The Far Shore of Time

“Exactly he,” she said happily. You would not think that a six-armed creature with a face like a bearded full moon could look coquettish, but she managed it. “He is a copy of the one we knew in the Two Eights, of course, but it is Mrrranthoghrow whom the Others copied for this mission and he remembers me well from earlier times. But you surprise me, Dannerman. Did you think I would be so affectionate with a total stranger?”

Next stop for me was my press conference-well, there was certainly no press there, but that was what it felt like to the person in the hot seat. I climbed up onto the platform, before the hundreds of staring eyes, and gave them a sketchy outline of my adventures with the Horch. Then I opened the floor for questions. That was a mistake. There were about a million of them, and all the time I was searching the hundred or more faces in the room for Patrice.

When I found her, squeezed into almost the last row, I managed an inconspicuous wave. She waved back, all right, but there was something about her that seemed wrong.

I took me a moment to figure that out. It was the clothes and the hairdo. Patrice had been wearing a pretty pants suit; this one was in Bureau coveralls. All right, she could have changed her clothes-not very likely, but possible-but she hadn’t had time to let her hair grow into a long ponytail.

There was only one possible explanation. The woman I was looking at wasn’t Patrice. She had to be Pat! The real Pat. And sitting beside her was a man who looked a lot like me, except that he wore a mustache, and I realized I was looking at the other me, Danny M., the man who was married to Pat.

That did not help my concentration.

When the deputy director, sitting behind me on the platform, saw that I was stumbling through the next couple of questions, he took pity on me-or, more likely, was afraid that I was getting tired enough to say something he didn’t want said. He got up and preempted the mike. “No more questions, please,” he said. “Agent Dannerman has had a very exhausting time. We must see that he is fed, and allowed to rest. As he is debriefed over the next few days the records and transcripts will be made available to all of you, under the terms of the UN agreement. Please leave now.”

There was a rumble of discontent from the audience at that, but they left-or I guess they did; Pell had me by the arm and escorted me backstage before I could see. Hilda was waiting there amid the tangle of ropes and discarded pieces of sets. “Nice job, Danno,” she informed me. “The way you duck the questions you don’t want to answer, you’ll make a good administrator someday.”

The deputy director gave her an opaque look, but all he said was, “Have you got a schedule for Dannerman yet?”

“Working on it, Marcus. He’s got to eat first, though.”

He looked surprised, as though that sort of pampering had never crossed his mind. Then he looked resigned. “Take care of it,” he ordered, and left without another word-to catch up on his harassing of somebody else, no doubt.

I looked at Hilda. I hadn’t realized I was hungry until she put it in my mind, but I was. “You mentioned food?”

“Right next door,” she said, rolling away. I followed her down a steep ramp, through a doorway, and came out in a little room-I suppose a dressing room at one time, now set up with a table and four chairs. Three of the chairs were occupied already: the Pat in the Bureau coveralls, that other Dannerman and old Rosaleen Artzybachova. “I thought you’d like company while you ate,” Hilda said indulgently. Then, less indulgent: “You’ve got forty-five minutes.”

As she left us I fixed my gaze on the Pat. “Patrice?” I guessed, very unsure of myself in more ways than one. She shook her head.

“No, Patrice went back to the Observatory to work on the Threat Watch,” she said. “I’m Pat-Pat One-but won’t I do for now?”

The food was typical Bureau on-duty fare: platters of sandwich materials, a big bowl of salad, coffee, fruit for dessert. I was hungry again and I ate, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I had never had the experience of sitting down at a table with myself before.

They began at once to tell me all the news that I hadn’t heard from Patrice, what a commotion they’d made when they got back, how this Dan and this Pat had been put in charge of their Dopey and Meow-“His name is actually Mrrranthoghrow,” I told them, and they practiced that for a while without a lot of success-and thus assigned to Camp Smolley. And all the while I kept looking at the two of them, and trying to figure out just what I was feeling.

Odd. That was how I was feeling. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Just odd. I guess it showed, because the other Dan grinned at me, then looked serious and said, “Weird, right? But you’ll get used to it.”

And Pat said sympathetically. “We all did.”