The Far Shore of Time

The questioning was pretty much nonstop. They did let me pee a couple of times-not giving me any decent privacy while I did it, of course; a Bureau goon stood alertly behind me every minute, in case I had some kind of evil trick to play with the urinal. They even let me eat once or twice, dry ham sandwiches that looked as though they’d been salvaged from somebody’s lunch meeting and black coffee out of the same urn the interrogators used. It was not the homecoming meal I had been dreaming about. What they wouldn’t let me do at all was sleep. When I began getting woozy they handed me a glass of tepid water and a couple of those Bureau-issue wake-up pills. The things woke me right up, but I would rather have got horizontal. Even the Christmas trees had been kinder than that.

I thought I’d seen the woman who handed me the wake-up pills around the headquarters before. I pressed my luck. While I was still swallowing, I asked her, “What about my friends in the sub, are they all right?”

She might have answered. She opened her mouth as though she intended to, but one of the other interrogators shouldered her aside. He took the glass from my hand and said, “Don’t worry about your buddies, we’re taking care of them. Now, tell us about these Horch that you say are good guys.” So I told them about the Two Eights and their nest, and why they were different from the cousin Horch.

It kept going until, along about the third or fourth wake-up pill, there was a change. My interrogators all stopped talking at once, turning toward the mirror wall. I knew why: they’d all heard something on their little earphones. At once a little door in the wall opened. Someone I knew walked in, looking both irritated and grim. It was the way Deputy Director Marcus Pell usually looked.

I stood up and offered him a hand to shake. “I’m Agent Dannerman,” I told him.

The deputy director didn’t answer at first. He ignored the hand and took one of the straight-backed chairs-its previous occupant getting up and out of the way fast-and regarded me for a moment. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “How do we know you’re who you say you are?”

I guessed, “Fingerprints? Retinal scan?” I think I was getting a little light-headed by then, regardless of the pills.

“Not good enough,” he said judiciously. “I understand the Scarecrows can make an exact copy of anybody or anything they like. You could be a Scarecrow brain wearing a human body, for all I know.”

“I’m not,” I said wearily, and couldn’t help adding, “For that matter, so could you.”

He didn’t take offense. He just nodded and said, “I think we need confirmation of your identity. Brigadier Morrisey! Come in, please.”

The door that opened this time wasn’t to the auditorium seats; it was the one that allowed suspects and interrogators to get in and out from the corridors outside. In a moment a clumsy-looking thing like a white-enameled kitchen refrigerator on wheels rolled in. I frowned at it, puzzled about what the deputy director was bringing this big metal thing in for, annoyed because it was blocking my view; I couldn’t see my old boss, Hilda Morrisey, at all. Even when the thing rolled up close to me and I could see the door behind it closing again, there was no sign of Hilda.

Then a voice that I knew came out of the box. “Tell me, Danno, what was the name of the Kraut broad from the Mad King Ludwigs you were shacking up with?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Hilda! They told me you were dead! What the hell are you doing in that thing?”

It-she-came to a full stop right across the table from me. There was nothing that looked human about the box. It had no face, only a rectangle of mirror glass at head height; I could not see what was behind it. But the voice was Hilda’s, all right-a little fainter than I was used to, a little breathier, but definitely Hilda. “I’m not quite dead, Danno. I got shot up a little, is all, and the reason I’m still alive is that I’ve got this box to keep me going. Answer the question.”

Evidently we wouldn’t be catching up on each other’s news for a while. “You mean Use?” I asked.

“Last name too,” she ordered.

I cudgeled my memory. “Keinwasser? Something like that. I never heard her real name until somebody, I think it was you, told me about it after she was arrested, and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. If you remember, I was in Intensive Care at the time.”

She didn’t comment, just rapped out: “The name of my sergeant when you were working on the dope ring in New York.”

“Uh. McEvoy? He was a master sergeant, but I don’t know his first name.”