Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  "Oh, that," she said, turning slightly to see if we were alone. We weren't. She was silent for a moment, then said in a lowered tone, "Yes. Well, I'll explain about that part when we come to it."

  That was the Hilda I knew. There was going to be a catch to her generosity. And, of course, there was.

  We got through Debriefing, solo, with its million questions about Beert's lab and Horch technology in general, and Break and Medical-five minutes for me to go to the bathroom, ten more for a couple of medics to peer down my throat and squirt something nasty-tasting into it so I wouldn't lose my voice-and Debriefing with Horch, where they asked the same sort of questions of Beert, with me translating. And, of course, wherever we went, our entourage trailed along.

  The linguists did their best to stay out of the way, but we now had an additional group keeping us company, mostly United Nations MPs. They didn't wear blue berets like the technicians, they wore blue helmets, and they were everywhere, watching everything, muttering reports into their pocket screens, acting suspicious of everything that was done with the Scarecrow stuff. (Suspicious of the Bureau! How very strange. I couldn't think why.)

  But they didn't stay with us when the questioning of Beert was over. Hilda shooed them off. "Agent Dannerman must have his time for relaxation," she said firmly, and they went. As soon as they were out of sight she turned to me. "We're going," she said briefly. "Bring your Horch friend along."

  "What-" I started to ask, but didn't bother finishing. Hilda wasn't answering questions just then. I sighed and told Beert to come along, and when he asked what I would have asked, I just shook my head. A couple of Bureau cops were waiting for us, and they led the way to an outside door. A van was waiting for us there; and when it had taken us to the chopper pad, a helicopter was waiting for the van.

  Then I guessed.

  "We're going to Arlington, aren't we?" I asked Hilda.

  And all she said was, "Where else?"

  Well, we did get lunch there, such as it was. It amounted to no more than the trademark Bureau sandwiches and coffee for me, and a few scraps of what looked like stewed rhubarb for Beert, all that Pirraghiz had been able to sort out in the time available. We weren't given much time to enjoy it, either.

  The Bureau's forensic laboratory was built to do whatever might be needed in any Bureau operation-everything from dissecting a spray bomb full of radionuclides in its containment ovens to analyzing the toxins in an assassin's needle-tipped umbrella or picking apart the linings in a smuggler's suitcase. The place they gave us to eat in smelled of ancient ashes and acids, but nothing was going on there at the moment but our lunch. Nor was much happening in most of the lab chambers we passed on the way in, but when Hilda informed us lunchtime was over and escorted us to a locked wing of the lab, there was plenty. At three or four work stations technicians-all Bureau people, not a single blue UN beret in sight-were delicately prizing apart pieces of the wrecked Scarecrow fighters. At a couple of other benches the objects being examined were the bits and pieces I had stolen from Beert and Pirraghiz-her books, his instruments. Beert snorted sadly as he saw them, but Hilda didn't let us linger. "Keep moving," she ordered. "We're going to see the live ones."

  The Bureau wasn't taking any chances with the live ones. The room the fighting machine and the Christmas tree were in was steel-walled. A couple of senior Bureau technicians were waiting for us, gathered around a monitor screen that let them see inside. There a pair of Bureau sharpshooters were covering the machines from separate angles in case either of them made some sudden hostile move. They weren't making any, apart from an occasional twitch.

  That made Hilda ask why they were doing that, and when I asked Beert he said somberly, "They are simply running routine systems checks, to be sure everything is functioning in case of need. There is nothing to fear."

  She mulled that over for a moment, then sighed. All she said was, "Let's get on with it."

  When we were inside the chamber the sharpshooters came to attention. "You have to stay out of our line of fire, Brigadier," one of them warned.

  "Yes, yes," she said testily, but she obediently rolled to one corner of the room and let the technicians take over.

  They knew what they wanted. Evidently they had studied everything I had said in debriefing about what the Christmas trees were capable of, and one by one they asked to have the machine put through its paces: extend branches down to the tiniest twiglets, display its recording lenses, speak. One of the techs was recording every move while the other gave me orders. Which I passed on to Beert to repeat, until he got tired of that and sulkily told the Christmas tree, "Do as Dan orders." Then it went a little faster… but still interminable.

