The Far Shore of Time

So I did, and we had named and more or less described about half the visible gadgets on the sub when Hilda called in to say that it was time for me to go to my next appointment. As I came down the ladder, Pirraghiz and the linguistics team following, Hilda studied me for a minute. “Are you deliberately trying to piss Daisy Fennell off?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “Not deliberately.”

“Well, you’re doing a good job of it,” she said, and then she made a little sound that must have been a chuckle. “On the other hand, I guess it doesn’t matter much, since she can’t get along without you. Hey, I guess none of us can really, can we, Danno? How does it feel to be the most important man in the world?”

The most important man in the world.

It had a nice sound. I pondered over it between pauses for translations at the next stop, which was in a kind of laboratory.

I’d seen the Bureau’s forensic lab at the headquarters in Arlington. The one at Camp Smolley was a lot bigger. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, and it was bustling with all kinds of activity. In one room technicians were doing mass spectroscopy, its door closed but the nasty, dentist’s-drill sound leaking through as they sputtered ions off samples of Scarecrow metals. In another the chemists had other samples bubbling and fizzing under glass hoods. The place Hilda took us to was a larger room, filled with rows of workbenches. Each of them held its own piece of Scarecrow gimmickry being investigated, with a handful of techs poking and prodding at its innards.

We stopped where Mrrranthoghrow was waiting with two or three techs, one of them wearing the UN blue beret. While Pirraghiz was hugging her long-lost friend in greeting, I got a look at what was on the bench. It was a huge thing, the size of Hilda’s mobile box, but it wasn’t on wheels, and instead of being refrigerator white, it was iridescently greenish. When Mrrranthoghrow finished hugging Pirraghiz he picked up a sheaf of carefully executed drawings and thrust them at me, mewing earnestly.

“This is a part of a transit machine of the Others,” Pirraghiz translated. “It comes from the human astronomical orbiter called Starlab and Mrrranthoghrow has made these sketches of its parts, which these people wish to discuss when one more person arrives.”

By the time I had translated that, the one more person was arriving, speeding along in her wheelchair with an apologetic expression on her face. It was Rosaleen Artzybachova. “Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to be on time, I’m afraid. Hello, Meow.”

She was speaking to Mrrranthoghrow, and the surprising part was that he replied with “Hello, Rosaleen” in English. Well, almost in English. It came out, “Uh-woh, Wozzaweeeen,” but close enough.

Hilda, of course, was having none of that. “We are seven minutes behind schedule, Dr. Artzybachova,” she said crisply. “Please do not delay us any more.”

“Of course,” Rosaleen said. “Here, Dan.” She plucked a couple of the carefully executed drawings out of my hand and pointed to the sketch of a round object with a partly serrated edge. “Ask him if this thing is meant to fit in with this other one-“ pointing to another sheet with a detail of something that looked like a clamshell.

And on and on. Well, there’s no sense describing every last thing I did around then, because there were many too many things to be done.

See, I was the only one who could talk to Beert or Pirraghiz, and through her to the other Docs. There was a lot of talking to be done, and every bit of it required my participation.

It wasn’t much of a stretch for Hilda to call me the most important man in the world. The busiest, anyway. So it isn’t really surprising that some really important matters just sort of slipped my mind.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a situation like mine. By that I mean finding yourself back on your home planet when you’d pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it again. And meeting once more the girl of your dreams ... more or less. And worrying about what your human associates were going to do to your best friend, who happened to be a Horch. And trying to catch up on food, sleep and news, the accumulated news of a world I hadn’t seen for many months. And all day long answering questions and asking them-of Pirraghiz and Beert-and always, every minute, hustled from one interrogation place to another with little time to eat and barely enough for sleeping.