“Probably. What’s he doing?”
“Being debriefed, of course. Wait a minute, I’ll show you.” The captain touched the controls again, and Dopey appeared. The little alien was perched glumly on a chair, surrounded by his debriefers. His cat whiskers were drooping and his fan had turned leaden gray. He was talking in a low monotone, and when Hilda tried to make out what he was saying she frowned. “Is that Spanish he’s talking? Why?”
The captain looked unhappy. “He said he was tired of speaking English, and both Herrera and Ortiz are bilingual. He was quite insistent. He’s not easy to get along with, ma’am.” He looked aggrieved. “You know that belly bag of his?”
It wasn’t the most sensible question anyone could ask; Hilda was looking right at the thing. “What about it?”
“Well, the lab people want it for study. Only he won’t let us take it.”
“The last man to try that,” Hilda said, remembering the flight back from Calgary, “nearly got electrocuted.”
“Yes, ma’am. They know that, but they think they could use insulated tongs or something. Funny thing is, it doesn’t seem to shock him, you know? I can’t figure that part out. Anyway, he complains that our tests-they’ve been going over it with radiation counters and things-the tests are depleting its power reserve, and he can’t live without it.”
“Do we have any idea whether that’s true?”
“No, ma’am. Only one way to find out, though-take it away from him and see if he dies. But I can’t do that without orders.”
Hilda nodded, eyeing the man. She wasn’t going to be the one to get him off the hook; if someone ever gave that order, it wouldn’t be Hilda Morrisey. “We’ll let that go for a while. Let’s go see him.”
As soon as Dopey saw Hilda he pushed his way past his debriefers and scurried over to her. “Colonel Morrisey, you must help me!-what?” He paused to listen to something one of the debriefers said in Spanish, then apologized. “Oh, it is now Brigadier Morrisey, my congratulations. Please make these people understand that we are starving! We must return to the Starlab and get more of our food.”
“You have food,” Captain Terman said quickly, glancing at Hilda.
“It is not food! It is certainly not our food-a teaspoon of that at a time, that’s all you give us-and that other stuff will kill us. You see what happened to my poor bearer!”
“It is only diarrhea,” the captain said. “The medics say he’ll be better as soon as he gets it out of his system.”
“And what if I get it, too?” Dopey bristled his whiskers at them. “I do not like to complain, Brigadier Morrisey, but these people simply do not know me. Can you not have one of the Dr. Adcocks come here? Or even an Agent Dannerman? Someone with whom I have been through adversity, who appreciates the sacrifices I have made? Who would surely not allow these people to give us such foul food?”
Hilda was losing patience. “Shut up about the food for a while,” she commanded.
“But I cannot! It is not as though I am asking you for something on my own behalf alone, Brigadier Morrisey! If you go to the Starlab orbiter, there is more than food there, there are wonderful things. Things that will be of great value to you! I have given Captain Terman a complete inventory-“
She turned to the captain, who looked defensive. “He gave us some kind of a list, sure but it’s gibberish. I didn’t bother passing it along, because who can make sense out of ‘quantum pseudo-rationalizer’ and things like that?”
“It is not my fault that your language does not contain terms for truly advanced technology,” Dopey said.
“I want that list,” Hilda ordered crisply. “Do we at least know what the things look like? When we do go back to Starlab, we’ll want to know what’s what.”
“I could ask him to describe them all,” the captain said doubtfully.
“Describe? But why do I not have my bearer simply draw pictures of them for you?” Dopey said eagerly.
“I thought he was sick.”
“It is the medical one who is sick. Do you see what your diet is doing to us? Oh, please, Brigadier Morrisey! Give us proper food! And arrange a flight to Starlab so that we can get more!” And added as an afterthought, “And, please, please, do instruct one of the Dr. Ad-cocks to come here so I will have the company of at least one person who understands me!”
Before Hilda left Camp Smolley the captain had managed to turn up drawing materials and she had the satisfaction of seeing the uninfected golem begin to turn out meticulous sketches of strange-looking machines. “I want these copied and couriered to me every day,” she ordered. “This isn’t satisfactory performance, Captain! Why haven’t you done this before?”
Mr. Sanjit Rao: “Will the delegate from the Estonian Republic yield?”
Mme. P.T. Padrylys: “No, I will not yield to the delegate from Sri Lanka. The Estonian Republic cannot allow this inquiry by a few large powers to the exclusion of the smaller nations, whose right to the fruits of any technology arising from interplanetary activities is clearly delineated in General Assembly Resolutions 2357, 3102 and 3103, and on this subject I have a right to be heard.”
The President: “The delegate from the Estonian Republic has indeed a right to be heard. However, her time has expired, and if we don’t get on with this hearing, we will be here all day.”
Proceedings of the General Assembly
He looked hangdog. “There’s been so much to do,” he complained. “You didn’t even hear about the war stories he was telling-“
“War stories?”
“Stories you wouldn’t believe, ma’am. We’ve got them all recorded if you want to hear them-“
She did want to hear them. She was running late, would have to go directly home to change for Daisy’s damn dinner party, but she waited an extra ten minutes while one of the techs produced the chip with the interrogation records on it, and then she got out of there. There would certainly have to be a lot of changes at Camp Smolley, she thought as she drove back onto the road.
When she could switch the car to automatic she popped the chip into the car’s player. . . .
The man had been right. The stories were hard to believe. They weren’t war as Hilda Morrisey knew war. They were stories of annihilation, of whole planets destroyed by dropping asteroids onto them, even of whole solar systems wiped out by making a sun go nova. The people of those planets weren’t human, of course. But they were, so Dopey had said, quite intelligent, quite civilized, quite advanced cultures which had simply refused to accept the Scarecrows as their masters.
So there was an actual war going on, and it was universe wide.
She sighed and turned off the player. Not one word of it sounded plausible to her. It was the kind of children’s fantasy you came across on the television when you were idly hunting for something worth watching … and immediately moved to the next channel. It couldn’t be true. The astronomers had been definite about that. The universe was not going to recollapse in the first place. And if it did, it surely would not bring about the miraculous rebirth of everyone who had ever lived … a category which, for Hilda, included a fair number of people whose deaths she had personally helped to bring about, and certainly did not wish ever to meet again.
But if it were true . . .
Hilda Morrisey didn’t spend much time thinking about her own death, and certainly not about some possible afterlife. If anything, she hoped there wouldn’t be one. When Hilda thought about dying at all she thought of it as a sort of grant of executive clemency. Being dead meant you didn’t have to face any more consequences of things you had done that someone, sometime, might want to hold you accountable for. She didn’t want to think that she could have been quite wrong about that.
The next morning she woke early and with a great desire to get the taste of Daisy Fennell’s quiche and ratatouille dinner and the chocolate-raspberry dessert that followed it out of her mouth. Her little apartment had a fully stocked kitchen, so Hilda was able to make herself some real oatmeal and pour herself some honest coffee, not flavored with Mexican chocolate or Florida limes. She had not expected so much domesticity from Daisy (though actually it had been Frank who did the cooking), and she especially had not expected the two teenage girls that Frank had brought to the marriage. Jesus, she thought, and put the dinner, and Frank’s partner Richard, out of her mind.
Forintel sitrep NBI Eyes Only
The Spanish police have asked us to investigate possible Stateside activities by members or sympathizers of the Basque nationalist organization, the Euskadi ta Askatasuna. It is thought that such persons, particularly in Southern California, are active in supplying funds and possible weapons to the Basque separatists in the Atlantic seaport towns of northern Spain.