  When they had seen everything the Christmas tree could do-at least twice-they turned to the fighting machine. That made the sharpshooters more nervous, but the machine obediently turned, moved and displayed its weaponry for a good twenty minutes. Then the technicians paused, looking at each other. "We'd like to see it fire its weapons," one of them said. "Do you think we could take it out to the range?"

  "You damn well could not," Hilda barked from her corner. "Neither of these things is leaving this room."

  The tech sighed. "All right, but we need to know its effective killing distance, firing rate, all that sort of thing."

  But when I asked Beert those questions all I got from him was some violent neck-twisting. "Do not forget, Dan," he said obstinately, "I came late to this world of high technology. I know nothing of weapons."

  I wasn't sure I believed him. I didn't want to call my old friend a liar, though, so I simply translated his words with a straight face. The way I looked at it, Beert was entitled to an occasional lie when his conscience didn't want him to tell the truth. After all, he had given me pretty much the same kind of slack when I was in his nest.

  When it was time to leave I was surprised to see that we'd had an audience. Marcus Pell was standing outside the cell, watching the machines on the monitor. He gave me a quick look. "I remind you, Agent Dannerman, that none of this is to be spoken of to anyone, especially those UN people. This is a Bureau matter. The only person outside the Bureau who knows anything about it is the President of the United States."

  "Yes, sir," I said, a little surprised that he had bothered to take the President into his confidence.

  Inside the cell the machines were twitching slightly again, and he jerked a thumb at them. "Do they have to be doing that?"

  "Beert says it's just systems checks," I told him, though I knew he had been told that before.

  "Well, I don't like it," the deputy director said. "Can't he turn them off?"

  When I put the question to Beert it seemed to bother him. He studied my face at close range for a moment before he said glumly, "Yes, Dan, I could do that. Why should I?"

  "Because they scare the hell out of some of the people here."

  "I do not mind that that is so, Dan. Do you remember that I am alone on this planet? These machines are the only security I have."

  "It isn't much, Beert," I told him. "First suspicious move either of them makes, the guards will destroy it."

  "Even so," he said flatly, closing the discussion. So I told the deputy director:

  "He can't do it."

  He didn't believe me. "So what was all that palaver about?" he demanded.

  "He was telling me all the reasons he couldn't do it. I didn't understand most of it."

  He gave me one of those deputy director looks. "Do you know what I think, Dannerman?" he asked. "I think your pal isn't being entirely frank with us. Maybe he needs a little encouragement."

  I didn't like the way his mind was going. "If you're talking about beating the piss out of him, that's against Bureau policy, isn't it?"

  "Only against human beings, Dannerman. Nobody ever said anything about space freaks."

  It was impossible for me to tell how serious he was. So I reminded him that not only was Beert a good friend to whom we owed a debt, but we knew so little of his anato
my that torture might kill him. He sniffed, meaning I did not know what. "Time's up," he said. "You're needed back at Camp Smolley." And that was all he said.

  On the way back we had to wait for the dolly to lift Hilda into the chopper. I took advantage of the moment of privacy to try to get back on the sort of fellowship I owed Beert. I tried to tell him I knew how he must be feeling, but he didn't let me get very far.

  "Do you indeed, Dan?" he asked angrily, but then collected himself. "I suppose you do. Do not concern yourself about it. This is my personal worry, not yours."

  "What worry do you mean?"

  He waved both arms and neck unhappily. "It is simply that I feel I may have made a mistake. I think I will never see my Greatmother again… and that may be as well, for I think she would not approve."

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Between the 1730-1930 Debriefing, solo and the 2100-2200 Debriefing, submarine, with Docs there was an hour and a half marked for dinner. This time it was real. Hilda not only gave me all that time for a leisurely meal, she let me have it in the little apartment belonging to Pat and Dan M., and she left us alone for it.

