Our Christmas trees deserted us then to fiddle with the machine, and I finally got the chance to ask Beert the question on my mind. “Why, Beert? Why are you coming with us?”
He swung his face partly toward mine, then away. To the air he said, “I want to be able to go back to my own nest.”
That didn’t make sense. “Why not just jump in that thing and go home?”
This time he did look at me. “And if I did that, what would I tell my Greatmother? That I turned loose somebody who had destroyed a Horch machine, with a bag of Horch material, and no way to know what you do with it? No, Dan. I can’t go home yet, though I wish with all my belly I could.”
“But-“ I began, trying to be reasonable, but then I ran out of time for being reasonable as Kofeeshtetch made his entrance.
The kid had an entourage with him, not only the four deadly Horch fighting machines but a large, ugly alien which had four or five tiny, different aliens clinging to his fur. I had seen them in pictures before, but never alive: the Bashfuls and the Happies, as the comics had named them on Earth.
“I promised to show you my other species,” Kofeeshtetch said proudly. “This large being is a warrior of the Others; the little ones are used for delicate work by them. Do not fear the warrior,” he added kindly. “He has been freed of his bondage and will do you no harm.” Kofeeshtetch allowed us a moment to admire his menagerie, then waved them off and gave one of the robots his orders.
Then he turned to us and got down to business. He extended one arm toward the TV, which the robot had made to display the globe of Earth again, and said: “Of the three eights and two vessels of the Others which are on your planet, I have chosen this one for your mission.”
I looked where he was pointing. The thing was down in the Gulf of’Aqaba, of all places. I demanded, “Why?”
He looked almost embarrassed. “It is not near any of the others. Also I liked the look of that funny-looking land mass.”
“No,” I said strongly, and then remembered to add, “Please. Do you remember what Djabeertapritch said about our many independent countries? Well, that one’s in the wrong country.” I stabbed at the map, in the vague direction of the East Coast of the United States. “Over here would be better. Can you enlarge this part of the globe?”
The Christmas tree did, and I saw the Eastern Seaboard swell up before me. There were four or five of those ruddy dots between Florida and Newfoundland. The best-looking one was not far from the alligator shape of Long Island, as close to the Bureau headquarters in Virginia as I could get. I pointed at it. “That one ... please.”
“Oh, very well,” Kofeeshtetch said sulkily, and gave an order to the Christmas tree by the machine, which began to fiddle with the controls. “Anyway,” he said, brightening, “now it is time!
Remember the order of battle! These two fighters first; they have their orders. Then two more to mop up. Then you, Djabeertapritch, with-ah-the ‘Dan.’ I wish you all good luck.”
Pirraghiz stirred. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’m going too. Also Djabeertapritch will want his own personal robot with him.”
Kofeeshtetch gave her an angry look. “It is very foolish to make trivial changes in a battle plan just before the engagement,” he complained.
“But it would be better that way,” Beert said, his tone placating. “Perhaps my robot could go with the second wave of fighting machines, then us, then-“
“No, Djabeertapritch,” Pirraghiz said firmly. “I will go before you. We do not know what the conditions will be when we arrive.”
Kofeeshtetch looked at Beert, who nodded agreement then gave up. “All right,” he said. “Now, if you’re ready? First wave! Go!”
It was the quietest beginning of a battle I can imagine. The first two fighters entered the machine, the door closed; it opened again; the second wave entered with Beert’s Christmas tree. It closed.
As Pirraghiz was going into the machine I checked my twenty-shots, one in each hand. Then I remembered something. “Oh, Kofeeshtetch! You were going to tell me what this installation was for.”
