t like my answer, either. When I said it was just so I could understand Horch, not a bit like those Beloved Leader spy bugs, they weren’t believing a word of it. They suspended questioning for a moment, just left me with the interrogators glowering at me in silence until someone came back with a couple of strips of coppery mesh which they wound around my head and neck. Then they wanted to know everything, and I mean everything, starting with when the Dopey and I popped out of the transit machine.

  The questioning was pretty much nonstop. They did let me pee a couple of times-not giving me any decent privacy while I did it, of course; a Bureau goon stood alertly behind me every minute, in case I had some kind of evil trick to play with the urinal. They even let me eat once or twice, dry ham sandwiches that looked as though they’d been salvaged from somebody’s lunch meeting and black coffee out of the same urn the interrogators used. It was not the homecoming meal I had been dreaming about. What they wouldn’t let me do at all was sleep. When I began getting woozy they handed me a glass of tepid water and a couple of those Bureau-issue wake-up pills. The things woke me right up, but I would rather have got horizontal. Even the Christmas trees had been kinder than that.

  I thought I’d seen the woman who handed me the wake-up pills around the headquarters before. I pressed my luck. While I was still swallowing, I asked her, “What about my friends in the sub, are they all right?”

  She might have answered. She opened her mouth as though she intended to, but one of the other interrogators shouldered her aside. He took the glass from my hand and said, “Don’t worry about your buddies, we’re taking care of them. Now, tell us about these Horch that you say are good guys.” So I told them about the Two Eights and their nest, and why they were different from the cousin Horch.

  It kept going until, along about the third or fourth wake-up pill, there was a change. My interrogators all stopped talking at once, turning toward the mirror wall. I knew why: they’d all heard something on their little earphones. At once a little door in the wall opened. Someone I knew walked in, looking both irritated and grim. It was the way Deputy Director Marcus Pell usually looked.

  I stood up and offered him a hand to shake. “I’m Agent Dannerman,” I told him.

  The deputy director didn’t answer at first. He ignored the hand and took one of the straight-backed chairs-its previous occupant getting up and out of the way fast-and regarded me for a moment. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “How do we know you’re who you say you are?”

  I guessed, “Fingerprints? Retinal scan?” I think I was getting a little light-headed by then, regardless of the pills.

  “Not good enough,” he said judiciously. “I understand the Scarecrows can make an exact copy of anybody or anything they like. You could be a Scarecrow brain wearing a human body, for all I know.”

  “I’m not,” I said wearily, and couldn’t help adding, “For that matter, so could you.”

  He didn’t take offense. He just nodded and said, “I think we need confirmation of your identity. Brigadier Morrisey! Come in, please.”

  The door that opened this time wasn’t to the auditorium seats; it was the one that allowed suspects and interrogators to get in and out from the corridors outside. In a moment a clumsy-looking thing like a white-enameled kitchen refrigerator on wheels rolled in. I frowned at it, puzzled about what the deputy director was bringing this big metal thing in for, annoyed because it was blocking my view; I couldn’t see my old boss, Hilda Morrisey, at all. Even when the thing rolled up close to me and I could see the door behind it closing again, there was no sign of Hilda.

  Then a voice that I knew came out of the box. “Tell me, Danno, what was the name of the Kraut broad from the Mad King Ludwigs you were shacking up with?”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Hilda! They told me you were dead! What the hell are you doing in that thing?”

  It-she-came to a full stop right across the table from me. There was nothing that looked human about the box. It had no face, only a rectangle of mirror glass at head height; I could not see what was behind it. But the voice was Hilda’s, all right-a little fainter than I was used to, a little breathier, but definitely Hilda. “I’m not quite dead, Danno. I got shot up a little, is all, and the reason I’m still alive is that I’ve got this box to keep me going. Answer the question.”

  Evidently we wouldn’t be catching up on each other’s news for a while. “You mean Use?” I asked.

  “Last name too,” she ordered.

  I cudgeled my memory. “Keinwasser? Something like that. I never heard her real name until somebody, I think it was you, told me about it after she was arrested, and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. If you remember, I was in Intensive Care at the time.”

  She didn’t comment, just rapped out: “The name of my sergeant when you were working on the dope ring in New York.”

  “Uh. McEvoy? He was a master sergeant, but I don’t know his first name.”

