That took Pat by surprise. “You speak English,” she said. It sounded like an accusation; the alien didn’t reply.
“Stupid question,” Martin reproved her. “He just did speak English. You, then. Will you tell us why we are here?”
“You are here,” the creature said, “so that you may be learned.” Its voice was shrill and grating, as much like the cawing of a parrot as any human speech, but the words were clear enough.
“Learned what?” the general demanded. The Dopey didn’t reply. “For whom?” No answer for that, either, and Rosaleen tried her luck:
“Can you say how we got here?”
The Dopey considered. “Not at present. Perhaps later,” it said at last. Pat thought it seemed to be waiting for something, but didn’t pursue the thought; she had other things on her mind. Food, for one thing, and she wasn’t the only one. Jimmy Lin was rooting around in the sparse collection: mints, apples, corn chips-she recognized the provenance; it was what they had had on their persons in the Clipper. It wasn’t much. It was welcome, though; she selected an apple, carefully excavated a bruised spot with a thumbnail, then bit into it. It was as moist as she had hoped.
Jimmy was less pleased. He was muttering dissatisfiedly to himself in Chinese, then looked up at the Dopey and snarled, “Wo zen mo nen chi zhe zhong dong xi!”
The alien didn’t miss a beat. “Ni bao li zhi you zhe xie, “ it replied. Every human jaw dropped at once, and Pat cried:
“You speak Chinese, too!”
“Of course. Also Cuban-Floridian Spanish and Dr. Artzybachova’s Galician dialect of Ukrainian, as well as a number of other human languages. This was necessary for my work on your orbiter. One moment.”
It turned to the wall. Almost at once the mirror bulged and admitted a pair of Docs, carrying a large metal object. They set it down and stood waiting. The Dopey said, “You now have all you need. Now you are simply to go about your affairs in the normal way. You may breed if you wish.”
That appeared to be all it had to say. It turned and left through the wall, the Docs silently trooping after. Dannerman sprang to the wall as soon as they were through, but, as before, the wall flowed like mercury around the departing aliens, and re-formed as solid as ever.
Well,” Dannerman said encouragingly, “at least now we have something to eat. Jimmy? What was that you and the BEM were talking about?”
Lin was looking amused-at least an improvement, Pat thought, over his sullen withdrawal of before. “I was just complaining about the food. I didn’t expect an answer, but then he said-in perfectly good Mandarin-that it was all there was among our possessions. But what about the other thing he said, Pat? Are you ready to start doing the breeding bit?”
She said simply, “Shut up.” She was watching Rosaleen Artzybachova, who was examining the metal object the Docs had carried in. It seemed to be a rectangular, fauceted tank, with pipes dangling from it that led nowhere. Rosaleen cupped one hand and held it under the faucet; when she twisted the lever, water came out. She sipped it and nodded.
“I think it’s the portable-water recycler from Starlab,” she reported. “It appears there is some water in the tank, and it tastes all right. However, I suggest we use it carefully. There’s nothing here to replenish it; in Starlab it had a condenser to collect moisture from the air and a still for wastewater from the toilets but, as you can see, those have been disconnected and left behind.”
“And, of course, we don’t even have regular toilets anyway,” Jimmy smirked. Pat scowled at him. But that was not all bad, she thought; she was not enthusiastic about drinking water that had come from a toilet, no matter how meticulously it was treated and distilled. But when she said as much, Dannerman laughed.
“And where do you think that water came from in the first place? Anyway, it looks like they’re going to take care of us. Maybe the Seven Ugly Dwarfs aren’t so bad after all.”
“But they are still the ones the broadcast warned us against,” Rosaleen reminded him, and no one had any answer for that.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pat
Of all the things Pat Adcock missed, the ones she would least have expected were clocks. They had none. There wasn’t any day or night in their cell; the white glow came always unvarying from the ceiling. She felt time dragging for her, with nothing to do, but the only clues the prisoners had to measure how much of it was passing were their own internal ones-the number of times they (unenthusiastically) ate some of the scraps the Dopey had given them, or slept (uncomfortably stretched on the bare cell floor), or, when the remorseless demands of their metabolisms made it necessary, did their best to come somewhere near the impossible wish to urinate and move their bowels in private.
It was not a kind of existence Pat Adcock had ever expected for herself. Not Patrice Dannerman Ely Metcalf Adcock, who had never in her life gone hungry, except in the occasional struggle to get rid of a few extra pounds, who had, from tiniest childhood, always lived a life of privileged security-well, reasonable security, if you didn’t count the natural hazards everyone faced from street violence or random terrorist acts. Pat was accustomed to being a person of position. She was entitled to give orders to nearly two hundred people, as the operating head of a reasonably prestigious scientific enterprise. She was also used to all the perquisites that went with being more or less rich.
What Pat Adcock was used to was being an organism efficiently adapted to the ecological niche she occupied. She had all the skills necessary for that life; knew how to juggle budgets even in runaway inflation; how to discourage a date who wanted more intimacy than she cared to give-and how to motivate one who didn’t; how to find a clean and comfortable ladies’ room at need, wherever she was; how much to tip a headwaiter and when it was best just to give him a smile; how to-
Well, how to live, in the particular world she was designed to live in.
But not in this new world, which seemed to call for skills she didn’t have and didn’t know how to acquire. So nothing in Pat’s previous life had prepared her for the present confinement and privation, not to mention the humiliating aspects of their captivity. Naked, weaponless, surrounded by the mirrored walls- wherever she looked six Pats, or sixty times six Pats, looked back at her, dwindling as the reflections became more distant. They were penned like abandoned dogs in an animal shelter, waiting to be adopted-or to be put to death. Nor did they have any more control than a stray dog over their future. They could tell time only by events. Only in their case the events weren’t inspections by possible new owners, they were occasions like the time when they got the food from Starlab, and the time when they were at last given back their clothes, and the frightening time when they killed the Dopey.
No circumstances were ever so bad that a little human effort couldn’t make them worse. As their tempers grew short they became quarrelsome. Pat snapped at Martin Delasquez for snoring, Dannerman and Rosie Artzybachova withdrew from the others, each busy at some not discussed thoughts of their own, while Martin and Jimmy Lin argued fiercely over whether the lack of blankets to sleep on was worse than the lacks in their limited larder, and whether mints, apples and corn chips represented a diet they could survive on. For Pat, who was trying to force herself to down one more meal of that sort of trash, it was the last straw. “Oh, shut up, you two, for God’s sake. Dan, what’s the matter with everybody?”
It was a rhetorical question, but she could see him making the effort to give her an answer. “It’s prisoner neurosis,” he said. “You see a lot of it in jails; that’s why you have so many murders in prisons. Actually, it’s the policeman’s best friend, because when people are hiding out from the cops, after a while they just can’t stand each other. That’s when they do something foolish and get caught.”
Jimmy was listening with a half smile. “You know all about that, don’t you, Dannerman?” he said.
Dan gave him an opaque look. “It’s common knowledge. Psych 101, or don’t they teach that in Chinese colleges?”
Lin met him stare for stare, then shrugged. “Actually, I got my bachelor’s at the University of Hawaii,” he said, and dropped the subject. Pat frowned, chopping a bruised part out of the apple she had just picked up; there was something going on between the two of them, but she couldn’t guess what. Jimmy was being his usual irritating self, of course, but Dannerman-well, what was Dannerman up to, exactly? He prowled their cell for hours at a time, then sat silently, seeming to be trying to work something out, though she couldn’t imagine what.