The Far Shore of Time e-3

by Pohl Frederik

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Things went fast then. I don’t know who the President gave orders to, or what the orders were, but by the time I was back in the sub, telling Pirraghiz what she would have to do about talking to the other sub crews, the word came. A special jet from some installation in Amarillo, Texas, would be arriving in two hours with “the materiel that was requisitioned.” Nothing more specific than that, but I knew what that materiel was going to be.

  While the Docs were left to rerig the sub’s comm systems so Pirraghiz would be able to talk to the crews when the time came, Hilda and I went into Beert’s room. He was making himself as comfortable as possible on the cot that had never been designed for Horch anatomy. He lifted his head languidly toward me. “Hello, Dan,” he said, his voice mournful. “I was sleeping. When I came back here I found myself thinking about our friend, the Wet One whom we sent to try to liberate his people-or, more likely, to his death. Do you suppose they have killed him yet?”

  It was a good question. It reminded me, a little guiltily, that I hadn’t given the amphibian a thought since we got back to Earth, had never even learned his name. But when I was translating what Beert had said for Hilda, she broke in. “Screw your noble hippopotamus friend, Danno. Tell the Horch what we’re going to do.”

  So I did. “We need your help,” I finished. “Also your robot, to operate the transit machine and find the right channels.”

  He waved his neck around thoughtfully for a moment. “Do I have a choice about helping you?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Do you want one?”

  He considered that. Then he said, “Oh, perhaps not. Of all the things I have done for you that the Greatmother might not approve, I think blowing up a ship of the Others would be about the least. Very well. Let us get the robot, and I will instruct him in what you want done.”

  The little Scarecrow submarine was more crowded than it had ever been intended to be, and it still stank. I had forgotten about the persistent scorched-fish smell of the sub. For the two surprisingly elderly men from Amarillo, sweating in their white laboratory coats, it was something they had never experienced before. They didn’t like it. They muttered to each other as they took the hatch plates off the “requisitioned materiel” and began to set their fuses. There were four of the chrome-plated beachballs, and I only hoped that the stink wasn’t making the men careless in their settings.

  Marcus Pell insisted on being present, though he stayed by my side, as far away from the nukes as we could get. It wasn’t very far, and of course that kind of distance wouldn’t have helped a bit if they had accidentally triggered one of the damn things. At the transit machine Beert’s Christmas tree was methodically sorting out channels to the scout ship, with Foozh talking to it and Pirraghiz translating. “What are they saying?” Pell demanded. His collar was loose, and he looked nervous.

  “The robot says there are evidently five transit machines on the scout ship.”

  “Hell!” Pell groaned. “We only have four bombs.”

  I didn’t respond to that. If four nukes couldn’t do the job, we were out of luck anyway. Beert drifted over, his neck pointed toward the bomb technicians. “Why are those persons so old?” he asked.

  I told him, “I’ve been wondering the same thing. I guess there haven’t been any additions to the nuclear weapons staff in a while.” Which made the deputy director demand a translation of that, too.

  Then the older of the techs stood up. “We’re ready. Give us the word when you want to start the operation.”

  “You’re sure these things will still work?” Pell barked.

  The man shrugged. “Sure as we can be,” he said. “Everything checks optimal. How about you, Deputy Director? Are you sure this machine will get them out of here right away? Because we’ve got sixty-second timers on them. It’ll take about half that to activate the fuse, pop the hatch back and set the first bomb in the machine. If they’re still here thirty seconds later, we aren’t going to know it.”

  Pell swallowed and turned inquiringly to me. “Ask that thing,” he ordered, pointing to Beert.

  There wasn’t any point in asking Beert again what he had already told us ten times, so I just observed to him that it was crowded in here, and when he agreed I reported to Pell: “He guarantees it.”

  The man from Amarillo sighed. He glanced at his partner, then said: “All right. We’ll start arming the first device.”

  In the event, the men from Amarillo didn’t take any thirty seconds. I guess they were worried about the time pressure; anyway, they closed up the first beachball pretty quickly and the two of them together rolled it on its little wheeled pallet over to the transit machine. By the time the door was closed and the Doc activated the transmission, less than twenty seconds had passed.

  And when the Doc opened the door again, the chamber was empty.

  So far, so good. “Reset for the second machine,” I ordered the robot. It didn’t move. All it did was extend a couple of twiglets questioningly toward Beert.

  Who sighed. “You will obey this person,” he ordered, and it did. When it reported the setting was complete I told the technicians to ready the second bomb; which went as expeditiously as the first.

  But when it came to getting ready for the third, the Christmas tree fiddled for a while, then spoke up. “No additional transit machines are in operation at the target. It appears destruction is complete.”

  “Thank you,” I said absently, thinking. Beert could not have known what I was thinking about, but it was clear that he knew something was going on in my head.

  “What is it, Dan?” he asked worriedly, just as Pell ran out of patience: “What the hell, Dannerman? Are we going to send the third bomb or not?”

  I gave Pell a shake of the head and turned to Pirraghiz. “Get on the horn to the subs!” I ordered. “Tell them to take their Dopeys into custody!”