  It wasn't exactly a home-cooked meal. It seemed they didn't do much cooking, because both of them worked for a living. Dan-that Dan-was in charge of Camp Smolley's resident aliens, their Dopey and Mrrranthoghrow; he told me that right now the job mostly amounted to monitoring all the Dopey's contacts to keep him from learning anything about the captured sub and Beert. It wasn't a demanding job. The Dopey's contacts were few; he had been well and truly interrogated long since, and there weren't many questions left to ask him.

  Dan M. was waiting for me when I got to the apartment. He offered me a drink, and I took it gladly-it was the first I'd been allowed since I got back. "Pat'll be along in a minute," he told me, as he poured the Canadian and ginger ale-naturally he didn't have to ask what I preferred. As I was holding the copper-mesh babushka out of the way with one hand in order to lift the glass to my lips, he gave me a disapproving look. "Why don't you take that thing off?" he asked. "We aren't going to be talking any military secrets here, are we?"

  "Well, Hilda said-" I began, and then reconsidered. Hilda, after all, wasn't there, and the thing certainly was a damned nuisance. I slipped it off and set it down on the floor next to my chair.

  "Better?" he asked. "Fine. Now you can look over the menu and see what you like." He scrolled the screen for me, offering comments. The gazpacho was more or less all right, but they made it with canned tomatoes; the soup of the day, though generally canned, was better. He didn't recommend any of the fish, but the steaks were pretty good. So I studied the menu with care, not so much because I was having trouble making up my mind as because I was feeling a little uneasy. It was the first time the other Dan and I had been alone together.

  It didn't seem to be bothering him much-well, he'd had the practice. He freshened my drink without being asked, and politely offered to show me around the apartment. I said no. I could see the workroom and bathroom from where I sat; the kitchen was only a little appendage off the main room, and I had no interest in visiting the bedroom he and Pat shared. I don't mean that I was consumed with jealousy, exactly. I just didn't choose to look at their bed.

  While he was placing our orders with the kitchen Pat came in, looking exactly as I expected her to look. "Sorry," she said. "Pell is such a pain in the ass sometimes." She took a quick look at the screen, made her choices and then sat down next to me, explaining what Marcus Pell had done to make her late. It was her job to take the Threat Watch synoptics as they came in from the Observatory and dumb them down enough for Marcus Pell to understand. That was a tricky tightrope for her to walk. If she didn't make them simple enough for him to grasp at the first hearing, he complained she was wasting his time. If she simplified them too much-as tonight-he got suspicious and demanded to know what she was leaving out.

  I listened to her story, but not attentively. What was mostly on my mind was less what she was saying than the mere presence of Pat herself beside me. This was the precise Pat I loved, the Pat I had made love to back on the prison planet; this was the exact, specific, identical physical body that I had undressed and explored, and had yearned to do the same to again for all that long time I spent with the Horch.

  Of course, so had this other Dan Dannerman with the mustache.

  I wondered if he felt any jealousy, with me sitting right there in the room with them. For that matter, I wondered if I did. I definitely felt something. When Pat passed me the salt and our fingers touched, I was aware that that was the hand that had caressed me…

  And, of course, the same hand that had caressed him as well.

  That was a jolting thought. On the other hand, Dan M. was definitely me, wasn't he? And was it possible for me to be jealous of myself?

  I didn't know the answer. This whole question of living in a world that contained more than one of me took a lot of getting used to, and I was nowhere near that point.

  I don't know what Dan M. made of my absentmindedness, but he surely noticed it. What he said after a moment, kindly, was, "I guess you'd like Patrice to come back, wouldn't you?"

  I thought for a moment, then came to a conclusion. I did want her to come back, if only to sort out what, if anything, I felt for the carbon copy of the woman I loved. I said, "Yes."

  "She didn't really want to leave, Dan," Pat said reassuringly. "She didn't have any choice about getting back to the Observatory. We're all working for the Bureau now, Patrice, too; she has to keep me posted on Threat Watch so I can pass the data along."

  I mulled that over. "Aren't there a couple of you Pats there already?"

