And then, as she excitedly began meowing into the microphone, I faced Beert. “Do you want to go home?” I asked.
That shook him up. His head darted to within centimeters of my face, his jaw dropped. “Dan,” he whispered pleadingly, “what are you saying?”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Just answer the question,” I said.
His long neck was trembling with excitement. “Go home, Dan? My belly yearns for it! Would you allow this?”
Marcus Pell was turning from Pirraghiz to me, his expression angry. “What’s she jabbering about? What’s going on?” he demanded.
I ignored Pell, speaking to the Christmas tree. “Can you transmit Djabeertapritch to the machines in the nest of the Eight Plus Threes?” And when it confirmed that it could, I ordered, “Set the machine up for transmission.” And then at last I turned to the nearly apoplectic deputy director.
“I just wanted to make absolutely sure,” I said apologetically.
The Far Shore of Time 301
“The job’s done. The survey ship is destroyed; there’s nothing left to transmit to.”
He made me repeat it two or three times, alternately blinking at me and at Pirraghiz as she meowed urgently into the ship-to-ship microphone. I jerked a thumb at the two remaining bombs. “Don’t you think you should get the hoists back so we can get these things out of here?” I suggested.
That took him by surprise. “Right,” he said, as glad as I thought he would be of the excuse to get away from them. And when he was out of the hatch to find the hoist operators, I said, “Good-by, Beert. Don’t linger. If he comes back, he’ll try to stop you.”
Horch don’t cry, but Beert’s hard little nose was running as he wrapped those reptilian arms around me for a moment, then leaped into the chamber. The men from Amarillo were goggling at what was going on, but they didn’t have any authority to prevent it.
I had one other thing to say to Beert. I held the door from closing for a moment, making him dart his head at me inquiringly. “Tell them for me, Beert,” I said. “Tell them we will fight the Others in every way we can. We won’t let them conquer us. But if we have to, we will fight the Horch as well. Tell them that.”
“I will tell them, Dan,” he said as I closed the door. And when it opened again the chamber was empty.
PART TWELVE
VICTORY
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
By the time Beert was gone the deputy director was already scrambling back down the ladder, shouting my name in a very unfriendly way. I didn’t look at him. For that matter, I didn’t stop to rejoice, or even take a deep breath; I had more important things to take care of.
First priority was giving Pirraghiz the orders to pass on to the sub crews: “Tell them all to turn off their transit machines and keep them off. Make sure they do that! Then,” I added as an afterthought, “tell them all to head out to deep water and stay there.” I didn’t want any of them where somebody could try a depth bomb.
When I was sure she was passing the word on I turned back to die deputy director, interrupting his tirade. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” I said, reasonably politely, “but I’m too busy to talk to you now.”
That was nowhere near the kind of deference he was used to, and it made him yell even louder. “The hell you say! You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Dannerman!”
I sighed, and put it less politely. “Shut the hell up,” I ordered.
Amazingly, he did. Or else had a heart attack. He turned a peculiar color and sat down heavily on die nearest flat surface. Whatever he was doing, I let him do it and went back to Pirraghiz. “Have they all done what I said?” I demanded. She raised one of her lesser arms to fend the question off while she was meowing into the microphone and listening to the yowls that came back.
Then at last she turned that great pale face toward me and said, “They are doing it, Dannerman, but not without much trouble and fighting.”
“Doing it isn’t good enough! Make sure it really gets done, by every last one!”
“Yes, Dannerman,” she sighed, and began polling the subs one by one. When it occurred to me to turn around again, Pell wasn’t there anymore. He had evidently gone out of the sub again-probably, I thought, to line up a firing squad for me.
At that moment I didn’t take much interest in what Pell might be up to. I was tired and cranky and not all that sure in my mind that I had done the right thing by letting Beert go. But it was done. Whatever the consequences might be, I had no way to deflect them.
Of those consequences there turned out to be plenty, though it took me a while to find out what they all were.
The deputy director didn’t come back that day, but Lieutenant Colonel Makalanos did. He gave me another of those unfriendly looks, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat down, silently watching my every move and occasionally stealing glances at the news screen he had brought with him. I wasn’t ready to talk to him, so I did my best to pretend he wasn’t there. It wasn’t that hard. There was plenty of back-and-forth talk with the subs to keep me busy.
They had followed my orders. Every one of them had turned off its transit machine, and they were all slipping quietly away from the shallow coastal waters. None reported any human attempt to bother them.
It was time to start asking them questions. I did-at length- and the answers came back the same way. After nearly an hour of that I sighed and turned around to face Makalanos. “All right,” I said. “I’d better tell you what they say the subs were doing so you can pass it on to the deputy director.”
He leaned back and scratched his chin. “I was hoping you might,” he said.
I let that go. “The freed crews, the Docs and the warriors, are all in control now. There was a lot of fighting. In the Sixteen Plus Eight and One-I mean in sub twenty-five-their Dopey tried to activate the methane release manually. They had to kill him. Four or five of the other Dopeys got killed too, but only one warrior died-his Dopey happened to have a weapon at the wrong time, so that was a close one. And,” I added, “we were right about the methane, I think, although none of the controlled crews were ever told what was going on and the Dopeys, the ones that survived, aren’t talking. Starting a couple of days ago the crews began receiving objects through their transit machines. They were tapered metal cylinders that they’d never seen before, and their orders were to push the things out through the disposal hatch. The crews weren’t told what the objects were supposed to do. Dr. Schiel’s idea was that they might use incendiaries, or maybe just high explosives, to blow up and release the trapped methane. It looks like he was right. I would guess,” I said, striking off on my own, “that the bombs were meant to be triggered from the scout ship, but I don’t think they were all in place yet. The sub crews were still busy emplacing the things when we blew the main ship up.”
I stopped there. Makalanos was staring at me. “Jesus,” he said. “And they’re still out there, those live bombs?”
It was a dumb question, but it was one I hadn’t thought of. “Shit,” I said. “I guess somebody’s going to have to pick them up and disarm them before we’re through. Anyway, get the word out. The D. D.’s going to want to know all this.”
“Oh,” he said, gesturing to one of the cameras, “the word’s out, all right, though whether anyone is paying attention right now, I don’t know. They’ve got other things on their minds.” And he turned his news screen around so I could see what was on it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Things weren’t going exactly the way I had expected. I had always understood that when you won a war it was a big event, so big that you stopped everything else to celebrate it. Extensively, with dancing in the streets, bands playing, maybe a ticker-tape parade down Broadway for the returning heroes with everybody laughing and drinking and hugging the handiest stranger.
There was no trace of any of that. When I looked at the screen what I saw was a free-for-all scramble for loot. The President had had nearly two hundred ambassadors all trying to make urgent diplomatic representations at once-plus every major executive in his own administration, plus Congress, plus every news medium and just about every single individual in the world who happened to know the telephone number of the White House. That was bad news for the deputy director’s probable desire to have me shot. He would need the President’s permission for that, and the President looked to be a lot too busy to give my personal future much of a thought.