He blinked his little snake eyes at me, his mind clearly changing gears. He threw a look at the transit machine, already yawning open for Beert and me. “You are upsetting the timetable,” he said pettishly. “Why, the installation is for the Eschaton, of course. Now go!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It was peaceful when we got into the transit machine. It wasn’t when we got out. Whatever we had arrived in-a chamber the size of an eighteen-wheeler truck, metal walls filled with displays and gadgets-it stank. Partly it smelled of scorched protein, like an ancient fish-and-chips store after a long, busy winter night, when nobody had cared to open a window. Partly it smelled of seared metal and destruction. It looked that way, too. The fighting seemed to be over, though most of our first-wave fighting machines had already become sizzling junk. In the first quick glance I saw an unfamiliar Doc, with a copper blanket over his head-I recognized my goodies bag-a distraught Dopey perched at one end of the chamber and a couple of dead Beloved Leader warrior-Bashfuls. The place was suffocatingly hot. And it was noisier than I would have believed.
Most of the noise didn’t come from the crackling metal or the whimpering Dopey perched at one end of the compartment as he gazed with horror at the Horch, Beert. The deafening part came from my friend Pirraghiz. Bafflingly, she was shrieking at the top of her lungs, a long, meowing garble in her own impenetrable language. She sounded either terrified or in pain. I swore to myself in alarm and staggered toward her in the sudden Earth gravity, looking for the wound that was causing her such agony. There didn’t seem to be any. Still screaming, she shook me off, at the same time gesturing to the strange Doc with the copper blanket over his head. I had no idea what she wanted from him, but after a moment he did. Wounded as he was-one of his lesser arms was terribly burned-he limped over to the control boards and quickly played his clawed hands over the colored dots.
When the Doc said something to Pirraghiz she stopped screaming at once and gave him a quick hug of greeting. Then she bent to examine his burned arm and tsk-tsked over it-in her case it was actually a sort of bup-bup sound-before she turned to me. “Wrahrrgherfoozh”-I think that’s what she said the Doc’s name was-“needs attention! I fear he may lose that arm! I must try to help him!”
“Well, sure,” I said, “but what was all the screaming about?”
Pirraghiz was already delicately probing the skin around the Doc’s-well, shoulder; at least, around the little bony bump where his burned lesser arm joined his torso. Her full attention was on his injuries, and she didn’t look up. “I didn’t want the Others to know what was happening,” she said, still gently working away on him. “So as soon as the machines and I got him neutralized with the mesh, I turned off the scrambler and began to scream-yelling that there were explosions, water was coming in, all that sort of thing. My intention was to make the Others believe we had some kind of a terrible accident,” she explained. “Then, as you saw, we turned off the communicator and the transit machine. Is that all right?”
It was a hell of a lot better than all right. I wished I had thought of it myself. What I said was an inadequate, “Thank you.”
She spared me a quick glance. “Yes. But, Dannerman, what do we do now?”
That was what I needed to figure out.
It was great to be back on Earth again, but I was still a long way from Arlington.
I took a moment to get a better idea of what I had to work with. The Horch fighting machines had been surgically efficient in their assault. As far as I could tell, none of the fittings of the sub had been damaged, but I didn’t see much that was helpful. There had been two Beloved Leader warriors on the sub, both now dead. There had been four Horch fighting machines, three of which were now scrap; the Bashfuls had put up a pretty good fight before they died. Beert’s personal robot seemed unharmed. So did the Dopey, who had stopped his terrified whining and was staring from one to the other of us as Pir
raghiz and I talked.
There was something I needed to know about that Dopey. So, watching him, what I said to Pirraghiz was, “The first thing we do is kill the Dopey, so he can’t make any trouble.”
Pirraghiz stiffened in surprise. The Dopey didn’t. He just kept looking back and forth at the two of us, with an occasional frightened glance at Beert. Even his tail plume didn’t change color. So either he was a wonderful actor, or he didn’t understand the Horch language we were speaking.
As Pirraghiz began to object I said, “Cancel that.” I pointed to the wounded Doc. “Can he drive this thing?”
She gave me a strange look, but then she mewed at the Doc and he mewed back. “Yes, he can. Wrahrrgherfoozh is engineer for this vessel. He can operate any part of it, but he wants to know where to drive to.”
