away entirely. Bathe her. Feed her the extra nutrients that weren’t included in her permanent glucose drip. Lift her onto the air-cushion bed that hissed and grumbled at her all night long, but saved her vulnerably fragile skin from bedsores, and, yes, brush her teeth for her, too.
It sounded like a hell of a life.
“But,” Dan said, “better than no life at all. At least she can work.” Then he grinned at me. Let’s talk about something else. Pat, did you tell him the news?”
Pat looked coy. “Oh,” she said, “well, it’s just that Pat Five is going stir-crazy, stuck in the house with the three babies. She wants to get back to work in the Observatory. So they’re setting up a little nursery there-had to kick Pete Schneyman out of his office to make the space, and he’s really mad about it, too.”
“Yes?” I said, with only moderate interest.
But then she said, “So that means Patrice might have a little free time. She’s talking about coming down here again for a visit.”
I stopped eating, with a forkful of lukewarm Bureau mashed potatoes on the way to my mouth. “That-would be nice,” I said.
Pat was grinning at me. “Just nice? Who do you think she’s coming to see, Dan?”
“And listen,” Dan M. said sternly, “don’t blow it this time. Take my word for it, this is what you want. When a Dan Dannerman and a Pat Adcock get together, it’s a match made in Heaven.”
Well, I didn’t doubt that. I didn’t even mind this other me telling me so, either.
I don’t mean that there were not some residual male-primate flashes of jealousy still floating around in my head. How could there not be? Jealousy is in the genes. No previous male primate had ever had to deal with this particular sort of situation before. My genes weren’t up to the subtleties. They were still loudly complaining that this man had taken this woman away from me, and what was I going to do about it? Settle, for instance, for second best?
It was an unworthy thought. Patrice wasn’t second-best anything. I knew that, but my genes weren’t sure, and I was too busy refereeing the debate between reason and instinct that was going on in my mind to be very good company at the rest of the meal. And then the news came that took my mind off the pointless interior debate.
Dan M. stretched and yawned, pushed aside the rest of his uneaten soggy apple pie, glanced at his watch and said, “Well, about time to hit the road for your nineteen-thirty, Dan.” But as we were standing up there was a call for him on his private screen. He took it in the other room, and when he came back he wasn’t cheerful anymore. “Shit,” he said. “There’s been a leak. Let’s see if I can call it up.”
Pat said, “What do you mean, a leak?” But he waved her off while he tinkered with the wall screen. It took him only a moment before he got a bare frame with the legend:
National Bureau of Investigation
Excerpt from “Maxwell at Night” program
Recorded at 1850 local time
The legend disappeared and we were looking at the face of the TV newscaster known as Robin Maxwell. I knew who the man was. Everybody in the Bureau did. Maxwell had been on the Bureau’s watch list for a long time because he seemed to have contacts in some dubious places.
It looked like he had found himself a new contact now. “The spooks are at it again,” he was telling his audience. “You know what they’ve got at the NBI now? They’ve squirreled away a Scarecrow submarine and a live Horch, would you believe it? Take a look.” The face disappeared and we saw a picture of the sub, with Beert standing on top of it. “They don’t want you to know about it, but hey, that’s what Maxwell’s for, telling you the things the big guys don’t want told ...”
He kept on talking, but there wasn’t any point in listening anymore. The thing that mattered had been said, and said on broadcast television which the Scarecrows were no doubt monitoring. So the secret was out.
CHAPTER FIFTY
I never did get to my 1930. All Camp Smolley’s schedules were disrupted for sure, because inside of an hour there were a hundred reporters battering at the gates of Camp Smolley, demanding to know everything there was to know about this Scarecrow submarine and actual living Horch that we were hiding from them, and why hadn’t they been told about them before?
The reporters didn’t get in, of course. They didn’t even get any answers. What they got was Daisy Fennell, sent out to face them down and tell them that: a, there was no truth at all to the rumor; b, those alleged pictures were obviously morphed fakes; and c, if any of Maxwell’s story had been true, it would be an act of treason to the human race to report it, because the Scarecrows would hear. While inside the camp the deputy director was raging through the hallways, demanding that every living soul in the installation take a PET lie-detector test to find the criminal who had broken security.
Whether any of the reporters believed Fennell, I couldn’t guess. The funny thing was that part of what she said was true. The photos Maxwell showed weren’t photos, they were morphs, probably made from descriptions he got from someone who had seen Beert and the sub but hadn’t taken their pictures. Beert looked more like the hideous cartoon of a Horch the Scarecrows had showed us than his living self, and the alleged photo of the submarine got the handling machinery at its bow all wrong.
It made a nice little no-win situation for the Bureau; they could easily prove Maxwell’s pictures were fakes, but only by admitting that the sense of his story was true.
So the media carried Daisy Fennell’s denials, but that didn’t solve the problem. Wrong as it was in detail, Maxwell’s pictures clearly showed what the Scarecrows would instantly recognize as their missing sub.
The question on everybody’s mind was: what were they going to do about it?
As far as anybody could tell, nothing. At least, not right away. Pirraghiz reported no special traffic to or among the Scarecrow submarine fleet.
All the same, there was a lot of worrying going on around Camp Smelly. Even Hilda was snappish, and the deputy director was hemorrhaging wrath, blame and worry all over the installation. He had his own way of dealing
