Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  "Something you said, I'm not sure what. Did you say she was just a copy of me? Because we're all a little bit sensitive about that."

  Well, I hadn't done that. Not exactly, anyway. What I had done was to admit to her that I'd told Pirraghiz she was "more or less" the woman in my dreams, but what was so bad about that? It was true, wasn't it?

  They all kept talking, mostly Dan M. telling me about the religious nut who had wormed her way into Hilda's confidence and repaid it by shooting her and three or four other people. I listened and responded. But I was still mulling over the Patrice problem when Hilda herself rolled in.

  "Finished, Danno?" she asked. "You better be. Wipe the crumbs off your face, because family time is over and the debriefers are waiting to get at you."

  PART TEN

  The Most Important Man in the World

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  There were half a dozen people impatiently waiting for me in the debriefing room, some male, some female, some wearing the blue UN beret and some in Bureau tans. They didn't waste time. They started in right away-"Describe in more detail the robots you called 'Christmas trees,' " one of them commanded, and we were off.

  It didn't stop, either. It didn't even slow down. After I told them how the robots had acted I had to tell them what their needles felt like when I touched them, and what they had done to me with their damned helmet, and what they had been doing to the Dopey. The questioning didn't even pause for breath- my breath, I mean; the debriefers had plenty of breathing space because they took turns with the questions-until Hilda's great white refrigerator box rolled back into the room. "Time's up for this segment," she said. "You go to the sub now, Danno."

  "Slow down a little, Hilda," I begged. "I have to go to the bathroom."

  "Sure you do, Danno. I've got you down for a pee break right after the next session. You can hold it until then, can't you?"

  And rolled away, leaving me to follow her, without waiting to hear whether I could or couldn't.

  There were more questions at the submarine, but this time they weren't for me. They were for the two Docs who waited there, Pirraghiz and the recent amputee, Wrahrrgherfoozh, and all I had to do was translate. The head debriefer seemed to be a middle-aged, red-haired woman I sort of knew-Daisy Fennell, her name was, one of the Bureau higher-ups. She started with the questions before I was all the way inside.

  They'd had the sense to leave the hatch open, and so the sub smelled a little better. Someone had also cleaned up the airsick guard's puke, but outside of that nothing much had been touched. There was one woman in there as we climbed down, operating three or four cameras that were methodically scanning around. "Watch where she's shooting," Fennel ordered. "We want to know the function of every piece of equipment in this vehicle, also as much as these, ah, persons can tell us about how it works. Understand? Start with this one."

  She was pointing where one of the cameras was pointing, to a sort of Chinese lantern, twelve or fifteen centimeters high, that was fixed to one wall. It glowed with a pale green light and was softly humming to itself. I passed the question on to Pirraghiz, who mewed to Wrahrrgherfoozh, who spoke at some length. When Pirraghiz translated for me, it came out as, "Wrahrrgherfoozh says it monitors the lighting system. I don't know why that's necessary, do you?" And while I was putting that into English for the debriefers, she kept on going. "He also told me what systems are inside it, but I did not understand the terms he used."

  "One moment, please," one of the debriefers said, while I was adding that. He looked unhappy. "Will you please make sure you give us exact wording in every case? Also ask Pir-Pirr-the one with the purry name to do the same when she translates for you."

  I opened my mouth to ask why, but Daisy Fennell was already talking. "Do as she says, Dannerman," she commanded. "Dr. Hausman and Dr. Tiempe are linguists; the deputy director has given them permission to record your translations so they can work on learning these languages."

  "Like a sort of Rosetta stone; do you know what that is?" Dr. Hausman said eagerly. "That's why verbatim translations are so important. Once we can match up individual words, we can build a vocabulary, and then we can start trying to identify a grammar. We've been trying to do that with Meow, but it's been very slow." Fennel flagged her down. "Another time, Dr. Hausman. We've got business here. Dannerman! I thought there was supposed to be some kind of chart here that showed where all the other subs were, but I don't see it."