  And then, as she excitedly began meowing into the microphone, I faced Beert. “Do you want to go home?” I asked.

  That shook him up. His head darted to within centimeters of my face, his jaw dropped. “Dan,” he whispered pleadingly, “what are you saying?”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Just answer the question,” I said.

  His long neck was trembling with excitement. “Go home, Dan? My belly yearns for it! Would you allow this?”

  Marcus Pell was turning from Pirraghiz to me, his expression angry. “What’s she jabbering about? What’s going on?” he demanded.

  I ignored Pell, speaking to the Christmas tree. “Can you transmit Djabeertapritch to the machines in the nest of the Eight Plus Threes?” And when it confirmed that it could, I ordered, “Set the machine up for transmission.” And then at last I turned to the nearly apoplectic deputy director.

  “I just wanted to make absolutely sure,” I said apologetically.

  The Far Shore of Time 301

  “The job’s done. The survey ship is destroyed; there’s nothing left to transmit to.”

  He made me repeat it two or three times, alternately blinking at me and at Pirraghiz as she meowed urgently into the ship-to-ship microphone. I jerked a thumb at the two remaining bombs. “Don’t you think you should get the hoists back so we can get these things out of here?” I suggested.

  That took him by surprise. “Right,” he said, as glad as I thought he would be of the excuse to get away from them. And when he was out of the hatch to find the hoist operators, I said, “Good-by, Beert. Don’t linger. If he comes back, he’ll try to stop you.”

  Horch don’t cry, but Beert’s hard little nose was running as he wrapped those reptilian arms around me for a moment, then leaped into the chamber. The men from Amarillo were goggling at what was going on, but they didn’t have any authority to prevent it.

  I had one other thing to say to Beert. I held the door from closing for a moment, making him dart his head at me inquiringly. “Tell them for me, Beert,” I said. “Tell them we will fight the Others in every way we can. We won’t let
them conquer us. But if we have to, we will fight the Horch as well. Tell them that.”

  “I will tell them, Dan,” he said as I closed the door. And when it opened again the chamber was empty.

  PART TWELVE

  VICTORY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  By the time Beert was gone the deputy director was already scrambling back down the ladder, shouting my name in a very unfriendly way. I didn’t look at him. For that matter, I didn’t stop to rejoice, or even take a deep breath; I had more important things to take care of.

  First priority was giving Pirraghiz the orders to pass on to the sub crews: “Tell them all to turn off their transit machines and keep them off. Make sure they do that! Then,” I added as an afterthought, “tell them all to head out to deep water and stay there.” I didn’t want any of them where somebody could try a depth bomb.

  When I was sure she was passing the word on I turned back to die deputy director, interrupting his tirade. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” I said, reasonably politely, “but I’m too busy to talk to you now.”

  That was nowhere near the kind of deference he was used to, and it made him yell even louder. “The hell you say! You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Dannerman!”

  I sighed, and put it less politely. “Shut the hell up,” I ordered.

  Amazingly, he did. Or else had a heart attack. He turned a peculiar color and sat down heavily on die nearest flat surface. Whatever he was doing, I let him do it and went back to Pirraghiz. “Have they all done what I said?” I demanded. She raised one of her lesser arms to fend the question off while she was meowing into the microphone and listening to the yowls that came back.

  Then at last she turned that great pale face toward me and said, “They are doing it, Dannerman, but not without much trouble and fighting.”

  “Doing it isn’t good enough! Make sure it really gets done, by every last one!”

  “Yes, Dannerman,” she sighed, and began polling the subs one by one. When it occurred to me to turn around again, Pell wasn’t there anymore. He had evidently gone out of the sub again-probably, I thought, to line up a firing squad for me.

  At that moment I didn’t take much interest in what Pell might be up to. I was tired and cranky and not all that sure in my mind that I had done the right thing by letting Beert go. But it was done. Whatever the consequences might be, I had no way to deflect them.

  Of those consequences there turned out to be plenty, though it took me a while to find out what they all were.

  The deputy director didn’t come back that day, but Lieutenant Colonel Makalanos did. He gave me another of those unfriendly looks, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat down, silently watching my every move and occasionally stealing glances at the news screen he had brought with him. I wasn’t ready to talk to him, so I did my best to pretend he wasn’t there. It wasn’t that hard. There was plenty of back-and-forth talk with the subs to keep me busy.

  They had followed my orders. Every one of them had turned off its transit machine, and they were all slipping quietly away from the shallow coastal waters. None reported any human attempt to bother them.

  It was time to start asking them questions. I did-at length-and the answers came back the same way. After nearly an hour of that I sighed and turned around to face Makalanos. “All right,” I said. “I’d better tell you what they say the subs were doing so you can pass it on to the deputy director.”

  He leaned back and scratched his chin. “I was hoping you might,” he said.