  She gave me a forgiving smile. "Pat Five has her hands pretty full with the triplets, and it needs both Patrice and P. J. to handle the job at the Observatory, Dan. They work in shifts. There's all the administrative work to do, the stuff I used to hate-signing payroll checks, travel vouchers have to be approved, somebody has to keep the interns in line-especially keep them from flirting with the Bureau spooks these days. And then there's the regular staff, Kip Papathanassiou and Pete Schneyman and all. Some ways, they're the hardest part of the job. Patrice says they keep barging in on her at all hours, all of them, because they're not getting the observing time to keep up with their Cepheid counts or gravitationallensing studies or whatever. Observing time! They know perfectly well that every big telescope is fully committed on Threat Watch… And then there's Threat Watch itself. Patrice and P. J. have the synoptics to prepare every six hours and send me so I can tell the deputy director what's going on. Now and then, when there's something special, I even get to brief the President." She nodded her head approvingly. "That's the good part of the job. The President isn't a bad guy, for a politician. And he always treats me as though I were a human being- not like Marcus Pell."

  I chewed away on my steak, listening. Something had crossed my mind about this Threat Watch thing, but there was something else on my mind that drove it out. "About Patrice," I said when Pat paused for a moment, getting the subject back to what interested me. "You said I hurt her feelings."

  "Well, you did. You shouldn't have said she was 'more or less' me, Dan," Pat informed me. "Patrice isn't more or less anybody. She's herself. And also me, of course, but none of us like to be told we're part of a matched set. Even if we are. It's better if we just think of ourselves as family, isn't it? Saves a lot of confusion."

  But it didn't. Not for me, anyway. Thinking of us as family didn't make it easier to handle for me, because I had had no experience in that area. I had never had a family to get used to. No siblings, parents long dead, no one to call a relative but Cousin Pat… and that was in the days when there was only one Cousin Pat.

  The fact was that I didn't have much time to be part of a family, anyway. I didn't have much time for anything at all. Hilda made sure of that. She came to collect me right on the dot, hurrying me to my last session of the day, this one at the submarine.

  I guess the talk had made me a
little absentminded. We got through the session at the sub without my noticing anything was wrong-work coming along well, Wrahrrgherfoozh promising the sub's incoming comm systems would be back on line in a day or so-and it wasn't until we were in the final talk session between Hilda and me that I put up my hand to scratch my head and said, "Oh, shit."

  Hilda interrupted herself in the middle of telling me that I really had to press Beert and the Docs harder for information to ask, "Now what, Danno?" Then she saw for herself. "Oh, Christ! Where's your damn Faraday shawl?"

  I said apologetically, "I guess I forgot to put it back on when I was having dinner. I'm sorry."

  "Sorry!"

  "Well, hell, Hilda, I didn't do it on purpose. But look, if I really was transmitting data to somebody, I've done it, haven't I? So why don't we just forget about the damn babushka?"

  And after a certain amount of chewing me out, she sighed and said, "Oh, what the hell. Maybe we could."

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Naturally, the deputy director blew a fuse. But in the long run he had to admit that if there was any damage to be done by letting me off wearing the babushka, it was done already. And that was the way my life went. Debriefing, translation, more debriefing, more translation… and bed. Apart from the fact that my head was babushkaless now-and that Hilda squeezed twenty minutes in the next day for me to get a haircut and a beard trim-every day the same.

  It wasn't all that unlike the days when the Christmas trees were pumping me for everything I knew about the human race.

  I did now have better food and a more comfortable bed, and even a little entertainment. There wasn't much variety to the entertainment, though. Every morning I turned on the news channels, and every morning the news was the same. There were stories about plane crashes and stock-market gyrations; there were senators denouncing the opposition party for not responding to the Scarecrow threat vigorously enough, and opposition leaders denouncing those senators for recklessly damaging national unity in this time of crisis. There were sports scores and weather forecasts and about a million other kinds of news items that the media thought worth passing on, but there was not ever a single word of any kind about the captured submarine, the Horch or the unexpected arrival of another Dan Dannerman.