anyway, if this plane had a spare bathtub.'
The Pat next to the real, or beardless, Dannerman apologized. 'We've been a little short of that kind of thing for a long time, too. Especially poor Pat Five over there. At least Patrice and I managed to get a swim in a few days ago-oh, you want to know about the names? They were Rosaleen's idea. I'm Pat One. This is Patrice. Our pregnant one is Pat Five. What shall we call you?'
'Call me?' It was a problem Pat had not expected to face. What she was called was Pat or Dr. Adcock; that was an immutable given in her life, and there had never been a reason to think about it at all. Until now, when there were three others entitled to the same name.
'Anything but Patsy, please,' said Patrice. 'We had a Patsy, but- she died.'
The Pat bit her lip; some interior struggle was going on. 'Oh, hell,' she said unhappily, 'we'll talk about that later. Anyway, maybe I'll be big about this. You stay with Pat. I'll be Pat One.'
'Well, thanks,' Pat said, a little bit grateful, still a lot puzzled, just as a pair of stews made their entrance, carrying plates of hot apple pie with ice cream.
'Sorry we took so long,' one of them apologized, 'but those weirdos are in the galley, trying to find something they can eat. Christ but they take up a lot of room!'
'And they stink,' said the other one, just as the real Dannerman came in from the front of the plane.
He seemed cheerful. 'Hey, I'll take a piece of that, too. And some coffee. And then maybe a beer.'
'A beer!' the other Dannerman said reverently.
The real one was grinning. 'We're missing all the fun,' he said.
'The whole world's arriving in Calgary now. The Ukrainians are after Dr. Artzybachova, the Chinese are taking Jimmy Lin off in a hell of a hurry. Even the Floridians are complaining that you didn't bring their General Delasquez back.'
Backgrounder
NBI contacts file
LIN, James Peng-tsu, Cdr, PRC Spaceforce
Commander Lin has a somewhat shadowy background. A full commander in the People's Republic Spaceforce, he was dismissed from the service for reasons variously given as 'political unreliability' and 'sexual misconduct'; research has not definitively established which. If the misconduct was sexual, one account has it that Lin is given to reenacting the exploits of his remote ancestor, an ancient Chinese sage named Peng-tsu, who wrote a book extolling the necessity and varieties of frequent sexual experience. An alternative report, however, suggests that Lin is homosexual and the alleged heterosexual activity is a. cover for what, in PRC eyes, is a serious crime.
Lin was hired as pilot by Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) in her mission to Starlab. There are now two of him, one who came back with the first batch of returnees from Starlab (this one bugged); the other with Agent J.D. Dannerman and the extraterrestrials. The second one is said to be the artificial-insemination father of the unborn child of the Dr. Adcock known as 'Pat Five' (see backgrounder file.)
'Martin's dead,' Dannerman-with-a-beard said between bites. 'We think he is, anyway.'
'Yeah, well, I hate to second-guess the boss, but maybe moving the landing site to Canada wasn't the best idea he ever had.'
Pat shushed him and turned to Pat One. 'What do you mean, Martin's dead?'
It was a short question, but it had a long
answer and not a cheery one. The Floridian pilot Pat had hired for her mission, General Martin Delasquez, had stayed behind to cover the rest of them while they escaped. Escaped from what? Well, there was a sort of a war going on. A big one. How big? Well, as far as they could tell, it seemed to involve the whole damn universe.
Vice Deputy Fennell sighed. 'How weird is this going to get? Let's get back to the beginning, from where you all entered Starlab.'
If what these people were saying was true-and Pat realized that she didn't have any choice anymore about believing them-they had been through a hell of an ordeal. Taken captive on Starlab by the creature they called Dopey and his Docs-by them, but not for them; they were only subject races, doing their masters' bidding.
And who were these masters? Why, all the newcomers agreed, the whole thing had been organized by that scarecrow creature from the space messages, a race of superbeings who chose to be called 'Beloved Leaders,' though why anyone should love them Pat could not imagine. Certainly their human captives had no reason to. They had been kept penned for weeks in a cell no larger than the airborne drawing room they were in, but without any of its amenities-without any amenities at all, even toilets!
That struck Pat as nasty. Then she heard a good deal nastier.
At least the original band of captives had been allowed to live intact, as a sort of control group of humans to be studied. But the aliens had other studies in mind as well, and those had been far worse. The aliens had made additional copies of their captives for anatomical research. Nearly all of those unfortunates had died during the experimentation, generally, Pat Five said, in considerable pain. She herself had been lucky. She had been the one who was chosen, pretty much at random, to become pregnant so the aliens could discover how human beings produced their young. Romance was not involved, nor even actual sexual intercourse. She had been artificially inseminated with sperm-from, she thought, one of the Jimmy Lins, though she couldn't be positive even of that-and so she alone of that group had survived.
Backgrounder
NBI contacts file
DELASQUEZ, Martin, Maj. Gen. Florida Air Guard
General Delasquez qualified for astronaut training in the U.S. NASA program, but never went into space due to the defunding of the program. When the State of Florida declared itself sovereign in its own territory, Delasquez became part of its Air Guard, rising to the rank of major general. He was attached to the Florida mission to the United Nations, stationed in New York City, when Dr. Patrice Adcock (see backgrounder file) hired him as copilot on her mission to Starlab. He returned with the others and was subsequently found to be bugged.
He was then hired by Eurospace as a consultant on Star-lab when they proposed to fly their own mission to the satellite, in which capacity he served for some months at the Eurospace facility in Kourou, Guyana.
Delasquez is said to be well connected politically in Florida's Cuban-American circles. A second Delasquez is said to have died while with the others in captivity by the Scarecrows.
It did not seem to Pat that Pat Five had been all that lucky.
She tried to imagine what it might be like to be a laboratory specimen, with an unwanted new life growing inside her. Then she stopped trying to imagine it. It was more painful than she could bear.
CHAPTER NINE
Hilda Morrisey had a good imagination, too. She needed it in her work, but she also needed to be able to turn it off when it was troublesome. Which Vice Deputy Daisy Fennell evidently could not; the woman, listening with openmouthed horror, had completely lost control of the debriefing. Hilda quelled the uneasy stirrings in her own belly and spoke up. 'Let's get back to business. One at a time, now. Go back to when you woke up in this place with the mirrors all around you. What happened next?'-pointing to the one who called herself Patrice.
Who shook her head. 'I wasn't there. Patsy and I came along later-'
And then there was a whole confusing other story about this 'Patsy'-still another copy of Dr. Adcock-and how she'd been electrocuted by some still other kind of alien monster that looked like a hippopotamus but delivered lethal electrical shocks. Only that didn't happen in the mirrored cell, it happened later on, after they'd all been taken out of the city-or the base, or the encampment or whatever you chose to call it-where they'd first arrived, and then been dumped out in the woods somewhere, because the other guys, the other^ variety of would-be universe- conquerors they called the 'Horch,' were fighting against the ones they called the Beloved Leaders-
