Pohl, Frederik - The Far Shore of Time

They began at once to tell me all the news that I hadn’t heard from Patrice, what a commotion they’d made when they got back, how this Dan and this Pat had been put in charge of their Dopey and Meow-“His name is actually Mrrranthoghrow,” I told them, and they practiced that for a while without a lot of success-and thus assigned to Camp Smolley. And all the while I kept looking at the two of them, and trying to figure out just what I was feeling.

Odd. That was how I was feeling. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Just odd. I guess it showed, because the other Dan grinned at me, then looked serious and said, “Weird, right? But you’ll get used to it.”

And Pat said sympathetically. “We all did.”

“Except in my case,” Rosaleen put in, “because I didn’t have anything of that sort to get used to. When I returned I learned that the other of me had died while we were away. That was more than simply a bizarre feeling, Dan. It was quite distressing. But as Dan says-as Dan M. says-one gets used to it.”

Then Pat-Pat One-began to show me pictures of Pat Five’s triplets; they looked like rather ordinary little girls to me, somewhat Asian-looking. As was to be expected, considering that what got Pat Five pregnant was some of the Beloved Leaders’ experimentation with sperm from their copy of Jimmy Lin. Who had managed to secure visitation rights, after a lot of high-level and acrimonious diplomatic discussion between the United States and the People’s Republic, and was surprisingly turning out to be a fondly besotted new father. And Pat Five was doing fine, too, except that the drugs she was taking to enhance her milk flow-three babies sucking away six times a day each!-had made her breasts so sensitive that she complained of being horny all the time. And how busy Patrice and P. J. were at the Observatory, with the Threat Watch using up so much of their resources, and the Observatory’s scientific staff constantly pissing and moaning I because they weren’t getting enough observing time to do any real science since the world’s telescopes were kept busy hunting comets that might be a threat.

All the time, out of the corner of my eye, I was watching Pat, my true love whom I had been missing so urgently, for so long. And what I was thinking was how much she looked like Patrice, with all of Patrice’s mannerisms and every bit of Patrice’s looks. I cleared my throat. “Will she be coming back soon, do you think?”

That made them all look at each other. “I don’t know,” Dan M. said at last.

And Pat bit her lip, and then leaned toward me confidentially. “I guess you know,” she said, “back in the prison planet Patrice, well, had a kind of crush on you-that is, you, I mean”-pointing a forefinger at each of us Dan Dannermans.

I blinked at that. “She did?”

Rosaleen was laughing, a dry old chuckle. “Of course she did, Dan, as did we all,” she said kindly. “Do not let it make you conceited. You were simply the only worthwhile man for many light-years in any direction. What did you expect?” She gave me a demure look. “Perhaps I should confess that I even had some sorts of foolish old-woman thoughts about you myself.”

“You did?” That was astonishing, too, but in a different way.

“Patrice didn’t exactly get over it, either,” Pat went on. “So when she heard you were here-well, look, I’m telling tales out of school, but we’re all kind of family here, aren’t we? And now you’ve just kind of hurt her feelings, you know.”

That baffled me. “What did I do?”

“Something you said, I’m not sure what. Did you say she was just a copy of me? Because we’re all a little bit sensitive about that.”

Well, I hadn’t done that. Not exactly, anyway. What I had done was to admit to her that I’d told Pirraghiz she was “more or less” the woman in my dreams, but what was so bad about that? It was true, wasn’t it?

They all kept talking, mostly Dan M. telling me about the religious nut who had wormed her way into Hilda’s confidence and repaid it by shooting her and three or four other people. I listened and responded. But I was still mulling over the Patrice problem when Hilda herself rolled in.

“Finished, Danno?” she asked. “You better be. Wipe the crumbs off your face, because family time is over and the debriefers are waiting to get at you.”

PART TEN

The Most Important Man in the World

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

There were half a dozen people impatiently waiting for me in the debriefing room, some male, some female, some wearing the blue UN beret and some in Bureau tans. They didn’t waste time. They started in right away-“Describe in more detail the robots you called ‘Christmas trees,’ “ one of them commanded, and we were off.

It didn’t stop, either. It didn’t even slow down. After I told them how the robots had acted I had to tell them what their needles felt like when I touched them, and what they had done to me with their damned helmet, and what they had been doing to the Dopey. The questioning didn’t even pause for breath-my breath, I mean; the debriefers had plenty of breathing space because they took turns with the questions-until Hilda’s great white refrigerator box rolled back into the room. “Time’s up for this segment,” she said. “You go to the sub now, Danno.”

“Slow down a little, Hilda,” I begged. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Sure you do, Danno. I’ve got you down for a pee break right after the next session. You can hold it until then, can’t you?”

And rolled away, leaving me to follow her, without waiting to hear whether I could or couldn’t.

There were more questions at the submarine, but this time they weren’t for me. They were for the two Docs who waited there, Pirraghiz and the recent amputee, Wrahrrgherfoozh, and all I had to do was translate. The head debriefer seemed to be a middle-aged, red-haired woman I sort of knew-Daisy Fennell, her name was, one of the Bureau higher-ups. She started with the questions before I was all the way inside.

They’d had the sense to leave the hatch open, and so the sub smelled a little better. Someone had also cleaned up the airsick guard’s puke, but outside of that nothing much had been touched. There was one woman in there as we climbed down, operating three or four cameras that were methodically scanning around. “Watch where she’s shooting,” Fennel ordered. “We want to know the function of every piece of equipment in this vehicle, also as much as these, ah, persons can tell us about how it works. Understand? Start with this one.”

She was pointing where one of the cameras was pointing, to a sort of Chinese lantern, twelve or fifteen centimeters high, that was fixed to one wall. It glowed with a pale green light and was softly humming to itself. I passed the question on to Pirraghiz, who mewed to Wrahrrgherfoozh, who spoke at some length. When Pirraghiz translated for me, it came out as, “Wrahrrgherfoozh says it monitors the lighting system. I don’t know why that’s necessary, do you?” And while I was putting that into English for the debriefers, she kept on going. “He also told me what systems are inside it, but I did not understand the terms he used.”

“One moment, please,” one of the debriefers said, while I was adding that. He looked unhappy. “Will you please make sure you give us exact wording in every case? Also ask Pir-Pirr-the one with the purry name to do the same when she translates for you.”

I opened my mouth to ask why, but Daisy Fennell was already talking. “Do as she says, Dannerman,” she commanded. “Dr. Hausman and Dr. Tiempe are linguists; the deputy director has given them permission to record your translations so they can work on learning these languages.”