Pohl, Frederik - The Far Shore of Time

While all that was soaking in I felt the chopper change course. A minute later the pilot got on the horn. “Folks,” he said, his voice sounding peculiarly amused, “we’re only a couple of I minutes from the Camp Smolley landing pad, but they’ve told us we have to orbit for a while. There seems to be some tricky traffic ahead of us. Matter of fact, if you look out of your left-hand windows, you can probably see it as we turn.”

We did look, and boy, we saw it, all right. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It was a giant blimp-copter, shaped like an immense fat sausage, its red and green lights blinking, and it was settling down toward the earth.

I don’t mean I’d never seen blimp-copters before. Actually I’d even been in one, years earlier, when we were retrieving some wreckage for evidence from a bombed-out survivalist compound. This one was a whole lot bigger. In the early dawn light it looked like an airborne ocean liner, and the funniest part was that slung under it was some other large thing that was shrouded in tarpaulins. It took me a moment to figure it out, but then I sucked in my breath. “My God,” I whispered. “That’s my submarine!”

Up ahead Hilda was complaining furiously to the pilot because the way her life-support box was strapped down, she couldn’t turn and look out. I didn’t blame her. It was something to see.

The blimp-copter pilot seemed to be pretty good at his job. Slowly his whirly blades pulled the big bag down, jockeying this way and that, a meter or two at a time, until his load was resting on a wheeled metal cradle between two low buildings. Then the aircraft sat there without moving for two or three minutes. Nothing seemed to be happening, except that the envelope of the big sausage wrinkled and shrank a little, almost invisibly.

If I hadn’t seen a blimp-copter in action before, I wouldn’t have known what was going on, but I was able to explain it to Patrice, who had loosened her seat belt and leaned over me to get a better look. “He’s pumping some of the helium back into the high-pressure tanks to cut the lift,” I said into her ear. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have neutral buoyancy when he lets go of the load, and the rotors couldn’t handle it.”

“Wow,” she said, craning her neck. She was practically in my lap. It had been a long time since I had had so much woman so close, so warm and smelling so good. I put my hand on her shoulder-to steady her-and she turned her head to look quizzically up at me.

I thought-no, I still think-that what had crossed her mind just then was something about kissing. It certainly crossed mine. Kissing Pat Adcock had been a dream, yearned for most thoroughly for a long time, and now our lips were not much more than twenty centimeters apart.

They didn’t get any closer. She didn’t move any nearer and neither did I. She was Pat Adcock, all right, but she was a different Pat Adcock, and I couldn’t sort that out.

Then the moment passed. The pilot was already on the horn again. “Okay, people, they say we can come in to land now. Make sure your seat belts are fastened, will you?” And Patrice straightened up and did as ordered. So did I, and that particular conundrum had to be set aside again.

The blimp-copter pilot had eased his big ship down another meter or two, until the cables that held his load went slack. Workmen on the ground had quickly released them, and the blimp-copter lifted and went sailing away into the sunrise. I lost sight of it as our own pilot was setting us down on the pad a few dozen meters away.

While we were waiting for somebody to bring up a forklift to get Hilda’s box to the ground, I could see that the handlers had already hooked a little tractor to the cradle the sub was on. They weren’t wasting any time. The machine was pulling the whole thing, sub and all, into a cavernous loading dock the size of a hotel ballroom.

As soon as we were off the chopper a couple of Bureau guards were waving us inside. Next to me Patrice stumbled and frowned; she was looking curiously toward the perimeter of Camp Smolley. Some sort of argument was going on there, Bureau guards and a couple of soldiers in unfamiliar blue berets yelling at each other. But what the squabble was about, I could not see.

The Bureau people weren’t just beckoning us inside, they were rushing us inside. As soon as the sub and we were in the loading dock, its big steel door folded itself down to shut us off from the outside world, and the workmen began pulling the tarps off the submarine.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Even in that moment I noticed something funny. The workmen weren’t the usual uniformed grunts the Bureau used for heavy lifting. They were high-ranking officers. I recognized some of them as upper brass from the Arlington headquarters, and they didn’t seem to like being used as manual labor.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about that; there was something more important. It was the first time I’d seen the whole Scarecrow submarine exposed. It didn’t look a bit like any vessel I’d seen before.

When the tarps came off at one end of the sub they revealed a squared-off stern with three great openings, making a triangle, looking like exhaust nozzles on a huge rocket. There was neither propeller nor rudder. At the bow end was a group of tightly nested jointed rods, for what purpose, I could not say. A whitely gleaming squarish thing was between them; it looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The rest of the hull was featureless metal, marked only by the hatch on the upper deck.

I heard my name called and turned around. It was Deputy Director Marcus Pell, looking recently slept and freshly bathed. From behind me Hilda’s voice said, “He wants you at the sub. Go!”

I went. The brigadiers and department subheads were rolling a wheeled ladder up to the sub’s side and Pell was standing impatiently beside it. “Up you go, Dannerman,” he snapped. “See if you can keep those freaks of yours from making any more trouble.”

I did as ordered, somewhat confused because I had no idea what kind of trouble Pell was talking about. Then the people on the desk opened the hatch and it got a lot more confusing than that.

The first thing that came out of the sub was the stink, worse than ever and with some unpleasant new | ingredients added. The second thing was a uniformed police lieutenant, looking as if he’d had a hard ride. He glowered at me. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, and didn’t wait for an answer. He turned to the deputy director, who had followed me up. “Is there somebody who can talk to those freaks? They wouldn’t let us touch the machinery at all. Then kept getting in Dr. Evergood’s way when she was trying to take care of the Doc with the burned arm and ... and Sergeant Coughlan was airsick all the way here,” he finished bitterly.

That explained the new aroma. It didn’t explain the fact that the second person out of the sub was a portly black woman in a stained white smock, whom I’d never seen before. The deputy director didn’t give me a chance to ask questions. “You heard what the lieutenant said, Dannerman,” he snapped. “Get in there and straighten the freaks out!”

As soon as I lowered myself inside, Beert and Pirraghiz came clamoring around me for news and explanations. “Give me a minute,” I begged-in Horch, of course-while I looked around. Part of the stink came from three Bureau-issue body bags stacked one on top of the other-four body bags, actually; two bags had been put together to hold a larger carcass. That would be the dead Doc; the other bags would be holding the bodies of the two dead Scarecrow warriors. Another component of the stench was a couple of drying puddles of vomit on the floor, just under the perch where the ship’s Dopey was fastidiously shielding his face with his fan and squawking his own raucous complaints at me-in English, this time. The sergeant who had been airsick gave me an aggrieved look and said faintly, “He’s been going on like that the whole time. They all have.”