Pohl, Frederik - The Far Shore of Time

They did. Faster than I would have believed possible, the next few choppers of federal police and the co-opted local cops had the place sealed off. They blocked the bridge at both ends, with roadblocks on our side to keep anybody from getting near the boat basin. A couple of uniformed noncoms were going from table to table in the restaurant to tell the late diners that everything was all right, they just couldn’t leave just yet because (showing a lot of imagination) there was a boat down there with a leaky fuel tank and they didn’t want anybody hurt in a possible explosion. They were erecting screens around the sub itself, and a Bureau colonel named Makalanos, this one by then already up from Arlington, was on the phone to arrange for a Navy submarine to tow the Horch ship to a secure place, underwater.

It was this Colonel Makalanos who got back into the sub with me.

I don’t know what he had expected to find, but his eyes popped when he saw the Dopey, the Docs, the Horch machines ... and Beert. “Mother of God,” he whispered, and then pulled himself together. “Tell the Meows and those other things what’s going on, Dannerman,” he ordered. “They’ll all go with the sub, and I’ll put a couple of guards on board, too. You? No, not you, Dannerman. I’m taking you straight to Arlington so you can explain all this to the deputy director.”

I don’t know what Beert had expected, either. He didn’t say. He just listened while I told him what the colonel wanted, his neck down around his midsection, his head tipped upward to regard me sorrowfully. “I’ll come back to you as soon as I can,” I promised. “Just don’t let the machines do anything, all right?”

He didn’t answer that. He had stopped looking at me and was staring at the four husky Bureau people who were climbing in, their weapons at the ready.

“Ah, Beert,” I said. “Listen, everybody’s going to be really grateful to you for your help against the Others. It’ll be all right.”

He twisted his neck to look at me again. “I hope that is so,” he said.

PART NINE

Home at Last

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the Bureau’s efficiency, because they had spent those hours very efficiently questioning me. They did it in relays, three or four of them at a time, and they questioned me hard. They didn’t give up a thing in return, either, no matter how much I begged to be told what was happening here on Earth. Or what they were doing with Beert and Pirraghiz or the sub. Or anything.

It took me right back to those good old days with the Christmas trees and the helmet. This time my interrogators weren’t causing me any actual physical pain, true. But, you know, interrogation is interrogation whoever does it. If the interrogators are really serious about it, it’s no fun at all for the party being interrogated.

The place I was in was what we called “the Pit of Pain,” one of the Bureau’s interrogation chambers. They had me and the interrogators down in the bare little working space where the action took place: a table and a few straight-backed chairs and nothing else. I knew there were people observing us in the gallery seats that surrounded the pit, but I couldn’t see them. They were hidden behind the one-way mirror walls.

The first question the Bureau’s goons asked me was, “What’s that thing on your neck?” They didn’t like the look of it, and they didn’t like my answer, either. When I said it was just so I could understand Horch, not a bit like those Beloved Leader spy bugs, they weren’t believing a word of it. They suspended questioning for a moment, just left me with the interrogators glowering at me in silence until someone came back with a couple of strips of coppery mesh which they wound around my head and neck. Then they wanted to know everything, and I mean everything, starting with when the Dopey and I popped out of the transit machine.

The questioning was pretty much nonstop. They did let me pee a couple of times-not giving me any decent privacy while I did it, of course; a Bureau goon stood alertly behind me every minute, in case I had some kind of evil trick to play with the urinal. They even let me eat once or twice, dry ham sandwiches that looked as though they’d been salvaged from somebody’s lunch meeting and black coffee out of the same urn the interrogators used. It was not the homecoming meal I had been dreaming about. What they wouldn’t let me do at all was sleep. When I began getting woozy they handed me a glass of tepid water and a couple of those Bureau-issue wake-up pills. The things woke me right up, but I would rather have got horizontal. Even the Christmas trees had been kinder than that.

I thought I’d seen the woman who handed me the wake-up pills around the headquarters before. I pressed my luck. While I was still swallowing, I asked her, “What about my friends in the sub, are they all right?”

She might have answered. She opened her mouth as though she intended to, but one of the other interrogators shouldered her aside. He took the glass from my hand and said, “Don’t worry about your buddies, we’re taking care of them. Now, tell us about these Horch that you say are good guys.” So I told them about the Two Eights and their nest, and why they were different from the cousin Horch.

It kept going until, along about the third or fourth wake-up pill, there was a change. My interrogators all stopped talking at once, turning toward the mirror wall. I knew why: they’d all heard something on their little earphones. At once a little door in the wall opened. Someone I knew walked in, looking both irritated and grim. It was the way Deputy Director Marcus Pell usually looked.

I stood up and offered him a hand to shake. “I’m Agent Dannerman,” I told him.

The deputy director didn’t answer at first. He ignored the hand and took one of the straight-backed chairs-its previous occupant getting up and out of the way fast-and regarded me for a moment. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “How do we know you’re who you say you are?”

I guessed, “Fingerprints? Retinal scan?” I think I was getting a little light-headed by then, regardless of the pills.

“Not good enough,” he said judiciously. “I understand the Scarecrows can make an exact copy of anybody or anything they like. You could be a Scarecrow brain wearing a human body, for all I know.”

“I’m not,” I said wearily, and couldn’t help adding, “For that matter, so could you.”

He didn’t take offense. He just nodded and said, “I think we need confirmation of your identity. Brigadier Morrisey! Come in, please.”

The door that opened this time wasn’t to the auditorium seats; it was the one that allowed suspects and interrogators to get in and out from the corridors outside. In a moment a clumsy-looking thing like a white-enameled kitchen refrigerator on wheels rolled in. I frowned at it, puzzled about what the deputy director was bringing this big metal thing in for, annoyed because it was blocking my view; I couldn’t see my old boss, Hilda Morrisey, at all. Even when the thing rolled up close to me and I could see the door behind it closing again, there was no sign of Hilda.

Then a voice that I knew came out of the box. “Tell me, Danno, what was the name of the Kraut broad from the Mad King Ludwigs you were shacking up with?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Hilda! They told me you were dead! What the hell are you doing in that thing?”

It-she-came to a full stop right across the table from me. There was nothing that looked human about the box. It had no face, only a rectangle of mirror glass at head height; I could not see what was behind it. But the voice was Hilda’s, all right-a little fainter than I was used to, a little breathier, but definitely Hilda. “I’m not quite dead, Danno. I got shot up a little, is all, and the reason I’m still alive is that I’ve got this box to keep me going. Answer the question.”