“The hell I’m not!”
“-but,” he finished, not missing a beat, “even if you did, you don’t have the choice. The President has declared a national emergency, so no resignations are going to be accepted.” He gave her a tolerant pat on the shoulder. “So you’ll be with us for the duration, Hilda, and as long as you’re here you might as well come in and get in on the fun. And by the way-congratulations on your promotion!”
Colonel-now Brigadier-Hilda Morrisey never allowed herself to waste time on resentment. That didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of carrying a grudge; sooner or later, she thought darkly, she would find a way to pay Marcus Pell back for all this. But that could wait.
Meanwhile, she had to admit that, yes, she really did want to be in on this bizarre affair. Pell led the way to a large room where most of the people from Starlab were gathered, the human ones, anyway. The room appeared to be the mansion’s library, since the walls were lined solidly with cases of books, but no one was reading. A screen was displaying the Dopey creature, sulkily describing some other weird creatures who were involved with his “Beloved Leaders” in one way or another, but no one in the library was paying much attention to that, either. They were mostly eating. The room smelled of recent bacon and eggs, and there were pitchers of coffee and juice and remnants of toast and fresh fruits on the low tables. It looked to Hilda like the sort of breakfast pigout you might find the morning after a high-schoolgirl sleepover.
There was a Bureau interrogator sitting alertly in a straight-backed chair, but he wasn’t interrogating. Sensibly enough, Hilda thought, he was simply listening as they talked among themselves, while his recorders were capturing everything that was said.
They all looked a lot cleaner than they had on the aircraft, and the ones from Starlab were wearing fresh clothes from the safe house’s stores. They looked as though they’d had some sleep, too-not necessarily alone, Hilda thought, noting the way the Dannerman with the beard and the Pat who seemed to be affixed to him were cozily sharing a bowl of strawberries in one corner of the room.
Tipler’s thesis was that when the expansion of the universe finally ran out of steam and the whole thing fell back into that bizarre point in space that had exploded into the Big Bang-the “Big Crunch,” as they called that ultimate collapse-everybody who had ever lived would live again. Tipler called it “the Omega Point.” That even more bizarre creature, Dopey, called it “the eschaton.” But it was the same basic idea.
When she checked around they seemed to be one Pat short. “A couple of doctors are checking Pat Five over,” the one called Patrice explained. “Want some coffee? There are clean cups over there.”
She took some. So did the deputy director, looking pleased with the way things were going. Dopey, who was in the next room, had been telling his interrogators all kinds of things about the mass of high-tech materiel on Starlab. Pell nodded. “We’re going to have to go back up there to get it. The director’s getting that set up now.”
Hilda looked skeptical. “How are you going to know how to make it work?”
But that wasn’t a problem, Patrice explained. Dopey himself didn’t know how to operate most of it – he had admitted as much, evidently somewhat amused at the thought – but he didn’t have to. One of the creatures Dopey called his “bearers” was a specialist in that sort of thing. He could operate any of it, and show the Bureau’s people how.
Hilda looked incredulous. “The golem can do that?”
“One of them can. The other’s a kind of biological-medical handyman; he’s the one who fixed up the guard last night.”
“And he fixed Rosaleen up, too,” Dannerman-beard called from across the room. “Between the two of them they can do all kinds of things, if Dopey tells them to.”
They sounded like pretty handy gadgets to Hilda. She opened her mouth to say as much to the deputy director, but he wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation. He was scowling at the screen, on which Dopey was complaining one more time to his interrogators about how desperately they needed their real food. It clearly was not what Pell wanted to hear from the alien; he got up and headed for the door to the other room.
But as he opened it Dopey caught sight of Hilda just behind Marcus Pell. “Stop now,” Dopey said peremptorily, waggling his plumed tail in reproof. “I do not require much rest, but I must have some. I will answer no further questions for the next – “ he twiddled his little paws in his belly bag – “twenty-five minutes.” He didn’t wait for a reply but hopped off his perch on a coffee table and brushed past the deputy director as he entered the library room.
He advanced on Hilda. “My dear Brigadier Morrisey, I appeal to you as a woman. Please relieve our distress! See that the foodstuffs are delivered to us at once!”
Hilda Morrisey was not used to being appealed to as a woman. Actually, she thought it rather quaint, but she shook her head. “I have nothing to say about that, Dopey.”
The little alien sighed. “In that event I will sleep for the remainder of the twenty-five minutes.” And he squatted down on the floor, under a dictionary stand. As he closed his eyes the great fan of his tail bent forward, covering him from the light, and he was still.
The deputy director glared around the room, looking for someone to blame. Then he shrugged. “You’re in charge,” he snapped at Hilda, and hurried out of the room-on his way, Hilda supposed, to find a secure screen so he could check in with headquarters.
Being in charge was nice, Hilda thought, but it would have been even nicer if she knew what she was supposed to do. For starters she nodded at the guards and interrogators. “You can all take ten,” she said. As they left gratefully she peered at Dopey. “Is that the way the thing sleeps?”
Patrice answered for all of them. “I don’t know. We never saw him sleep before.”
“Urn,” Hilda said, and then got down to business. “All right. Tell me what you’ve found out so far,” she ordered, looking at her own Dannerman.
He looked rebellious. “Christ, Hilda! They’ve been talking for hours! It’s all on the tapes, anyway.”
It was a reasonable answer, so she tried a different tack. “Then let’s get to something they haven’t talked about. Don’t you have any questions that haven’t been answered yet?”
Pat spoke up for him. “Well, I do,” she said, sounding tentative, turning to the other Pats. “You said something about another one of us who died?”
The two other Pats looked at each other. Patrice sighed. “Yes, that was Patsy. We were swimming and these other creatures-they looked sort of like seals-“
“More like a hippopotamus,” Pat One corrected.
“Anyway, they had some kind of electric shockers. Like electric eels, I guess. And they lived in the water and- Well, things went sour, and one of them killed Patsy. Do we have to talk about this now? It was bad.”
“I’m afraid you do,” Hilda informed her-not cruelly, but not particularly sympathetically, either. Making people talk about things they didn’t want to talk about was basic to her job description. “You have to talk about everything. Now, these animals with the electric shockers-“
“They weren’t animals,” Dannerman-beard corrected her. “They were fellow prisoners, just like us.”
“Anyway, all that’s on the tapes already,” Patrice said. “There were lots of different kinds of-people-from different planets there and- Oh, hi!” she said, turning to greet Pat Five as she entered.
“Hi,” Pat Five said, looking belligerent. She spotted the table with the coffee cups and headed toward it.
“Come on,” Pat One coaxed. “Don’t keep us in suspense. What did the doctors find out?”
“They found out I was pregnant,” Pat Five said, pouring a cup and adding four or five spoonfuls of sugar. “They wanted me to go into a hospital here for observation. I told them screw that. There are plenty of hospitals in New York and I want to go home. And then I want to get back to work.”
“So do I,” said Patrice eagerly. “I was thinking about it all the time we were in that damn cell. . . .” Then her face fell. “Oh, hell,” she said. “I didn’t think. How in the world are we ever going to sort that out?”
“Sort what out?” Hilda demanded.
Pat-the real Pat-answered for them all. “Sort out which of us is going to run the Observatory, of course.” They were all silent for a moment, then she added gloomily, “I don’t think it’ll be me, anyway.”