Another good question. If I can see some kind of a map, I’ll tell him.
More mewing. Then, “The locators are turned off, Dannerman,” she reported. “They are part of the communication system.” While I was absorbing the notion that we were somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and blind, she added, “However, Wrahrrgherfoozh says it is possible for him to alter the system to receive only and not to transmit. But that will take some time.”
That lifted a huge weight from my soul. “Tell him to do it, then!”
“He is badly hurt, Dannerman. I do not think we can save that arm.”
That was when Beert spoke up. He had been quietly talking to his Christmas tree, and he said, “Dan. I have used my machine to work on many devices of the Others. Perhaps it can help.”
I looked at Pirraghiz. “Can it?” And when she nodded, “Then tell them to get on with it! I mean, please.”
The Christmas tree scuttled over to the board, Pirraghiz explained to the Doc what was going on, and I had my first chance to say anything to Beert. He was standing silent, his head darting this way and that, his arms slumped by his side. He looked dejected.
I said, “Beert? Listen, I’m sorry that I got you into this.”
He turned the head toward me, but all he said was, “Yes.”
There was nothing to be done for the dead warriors. The one surviving fighting machine was poking at the ruins of the other three, but it didn’t look like they were going to be repairable for a good long time. If ever.
By then the Dopey had managed to collect himself. He fixed his little kitten eyes on me and spoke up. “Sprechen-sie Deutsch?” he asked. He was looking at me. “Panamayoo Paruski? Parlezvous-“
I cut him off, “Try English.”
He switched at once, gazing at me intently. “I must ask, why are you here? Do you have any understanding of what fate awaits you for daring to bring a filthy Horch into a vessel of the Beloved Leaders?”
“They have to catch us first,” I said. It was oddly pleasing to be speaking my own language again, even with this creature.
“But they surely will,” he said reasonably. “Then it will be terrible for you. You have only one chance to avoid the worst of the punishment, and that is to destroy the Horch and his machine with that projectile weapon of yours. At once. And then-“
“Forget it,” I said.
But—
I put it more strongly. “What I mean is, shut up. I’ll talk to you later, but if you don’t keep quiet now, I will turn you over to the filthy Horch.”
That didn’t stop him, either. I turned my back on his arguments and spoke in his own language to Beert: “Do you think you could get your fighter to scare him? Not kill him. Just make him be quiet.”
Beert’s head lifted to gaze at me. “Then you don’t really want him killed?”
“Of course I don’t, Beert. What use is he dead? I want him alive to be interrogated. Do you think I would actually murder an unarmed person?”
He gazed at me in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I was not sure.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It didn’t take the Doc and the Christmas tree as long as I feared to get some of the systems running, and then the wall over the controls blossomed into a display. A golden dot marked our position. There weren’t any other dots nearby, which I thought was good, and at the top of the picture was an irregular mass which I took to be the coast.
I grunted at him as I tried to figure out what to do. Back in those New Jersey summers with Uncle Cubby, my parents had sometimes taken me out for a fishing trip in Uncle Cubby’s seldom-used cabin cruiser. I wished I had paid more attention to the charts. What I saw looked nothing like any coastline I remembered.
Then I saw one of the problems. I was accustomed to maps in which up was always north. Evidently the Beloved Leaders had no such prejudice. I guessed the land had to be east, and-once I craned my neck to peer at it sidewise and got the Doc to widen the view-it made sense. Island that forked at one end, like an alligator’s opened jaws, narrow body of water behind it and then the mainland-“Long Island,” I announced. “Great! That water over on the left has to be New York Bay. That’s where we want to go! Tell the Doc, Pirraghiz!”
She didn’t move right away. She was looking at me puzzledly again. So was Beert, and I realized I had used the English names for what I saw, since the Horch language didn’t have any. When I explained to them that “New York Bay” was one of the busiest harbors on Earth, and we would have no trouble making contact there, Beert swung his neck around closer to me. “First answer a question for me, Dan. What will you do when you get there?”
