“Didn’t work, did it?” Jimmy Lin growled. “Now you’ve got them even madder at us.”
That was more than Pat could stand-this from one of the men who had actually killed the first Dopey! But, surprisingly, it was Martin who came to Dannerman’s defense.
“You are wrong, Lin,” Martin said heavily. “He was quite correct. It is the duty of a prisoner of war to try to escape, by any means possible.” He hesitated, then added, “I beg your pardon, Dannerman. You are not as useless as I thought. Now I think I will go back to sleep.”
The entertainment was obviously over, so, more slowly, Jimmy and Rosaleen Artzybachova followed his example. Dannerman sat awake, leaning against the wall with his eyes half closed. After an indecisive moment Pat sat down next to him. He raised his head to look at her. “Are we friends again?” he asked hopefully.
Pat considered. “Well,” she said, “not active enemies, anyway. Right now I’m a lot madder at Martin than I am at you.”
“So is it all right if I say something?” When she nodded he cleared his throat and added, “I want to apologize. I’m sorry about lying to you and all. Will you believe me when 1 say I never wanted to do anything to harm you?”
She thought about that for a moment, then shrugged. “We’d have to get into a definition of what ‘harm’ means, wouldn’t we?”
“Well, I mean personal harm. I admit what I was doing might have kept you from making a lot of money, maybe-“
“Damn straight it might. Important money. Money I needed, as a matter of fact; my second divorce came pretty close to cleaning me out.” She thought about that might-have-been money, then relented. “Let’s let it drop. Tell me, though. How’d you get into the spy business in the first place?”
“You mean, how did a nice guy like me get into a racket like that?” He grinned. “It just happened. I was in protsy in college, I told you that. I didn’t think it would last past graduation, but they called me up.”
“Into the army?”
“Not the army,” he said wearily. “I keep telling you; it was the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps. I guess I was a natural for them, with my background-well, you know how we grew up. Golden kids, private schools, all of Uncle Cubby’s rich power-broker friends hanging around when we spent our summers at his place. So I made a lot of contacts, and then when I grew up I had entry into all kinds of places. Sometimes that was pretty useful for the Bureau.”
“I suppose,” she said thoughtfully. “What the hell were you doing in protsy in the first place?”
“Easy credits . . . and, well, yes, there was also a girl. . . .”
She laughed out loud. A couple of the sleepers stirred, and she lowered her voice. “That’s the story of your life, isn’t it? Was she the one you brought to Uncle Cubby’s for Christmas just before your father died?”
“No, that was a different one,” he admitted. “You had a guy there, too. Was he the one you ran off and married?”
She gave him a sharp look, then smiled. “No. Actually not even close. Well, maybe neither of us is that much different from Jimmy Lin, just a little less outspoken about it.” She nestled against him comfortably, then remembered to pull away.
He turned to look into her face. “What’s the matter?”
She said uncomfortably, “I don’t think I smell very good right now.”
“So join the club.”
“Damn it, Dan, I don’t want to be in that club! I’d give anything for a bath-or at least for a little more water and somebody to chain Jimmy Lin up while I sponged myself off.” She paused to smother a yawn. “Hell. Tell me something, Dan. Do you see any way of ever getting out of here?”
He gave her a warning look, but only said, “Did you notice how that thing reached right in to where I was standing to grab the stuff?”
“Meaning they’re watching us?” She shuddered involuntarily, looking about. Well, she hadn’t really ever doubted that they were being observed, but still-
On the other hand, getting out of this place was definitely the central concern in her mind, and she couldn’t let it go. “So the walls have ears. Right. But do you have any ideas?”
He considered the question for a moment, then picked his words with care. “I hope so, Pat. There has to be something.”
His tone struck Pat as somber. “But you have thought of what that is?”
“If you mean something that could help us escape,” he said, glancing at the ceiling, “no. Not really. What I’m thinking is that there are all these people back home who don’t have any idea they’ve been watched all this time.”
There was an expression on his face that Pat couldn’t identify-stubbornness, worry, concern? Something of all of them, plus a kind of determination she had never before associated with Cousin Dan-Dan. “I have a duty,” he said, and stopped there.
In the silence she leaned back against him, wondering. It had never occurred to her that a cloak-and-dagger spook might be driven by conscience and concern as much as by-well, by whatever misguided adolescent yearning for colorful action might make a person get into that line of work. It was a new feeling for Pat. Not a bad one. It made him a lot easier to be comfortable with. . . .
Which she was. Comfortable. In spite of everything; comfortable enough to be definitely drowsy. When she yawned, he did, too. “We’ll figure something out,” he said. “Right now I’m sleepy.”
And so, Pat realized, was she. It occurred to her that it would be nice for them to untangle themselves so they could stretch out, but by the time she had got that far in her thinking she was already asleep with her head on Dannerman’s shoulder.
What woke Pat up was someone talking. The person was intruding on her dream, and she didn’t want to let go of it, especially not because of the green-skinned woman playing a musical instrument who was intruding into it. When she opened her eyes she discovered her head was in Dannerman’s lap and Jimmy Lin was grinning down at them. She sat up abruptly. “What did you say?” she demanded fuzzily.
“I was asking Dan what you were doing. Looked like the Jade Woman and Flute bit to me. Of course, Dan claims it didn’t happen, but then old Dan’s a real gentleman about a lady’s honor, isn’t he?”
“Damn you,” she said. “Can’t you turn off your testosterone for a while now and then? What is it, do you get a kick out of making trouble?”
His expression changed to belligerency. “Are you talking about the accident? Well, you know what? I’m not sorry we killed the little son of a bitch, even if it didn’t take. Sooner or later I’m going to find some way to make him give us straight answers, and if he won’t do it I wouldn’t mind killing him all over again.”
Dannerman was sitting up straight now, glaring at Lin. Pat was pleased to see that he was getting angry, too, but a little disappointed, too, when she realized that the anger wasn’t at Lin’s smarmy remarks. “You’re an idiot,” he said flatly. “If you really wanted to do something like that you’re sure making it hard by advertising it ahead of time.”
Lin shrugged and stalked away. Dannerman hesitated, then patted Pat on the head, easing it off his lap. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, and got up without saying what the idea was. What he did was only to head for the stack of miscellaneous supplies Dopey’s golems had brought.
Pat gazed after him, her back propped against the wall, knees hugged to her body. She was thinking about the connotations of being patted on the head. “Pat on the head” was a metaphor for tolerant dismissal and there had been a time, in her rad-fem undergraduate days, when any male who ventured such an act did so at his own peril. But she didn’t feel tolerated, and certainly she didn’t feel dismissed. What that casual touch had felt like was affection. Maybe even sexual affection. Tentative, yes, but under the circumstances about as forthright as was feasible. Under other circumstances . . .
Under other circumstances, Pat told herself wistfully, something nice might come of that; but not under these.
She shook herself and stood up, curious about what Dan-nerman was doing. He had borrowed Rosaleen’s multicolor pen and was busily printing something out on a scrap of wrapping paper from the Starlab booty, shading what he was writing with his other hand. Rosaleen Artzybachova was sitting cross-legged nearby, watching him curiously. When Dannerman saw Pat standing over him he complained, “The damn ink smears on this stuff.”