That made me grin, with my mouth full of sausage. “Starting right out with trick questions, are we, Patrice? Uncle Cubby didn’t have a cat. Grandma Dannerman was allergic to them. The cook had a little yellow dog, but it wasn’t ever allowed out of the servants’ quarters. I think its name was Molly.”
She made a face at me. “Was it? I don’t remember. So tell me how old you were when we first met, and what rooms we had in Uncle Cubby’s house.”
So I told her that and, when she went on to ask, told her what it was like to swim in the muddy-bottomed river below the house, and the names of Uncle Cubby’s servants, or as many of them as either of us could remember, and what games we used to play. Except that when I started to mention the games she and I had played under Uncle Cubby’s big front porch she cleared her throat and changed the subject. Well, I knew why that was. I had no doubt that every word we spoke and every expression on our faces was monitored so that the Bureau’s gumshoes watching us wouldn’t miss a thing, and there were things Patrice didn’t choose to discuss in front of strangers.
By the time I had reached the point where I couldn’t eat any more, she had run out of questions. “All right,” she said, and looked away. She spoke to the air. “Hilda? If he’s a fake, he’s a damn good one. Come on in.”
The door opened at once, and Hilda’s mobile life support rolled in. The big white box stopped right in front of me, so she could take another good look at my face, but when she spoke it was to Patrice. “You’re sure about him?”
Patrice shrugged. “As sure as I can be in twenty minutes. I think it’s him, all right.”
Hilda meditated for a moment, then sighed. “All right, Pa-trice, but you’d better come along with us to double-check. The chopper’s waiting.”
Patrice frowned as if she might be about to object to the idea. I didn’t give her a chance. All this talk about good times in the old days had put more urgent matters out of my mind, but they came flooding back. “Hold it,” I said. “What’s happening with my friends and the sub? And where are we going?”
“We’re going to Camp Smolley,” Hilda informed me. “Ever been there? The old biowar research plant? That’s where the action is on trying to reverse-engineer Scarecrow artifacts these days.”
“My friends-“
Her voice got harsh. “I said the chopper’s waiting, Danno. We’ll see your pals when we get there. The Navy towed the sub to Hampton Roads for security reasons, and now they’re flying it to Smolley.”
I stared at her. That huge thing? Flying it? But when I tried to ask her about it she wasn’t patient anymore. “You’ll see when we get there. Now get your ass in gear.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Outside it was still dark and there were a few stars in the sky- unusually, for foggy, cloudy northern Virginia. I didn’t think it was going to stay dark for long. I didn’t have any good idea of the time, but a full moon was down near the western horizon and daybreak couldn’t be far away.
Getting into the helicopter took a little longer than I would have guessed. The problem was Hilda’s life-support system; we had to wait while they brought up the kind of lift they use to bring meals into passenger jets. She rolled her white box onto the lift, it elevated her, she rolled onto the chopper, two attendants guiding her. Then Patrice and I were allowed to board. The rotors began to turn before they’d finished strapping Hilda down, and we were airborne.
I had about a million more serious questions-really serious ones-on my mind, but I couldn’t help it. First I had to clear up what she had said. “Patrice? You said Pat was married?”
As she was buckling herself in she paused to give me what struck me as an unsympathetic look, I could not guess why. “Pat One, you’re talking about. Yes, she’s definitely married. To Dan M.-M for mustache, see? That’s what we call that particular Dan because he’s got a mustache. He’s the one who was with us on the prison planet. And Dan S.-the clean-shaved one, the one that never got there-he’s married, too, to that little girl you were romancing from the theater. I guess all your other Dans have been taking all your old girlfriends out of circulation while you were away.” She gave me a considering look. I wasn’t sure what was in her mind, but what she said was, “Maybe you should tidy up that beard a little and keep it for a while, Dan. So we can tell you apart. We could call you Dan B., for beard.”
She went on to explain some of the other problems of nomenclature for all us identical copies. She was still Patrice, just as Rosaleen had named her back on the prison planet. The Pat I had been thinking of as my own particular Pat was now called Pat One. The one who had been pregnant was still Pat Five (and no, she wasn’t pregnant anymore; she had given birth to triplets, three little girls). And the Pat who had been returned to Earth with a bug in her head and never got to the prison planet with the rest of us had flatly refused to be given any number, so she was called P. J.
While she was telling me how to tell the Pats apart by sight- it had to do with the colors they wore-I remembered the important stuff. I broke in on her explanations with, “What about the Beloved Leaders?”
She looked startled, then relaxed. “I haven’t heard them called that for a while. The Scarecrows, we call them now. What about them?”
“Jesus, Patrice! Nobody’s said a word about them, but you must know they’re planning to kill off a lot of people. Whatever you call them, why aren’t you worried?”
She considered that for a moment. “Well, I do worry, a little bit, sometimes,” she admitted, “but not much. The situation is under control, Dan. Honest. The Scarecrows call in every once in a while-lots of bluster, warnings, demands we let them come down to talk to us-but it’s just talk. They sneaked in those damn submarines that caught a lot of people and bugged them a while ago-the same way I was, remember? So they could use the people as spies? But we’ve located most of those people and debugged them. The Scarecrows haven’t done anything aggressive since then, not even their submarines.”
I frowned. “How did you know they had subs on Earth?”
“Figured it out, Dan. All the bugged people turned out to have been at sea. The only Scarecrow object from the scout ship landed in the sea. Had to be. Only,” she said without pleasure, “the damn things aren’t easy to find. Every navy in the world’s been looking. No luck. There was this one Turkish destroyer that thought it had one and depth-bombed it, only it turned out to be an Italian submarine. But nobody ever actually saw one-well, until you brought us yours, I mean. We don’t even know how many of the things there are-probably at least a dozen-“
“Twenty-six,” I said. “Twenty-five besides the one I brought in.”
“Oh,” she said, dampened. “Well, if you’ve got some way of locating them, probably they could be depth-bombed for real.”
I stared at her. “Are you crazy? The subs aren’t the problem. The Belov-The Scarecrow are the problem! They can wipe us out any time they like!”
She gave me a strangely indulgent look. “Not really, Dan. We know what they’re capable of. Dopey told us. What he said,” she went on, sounding a lot like a mother telling her two-year-old that there aren’t really any monsters under the bed, “was that the Scarecrows could tweak a big near-Earth-passing asteroid out of its orbit and dump it on the Earth and kill us all that way. You know. Like the old KT event that killed the dinosaurs. Well, that’s what Threat Watch is all about, Dan. You don’t know what Threat Watch is, though, do you? It’s what’s been keeping us busy at the Observatory; I was working there, keeping track of all the findings, when they called me about you. Every decent telescope in the world is searching for objects with orbits that can come anywhere near us. We’ve mapped just about everything bigger than a panel truck for ten or twelve AU in every direction, whether they’re asteroids or comets or can’t-tell-which. I promise there’s absolutely nothing big that’s in an orbit that can come anywhere near hitting us for a minimum of two years. And there isn’t any tweaking going on, either. Threat Watch hasn’t found a single object that shows any signs of interference with its ballistic orbit.”