The Siege of Eternity

But here she was at Camp Smolley again, and what was in the back of Brigadier Morrisey's mind stayed where it was. The camp was in an uproar. Daisy Fennell was there, giving Colonel Makalanos a hard time for imagined failings at getting more information out of the Docs. All three of the freaks were back at the biowar station, and security precautions were doubled. There was an armed guard at the door of the interrogation room, where the two Docs were vociferously mewing at Dopey. Whatever they were saying, they seemed to think it was urgent, but the little turkey was adamantly refusing to respond, his cat eyes squeezed shut, his little paws thrust firmly into that coppery belly bag. In a corner of the room Dannerman was having an agitated, low-voiced conversation with a woman; it wasn't until Hilda recognized the woman as Anita Herman that she knew which Dannerman it was. The linguistics team was on hand, doing their best to get a clue as to the Docs' language, but if they were making any progress at all, Hilda couldn't see how. It didn't seem that way to her.

Her first target was Dannerman. As she approached, Anita Berman was in the process of jumping up and delivering a final, scathing remark: "I don't care about the money, I don't care about the part, what I care about is getting you out of this crazy life you're leading!" She flounced away, leaving Dannerman peering after her. The funny thing was, he was actually looking pleased.

"What's that all about?" Hilda asked.

He shook his head. "Something I was worried about, that's all. Listen, is it true about all these bugs being found?"

"Damn straight it's true, but that isn't what I wanted to ask you. Have you had a chance to talk to Dopey about that drawing the Doc made?"

The fond smile evaporated from his face. "Uh, yes," he said reluctantly. "He said-well, he didn't say anything for sure, only maybe-"

"Damn you! Maybe what?"

He swallowed. "He said he didn't know anything really, but, after all, the Horch captured everything the Scarecrows had on that planet. Including the transit machine-the one that made copies of us? So if they wanted more copies of me, or anything else, there wouldn't be anything in the world that could stop them."

There was a goddam limit, Hilda Morrisey told herself, to the number of things she should have to worry about at one time. How many crazinesses were going to be thrown at her? She sat down, trying to collect her thoughts. Merla Tepp appeared from nowhere, silently bearing a cup of coffee, and when Hilda looked at the woman's face there was one more annoyance staring at her. The woman had the expression of someone more put-upon than was bearable-even more put-upon than Hilda herself, though perhaps for different reasons. (What was it with Tepp? It couldn't be just the fact that she loathed the aliens. Was there some personal problem? And if there was, who cared?) Hilda put her aide's problems out of her mind and concentrated on what was going on.

Hilda Morrisey had presided at plenty of interrogations in her career, but never one like this. This time the subjects were doing their best to spill every last thing they knew. In fact, they were doing it nonstop, their mewing voices sometimes plaintive, sometimes yowling mad, but what they were carrying on about no one could say.

It was the translator who was the problem. Dopey was not cooperating. Occasionally he mewed irritably back at the Docs, mostly he merely sat huddled silently on his perch, eyes closed in suffering, tail plume dull and dejected. From where the observers sat on the other side of the one-way glass they could see Patrice, in the interrogation room with the subjects, where she had been for the last hour. She was expostulating with Dopey, but he was ignoring her as well.

Patrice sighed and came out. "I need a break," she said, looking at the linguistics team as they hovered over their frequency analyzers and screens. "You guys getting anything?" she asked.

The head of the team shook her head. "Can't te\\."Well, Hilda thought, theirs was a pretty forlorn hope to begin with. A language was not like a cipher, and all the computers in the world were not likely to solve the translation problem.

While, infuriatingly, the finest translation system the world had ever known was sulking on his perch not a dozen meters away, and refusing to help. "If we could just get a few sentences that were in both languages to match up, we might make a start," the woman said pensively. "Like the Rosetta Stone, you know."

"Damn the Rosetta Stone and damn that goddam freak," Daisy Fennell said. "Don't we have any way to make the little bastard cooperate?"

Patrice Adcock looked almost amused. "What would you suggest? Threaten his life, maybe? But he isn't worrying about dying. He thinks he'd get brownie points with the Scarecrows if he died doing something in their service-like refusing to translate for the Docs."

Technology Analysis, NBI

Agency Eyes Only

Subject: "Virtual energy" and tachyon transport