“That is not a useful datum,” Dopey declared, but Danner-man cut in.
“Sure it is. Now you know he was a cosmologist; that ought to help identify him. Anyway, that’s all we’ve got, so now let’s talk about-“
But what it was Dannerman wanted to talk about he didn’t get a chance to say. The ground shook, the wall flared again, the sound of distant thunder drowned out his words.
This time the display lasted for many seconds. No one spoke, though Dopey was whimpering softly. Patsy, eager to take advantage of any new visions that might come through the wall if it happened to go transparent again, faced it unblinking through all its swirling changes of color. It didn’t. It cycled rapidly through the entire spectrum, then resumed its milky mirror sheen. She turned just in time to see Dopey’s plume vanishing through the mirror as the creature sped away.
“Oh, damn the thing,” Pat said feelingly. Rosaleen was more tolerant.
“He’s frightened,” she observed. “I don’t blame him. If we knew everything he knows we might be terrified, too.”
“I’m already terrified as much as I can handle, Rosie,” Pat said. “Well. What do we know that we didn’t know before?”
The answer to that, Patsy thought, was “damn little.” She listened as the others tried to piece meaning together from what Dopey had told them, but there wasn’t a lot of meaning there. All right, things were even worse than they had expected; but what kind of news was that?
She scowled at her own reflection in the mirror wall, half listening to what the others were saying, mostly filling with resentment. For just a moment there she had been reminded that she had another life, a life in which she was not a helpless pawn stranded in a demeaning captivity, but a responsible human being who held an important job. She was, for God’s sake, a highly trained scientist. It was time for her to act like one, she told herself. It was time to stop being so damn passive and start to take action. . . .
The problem was, she could not think of any productive action to take.
She looked at the others. Dannerman, at least, seemed to be actually doing something, even if only going over everybody’s recollections, repetitively, demandingly. Maybe, she thought, that was the way he had learned to interrogate witnesses in spook school. Was there any point in it? Did it matter how much they learned, when there was nothing they could do about it, anyway?
A snarling, buzzing sound interrupted her. It interrupted everyone else, too. It was not a sound any of them had heard before, and so it took them a moment to realize that it came from the helmet.
“What the hell,” Dannerman said.
“I think it wants to be picked up again,” Patrice said.
Jimmy Lin said nervously, “You sure? It sounds like it’s broken to me. Could be dangerous.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Pat said in exasperation, snatched the thing from the floor and pulled it on over her head. . . .
And then a moment later, she gasped, “Hey! It’s a damn Horch and it’s trying to tell me something!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Patsy
Whatever it was that Pat was seeing, it was brief. Hardly more than a minute or two; and when she pulled the helmet off her head, her expression both astonished and bewildered, and handed it to Patrice, it was without a word. Not without a struggle, though. Martin was already grabbing for it, but Pat pushed him away. As was right and proper, Patsy told herself, even in that moment; at least now they were doing alphabetical order again. And was quick to take the helmet when Patrice, as startled and uncertain as Pat herself, handed it to her.
The most astonishing thing Pat had said was true. It was a Horch that faced her in the simulation space. It was not at all the same Horch that Colonel duValier had displayed, either. This one carried no vicious-looking weapons, wore no armor, seemed much less evil. But it was certainly a Horch, all the same; and how such a thing could manage to use the device of the Beloved Leaders she could not guess.
Nor had time to.
The Horch didn’t speak. It gestured-with both its boneless arms and with its sinuous, long neck as well-toward a corner of the field of view, and immediately a picture appeared there. Patsy was looking at a street scene in what, she knew, had to be a city, though not any kind of city she had ever seen before. The street itself was not a mere strip of hard surface. It was a moving ribbon of what looked like liquid metal, on which what looked like great, multicolored dragonflies danced, and now and then launched themselves into the air to fly into doorways set into tall buildings, high in the air. The buildings were alabaster and goldenrod and fleshy pink, some of them (it seemed to Patsy) a dozen stories tall. All this was what she saw in the first eye-blink, and she had no time to study details. Almost at once the view pulled back, as though the camera were rising to the sky. Through the sky; accelerating, it flew higher and higher until it was out of the planet’s atmosphere entirely, looking down on the whole planet, pale blue and tainted white, as from orbit.
Then a spacecraft came into view, coppery-red and glittering, and the point of view approached it, entered it as though the ship’s hull were only mist, and showed the inside. A Beloved Leader swam languidly in zero gravity there, the very scarecrow of the original message from space. It waved a fragile arm at its viewscreen, and something-something, something huge and dark and craggy-came plunging from nowhere at the planet. It blazed an eye-searing meteor trail through the atmosphere, and when it struck the surface it exploded with the power of a billion nuclear bombs.
And that planet died before Patsy’s eyes.
No time to think about that now, either; immediately she was looking at another street scene (different street, dense with fast-moving vehicles; different buildings; different beings, these looking like wraiths with heads like sunflowers), but the story was the same. Pull back into space, see a Beloved Leader negligently take aim on the world, observe that world destroyed. And instantly there was another. And another, and another-the pace speeding up, the planets all-different, the end always the same. And then-
And then the velocity slowed. A world appeared in the field of view that she recognized at once. It was the world Patsy had always known: their own Earth, northern hemisphere. Down toward the fringes that approached the equator she could see the hook of Italy, the wedge of India with Sri Lanka hanging like a teardrop from its tip, the narrow Red Sea. And when the view went inside the object in orbit this time it was not an alien spacecraft. It was an orbiter she recognized: their own Starlab! And there was no giant asteroid plunging toward the planet-not yet-but what was happening inside was even more frightening. There was no Beloved Leader present. What there was was Dopey, clinging to a wall while a pair of Docs worked over a human figure spread-eagled against a bulkhead. The Docs were doing something to the back of the man’s head. Then they drew back. The human figure turned itself-it was Martin!- and silently pulled itself to a lineup, joining Dannerman, Jimmy Lin, Rosaleen and Patsy herself. The Docs herded the humans, who moved like zombies, into the Clipper, and it dropped away en route to the planet.
That was it. The picture went black.
They had all seen the same thing.
They had all had the same reaction. “So the Horch want us to believe that the Beloved Leaders are mass murderers,” Dannerman said meditatively. “Which, of course, is what the Beloved Leaders want us to believe about the Horch.”
“So where does that leave us?” Jimmy Lin demanded. No one answered, but of course the answer was obvious, Patsy thought. They were left right where they had been all along: in their cell.
“But, if the Horch are telling the truth, Dopey also sent copies of us back to Earth,” Rosaleen said. “Why would he do that, do you suppose?”
“We will damn well ask him that,” Martin said, his face grim.
“If we see him again,” Dannerman said.
That alarmed Patsy. “Why? Do you think he’s going to abandon us?”
“I think he may not have much to say about it,” Dannerman told her. “If things are as bad as he says- Now what does the thing want?” he added, as the helmet snarled at them again.
Martin was the nearest; he picked it up. “There’s only one way to find out,” he said.
Pat was outraged. “You’re doing it again! It’s my turn first!”