I listened to her story, but not attentively. What was mostly on my mind was less what she was saying than the mere presence of Pat herself beside me. This was the precise Pat I loved, the Pat I had made love to back on the prison planet; this was the exact, specific, identical physical body that I had undressed and explored, and had yearned to do the same to again for all that long time I spent with the Horch.
Of course, so had this other Dan Dannerman with the mustache.
I wondered if he felt any jealousy, with me sitting right there in the room with them. For that matter, I wondered if I did. I definitely felt something. When Pat passed me the salt and our fingers touched, I was aware that that was the hand that had caressed me…
And, of course, the same hand that had caressed him as well.
That was a jolting thought. On the other hand, Dan M. was definitely me, wasn’t he? And was it possible for me to be jealous of myself?
I didn’t know the answer. This whole question of living in a world that contained more than one of me took a lot of getting used to, and I was nowhere near that point.
I don’t know what Dan M. made of my absentmindedness, but he surely noticed it. What he said after a moment, kindly, was, “I guess you’d like Patrice to come back, wouldn’t you?”
I thought for a moment, then came to a conclusion. I did want her to come back, if only to sort out what, if anything, I felt for the carbon copy of the woman I loved. I said, “Yes.”
“She didn’t really want to leave, Dan,” Pat said reassuringly. “She didn’t have any choice about getting back to the Observatory. We’re all working for the Bureau now, Patrice, too; she has to keep me posted on Threat Watch so I can pass the data along.”
I mulled that over. “Aren’t there a couple of you Pats there already?”
She gave me a forgiving smile. “Pat Five has her hands pretty full with the triplets, and it needs both Patrice and P. J. to handle the job at the Observatory, Dan. They work in shifts. There’s all the administrative work to do, the stuff I used to hate-signing payroll checks, travel vouchers have to be approved, somebody has to keep the interns in line-especially keep them from flirting with the Bureau spooks these days. And then there’s the regular staff, Kip Papathanassiou and Pete Schneyman and all. Some ways, they’re the hardest part of the job. Patrice says they keep barging in on her at all hours, all of them, because they’re not getting the observing time to keep up with their Cepheid counts or gravitationallensing studies or whatever. Observing time! They know perfectly well that every big telescope is fully committed on Threat Watch… And then there’s Threat Watch itself. Patrice and P. J. have the synoptics to prepare every six hours and send me so I can tell the deputy director what’s going on. Now and then, when there’s something special, I even get to brief the President.” She nodded her head approvingly. “That’s the good part of the job. The President isn’t a bad guy, for a politician. And he always treats me as though I were a human being- not like Marcus Pell.”
I chewed away on my steak, listening. Something had crossed my mind about this Threat Watch thing, but there was something else on my mind that drove it out. “About Patrice,” I said when Pat paused for a moment, getting the subject back to what interested me. “You said I hurt her feelings.”
“Well, you did. You shouldn’t have said she was ‘more or less’ me, Dan,” Pat informed me. “Patrice isn’t more or less anybody. She’s herself. And also me, of course, but none of us like to be told we’re part of a matched set. Even if we are. It’s better if we just think of ourselves as family, isn’t it? Saves a lot of confusion.”
But it didn’t. Not for me, anyway. Thinking of us as family didn’t make it easier to handle for me, because I had had no experience in that area. I had never had a family to get used to. No siblings, parents long dead, no one to call a relative but Cousin Pat… and that was in the days when there was only one Cousin Pat.
The fact was that I didn’t have much time to be part of a family, anyway. I didn’t have much time for anything at all. Hilda made sure of that. She came to collect me right on the dot, hurrying me to my last session of the day, this one at the submarine.
I guess the talk had made me a little absentminded. We got through the session at the sub without my noticing anything was wrong-work coming along well, Wrahrrgherfoozh promising the sub’s incoming comm systems would be back on line in a day or so-and it wasn’t until we were in the final talk session between Hilda and me that I put up my hand to scratch my head and said, “Oh, shit.”
Hilda interrupted herself in the middle of telling me that I really had to press Beert and the Docs harder for information to ask, “Now what, Danno?” Then she saw for herself. “Oh, Christ! Where’s your damn Faraday shawl?”
I said apologetically, “I guess I forgot to put it back on when I was having dinner. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry!”
“Well, hell, Hilda, I didn’t do it on purpose. But look, if I really was transmitting data to somebody, I’ve done it, haven’t I? So why don’t we just forget about the damn babushka?”
And after a certain amount of chewing me out, she sighed and said, “Oh, what the hell. Maybe we could.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Naturally, the deputy director blew a fuse. But in the long run he had to admit that if there was any damage to be done by letting me off wearing the babushka, it was done already. And that was the way my life went. Debriefing, translation, more debriefing, more translation … and bed. Apart from the fact that my head was babushkaless now-and that Hilda squeezed twenty minutes in the next day for me to get a haircut and a beard trim-every day the same.
It wasn’t all that unlike the days when the Christmas trees were pumping me for everything I knew about the human race.
I did now have better food and a more comfortable bed, and even a little entertainment. There wasn’t much variety to the entertainment, though. Every morning I turned on the news channels, and every morning the news was the same. There were stories about plane crashes and stock-market gyrations; there were senators denouncing the opposition party for not responding to the Scarecrow threat vigorously enough, and opposition leaders denouncing those senators for recklessly damaging national unity in this time of crisis. There were sports scores and weather forecasts and about a million other kinds of news items that the media thought worth passing on, but there was not ever a single word of any kind about the captured submarine, the Horch or the unexpected arrival of another Dan Dannerman.
So security was holding. Whatever the faults of the National Bureau of Investigation, it was still outstanding at keeping its secrets buried.
There was something else that wasn’t there, and when I had a free moment with Hilda I asked her about it. “Don’t they have traffic advisories anymore? I didn’t see anything at all about terrorists on the news.”
“Oh,” she said offhandedly, “those are last year’s worries. The nuts’ve all calmed down, now that they’ve got something else to worry about. We haven’t had a terrorist scare in weeks. Now get a move on, they want us at the submarine.”
That stopped me in midthought. “The schedule says we’re supposed to be doing solo debriefing,” I protested, not liking the sound of a break in the routine.
Hilda wasn’t patient. “Let me worry about scheduling, will you, Danno? It’s the submarine now. They’ve got the stuff working.”
When we got there Hilda waited outside as I climbed up to the sub’s hatch, the linguists trailing as always. As always, the congestion inside the vessel was acute: all three Docs, the linguists, the technicians and me.
But it was worth the crowding. Wrahrrgherfoozh and Mrrranthoghrow had finally finished the job of rebuilding the sub’s communications for receiving only-would have had it done a lot faster, Mrrranthoghrow said, sounding aggrieved, if all those Bureau and UN techs hadn’t kept getting in the way. Well, I couldn’t blame the techs for that. It was their best chance ever to watch people who knew what they were doing in the actual process of repairing a piece of Scarecrow machinery.