I studied the display. “Change of plan,” I said.
Both Beert and Pirraghiz turned to me, Pirraghiz’s expression wondering, Beert’s merely resigned.
“I don’t think we’d better get into all that traffic,” I told them. “Better if we can find some quiet bay somewhere along the shore. Show me what’s down-here.”
I put my finger on the barrier island that began around the Highlands and went south. Why did I pick there? I don’t know. Maybe I thought we might just pull in at Uncle Cubby’s old boat dock and knock on his door.
I didn’t think it long. Uncle Cubby was long dead. I had no idea who owned his house, and didn’t want to investigate. “There’s a bay,” I said, pointing between the Sea Bright barrier island and the shore. “Let’s take a look.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It wasn’t a bay. It was the mouth of a river that I had forgotten about, but that was just as good.
Slowly and carefully the Christmas tree piloted us upstream on this nice, wide river with no boats visible anywhere on its surface. I never took my eyes off the display. Not far ahead I saw something that stretched clear across the river, which worried me for a moment. A dam? So we’d have to go back and try again?
But it was a bridge. And off to one side of it was a system of docks with small objects moored to them: a boat basin,
“That’ll do,” I said, hoping I was right.
In fact, it did very well. The Christmas tree brought us to the surface, the robot opened the hatch and I climbed out into a cold, wet-but Earthly!-drizzle.
I saw lights up on the road. I found a little driveway that led up to them, and when I was at street level, there, right across the road, was a large and lighted seafood restaurant.
When I was inside the cashier gave me a thoroughly funny look-reasonably enough; I was tattered, unwashed and long unshaven-but she pointed me to a telephone anyway. There was a scattering of diners in the place, curiously, most of them in uniform. They were staring at me, too. I turned my back on them.
Naturally I had no encryption facilities. I didn’t even have a payment card, and the restaurant’s smells of good, hot human food were driving me crazy. But I managed to get a collect call through to the Bureau in Arlington.
The duty officer must have thought I was crazy, too, but she listened as I talked: “This is Senior Agent James Daniel Danner-man calling. I’m the one that-ah”-I tried to figure out how to put it-“the one you haven’t seen for quite a while because I’ve been away. A long way away. Relay this information immediately to Colonel Hilda Morrisey or Deputy Director Marcus Pell. I require immediate pickup and a full squad to take charge of important assets.”
There was a moment’s silence while she thought that over. “I thought Brigadier Morrisey was dead,” she said doubtfully.
I don’t know which shook me up more, Hilda dead or Hilda a brigadier. But I didn’t have time to think about it. “Tell somebody in authority at once,” I ordered, and got the restaurant cashier to tell me where I was so I could pass it along. “And most of all,” I finished, “tell them no shooting.”
I guess she did pass the word along, because in about twenty minutes half the helicopters in the world seemed to be jockeying to land in the restaurant parking lot, and I could hear sirens coming toward us from the highway.
It’s amazing what the Bureau can do when it puts its mind to it. Although the gaggle of Bureau people who popped out of the first two choppers claimed to be from the New York office, I didn’t know a soul among them. But they knew me. “Jesus, Dannerman, how the hell many of you guys are there, anyway?” one of them asked wonderingly, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind. Let’s get some damage control going here.”
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.