laboratory.
I’d seen the Bureau’s forensic lab at the headquarters in Arlington. The one at Camp Smolley was a lot bigger. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, and it was bustling with all kinds of activity. In one room technicians were doing mass spectroscopy, its door closed but the nasty, dentist’s-drill sound leaking through as they sputtered ions off samples of Scarecrow metals. In another the chemists had other samples bubbling and fizzing under glass hoods. The place Hilda took us to was a larger room, filled with rows of workbenches. Each of them held its own piece of Scarecrow gimmickry being investigated, with a handful of techs poking and prodding at its innards.
We stopped where Mrrranthoghrow was waiting with two or three techs, one of them wearing the UN blue beret. While Pirraghiz was hugging her long-lost friend in greeting, I got a look at what was on the bench. It was a huge thing, the size of Hilda’s mobile box, but it wasn’t on wheels, and instead of being refrigerator white, it was iridescently greenish. When Mrrranthoghrow finished hugging Pirraghiz he picked up a sheaf of carefully executed drawings and thrust them at me, mewing earnestly.
“This is a part of a transit machine of the Others,” Pirraghiz translated. “It comes from the human astronomical orbiter called Starlab and Mrrranthoghrow has made these sketches of its parts, which these people wish to discuss when one more person arrives.”
By the time I had translated that, the one more person was arriving, speeding along in her wheelchair with an apologetic expression on her face. It was Rosaleen Artzybachova. “Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to be on time, I’m afraid. Hello, Meow.”
She was speaking to Mrrranthoghrow, and the surprising part was that he replied with “Hello, Rosaleen” in English. Well, almost in English. It came out, “Uh-woh, Wozzaweeeen,” but close enough.
Hilda, of course, was having none of that. “We are seven minutes behind schedule, Dr. Artzybachova,” she said crisply. “Please do not delay us any more.”
“Of course,” Rosaleen said. “Here, Dan.” She plucked a couple of the carefully executed drawings out of my hand and pointed to the sketch of a round object with a partly serrated edge. “Ask him if this thing is meant to fit in with this other one-“ pointing to another sheet with a detail of something that looked like a clamshell.
And on and on. Well, there’s no sense describing every last thing I did around then, because there were many too many things to be done.
See, I was the only one who could talk to Beert or Pirraghiz, and through her to the other Docs. There was a lot of talking to be done, and every bit of it required my participation.
It wasn’t much of a stretch for Hilda to call me the most important man in the world. The busiest, anyway. So it isn’t really surprising that some really important matters just sort of slipped my mind.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a situation like mine. By that I mean finding yourself back on your home planet when you’d pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it again. And meeting once more the girl of your dreams ... more or less. And worrying about what your human associates were going to do to your best friend, who happened to be a Horch. And trying to catch up on food, sleep and news, the accumulated news of a world I hadn’t seen for many months. And all day long answering questions and asking them-of Pirraghiz and Beert-and always, every minute, hustled from one interrogation place to another with little time to eat and barely enough for sleeping.
The worst part was the constant interruptions. We would go from trying to figure out whether Mrrranthoghrow was talking about magnetism or electricity or something entirely different to an emergency trip to the sub, where Daisy Fennell was having hysterics because the Doc had begun ripping one whole panel out of the sub’s wall. By the time we finished convincing her that he was just doing what he was told to do up the chain of communication (Wrahrrgherfoozh, Pirraghiz, me, Fennell) and she finished demanding that he let Bureau mechanics observe and record every move (back down the same chain-four or five times each way), Hilda was already getting calls from the reverse-engineering people to complain that their allotted time was being frittered away. And when we got back to the hunk of Scarecrow transit machine, Mrrranthoghrow was in the middle of trying to explain the way the thing’s laserlike weaponry was generated and Rosaleen Artzybachova was begging to be told where the power came from. And while we were trying to deal with that, the head of the UN detachment showed up to protest that some of the semiorganic Scarecrow materiel was making fizzing noises and seemed to be rotting away, and why were we wasting time with hardware when valuable stuff was being lost because they didn’t know how to preserve it?
It was pretty hectic. Trust me on that. The only ones who were enjoying it all were the linguists, and they were in heaven. After months of effort, they’d picked up only a few words of Doc; now they had their Rosetta stone, me, and a completely different new language, Horch. Two new languages! Not just “new” in the sense that some newly discovered African hill tribe’s language was “new” to, at least, Western linguists, but wholly new in provenance, languages that had developed with no ancestors in common with any language any human being had ever heard before, all the way back to the earliest presentient screeches and grunts. I could almost smell their ecstatic daydreaming about the papers they would someday contribute to the linguistics journals.
I was glad they were having fun. Nobody else was. Definitely I was not, and least happy of all was my friend, Beert. When they brought me in to question him he was belly-down on his army cot, head held dejectedly low.
The way I looked at it, he had a lot to be dejected about. The room he was in was Spartan and not at all private; two wall-mounted cameras followed him wherever he went. Which was never very far, since the cell was only about two meters by three altogether. When we all piled in, there was hardly room to move at all.
“They want me to ask you some questions, Beert,” I told him.
His neck had swerved to the two armed guards in UN blue helmets. “Yes, I supposed that they would,” he said absently, and then asked, “Those persons with the blue metal on their heads, are they your cousins?”
“Something like that,” I said, but that was all the chitchat we were allowed. And before we could get down to business the translators were on my case again for verbatim translations of everything we had said.
When the debriefers’ questions began he stayed dejected, but answered civilly enough. It wasn’t a very useful interview, though. The first things the debriefers wanted to know about were weaponry, and Beert complained that he had had no experience in that area. “My robot may have more of that data,” he said, “but I think not much.” And then when I translated that, Hilda cleared her throat.
“Since we don’t have one of his robots to ask,” she said warningly, “let’s go on to some other subject.”
I took the hint. When, disappointed, the interrogators switched to questions about other kinds of Horch technology, Beert complained several times that his robot was the one to be asked of such matters, but I simply
