“That’ll do,” Vice Deputy Fennell cut in. “You’ll get your chance to talk later; now I’m taking Agent Dannerman’s statement.”
The new Dannerman looked at Pat quizzically, then went on. As soon as they entered Starlab, he said, they’d seen at once that it had been changed radically. New machines. Big ones. Strange ones. “The orbiter was full of them,” he said, “and all the time we were there I had the feeling we were being watched. …”
It went on and on, Dannerman telling these incredible stories-these untrue stories, by Pat’s own recollection!-while the three other Pats nodded agreement. But it hadn’t happened that way!
Or had it? Had something gone really wrong with her own memory?
She hardly noticed when the food began to arrive, but all four of the returned people leaped at it.
And, as a matter of fact, when she absentmindedly took some for herself she discovered that it was an impressive meal, a tribute to the deputy director’s airborne kitchen. There was a huge salad, the lettuce crisp enough to crackle, the cucumber slices neatly trimmed of skin, a few curls of a red onion and five different kinds of dressing in silver boats. It didn’t go to waste. Before the steaks came-half-kilo steaks, beautifully marbled, still sizzling as the stew set them down- the three Pats and the recently arrived Dannerman (the other one had taken off for the deputy director’s private office as soon as they were in the air) had finished the salad, every scrap, as well as the quarter-liter glasses of milk she kept refilling for them. The debriefing paused briefly for eating, and Pat took advantage of the chance. “Dan?” she asked. “I don’t remember any of that!”
“No, of course not,” he said kindly. “Dopey blanked out your memories.”
“Who did what?”
Dannerman started to grin, but the Pat next to him tugged at his arm. He suppressed the smile. “It isn’t your fault, Pat. They have all kinds of tricks-oh, what’s this?”
What the stews were offering was fruit salad, and all four of the returnees cried a unanimous, “No!”
“Surprise us,” one of them added. “Something that can’t be freeze-dried or canned or irradiated, okay?” And then, looking at Pat, “We’ve been living on old stores from Starlab for months, so this is pure heaven-or would be, anyway, if this plane had a spare bathtub.”
The Pat next to the real, or beardless, Dannerman apologized. “We’ve been a little short of that kind of thing for a long time, too. Especially poor Pat Five over there. At least Patrice and I managed to get a swim in a few days ago-oh, you want to know about the names? They were Rosaleen’s idea. I’m Pat One. This is Patrice. Our pregnant one is Pat Five. What shall we call you?”
“Call me?” It was a problem Pat had not expected to face. What she was called was Pat or Dr. Adcock; that was an immutable given in her life, and there had never been a reason to think about it at all. Until now, when there were three others entitled to the same name.
“Anything but Patsy, please,” said Patrice. “We had a Patsy, but- she died.”
The Pat bit her lip; some interior struggle was going on. “Oh, hell,” she said unhappily, “we’ll talk about that later. Anyway, maybe I’ll be big about this. You stay with Pat. I’ll be Pat One.”
“Well, thanks,” Pat said, a little bit grateful, still a lot puzzled, just as a pair of stews made their entrance, carrying plates of hot apple pie with ice cream.
“Sorry we took so long,” one of them apologized, “but those weirdos are in the galley, trying to find something they can eat. Christ but they take up a lot of room!”
“And they stink,” said the other one, just as the real Dannerman came in from the front of the plane.
He seemed cheerful. “Hey, I’ll take a piece of that, too. And some coffee. And then maybe a beer.”
“A beer!” the other Dannerman said reverently.
The real one was grinning. “We’re missing all the fun,” he said.
“The whole world’s arriving in Calgary now. The Ukrainians are after Dr. Artzybachova, the Chinese are taking Jimmy Lin off in a hell of a hurry. Even the Floridians are complaining that you didn’t bring their General Delasquez back.”
Backgrounder
NBI contacts file
LIN, James Peng-tsu, Cdr, PRC Spaceforce
Commander Lin has a somewhat shadowy background. A full commander in the People’s Republic Spaceforce, he was dismissed from the service for reasons variously given as “political unreliability” and “sexual misconduct”; research has not definitively established which. If the misconduct was sexual, one account has it that Lin is given to reenacting the exploits of his remote ancestor, an ancient Chinese sage named Peng-tsu, who wrote a book extolling the necessity and varieties of frequent sexual experience. An alternative report, however, suggests that Lin is homosexual and the alleged heterosexual activity is a. cover for what, in PRC eyes, is a serious crime.
Lin was hired as pilot by Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) in her mission to Starlab. There are now two of him, one who came back with the first batch of returnees from Starlab (this one bugged); the other with Agent J.D. Dannerman and the extraterrestrials. The second one is said to be the artificial-insemination father of the unborn child of the Dr. Adcock known as “Pat Five” (see backgrounder file.)
“Martin’s dead,” Dannerman-with-a-beard said between bites. “We think he is, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I hate to second-guess the boss, but maybe moving the landing site to Canada wasn’t the best idea he ever had.”
Pat shushed him and turned to Pat One. “What do you mean, Martin’s dead?”
It was a short question, but it had a long
answer and not a cheery one. The Floridian pilot Pat had hired for her mission, General Martin Delasquez, had stayed behind to cover the rest of them while they escaped. Escaped from what? Well, there was a sort of a war going on. A big one. How big? Well, as far as they could tell, it seemed to involve the whole damn universe.
Vice Deputy Fennell sighed. “How weird is this going to get? Let’s get back to the beginning, from where you all entered Starlab.”
If what these people were saying was true-and Pat realized that she didn’t have any choice anymore about believing them-they had been through a hell of an ordeal. Taken captive on Starlab by the creature they called Dopey and his Docs-by them, but not for them; they were only subject races, doing their masters’ bidding.
And who were these masters? Why, all the newcomers agreed, the whole thing had been organized by that scarecrow creature from the space messages, a race of superbeings who chose to be called “Beloved Leaders,” though why anyone should love them Pat could not imagine. Certainly their human captives had no reason to. They had been kept penned for weeks in a cell no larger than the airborne drawing room they were in, but without any of its amenities-without any amenities at all, even toilets!
That struck Pat as nasty. Then she heard a good deal nastier.
At least the original band of captives had been allowed to live intact, as a sort of control group of humans to be studied. But the aliens had other studies in mind as well, and those had been far worse. The aliens had made additional copies of their captives for anatomical research. Nearly all of those unfortunates had died during the experimentation, generally, Pat Five said, in considerable pain. She herself had been lucky. She had been the one who was chosen, pretty much at random, to become pregnant so the aliens could discover how human beings produced their young. Romance was not involved, nor even actual sexual intercourse. She had been artificially inseminated with sperm-from, she thought, one of the Jimmy Lins, though she couldn’t be positive even of that-and so she alone of that group had survived.
Backgrounder
NBI contacts file
DELASQUEZ, Martin, Maj. Gen. Florida Air Guard
General Delasquez qualified for astronaut training in the U.S. NASA program, but never went into space due to the defunding of the program. When the State of Florida declared itself sovereign in its own territory, Delasquez became part of its Air Guard, rising to the rank of major general. He was attached to the Florida mission to the United Nations, stationed in New York City, when Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) hired him as copilot on her mission to Starlab. He returned with the others and was subsequently found to be bugged.
He was then hired by Eurospace as a consultant on Star-lab when they proposed to fly their own mission to the satellite, in which capacity he served for some months at the Eurospace facility in Kourou, Guyana.
Delasquez is said to be well connected politically in Florida’s Cuban-American circles. A second Delasquez is said to have died while with the others in captivity by the Scarecrows.