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.”
“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 anatomy 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?”
The Far Shore of Time e-3 Page 21
