Pat didn’t answer that. Instead, she asked, “What’s this Jewchoon place you’re talking about?”
“Jiuquan,” Dannerman corrected. “It’s the Chinese space center, like our Cape and Huntsville and Houston all rolled into one.” Then, to Lin, “Tell you what. Let’s change the subject, all right? No hard feelings. We all did what we had to do … and look how much good it’s done any of us.”
Time passed. Pat was interested to discover that time kept right on passing, even when there really weren’t any events to mark the passage. Oh, there were a few slow, but visible, processes of change. All three of the men were developing tacky-looking beards, and Pat’s own axillary growth was no longer scratchy stubble.
But very little happened. Once or twice Dopey put in a brief appearance, not talkative, seeming harried. Sporadically someone would have a notion and commit it to paper to be passed around, but none of the ideas seemed to go anywhere. Sleeping, eating, defecating took up just so much of their time, and the rest hung heavy. Pat was mildly pleased to discover that she could beat any of the others but Rosaleen at chess, once Rosaleen had made a wrapping-paper board, and while she and Dannerman were playing their hundredth game Jimmy Lin was attempting to fabricate a deck of playing cards out of more scraps of the paper towels. “At least I might have a chance to win something at poker now and then,” he said sulkily.
Pat rocked back on her heels as a thought struck her. “It’s your move,” Dannerman said.
“Wait a minute. Give me the pen and a piece of paper, will you, Jimmy? Something just occurred to me.”
And she began to print: Would it do any good if we tried to get Dopey into a game of something? She was just about to hand it to Dannerman when Jimmy called: “Hey, looks like Dopey’s coming back!”
Indeed the mirror wall was turning milky again. Caught with the scrap of paper in her hand, Pat stared about, looking for a place to hide it. There wasn’t any. Desperately she popped it in her mouth and began to chew.
She forgot to swallow when she saw what was happening. Dopey was indeed entering through the wall, but he wasn’t alone. He was leading two other human beings through the wall.
“Hey!” Jimmy Lin shouted in delight. “Naked women!”
So they were, being shepherded into the cell by a pair of Docs, looking terrified and angry at the same time. Each of them was rubbing the back of her neck with one hand as she clutched her bundle of clothing with the other. “You said,” Dopey explained, “that you required additional breeding stock.”
They looked very familiar to Pat Adcock. She swallowed the lump of paper as she stared at them, clutching Dannerman’s arm. “Sweet Jesus,” she gasped. “They’re both me!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pat
It was frightening, it was unbelievable, but Pat had to face up to the fact that it was true. These two women were indeed herself. They were two precisely identical copies of Dr. Patrice Ad-cock-oh, a lot cleaner, yes, and a lot less frayed-looking, but in every other way exactly herself. Their voices were the same. Their appearance was the same. The way they were hurrying into their clothes-Dannerman politely looking away, Martin impolitely observing, Jimmy Lin frankly ogling-was just the way she had done it when she first got clothing again. And when she asked, “Where the hell did you two come from?” what they answered was just what she would have said:
“Starlab.” They said it in chorus, too, and then stopped short to stare at each other-to stare at everything around them. “Jesus,” one of them began, a half-second before the other, who paused to let the first one finish with the flip side of Pat’s question. It wasn’t “Where did you come from?” but “Where in God’s name are we?”
That got several answers; the habit of talking in chorus was contagious, Pat thought. Jimmy Lin, giggling, said, “You’ve been abducted by space aliens,” and Rosaleen said compassionately, “That’s a long story,” and Dannerman proposed, “You go first, please? Tell us everything that happened. It might be important. Then we’ll tell you everything we know.”
Pat Adcock listened to her duplicates talk she discovered a strange feeling in herself. It was pride. She was proud of herself-of her two new selves. They were less than an hour in this bizarre and terrifying new place, and yet they were managing to tell a coherent story. Oh, with repetitions and interruptions, of course-many interruptions- but it showed, she was gratified to think, some real strength of character.
The first thing her two duplicates remembered was waking up; they had been lying on what the first new Pat described as a kind of army cot and the other as a morgue slab. There were aliens all around them, and they weren’t just the Dopey and the Docs that stripped them and convoyed them to the cell. “I saw one of the ones they call ‘Bashful,’ “ the other said. “You know, the ones with the big eyes and the dewlaps that cover their faces? He was doing something with a big machine that looked kind of like a refrigerator. What? Oh, I don’t know what, but he was making lights go on and off-the lights were in that green jelly stuff, you know? Like we saw on Starlab. A lot of it was like on Starlab.” They hadn’t observed their surroundings very closely, because as soon as they were awakened they were unceremoniously stripped by the Docs. And their necks hurt, they said, rubbing them reminiscently. “Let me see,” Rosaleen ordered, and Jimmy Lin chimed in, “Me, too!”
“Knock it off,” Pat said wearily, elbowing him out of the way. She and Rosaleen bent to inspect the nape of the women’s necks. “Here?” Pat asked, touching a vertebra.
“Up a little higher. There.” Pat and Rosaleen studied the hairline-how neatly trimmed, Pat thought with a twinge of jealousy-but there was nothing to see.
“Maybe you bumped yourselves,” Jimmy offered, crowding in to look. But they denied that.
Then, yes, the Dopey and the Docs had gone through their clothing and handed it back to them. “There was a whole pile of other clothes there,” one remembered, and the other confirmed it.
“I saw something with a lot of braid on it-it looked like that jacket you’re wearing, Martin. All in a heap, with a lot of other stuff. No, they weren’t doing anything with it; it looked like they just tossed it there.”
“Maybe they’re making clean clothes for us,” Pat said hopefully.
“Maybe.” And then they were marched down a long, busy passage, lined with bizarre things that probably were machines, they thought, to the point where they saw all the rest of the captives. “Wall? No. I didn’t see any wall. Not from the outside, not until we were inside here. No, it didn’t look like glass. It didn’t look like anything at all. All I saw was the bunch of you, playing cards or something, but it didn’t look like you saw us . . . and then we were here and there were these big damn mirrors all around us.”
“And those machines?” Rosaleen asked. “What did they look like?”
But she didn’t get much of an answer. They had been too full of other questions for close study. One of the devices they passed was making a kind of coffee-percolator sound, one of the new Pats remembered, and the other said another one was giving off heat; but, “Just weird, you know? Like the stuff on Starlab.” Then she pleaded, “Our turn now. What is this place?”
Pat took over. “Come over and sit down,” she offered. “Want something to eat? Jimmy, make us some of that lousy coffee, anyway.”
Pat Adcock, who had been an only child, had never had any experience with this sort of thing. She had never had sisters before, much less identical triplets. She was astonished to discover how much she liked it. There was something warmly pleasing about sitting with the two new versions of herself, the repulsive coffee cooling untasted in their hands, while she took over the job of briefing them.
There was a lot to be told. Pat had not realized just how much she and the other captives had had to learn in all those long days in the cell until she had to summarize it all for the two new Pats: their capture, their imprisonment, their futile attempts at escape-the whole disheartening story. It was bad enough for the original five captives, even worse for the new arrivals . . . who, Pat thought, not only had the shock of finding themselves in this bizarre new predicament, but also of suddenly being inexplicably part of a perfectly matched set of three.
They took it well, increasing Pat’s pride in them. Took it well most of the time, anyway; not counting their outrage when she explained the toilet arrangements to them. They were almost (though not quite) as repelled when she told them that everything they did, all the time, was watched from outside the cell. “They have no right!” one of them exclaimed-barely before the other.