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people, they say we can come in to land now. Make sure your seat belts are
fastened, will you?" And Patrice straightened up and did as ordered. So did I,
and that particular conundrum had to be set aside again.
The blimp-copter pilot had eased his big ship down another meter or two, until
the cables that held his load went slack. Workmen on the ground had quickly
released them, and the blimp-copter lifted and went sailing away into the
sunrise. I lost sight of it as our own pilot was setting us down on the pad a
few dozen meters away.
While we were waiting for somebody to bring up a forklift to get Hilda's box
to the ground, I
could see that the handlers had already hooked a little tractor to the cradle
the sub was on. They weren't wasting any time. The machine was pulling the
whole thing, sub and all, into a cavernous loading dock the size of a hotel
ballroom.
As soon as we were off the chopper a couple of Bureau guards were waving us
inside. Next to me
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Patrice stumbled and frowned; she was looking curiously toward the perimeter
of Camp Smolley. Some sort of argument was going on there, Bureau guards and a
couple of soldiers in unfamiliar blue berets yelling at each other. But what
the squabble was about, I could not see.
The Bureau people weren't just beckoning us inside, they were rushing us
inside. As soon as the sub and we were in the loading dock, its big steel door
folded itself down to shut us off from the outside world, and the workmen
began pulling the tarps off the submarine.
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CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Even in that moment I noticed something funny. The workmen weren't the usual
uniformed grunts the
Bureau used for heavy lifting. They were high-ranking officers. I recognized
some of them as upper brass from the Arlington headquarters, and they didn't
seem to like being used as manual labor.
I didn't spend much time thinking about that; there was something more
important. It was the first time I'd seen the whole Scarecrow submarine
exposed. It didn't look a bit like any vessel I'd seen before.
When the tarps came off at one end of the sub they revealed a squared-off
stern with three great openings, making a triangle, looking like exhaust
nozzles on a huge rocket. There was neither propeller nor rudder. At the bow
end was a group of tightly nested jointed rods, for what purpose, I could not
say. A whitely gleaming squarish thing was between them; it looked vaguely
familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. The rest of the hull was featureless
metal, marked only by the hatch on the upper deck.
I heard my name called and turned around. It was Deputy Director Marcus Pell,
looking recently slept and freshly bathed. From behind me Hilda's voice said,
"He wants you at the sub. Go!"
I went. The brigadiers and department subheads were rolling a wheeled ladder
up to the sub's side and Pell was standing impatiently beside it. "Up you go,
Dannerman," he snapped. "See if you can keep those freaks of yours from making
any more trouble."
I did as ordered, somewhat confused because I had no idea what kind of trouble
Pell was talking about. Then the people on the desk opened the hatch and it
got a lot more confusing than that.
The first thing that came out of the sub was the stink, worse than ever and
with some unpleasant new | ingredients added. The second thing was a
uniformed police lieutenant, looking as if he'd had a hard ride. He glowered
at me. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded, and didn't wait for an answer. He
turned to the deputy director, who had followed me up. "Is there somebody who
can talk to those freaks? They wouldn't let us touch the machinery at all.
Then kept getting in Dr.
Evergood's way when she was trying to take care of the Doc with the burned arm
and . . . and
Sergeant Coughlan was airsick all the way here," he finished bitterly.
That explained the new aroma. It didn't explain the fact that the second
person out of the sub was a portly black woman in a stained white smock, whom
I'd never seen before. The deputy director didn't give me a chance to ask
questions. "You heard what the lieutenant said, Dannerman," he snapped. "Get
in there and straighten the freaks out!"
As soon as I lowered myself inside, Beert and Pirraghiz came clamoring around
me for news and explanations. "Give me a minute," I begged-in Horch, of
course-while I looked around. Part of the stink came from three Bureau-issue
body bags stacked one on top of the other-four body bags, actually; two bags
had been put together to hold a larger carcass. That would be the dead Doc;
the other bags would be holding the bodies of the two dead Scarecrow warriors.
Another component of the stench was a couple of drying puddles of vomit on the
floor, just under the perch where the ship's Dopey was fastidiously shielding
his face with his fan and squawking his own raucous complaints at me-in
English, this time. The sergeant who had been airsick gave me an aggrieved
look and said faintly, "He's been going on like that the whole time. They all
have."
They all still were. The surviving Doc was holding up his ruined arm, now
neatly bandaged and a lot shorter than it had been, and mewing earnestly to
Pirraghiz. The only things capable of speech or action that weren't demanding
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attention at once were the two machines, Beert's Christmas tree and the
surviving robot fighter. They stood totally silent and unmoving in a corner of
the sub's cabin. I appreciated that.
I raised a hand and said loudly, in English: "Shut up." Then in Horch, "I'm
sorry if you had a rough trip, but it's over now. Pirraghiz? What happened to
your friend?"
She was standing next to him, with one big hand on his shoulder for
comforting. "At the other nest-
the first place they took us to, I don't know where it was-the human female
amputated most of his stump," she told me. "She did an excellent job, I
think."
I blinked at that. "You let her operate on him?"
"I had no choice, Dannerman. It was clear that she knew what she was doing,
and the medical [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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