The Far Shore of Time

She went on to explain some of the other problems of nomenclature for all us identical copies. She was still Patrice, just as Rosaleen had named her back on the prison planet. The Pat I had been thinking of as my own particular Pat was now called Pat One. The one who had been pregnant was still Pat Five (and no, she wasn’t pregnant anymore; she had given birth to triplets, three little girls). And the Pat who had been returned to Earth with a bug in her head and never got to the prison planet with the rest of us had flatly refused to be given any number, so she was called P. J.

While she was telling me how to tell the Pats apart by sight-it had to do with the colors they wore-I remembered the important stuff. I broke in on her explanations with, “What about the Beloved Leaders?”

She looked startled, then relaxed. “I haven’t heard them called that for a while. The Scarecrows, we call them now. What about them?”

“Jesus, Patrice! Nobody’s said a word about them, but you must know they’re planning to kill off a lot of people. Whatever you call them, why aren’t you worried?”

She considered that for a moment. “Well, I do worry, a little bit, sometimes,” she admitted, “but not much. The situation is under control, Dan. Honest. The Scarecrows call in every once in a while-lots of bluster, warnings, demands we let them come down to talk to us-but it’s just talk. They sneaked in those damn submarines that caught a lot of people and bugged them a while ago-the same way I was, remember? So they could use the people as spies? But we’ve located most of those people and debugged them. The Scarecrows haven’t done anything aggressive since then, not even their submarines.”

I frowned. “How did you know they had subs on Earth?”

“Figured it out, Dan. All the bugged people turned out to have been at sea. The only Scarecrow object from the scout ship landed in the sea. Had to be. Only,” she said without pleasure, “the damn things aren’t easy to find. Every navy in the world’s been looking. No luck. There was this one Turkish destroyer that thought it had one and depth-bombed it, only it turned out to be an Italian submarine. But nobody ever actually saw one-well, until you brought us yours, I mean. We don’t even know how many of the things there are-probably at least a dozen-“

“Twenty-six,” I said. “Twenty-five besides the one I brought in.”

“Oh,” she said, dampened. “Well, if you’ve got some way of locating them, probably they could be depth-bombed for real.”

I stared at her. “Are you crazy? The subs aren’t the problem. The Belov-The Scarecrow are the problem! They can wipe us out any time they like!”

She gave me a strangely indulgent look. “Not really, Dan. We know what they’re capable of. Dopey told us. What he said,” she went on, sounding a lot like a mother telling her two-year-old that there aren’t really any monsters under the bed, “was that the Scarecrows could tweak a big near-Earth-passing asteroid out of its orbit and dump it on the Earth and kill us all that way. You know. Like the old KT event that killed the dinosaurs. Well, that’s what Threat Watch is all about, Dan. You don’t know what Threat Watch is, though, do you? It’s what’s been keeping us busy at the Observatory; I was working there, keeping track of all the findings, when they called me about you. Every decent telescope in the world is searching for objects with orbits that can come anywhere near us. We’ve mapped just about everything bigger than a panel truck for ten or twelve AU in every direction, whether they’re asteroids or comets or can’t-tell-which. I promise there’s absolutely nothing big that’s in an orbit that can come anywhere near hitting us for a minimum of two years. And there isn’t any tweaking going on, either. Threat Watch hasn’t found a single object that shows any signs of interference with its ballistic orbit.”

I wasn’t willing to be convinced. “All right, but that isn’t the only weapon they’ve got, Patrice. They’ve turned some suns into novas-“

She was smiling tolerantly at me. “Our sun, Dan? You’re not much of an astrophysicist, are you? Can’t happen. Our sun isn’t that kind of star.”

She seemed so confident. I stared at her. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I can be. No, the asteroid impact is the only scenario that makes sense, and trust me, we’ve definitely got at least two years grace on that one, Dan. Every observatory’s computer models agree on that.”

Two years. I thought about two years for a bit. It was a lot better than no margin at all, but I couldn’t help asking, “And then?”

She gave my hand a reassuring pat. “Ah, by then we’ll be ready for them, Dan. There are big new spaceships building all over the world. Fighters. High-mass ships with plenty of delta-V. And weapons!”

I frowned. “So if the Scarecrows nudge an asteroid, we’ll nudge it back?”