Frederik Pohl - The far shore of time

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FREDERIK POHL

THE FAR SHORE OF TIME

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either

fictitious or are used fictitiously.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by James Frenkel

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web: www.tor.com

Tor* is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC ISBN 0-312-86618-6

First Edition: July 1999

Printed in the United States of America

For Betty Anne, as always

PART ONE

BEFORE

CHAPTER ONE

We were actually on our way home when it happened. We didn't have any doubt that that was where we

were going, and we were, boy, ready. We had been months and months in the captivity of a weird

alien creature from another world, the one we called Dopey. He was alien, all right. He looked

sort of like a large chicken with a kitten's face and a peacock's tail, and he had kidnapped the

lot of us-snatched us right out of the old Starlab astronomical satellite and thrown us into some

kind of space-traveling machine that whisked us from hereto some unbelievably distant there in no

time at all. And there was where Dopey kept us, in one damn miserably uncomfortable prison or

another, on this unpleasant planet we had never heard of before.

That was a truly nasty experience, but, the way it looked to us at the time, it was over! Against

the odds, we had escaped! Our chance to get away came when some rival gang of nonhumans, these

ones called the "Horch," invaded our prison planet. In the confusion we fought our way to the

matter-transmitter thing, and jumped in, and were on our way home. I was the last to climb into

the machine. . . .

And I saw the pale lavender flash that meant it was working. ...

And I came out again.. . .

But I wasn't home at all. The place I was in didn't look at all like Starlab. A pair of those

silvery-spidery Horch wheeled fighting machines that had been trying to kill us were standing

there, not half a dozen meters away. This time they weren't shooting at me, though. If they had

been, I couldn't have shot back, because something I couldn't see grabbed me from behind-no,

enveloped me, in an all-points hug that didn't let me move a muscle-as I heard the machine's door

open again.

Dopey spilled out on top of me, plume all ruffled, little cat eyes glaring around in terror. He

took one look at the machines and began to shake. Something hard and painful was pressing behind

my right ear. I managed to yell a question at Dopey; and just before the lights went out he sobbed

an answer: "Agent Dannerman, we are in the hands of the Horch."

And that was the nastiest, the very nastiest, moment of all.

PART TWO

Interrogation

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CHAPTER TWO

When I woke up I was lying on a hard, glassy floor. My head felt as though someone had taken a

baseball bat to it.

I kept my eyes prudently closed for a moment. I listened, trying to figure out where I was and

what I was doing there. All I heard was an occasional skritchy-tinkly sound, like an incomplete

set of cheap wind chimes, and now and then a faint whir that sounded a little like skate wheels on

a hard floor.

That told me nothing useful, so I took the plunge. I opened my eyes and scrambled to my feet. That

made my headache worse, but was the least of my immediate worries. I was in serious trouble.

The room I found myself in was smallish and square, with shiny walls that looked as though they

were made of some sort of pale yellow porcelain. There was nothing on the walls-no windows, no

decorations-only a couple of doors, both securely closed.

I was not alone in the room.

Two bizarre machines were hovering over a small chest, made out of the same primrose chinaware as

the walls. They weren't the spidery Horch fighting machines I'd seen before. What they looked

like, more than anything else, was a pair of squat, crystalline Christmas trees. They had spiky

glass branches coming off a central trunk, and twigs off the branches, and needles off the twigs-

yes, and littler needles coming off the needles, too. For all I knew there were still littler

needles than those as well, but I didn't see them. Each of the machines was topped off by a sort

of glassy globe, where the angel should have been on a proper Christmas tree, and these were

faceted and glittery, like the rotating mirror spheres people rent to cast little spangles of

light around a dance floor. One of the things was a pale green, the other a rosy pink. It seemed

to me-that was hope speaking, not wisdom-that they looked pretty fragile. Whatever they were up

to, I thought, I would have something to say about, because one swift kick would shatter a quorum

of their glassy needles.

I was quite wrong about that, of course.

