The Far Shore of Time

The fact was that I didn’t have much time to be part of a family, anyway. I didn’t have much time for anything at all. Hilda made sure of that. She came to collect me right on the dot, hurrying me to my last session of the day, this one at the submarine.

I guess the talk had made me a little absentminded. We got through the session at the sub without my noticing anything was wrong-work coming along well, Wrahrrgherfoozh promising the sub’s incoming comm systems would be back on line in a day or so-and it wasn’t until we were in the final talk session between Hilda and me that I put up my hand to scratch my head and said, “Oh, shit.”

Hilda interrupted herself in the middle of telling me that I really had to press Beert and the Docs harder for information to ask, “Now what, Danno?” Then she saw for herself. “Oh, Christ! Where’s your damn Faraday shawl?”

I said apologetically, “I guess I forgot to put it back on when I was having dinner. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry!”

“Well, hell, Hilda, I didn’t do it on purpose. But look, if I really was transmitting data to somebody, I’ve done it, haven’t I? So why don’t we just forget about the damn babushka?”

And after a certain amount of chewing me out, she sighed and said, “Oh, what the hell. Maybe we could.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Naturally, the deputy director blew a fuse. But in the long run he had to admit that if there was any damage to be done by letting me off wearing the babushka, it was done already. And that was the way my life went. Debriefing, translation, more debriefing, more translation ... and bed. Apart from the fact that my head was babushkaless now-and that Hilda squeezed twenty minutes in the next day for me to get a haircut and a beard trim-every day the same.

It wasn’t all that unlike the days when the Christmas trees were pumping me for everything I knew about the human race.

I did now have better food and a more comfortable bed, and even a little entertainment. There wasn’t much variety to the entertainment, though. Every morning I turned on the news channels, and every morning the news was the same. There were stories about plane crashes and stock-market gyrations; there were senators denouncing the opposition party for not responding to the Scarecrow threat vigorously enough, and opposition leaders denouncing those senators for recklessly damaging national unity in this time of crisis. There were sports scores and weather forecasts and about a million other kinds of news items that the media thought worth passing on, but there was not ever a single word of any kind about the captured submarine, the Horch or the unexpected arrival of another Dan Dannerman.

So security was holding. Whatever the faults of the National Bureau of Investigation, it was still outstanding at keeping its secrets buried.

There was something else that wasn’t there, and when I had a free moment with Hilda I asked her about it. “Don’t they have traffic advisories anymore? I didn’t see anything at all about terrorists on the news.”

“Oh,” she said offhandedly, “those are last year’s worries. The nuts’ve all calmed down, now that they’ve got something else to worry about. We haven’t had a terrorist scare in weeks. Now get a move on, they want us at the submarine.”

That stopped me in midthought. “The schedule says we’re supposed to be doing solo debriefing,” I protested, not liking the sound of a break in the routine.

Hilda wasn’t patient. “Let me worry about scheduling, will you, Danno? It’s the submarine now. They’ve got the stuff working.”

When we got there Hilda waited outside as I climbed up to the sub’s hatch, the linguists trailing as always. As always, the congestion inside the vessel was acute: all three Docs, the linguists, the technicians and me.

But it was worth the crowding. Wrahrrgherfoozh and Mrrranthoghrow had finally finished the job of rebuilding the sub’s communications for receiving only-would have had it done a lot faster, Mrrranthoghrow said, sounding aggrieved, if all those Bureau and UN techs hadn’t kept getting in the way. Well, I couldn’t blame the techs for that. It was their best chance ever to watch people who knew what they were doing in the actual process of repairing a piece of Scarecrow machinery.