A dozen human beings turned out to be no match at all for a fighting Doc; but the one with the babushka was another matter. He had one of those great arms around the throat of his twin from behind, and all of the other arms frantically trying to stretch the metal mesh around his head. It didn’t happen right away, because the captive Doc was doing everything he could to avoid it; but when the shawl was in place everything stopped. The attacking Doc mewed, a sharp, high-pitched cat’s yowl, to the other, who abruptly let go of the unfortunate guard who had managed to grab him. He stood up, shedding guards, mewing back excitedly to the other, adjusting the shawl for himself.
That seemed to be it, and wonderfully no one appeared to be seriously hurt.
“Let him go!” Hilda gasped, triumphant. “That does it. Is everybody all right? Fine, now we get them down to the operating room.”
The operating room didn’t look like an operating room anymore; all the usual equipment had been pushed out of the way and something that looked like a torture rack had been constructed on the floor-ten huge metal manacles of varying sizes, bolted to the cement, looking capable of holding an elephant.
Whether they were capable of holding a Doc was another question, and the two of them, yowling those high-pitched feline sounds at each other, were testing them with all their strength. As Dannerman and the others took their gallery seats Hilda was jubilantly explaining what was going on. “See, as long as they’ve got those things on their heads they’re out of Dopey’s control, but they’ve still got some kind of bugs inside them. So what we do now is we operate, only in order to get them they might have to remove the shields, and then- Well, then see for yourself.” She pointed proudly at what was going on in the operating room before them. One of the Docs was lying down, while the other fixed the clamps around arms, legs, neck. “So now we’re going to do it,” Hilda finished with satisfaction, and then looked at Dannerman in a different way. “Come here a minute while they’re getting organized,” she said. And, when they had moved out of anybody else’s earshot: “Listen. Are there any more of you Dannermans around?”
He looked startled. “Jeez, I hope not. Why are you asking?”
She sighed. “I don’t really know. It’s just that that other Doc’s been drawing pictures again, and one of them showed one of you guys along with what looked like a Horch. Any idea what that means?”
“With a Horch? No. I never saw any of those.”
She looked pensive for a moment. Then she shrugged, and added in a friendlier tone, “Oh, and by the way, Danno, congratulations. Can I be your best man?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Pat Adcock could have counted on the fingers of her two hands the number of times she’d visited anyone in a hospital. If you left out the visits to Pat Five, she probably could have done it on her thumbs; it was not one of her favorite ways of spending an hour.
Pat Five didn’t make it any more appealing, either. She was thoroughly sick of her incarceration, and she let everybody know it. “I want some water,” she informed Pat at once. “You’ll have to hold it for me; I’m not supposed to lift anything.”
Pat did as requested, holding the bottle with the flexible straw while Pat Five sipped. Then, thirst quenched, she spent five minutes explaining how she felt, which was weak and bored and wishing the whole damn business was over. Then she wanted to know how things were going at the Observatory, which was a gratifying change of subject. So Pat told her how hard it was to track the actual Scarecrow ship, and how Rosaleen seemed healthier and stronger than ever, thanks, it seemed, to whatever the medical Doc had done to her metabolism back when they were in the Scarecrow captivity, and how the two Docs seemed to have liberated themselves from Scarecrow control and were now helping with the reverse engineering of the things from Starlab.
“Yes, they’re very good at taking things apart,” Pat Five said bitterly.
Pat said-humbly, because she hadn’t experienced what that taking apart was like for herself-“Well, it’s not all their fault. They were under Scarecrow control; now they’re not.”
“I suppose so,” Pat Five said, unconvinced. And then there didn’t seem to be anything else to talk about.
When Pat finally got out of the sickroom there was still one other chore to take care of. She tracked Pat Five’s doctor down as she stood at the nurses’ desk, chatting with somebody who seemed to be a dietician.
When Pat asked after Pat Five’s condition the doctor said, “Why don’t you come into my office?” She was a slim, Oriental-looking woman, perhaps Bengali, but she spoke without an accent. Her office looked like a smaller, less expensive version of Pat’s own. Instead of astronomical pictures the doctor’s wall screen was running looped views of some kind of surgery-startlingly, not human surgery. The doctor noticed where Pat was looking and, slightly embarrassed, flipped the screen off. “It is the removal of the instrument from the Doc,” she apologized. “Not my specialty, of course, but it is simply interesting to see that much of alien anatomy, even if only around the neck and skull. Would you like some tea? No?” Then she got down to business. “As to your-ah, sister,” she said, for lack of a better word, “her condition is somewhat improved. The fetal heartbeats are good, but we may have to deliver early. It seems she evidently had some pretty rough-and-ready surgery before she became pregnant, as well as malnutrition and a bad time in general early in the pregnancy.”
“That she did,” said Pat One.
“Yes. It’s a great pity. She’s a little older than we usually see for a primapara, but if she’d had decent food and care, she could have a dozen babies without any trouble. She’s built for it.” Her expression was resentful, as though she were angry at Pat Five for not having taken better care of herself. “Well, as it is, there are some problems. We may have to do a C-section, when it comes to that, but the babies will be better off the longer the pregnancy continues. In any case, the prognosis is reasonably good, but we’re watching her carefully. Did you have any specific questions?”
And when Pat couldn’t think of any the doctor looked embarrassed again. She pulled a copy of Pat Five’s chart out of her desk and displayed it hesitantly. On the margins were two signatures, both in Pat’s own hand: Dr. Pat Adcock (Pat Five) and Dr. Pat Adcock (Patrice). “If you wouldn’t mind-just for a souvenir-do you think I could have your autograph as well?”
In the taxi on the way back to the Observatory, her guard mercifully quiet beside her, Pat meditated on her sudden vicarious fame. Was it going to last? How would it affect her life-would she ever be able to have dates again like any normal human being? For that matter, shouldn’t she be getting out more now? And-big question!-what was that the doctor had said about having been built to deliver a dozen babies? And if that was true for Pat Five, after all the things the Scarecrows had done to her, how about Pat herself, who shared the identical physiology?
It was a queer, scary-attractive thought. It made something inside her twitch, and she was glad when the cab ride was over and she had to attend to current reality. At the Observatory’s reception desk, Jan-ice DuPage was talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Maureen Capobianco, the cruise companion Janice hadn’t had. The cruise, however, hadn’t been a total success. Capobianco told her they’d had some sort of accident as the ship approached Rio de Janeiro-engine trouble of some kind; they’d lain dead in the water for most of one night, with the antiroll pumps that shifted ballast around not working and the ship heaving uncomfortably in the Atlantic swell and everybody getting seasick. They finally limped into Rio twelve hours late. “So we had a day in Rio,” Maureen told her, “but then they canceled the rest of the cruise and flew us home.”
“And they’re all getting some kind of a refund,” Janice said bitterly, “but I got stuck for the whole thing, and I didn’t even get to go. Pat? Is it all right if I go out to lunch a little early?”
Whether it was all right or not, Pat felt, she had to say it was- having made Janice miss her cruise because of the “emergency.” Once in her own office it didn’t take long to find that that emergency search for the Scarecrow scout ship had still produced nothing. On the other hand, it had pretty well ruled out any new spacecraft heading in toward Earth at any immediately worrisome distance, too.