“So you killed them all?” Pat asked in horror.
Dopey said earnestly, “It was not an evil act! Do you not understand? In effect, we merely transported them all, instantly, to their immortality at the eschaton.”
Dannerman was staring at him. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. Then, obstinately: “But you yourself sent copies of us back to Earth from Starlab.”
Dopey recovered himself quickly. “So much argument for so little purpose, when time is passing by!” he said in indignation.
“But of course we sent copies to Earth, how else could we obtain primary-source data? The observation units we installed did the copies no harm.”
That was too much for Patsy. “Then why the hell are our copies in jail?” she demanded.
“Ah,” Dopey said, “yes, I see why you are concerned. But it was necessary to alter the memories of those copies, since we did not wish to prematurely reveal our presence. And then they became suspicious after they discovered the device in Dr. Artzybachova at the autopsy-“
He stopped there, suddenly aware of the way Rosaleen was staring at him. “The autopsy,” she repeated, as though she had to say it out loud to make it real.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said sadly. “I am sorry to say that your copy was the first living human subject in which we implanted the device. Of course, we had experimented on the head of the corpse in Starlab. But that was in a very poor state of preservation and we were not well experienced in the procedure when we did your copy, Dr. Artzybachova. I regret it, but your copy did not survive.”
By the time Dopey had left with his zombie-urging haste at every breath-all the captives had had a chance to study the map. It impressed Patsy: the Doc had sketched as quickly as it could move the pen, but the result was as carefully drawn as any Geodetic Survey chart. Who would have thought that speechless golem capable of such detail? But the important thing was that everyone agreed that they could follow it. Rosaleen, who had been very quiet, not to say subdued-well, Patsy thought, why wouldn’t she be, now that her fears were confirmed?-spoke up at last. “It is all quite clear,” she said, her voice colorless, her expression blank. “We should have no problem.”
“If we go to this place,” Dannerman said argumentatively.
Martin scowled at him. “Do we have a choice? You yourself have seen what damage these ‘surrogate’ things can do.”
“Maybe we don’t,” Dannerman conceded, but his tone was reluctant.
Patsy was studying his face. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t you want to leave here?”
He shrugged. “Martin’s right about that, we probably can’t stay here. It’s the part that comes after that that I don’t like. The son of a bitch wants us to fight his battles for him! Christ! We don’t owe him a thing. It’s his fault we’re here in the first place.”
“But we are here,” she said reasonably, “and those Horch surrogates do look as though they’re killing everything they can catch. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we need to fight them just to stay alive.”
He grunted. “You’re pretty warlike, all of a sudden.”
“I don’t want to die any sooner than necessary, is that so strange?” She gave him a disapproving look. “I thought you were the trained killer here. What happened?”
He shook his head. “What happened,” he said, “is that I’m well enough trained to stay out of other people’s fights, especially against superior forces.”
Martin rumbled, “I understand your concern, Dannerman, but we can deal with what comes later later. The question is, what do we take with us when we leave? Food, of course; remember what Dopey said. He cannot eat our food, so we probably cannot eat anything we find there, either.”
“How the hell are we going to carry all these things?” Jimmy Lin said, staring at the mound of food containers.
“Well, that I can answer for you,” Dannerman said. “We can use the rods I brought back and the blankets from Starlab to make travoises.”
Martin kicked at the rods contemptuously. “Most of those rods are too thick to fit through the blanket loops,” he pointed out.
“So we use the others. Let’s get on with it.”
“Hey,” said Patsy and Pat at once, and Patrice added, “It’s not that easy. What did Dopey say, two kilometers? Rosaleen can’t walk that far.”
“Fine,” Dannerman said. “She won’t have to. We’ll make a travois for her, too.”
Martin said with disdain, “Using those toothpicks? The thing will come apart in ten minutes, and then you will drop the old lady on her ass. It’s simpler for me to carry her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Patsy
When they started on their trek to their new home, Patsy was filled with worries. What was waiting for them there? Would they be able to follow the Doc’s hastily drawn map without getting lost? Would they be able to see where they were going at all, since Dopey had told them it was night outside? But when they reached the edge of the Beloved Leader base-cut as cleanly as with a knife, one moment surrounded by the hulking dead machinery, the next looking out on a sprawl of meadow and woods-at least one of those worries disappeared. They all stopped dead in their tracks, looking up. “Oh, my God,” Patsy breathed. “Will you look at that sky?”
They all were looking. They couldn’t help it. Overhead there were a zillion stars, far brighter than anything she had ever seen on Earth, and far more of them. There were red stars and blue ones, yellow ones, white ones. On Earth star colors were so muted that you had to stare at even, say, Betelgeuse to be sure that it was really ruddy instead of featureless white. Here there was no doubt. The colors were as unmistakable as traffic lights, and nearly as brilliant. There seemed to be at least a thousand stars up there that were brighter than Venus at its maximum from Earth. There were a dozen or more that seemed even brighter than the Moon. Patsy had heard of, but had never seen, starlight you could read a book by. This was starlight you could do brain surgery by.
Next to her Pat sighed. “You know what, friends?” she murmured. “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.”
Two kilometers wasn’t much; Patsy had jogged more than that some mornings before breakfast, along the bridle path in the park… in the days when Patsy was still Dr. Pat Adcock, who not only jogged but worked out in the gym once a week-most weeks, anyway.
Those days were past. Confinement in that tiny cell had left them all out of shape, and a two-kilometer hike was now a lot. They took turns dragging the travoises that were loaded with most of their Starlab food, three of them at a time with Rosaleen limping painfully along when she could and riding on Martin’s back when she couldn’t, and the other two following behind to pick up whatever rations fell from a travois and toss them back onto the pile.
But there was so much to see! When she was dragging a travois Patsy’s eyes were on the sky as much as on where she was going; when Jimmy Lin relieved her to drop back and do pickup she was glad to see who was there with her. “Patrice!” she hissed, trying to keep her voice low enough that the others might not hear. “Do you know what I think? I think we’re in the middle of a globular cluster!”
Patrice bent to pick up a pair of soft-plastic packs and tossed them into Jimmy Lin’s travois. “So does Pat,” she whispered. “We were talking about it before. At first I thought maybe we were at the core of the galaxy, you know? The star density might be about the same. But we’d know that, all right, and-“
“Hey, back there!” Dannerman called. “Pay attention to what you’re doing, we can’t afford to lose any food.” But he had stopped at the edge of a dark lake, setting down the handles of his own travois to consult over the map with Rosaleen and the general.
Patsy would have supposed that Jimmy Lin would be right up there to take part in the debate, but he lingered when everyone had stopped. “What were you guys saying about a globular cluster?”
Patrice frowned. “Sorry, we were trying to keep it quiet. What about it?”
“Well, to start with, what is it?”
“It’s what it says it is. It’s a tight cluster of thousands of stars, more or less shaped like a ball. But if that’s what we’re in, then we’re really pretty far from home; most of them are in the galactic halo, none of them closer than several thousand light-years.”
“Wherever they are, their stars are really jammed close together,” Patsy added. “Thousands of them might fit into the space between Earth and Alpha Centauri… a lot like what you see up there.”