  I let that go. “The freed crews, the Docs and the warriors, are all in control now. There was a lot of fighting. In the Sixteen Plus Eight and One-I mean in sub twenty-five-their Dopey tried to activate the methane release manually. They had to kill him. Four or five of the other Dopeys got killed too, but only one warrior died-his Dopey happened to have a weapon at the wrong time, so that was a close one. And,” I added, “we were right about the methane, I think, although none of the controlled crews were ever told what was going on and the Dopeys, the ones that survived, aren’t talking. Starting a couple of days ago the crews began receiving objects through their transit machines. They were tapered metal cylinders that they’d never seen before, and their orders were to push the things out through the disposal hatch. The crews weren’t told what the objects were supposed to do. Dr. Schiel’s idea was that they might use incendiaries, or maybe just high explosives, to blow up and release the trapped methane. It looks like he was right. I would guess,” I said, striking off on my own, “that the bombs were meant to be triggered from the scout ship, but I don’t think they were all in place yet. The sub crews were still busy emplacing the things when we blew the main ship up.”

  I stopped there. Makalanos was staring at me. “Jesus,” he said. “And they’re still out there, those live bombs?”

  It was a dumb question, but it was one I hadn’t thought of. “Shit,” I said. “I guess somebody’s going to have to pick them up and disarm them before we’re through. Anyway, get the word out. The D. D.’s going to want to know all this.”

  “Oh,” he said, gesturing to one of the cameras, “the word’s out, all right, though whether anyone is paying attention right now, I don’t know. They’ve got other things on their minds.” And he turned his news screen around so I could see what was on it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Things weren’t going exactly the way I had expected. I had always understood that when you won a war it was a big event, so big that you stopped everything else to celebrate it. Extensively, with dancing in the streets, bands playing, maybe a ticker-tape parade down Broadway for the returning heroes with everybody laughing and drinking and hugging the handiest stranger.

  There was no trace of any of that. When I looked at the screen what I saw was a free-for-all scramble for loot. The President had had nearly two hundred ambassadors all trying to make urgent diplomatic representations at once-plus every major executive in his own administration, plus Congress, plus every news medium and just about every single individual in the world who happened to know the telephone number of the White House. That was bad news for the deputy director’s probable desire to have me shot. He would need the President’s permission for that, and the President looked to be a lot too busy to give my personal future much of a thought.

  See, that was the other thing that was different about winning this war.

  As I understand it, the way it was usually done was that the victors took what they wanted that had formerly belonged to the losers-it was what they called the “spoils of war”-and everybody was happy (well, everybody except the losers).

  This time it couldn’t work out that way. The victors were everybody in the human race. But there were spoils of war, all right, mostly comprising those twenty-five free-ranging Scarecrow submarines. Each one of those subs was packed with so much priceless Scarecrow technology that every last nation on Earth was demanding to have one for its very own, and there just weren’t anywhere near enough of the things to go around.

  It was Pirraghiz who shook me loose from the news screen. “Are you all right, Dannerman?” she asked worriedly, touching my forehead with one lesser arm, like any human mother. “You appear to be near clinical exhaustion.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, although it wasn’t true. She peered incuriously at the screen, but didn’t ask me what was going on and I didn’t volunteer. “What’s happening with the subs?”

  She was looking worried. “The submarines are quite intact, but there is a problem,” she said. “The crews no longer have functioning transit machines.”

  I was too tired to take her meaning right away. “Damn straight they don’t! They’re going to keep them that way, too.”

  She gave me one of those six-armed shrugs. “That is the problem,” she said. “The crews will be getting hungry.”

  Well, I couldn’t have thought of everything. It simply had not occurred to me that the transit machines were what kept the sub crews supplied with food and water. I swore
a little bit, and then said reluctantly, “I guess we could make more food for them with the machine here, but maybe we’re going to have to let them surrender themselves so we can get it to them.” ;

  “Perhaps not, Dannerman,” she offered. “Wrranthoghrow says it is possible for the crews to rework the machines so that there can be no incoming, but they can be used to make copies from stored data. Is that all right?”

  “If he’s sure,” I said reluctantly.

  She looked at me with reproof. “Of course he is sure. I will tell him to give the order.” And all the time she was talking she had begun touching me all over in the way I had become used to while I was recovering in the compound. “You require much more rest,” she informed me, motherly and stern. “You cannot continue with this work without sleep indefinitely. Is it now an appropriate time to copy your translation module so that one may be inserted in some of your conspecifics?”

  I blinked at her. I hadn’t been thinking about that possibility. When she brought it back to my mind it seemed like the best idea I’d ever heard. Sharing the translation work with two or three of the linguists would delight them, and let me get a little time off-not to mention a little time to think about such personal matters as what I wanted to do about Patrice. On the other hand—

  On the other hand, I had got pretty used to being the most important man in the world. I temporized. “We’ll see about that when we get all this straightened out. How long will it take the crews to rejigger their machines?”

  When she told me it seemed a reasonable time, so we began checking the subs, one by one, to make sure they could handle the job. And while we were doing that I felt Colonel Makalanos tap me on the shoulder. “It’s Brigadier Morrisey,” he said. “She’s outside the sub and she wants to talk to you right away.”

  I thought about telling Hilda what I had told the deputy director. Still, getting out of the sub for a few minutes sounded pretty good to me, and besides, Hilda wasn’t the deputy director. She was always thorny and sometimes she was just damned brutal, but she was my friend.