“Call the Bureau,” I said promptly. “See if they can get this sub under wraps before the Others can see what we’re doing-“
I stopped there; what I had just said didn’t sound right to me. Before I could figure out what it was, Beert went on. “And then?”
To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought much about that “then.” Especially about what then would mean for him and Pirraghiz. “Why,” I said, “I guess we’ll let the Bureau figure out what to do next.”
“What you mean,” he said meditatively, “is that you will turn this vehicle, and us, over to your human spy organization. Who will question us, and no doubt do their best to copy its technology, both Others and Horch.”
“I guess that’s about the size of it,” I admitted.
He sighed-that shrill Horch whistle of released breath that meant resignation. He didn’t say anything. He just nodded to Pirraghiz, who spoke to Wrahrrgherfoozh.
The Doc touched only a few dots on the board, but I felt the results at once. The submarine was turning and beginning to accelerate. The picture on the wall whirled to a new orientation, and we were beginning to go home.
That felt good. It felt like things were going to work out after all. It even felt as though I were going to get that steak before long, and sleep that night in a real bed ... and maybe even see Pat...
But we weren’t there yet.
The air fresheners had removed a certain amount of the stench from the sub, and things were quieting down. Cowed by the Horch fighting machine looming over him, the Dopey was still muttering-but softly, and to himself. Pirraghiz and the other Doc were in close conversation with each other. It looked as though they had left the navigation to Beert’s Christmas tree. Beert himself was standing by the control board, gazing at the changing display that showed where we were moving. I didn’t think he was seeing it, though. His neck was waving a slow sine, as though he were deep in thought.
When he saw me looking at him he turned his head toward me. “I have reasoned out,” he announced, “that your order to kill the little one was a ruse of some kind, not an actual intention.”
“That’s right, Beert. It was a trick,” I admitted. “We Bureau agents are full of tricks, but listen, Beert, I don’t mean to trick you. When we get to the Bureau they will know how much we all owe to you and Pirraghiz, because I’ll damn sure make sure they understand.”
“I will be grateful for that,” he said sadly.
And made me feel like a rat. Or, more accurately, made me feel that he was feeling the way I had when the Ho
rch machines were working me over. Alone. Depressed. Pretty near hopeless. And all of it my fault.
There wasn’t anything I could do about it, though. I tried to take his mind off it by changing the subject. “Listen, Beert, I’ve been meaning to ask you. What did Kofeeshtetch mean about the nexus thing helping the Eschaton?”
It didn’t cheer him up. He gave me a three-snake shrug. “Perhaps it is something to be used when the Eschaton comes.”
“Yeah, but,” I said, “nothing physical is going to survive to the Eschaton, is it? Isn’t everything supposed to go back into a kind of a point at the Big Crunch? So how would they get it there without its turning into a mess of quarks or something?”
He shrugged again. “I do not know. The cousins have not yet shared that kind of knowledge with me.”
Pirraghiz didn’t know, either. Neither did the wounded Doc. If the Dopey knew, he wasn’t telling. I added that to the lengthening list of questions I was not likely to get answers to any time soon.
Anyway, other things were beginning to jostle for attention in my mind.
Like Pat. Very much like Pat. I was deeply, excitingly aware that every minute that passed was getting me closer and closer to the minute when I could actually see and touch her again.
And although that was fine, it wasn’t all fine. Another itchy little needle of reality was beginning to force itself upon me.
Pat already had a Dan Dannerman. What was she going to do with me?
As we approached New York’s Lower Bay I got one more of those nasty little stabs of reality.
Pirraghiz assured me that the other Doc had assured her that, yes, it would be possible to bring the sub close enough to the surface to be awash, and yes, there was a hatch that I could use to get out of, and then—
Well, then what should I do? Wave to a passing Staten Island ferry and hitch a ride to shore? Use a flashlight-if I could find anything like a flashlight-to send a message in Morse code-if I could remember the Morse code-to—
The Far Shore of Time e-3 Page 16