  “Your mother’s birthday?” And when I told her that, she wanted the names of all my fellow lodgers in Rita Gummidge’s rooming house, and the date of my promotion to senior agent, and the address of the little theater in Coney Island where my then girlfriend, Anita Berman, worked as ticket clerk when she didn’t have a part in whatever play they were doing at the time. Hilda was thorough-maybe a little more thorough than the deputy director enjoyed, because he was drumming his fingers on the table before she was through.

  Then she turned the big box to face him. “Looks all right as far as I can tell, Marcus,” she said cautiously. “We’ll get a better fix when the other witness gets here. I suggest we let him get some sleep.”

  She caught the deputy director in the middle of a yawn of his own. He suppressed it and said, “Very well. Put him in a cell.”

  That didn’t sound good to me. Or to Hilda. “We can do better than that, Marcus,” she said. “If he’s him, he’s entitled to a little something. I’ve reserved one of the VIP suites downstairs for him.”

  I think because he was too sleepy to object, Pell only shrugged. “Put a double guard on it. Now take him away.”

  The VIP suites were what they sounded like, plush little accommodations for high-ranking or otherwise important visitors who might need to be put up temporarily by the Bureau. They had comfortable beds and private baths and all the fixings. I didn’t pay much attention to the niceties, though. I fell into the sack and, wake-up pills or none, in two minutes I was gone.

  When I woke up there was an orderly standing by my bed, a coffee tray in his hand. “They want you to be ready to leave for another destination shortly, Agent Dannerman. There are clean clothes hanging behind the bathroom door.”

  Of course I asked him what this other destination I was supposed to be leaving for was, but the door was already closing behind him by the time I got the question out. I swallowed one whole cup of the coffee, scalding as it was, and headed for the shower. While I was dressing I got my first good look at myself in a human mirror. I looked skinny, and the beard I’d grown in captivity needed either trimming or shaving off entirely, I wasn’t sure which. I was a good many months behind a haircut, too. I came out of the bathroom, wondering absently if the Bureau was going to have a barber wherever I was going...

  A woman was standing by my unmade bed. Not just any woman; this one had the face and form of the one I had been dreaming about. I gaped at her unbelievingly. “Pat?” I croaked.

  That seemed to annoy her. “Actually I’m Patrice,” she said. “The Pat you’re talking about is over at Camp Smolley, and by the way, you might be interested to know that she’s married now. Married to you, as a matter of fact.” She didn’t give me time to absorb that, but went right on. “Listen, I’m starved. Put your babushka back on and let’s get some breakfast while we talk.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I hadn’t had anywhere near enough sleep, and the question of what the Bureau was doing with Beert and Pirraghiz and the sub hung heavy in my mind. But right then, not very heavy, beca
use I had more personal things to distract me. Partly it was the presence of Patrice Adcock. She was a lot cleaner and better-dressed than the last time I’d seen her, with her more or less reddish hair curled around her pretty face and looking so exactly like Pat that I had to remind myself that she wasn’t really Pat. That was confusing, and I had too many other things on my mind to want to be confused about the woman I loved.

  The other part of it was food. I didn’t hear any order given, but almost immediately two Bureau noncoms appeared at the door, rolling in breakfast tables that were covered with hot plates and cold. I think the meal must have been prepared in the deputy director’s private kitchen, because it was fine. There were eggs, four of them, lightly fried with their perfect golden yolks staring up at me. Hash browns, crisp and oniony. A liter or so of orange juice that had obviously been squeezed within the hour. Crisp bacon. Crackly-crusted sausages. Pancakes with melted butter and hot syrup dribbling down their sides. More coffee-more of everything, in fact.

  It was the precise kind of meal I had been dreaming about for a long time.

  The metal-mesh babushka kept getting in the way of my mouth, but I didn’t let that slow me down. I managed to get down a good share of everything in sight as we talked, while Patrice contented herself with picking at some toast and half a papaya. “The reason I’m here,” she told me, “is they wanted somebody who knew you to check you out, and who better than me? So let’s get down to it. What was the name of Uncle Cubby’s cat?”

  That made me grin, with my mouth full of sausage. “Starting right out with trick questions, are we, Patrice? Uncle Cubby didn’t have a cat. Grandma Dannerman was allergic to them. The cook had a little yellow dog, but it wasn’t ever allowed out of the servants’ quarters. I think its name was Molly.”

  She made a face at me. “Was it? I don’t remember. So tell me how old you were when we first met, and what rooms we had in Uncle Cubby’s house.”