  I looked around and spotted the place where it had been, but now it was only a sort of glassy oval that displayed nothing at all. "There. I guess it's turned off for some reason."

  "Why is it turned off?"

  I put the question to Pirraghiz and got the answer from Wrahrrgherfoozh. "He says it's because the way the systems are hooked up-"

  "Please!" the linguist begged. "Exact words! Also the Doc's when he speaks to Pirraghiz, if you don't mind."

  I didn't, particularly. Pirraghiz was less obliging when I told her about it. "It is very tedious this way," she sniffed. "If these other persons wish to speak the Horch language, why do you not implant them with language modules of their own?"

  When I translated that, there was an amused titter all around, though she hadn't sounded to me as though she were joking. But Fennell wasn't amused. "Get the hell on with it, Dannerman," she ordered. "Cut the comedy!"

  So I did, as best I could. Trying to translate word for word made the job about twice as tedious, and it was tedious enough already. Still, we finally got that message cleared up. Wrahrrgherfoozh had cut the sub's communications out completely when we took over. That was good, since the Scarecrows stopped receiving data from us, and thus wouldn't know what had happened, but it was also bad because we stopped receiving anything from them at the same time. Nothing was incoming. No talk on the circuits between subs, no data to locate the other subs on the screen. No nothing at all.

  But when I asked, Pirraghiz conferred with Wrahrrgherfoozh and reported that, yes, he'd never done it before but he thought he could maybe rejigger the sub's communications systems so that we could receive without transmitting. It wasn't an easy job, but if he could get Mrrranthoghrow to help him, maybe, in a day or two.

  Fennell didn't enjoy that news. "Meow's needed elsewhere," she said.

  I shrugged. "If you think so. If you want my opinion, I'd say he's needed here. We don't know what the Scarecrows are doing, * do we? If Pirraghiz could listen in, we might be able to find out, whether they've really bought the idea of an accident, and the I sooner the better."

  I guess my tone wasn't very deferential, because she gave me a hard look. "I'll take it up with the deputy director," she said. "Get back to work."

  So I did, and we had named and more or less described about half the visible gadgets on the sub when Hilda called in to say that it was time for me to go to my next appointment. As I came down the ladder, Pirraghiz and the linguistics team following, Hilda studied me for a minute. "Are you deliberately trying to piss Daisy Fennell off?" she demanded.

  I shrugged. "Not deliberately."

  "Well, you're doing a good job of it," she said, and then she made a little sound that must have been a chuckle. "On the other hand, I guess it doesn't matter much, since she can't get along without you. Hey, I guess none of us can really, can we, Danno? How does it feel to be the most important man in the world?"

  The most important man in the world.

  It had a nice sound. I pondered over it between pauses for translations at the next stop, which was in a kind of laboratory.

  I'd seen the Bureau's forensic lab at the headquarters in Arlington. The one at Camp Smolley was a lot bigger. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, and it was bustling with all kinds of activity. In one room technicians were doing mass spectroscopy, its door closed but the nasty, dentist's-drill sound leaking through as they sputtered ions off samples of Scarecrow metals. In another the chemists had other samples bubbling and fizzing under glass hoods. The place Hilda took us to was a larger room, fi
lled with rows of workbenches. Each of them held its own piece of Scarecrow gimmickry being investigated, with a handful of techs poking and prodding at its innards.

  We stopped where Mrrranthoghrow was waiting with two or three techs, one of them wearing the UN blue beret. While Pirraghiz was hugging her long-lost friend in greeting, I got a look at what was on the bench. It was a huge thing, the size of Hilda's mobile box, but it wasn't on wheels, and instead of being refrigerator white, it was iridescently greenish. When Mrrranthoghrow finished hugging Pirraghiz he picked up a sheaf of carefully executed drawings and thrust them at me, mewing earnestly.

