I looked at Hilda. I hadn’t realized I was hungry until she put it in my mind, but I was. “You mentioned food?”
“Right next door,” she said, rolling away. I followed her down a steep ramp, through a doorway, and came out in a little room-I suppose a dressing room at one time, now set up with a table and four chairs. Three of the chairs were occupied already: the Pat in the Bureau coveralls, that other Dannerman and old Rosaleen Artzybachova. “I thought you’d like company while you ate,” Hilda said indulgently. Then, less indulgent: “You’ve got forty-five minutes.”
As she left us I fixed my gaze on the Pat. “Patrice?” I guessed, very unsure of myself in more ways than one. She shook her head.
“No, Patrice went back to the Observatory to work on the Threat Watch,” she said. “I’m Pat-Pat One-but won’t I do for now?”
The food was typical Bureau on-duty fare: platters of sandwich materials, a big bowl of salad, coffee, fruit for dessert. I was hungry again and I ate, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I had never had the experience of sitting down at a table with myself before.
They began at once to tell me all the news that I hadn’t heard from Patrice, what a commotion they’d made when they got back, how this Dan and this Pat had been put in charge of their Dopey and Meow-“His name is actually Mrrranthoghrow,” I told them, and they practiced that for a while without a lot of success-and thus assigned to Camp Smolley. And all the while I kept looking at the two of them, and trying to figure out just what I was feeling.
Odd. That was how I was feeling. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Just odd. I guess it showed, because the other Dan grinned at me, then looked serious and said, “Weird, right? But you’ll get used to it.”
And Pat said sympathetically. “We all did.”
“Except in my case,” Rosaleen put in, “because I didn’t have anything of that sort to get used to. When I returned I learned that the other of me had died while we were away. That was more than simply a bizarre feeling, Dan. It was quite distressing. But as Dan says-as Dan M. says-one gets used to it.”
Then Pat-Pat One-began to show me pictures of Pat Five’s triplets; they looked like rather ordinary little girls to me, somewhat Asian-looking. As was to be expected, considering that what got Pat Five pregnant was some of the Beloved Leaders’ experimentation with sperm from their copy of Jimmy Lin. Who had managed to secure visitation rights, after a lot of high-level and acrimonious diplomatic discussion between the United States and the People’s Republic, and was surprisingly turning out to be a fondly besotted new father. And Pat Five was doing fine, too, except that the drugs she was taking to enhance her milk flow-three babies sucking away six times a day each!-had made her breasts so sensitive that she complained of being horny all the time. And how busy Patrice and P. J. were at the Observatory, with the Threat Watch using up so much of their resources, and the Observatory’s scientific staff constantly pissing and moaning I because they weren’t getting enough observing time to do any real science since the world’s telescopes were kept busy hunting comets that might be a threat.
All the time, out of the corner of my eye, I was watching Pat, my true love whom I had been missing so urgently, for so long. And what I was thinking was how much she looked like Patrice, with all of Patrice’s mannerisms and every bit of Patrice’s looks. I cleared my throat. “Will she be coming back soon, do you think?”
That made them all look at each other. “I don’t know,” Dan M. said at last.
And Pat bit her lip, and then leaned toward me confidentially. “I guess you know,” she said, “back in the prison planet Patrice, well, had a kind of crush on you-that is, you, I mean”-pointing a forefinger at each of us Dan Dannermans.
I blinked at that. “She did?”
Rosaleen was laughing, a dry old chuckle. “Of course she did, Dan, as did we all,” she said kindly. “Do not let it make you conceited. You were simply the only worthwhile man for many light-years in any direction. What did you expect?” She gave me a demure look. “Perhaps I should confess that I even had some sorts of foolish old-woman thoughts about you myself.”
“You did?” That was astonishing, too, but in a different way.
“Patrice didn’t exactly get over it, either,” Pat went on. “So when she heard you were here-well, look, I’m telling tales out of school, but we’re all kind of family here, aren’t we? And now you’ve just kind of hurt her feelings, you know.”
That baffled me. “What did I do?”
“Something you said, I’m not sure what. Did you say she was just a copy of me? Because we’re all a little bit sensitive about that.”
Well, I hadn’t done that. Not exactly, anyway. What I had done was to admit to her that I’d told Pirraghiz she was “more or less” the woman in my dreams, but what was so bad about that? It was true, wasn’t it?
They all kept talking, mostly Dan M. telling me about the religious nut who had wormed her way into Hilda’s confidence and repaid it by shooting her and three or four other people. I listened and responded. But I was still mulling over the Patrice problem when Hilda herself rolled in.
“Finished, Danno?” she asked. “You better be. Wipe the crumbs off your face, because family time is over and the debriefers are waiting to get at you.”
PART TEN
The Most Important Man in the World
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
There were half a dozen people impatiently waiting for me in the debriefing room, some male, some female, some wearing the blue UN beret and some in Bureau tans. They didn’t waste time. They started in right away-“Describe in more detail the robots you called ‘Christmas trees,’ “ one of them commanded, and we were off.
