"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, because 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."
So I told her that and, when she went on to ask, told her what it was like to swim in the muddy-bottomed river below the house, and the names of Uncle Cubby's servants, or as many of them as either of us could remember, and what games we used to play. Except that when I started to mention the games she and I had played under Uncle Cubby's big front porch she cleared her throat and changed the subject. Well, I knew why that was. I had no doubt that every word we spoke and every expression on our faces was monitored so that the Bureau's gumshoes watching us wouldn't miss a thing, and there were things Patrice didn't choose to discuss in front of strangers.
By the time I had reached the point where I couldn't eat any more, she had run out of questions. "All right," she said, and looked away. She spoke to the air. "Hilda? If he's a fake, he's a damn good one. Come on in."
The door opened at once, and Hilda's mobile life support rolled in. The big white box stopped right in front of me, so she could take another good look at my face, but when she spoke it was to Patrice. "You're sure about him?"
Patrice shrugged. "As sure as I can be in twenty minutes. I think it's him, all right."
Hilda meditated for a moment, then sighed. "All right, Pa-trice, but you'd better come along with us to double-check. The chopper's waiting."
Patrice frowned as if she might be about to object to the idea. I didn't give her a chance. All this talk about good times in the old days had put more urgent matters out of my mind, but they came flooding back. "Hold it," I said. "What's happening with my friends and the sub? And where are we going?"
"We're going to Camp Smolley," Hilda informed me. "Ever been there? The old biowar research plant? That's where the action is on trying to reverse-engineer Scarecrow artifacts these days."
"My friends-"
Her voice got harsh. "I said the chopper's waiting, Danno. We'll see your pals when we get there. The Navy towed the sub to Hampton Roads for security reasons, and now they're flying it to Smolley."
I stared at her. That huge thing? Flying it? But when I tried to ask her about it she wasn't patient anymore. "You'll see when we get there. Now get your ass in gear."
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Outside it was still dark and there were a few stars in the sky- unusually, for foggy, cloudy northern Virginia. I didn't think it was going to stay dark for long. I didn't have any good idea of the time, but a full moon was down near the western horizon and daybreak couldn't be far away.
Getting into the helicopter took a little longer than I would have guessed. The problem was Hilda's life-support system; we had to wait while they brought up the kind of lift they use to bring meals into passenger jets. She rolled her white box onto the lift, it elevated her, she rolled onto the chopper, two attendants guiding her. Then Patrice and I were allowed to board. The rotors began to turn before they'd finished strapping Hilda down, and we were airborne.
I had about a million more serious questions-really serious ones-on my mind, but I couldn't help it. First I had to clear up what she had said. "Patrice? You said Pat was married?"
As she was buckling herself in she paused to give me what struck me as an unsympathetic look, I could not guess why. "Pat One, you're talking about. Yes, she's definitely married. To Dan M.-M for mustache, see? That's what we call that particular Dan because he's got a mustache. He's the one who was with us on the prison planet. And Dan S.-the clean-shaved one, the one that never got there-he's married, too, to that little girl you were romancing from the theater. I guess all your other Dans have been taking all your old girlfriends out of circulation while you were away." She gave me a considering look. I wasn't sure what was in her mind, but what she said was, "Maybe you should tidy up that beard a little and keep it for a while, Dan. So we can tell you apart. We could call you Dan B., for beard."
She went on to explain some of the other problems of nomenclature for all us identical copies. She was still Patrice, just as Rosaleen had named her back on the prison planet. The Pat I had been thinking of as my own particular Pat was now called Pat One. The one who had been pregnant was still Pat Five (and no, she wasn't pregnant anymore; she had given birth to triplets, three little girls). And the Pat who had been returned to Earth with a bug in her head and never got to the prison planet with the rest of us had flatly refused to be given any number, so she was called P. J.
While she was telling me how to tell the Pats apart by sight- it had to do with the colors they wore-I remembered the important stuff. I broke in on her explanations with, "What about the Beloved Leaders?"
She looked startled, then relaxed. "I haven't heard them called that for a while. The Scarecrows, we call them now. What about them?"
"Jesus, Patrice! Nobody's said a word about them, but you must know they're planning to kill off a l
ot of people. Whatever you call them, why aren't you worried?"
She considered that for a moment. "Well, I do worry, a little bit, sometimes," she admitted, "but not much. The situation is under control, Dan. Honest. The Scarecrows call in every once in a while-lots of bluster, warnings, demands we let them come down to talk to us-but it's just talk. They sneaked in those damn submarines that caught a lot of people and bugged them a while ago-the same way I was, remember? So they could use the people as spies? But we've located most of those people and debugged them. The Scarecrows haven't done anything aggressive since then, not even their submarines."
I frowned. "How did you know they had subs on Earth?"
"Figured it out, Dan. All the bugged people turned out to have been at sea. The only Scarecrow object from the scout ship landed in the sea. Had to be. Only," she said without pleasure, "the damn things aren't easy to find. Every navy in the world's been looking. No luck. There was this one Turkish destroyer that thought it had one and depth-bombed it, only it turned out to be an Italian submarine. But nobody ever actually saw one-well, until you brought us yours, I mean. We don't even know how many of the things there are-probably at least a dozen-"
"Twenty-six," I said. "Twenty-five besides the one I brought in."
"Oh," she said, dampened. "Well, if you've got some way of locating them, probably they could be depth-bombed for real."
I stared at her. "Are you crazy? The subs aren't the problem. The Belov-The Scarecrow are the problem! They can wipe us out any time they like!"
She gave me a strangely indulgent look. "Not really, Dan. We know what they're capable of. Dopey told us. What he said," she went on, sounding a lot like a mother telling her two-year-old that there aren't really any monsters under the bed, "was that the Scarecrows could tweak a big near-Earth-passing asteroid out of its orbit and dump it on the Earth and kill us all that way. You know. Like the old KT event that killed the dinosaurs. Well, that's what Threat Watch is all about, Dan. You don't know what Threat Watch is, though, do you? It's what's been keeping us busy at the Observatory; I was working there, keeping track of all the findings, when they called me about you. Every decent telescope in the world is searching for objects with orbits that can come anywhere near us. We've mapped just about everything bigger than a panel truck for ten or twelve AU in every direction, whether they're asteroids or comets or can't-tell-which. I promise there's absolutely nothing big that's in an orbit that can come anywhere near hitting us for a minimum of two years. And there isn't any tweaking going on, either. Threat Watch hasn't found a single object that shows any signs of interference with its ballistic orbit."
Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time Page 17