  "This is a part of a transit machine of the Others," Pirraghiz translated. "It comes from the human astronomical orbiter called Starlab and Mrrranthoghrow has made these sketches of its parts, which these people wish to discuss when one more person arrives."

  By the time I had translated that, the one more person was arriving, speeding along in her wheelchair with an apologetic expression on her face. It was Rosaleen Artzybachova. "Sorry if I've kept you waiting," she said. "I didn't expect you to be on time, I'm afraid. Hello, Meow."

  She was speaking to Mrrranthoghrow, and the surprising part was that he replied with "Hello, Rosaleen" in English. Well, almost in English. It came out, "Uh-woh, Wozzaweeeen," but close enough.

  Hilda, of course, was having none of that. "We are seven minutes behind schedule, Dr. Artzybachova," she said crisply. "Please do not delay us any more."

  "Of course," Rosaleen said. "Here, Dan." She plucked a couple of the carefully executed drawings out of my hand and pointed to the sketch of a round object with a partly serrated edge. "Ask him if this thing is meant to fit in with this other one-" pointing to another sheet with a detail of something that looked like a clamshell.

  And on and on. Well, there's no sense describing every last thing I did around then, because there were many too many things to be done.

  See, I was the only one who could talk to Beert or Pirraghiz, and through her to the other Docs. There was a lot of talking to be done, and every bit of it required my participation.

  It wasn't much of a stretch for Hilda to call me the most important man in the world. The busiest, anyway. So it isn't really surprising that some really important matters just sort of slipped my mind.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I don't know if you've ever found yourself in a situation like mine. By that I mean finding yourself back on your home planet when you'd pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it again. And meeting once more the girl of your dreams… more or less. And worrying about what your human associates were going to do to your best friend, who happened to be a Horch. And trying to catch up on food, sleep and news, the accumulated news of a world I hadn't seen for many months. And all day long answering questions and asking them-of Pirraghiz and Beert-and always, every minute, hustled from one interrogation place to another with little time to eat and barely enough for sleeping.

  The worst part was the constant interruptions. We would go from trying to figure out whether Mrrranthoghrow was talking about magnetism or electricity or something entirely different to an emergency trip to the sub, where Daisy Fennell was having hysterics because the Doc had begun ripping one whole panel out of the sub's wall. By the time we finished convincing her that he was just doing what he was told to do up the chain of communication (Wrahrrgherfoozh, Pirraghiz, me, Fennell) and she finished demanding that he let Bureau mechanics observe and record every move (back down the same chain-four or five times each way), Hilda was already getting calls from the reverse-engineering people to complain that their allotted time was being frittered away. And when we got back to the hunk of Scarecrow transit machine, Mrrranthoghrow was in the middle of trying to explain the way the thing's laserlike weaponry was generated and Rosaleen Artzybachova was begging to be told where the power came from. And while we were trying to deal with that, the head of the UN detachment showed up to protest that some of the semiorganic Scarecrow materiel was making fizzing noises and seemed to be rotting away, and why were we wasting time with hardware when valuable stuff was being lost because they didn't know how to preserve it?

  It was pretty hectic. Trust me on that. The only ones who were enjoying it all were the linguists, and they were in heaven. After months of effort, they'd picked up only a few words of Doc; now they had their Rosetta stone, me, and a completely different new language, Horch. Two new languages! Not just "new" in the sense that some newly discovered African hill tribe's language was "new" to, at least, Western linguists, but wholly new in provenance, languages that had developed with no ancestors in common with any language any human being had ever heard before, all the way back to the earliest presentient screeches and grunts. I could almost smell their ecstatic daydreaming about the papers they would someday contribute to the linguistics journals.

  I was glad they were having fun. Nobody else was. Definitely I was not, and least happy of all was my friend, Beert. When they brought me in to question him he was belly-down on his army cot, head held dejectedly low.

  The way I looked at it, he had a lot to be dejected about. The room he was in was Spartan and not at all private; two wall-mounted cameras followed him wherever he went. Which was never very far, since the cell was only about two meters by three altogether. When we all piled in, there was hardly room to move at all.

  "They want me to ask you some questions, Beert," I told him.

  His neck had swerved to the two armed guards in UN blue helmets. "Yes, I supposed that they would," he said absently, and then asked, "Those persons with the blue metal on their heads, are they your cousins?"

  "Something like that," I said, but that was all the chitchat we were allowed. And before we could get down to business the translators were on my case again for verbatim translations of everything we had said.

  When the debriefers' questions began he stayed dejected, but answered civilly enough. It wasn't a very useful interview, though. The first things the debriefers wanted to know about were weaponry, and Beert complained that he had had no experience in that area. "My robot may have more of that data," he said, "but I think not much." And then when I translated that, Hilda cleared her throat.

  "Since we don't have one of his robots to ask," she said warningly, "let's go on to some other subject."

  I took the hint. When, disappointed, the interrogators switched to questions about other kinds of Horch technology, Beert complained several times that his robot was the one to be asked of such matters, but I simply didn't translate. Technology wasn't a productive area anyway; even when Beert had answers, the terms he used meant nothing to me. Or to the debriefers.

  That didn't stop them from asking, though. They were entitled to a full hour, they said. They claimed every minute of it, although the need for sleep was catching up with me and I was yawning long before Hilda announced time was up and hustled me out of the room.

  For once the linguists didn't follow. That puzzled me, but when I asked Hilda she said, "You don't need to take them to bed with you, do you?"

  "Bed?" I had almost given up on the hope of being allowed to go to bed.

  "Bed, Danno," she confirmed. "You'll need your rest. You've got a long day ahead of you tomorrow." Then she added approvingly, "You did good in there, Danno. Just remember: Scarecrow stuff, tell them everything. What you saw and did, tell them everything. The Horch stuff at Arlington, you don't tell them anything about it at all."

  "Um," I said, meaning, you've told me all this before and I'm too tired to hear it again. Then I said, "Can't you do better for Beert than that dump? Remember, we owe him-"

  "I do remember," she said crossly. "We'll do the best we can. Give it a rest."

  I stopped, turned and peered into her one-way glass, which made her recoil a little. "What the hell are you up to now, Danno?" she demanded.

  "I'm trying to see if you still have a heart."

  "As much as I ever did," she snapped. "Back off, Danno. You have to get over this nasty little curiosity
about what I look like inside this box. I can see out, but you can't see in, and that's the way I want it. Now go to bed. You're going to have a full day tomorrow."

  When the door closed behind me, I looked around. My room wasn't much better than Beert's, except that it did have a TV set and washstand, and there was a lid on the toilet. I thought about turning on the TV to catch a little news before I went to sleep, but I lay down to think about it, and then I didn't want to get up again. I wondered what Pat was doing just then. Then I wondered what Patrice was doing. Then I wondered what it was that was niggling for attention at the edges of my mind. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke up I had forgotten that there was anything like that at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I knew my new life with the Bureau was not going to be any bed of roses. I found out just how tough it was going to be as soon as I was awake. I was eating the breakfast an orderly had delivered-a lot less pleasing than the last human breakfast I had had, with its room-temperature eggs and not-quite-crisp bacon- when my TV screen beeped at me and displayed my schedule for the day:

  0700 Reveille

  0800-0915 Debriefing, solo

  0915-1000 Break and medical

  1000-1130 Debriefing with Horch

  1130-1430 Lunch

  1430-1500 Debriefing, submarine, with Docs

  1500-1715 Translation, technical, with Docs

  1715-1730 Break and medical

  1730-1930 Debriefing, solo

  1930-2100 Dinner

  2100-2200 Debriefing, submarine, with Docs

  2200-2230 Administrative conference

  2230 Medical, and retire for night

  It looked pretty formidable, apart from that one surprising exception. When Hilda came to hustle me over to Debriefing, solo I said gratefully, "I guess you do have a heart, Hilda. Thanks for that long lunch hour."