They evidently took notice of the fact that I was awake. The green one did something queer with

some of its needles. Clusters of them rearranged themselves, fusing into colorless, faintly

glowing lenses pointing in my direction, while the other extended a branch toward something I

couldn't see inside the porcelain box.

I must have made a sudden move, because there was a quick, new pang from my head. I reached up to

touch the part that hurt and made an unpleasant discovery. Something that didn't belong there was

just behind my ear. It was ribbed and hard-surfaced, and faintly warm to the touch, like my own

flesh. It seemed to be embedded in my skin. It hadn't been there before, and I didn't like it.

That was when the littler one-its needles were like slivers of shell-pink glass-rolled up close to

my face, waving its nearest sprig of needles under my nose.

Then it really surprised me. It spoke to me. It said, "You will be asked questions. Answer them

quickly and accurately."

That put a different face on things.

I know it sounds peculiar, but when the machine said that to me it actually made me feel a bit

better. Interrogation was something I understood, having done plenty of it myself. I spoke right

up. I said, "My name is James Daniel Dannerman. I am a citizen of the United States of America and

a senior agent of the American National Bureau of Investigation. I have been a captive of the

Beloved Leaders, who are your enemies as well as my own-"

The Christmas tree unhurriedly stuffed a fist of needles into my mouth to shut me up, and the

needles weren't fragile at all. They were curiously warm. They didn't hurt, but it was like being

gagged with a mouthful of steel wool. It said, "You have not been asked those questions. Answer

only the questions you have been asked."

I'm not sure what I tried to say in response. With that glassy bird's nest stuffed in my mouth it

only came out as "wumf," but it made the thing remove the needles from my mouth and speak again.

"You will now supply information," the machine said, "concerning the conspecific persons you

identify as 'Scuzzhawks.' Did their poor personal hygiene and use of psychoactive materials

adversely affect their mortality and reproduction rates?"

CHAPTER THREE

Of all the things I could have expected to be interrogated about by a Horch machine, that one was

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about at the bottom of the list.

I did know all about the Scuzzhawks, of course. They were an ultralight plane gang that roamed the

American Southwest, scandalizing law-abiding citizens. The Scuzz were more or less based in Orange

County, California, but they rallied anywhere from Bakersfield to Tijuana. They didn't bathe much.

They didn't wear much, either-there was a limit to how much load their frail little craft could

lift, and they reserved most of their carrying capacity for beer and shotgun shells. They painted

the wings of their ultralights with obscene slogans; they relieved themselves wherever they felt a

need, which was frequently-even while they were airborne, and often enough over the clean, well-

kept patios of respectable homeowners. The Scuzzhawks were not nice people. They earned their fuel

and food and beer and dope by drug-dealing and petty crime, and sometimes crimes that were not so

petty; and early in my career with the Bureau I had been assigned to infiltrate them. That mission

hadn't been my choice. When it was over I felt lucky to get out of it alive and generally disease-

free.

Why this pink-glassy Christmas tree was asking about them, I could not guess, but the reason

didn't matter. The important thing was that it did want to know about them.

That gave me bargaining room. Information is a valuable commodity, worth trading for. I said,

"Let's be reasonable here. I'll tell you all you want to know about the Scuzzhawks, but first I

have a couple of questions of my own. What's this thing behind my ear?"

The rose-pink one didn't answer that. It simply rolled away on its little wheels to the chinaware

chest, where it extruded enough twiglets to open the chest and take something out, while Greenie

rolled forward and grabbed me again.

It was strong, too. It held me tightly, but not painfully. I would have guessed that some of those

glassy needles would have punctured my skin where they touched. They didn't. Retracted, I

supposed, like a playful kitten's claws.

Then I saw what the pink one was carrying toward me, and I felt better right away.

The thing it had taken out of the chest was a helmet of a kind I had seen before. Dopey had given

us one when he was our jailer, and it was a truly wonderful little gadget. When I wore it I could

tap into the mind of that other Dan Dannerman, the copy of me who had been sent back to Earth, in

a marvelous kind of virtual reality. (I'm not talking about the Dan Dannerman who escaped with the

others. This was a different one. I'm sorry about that. I know all these copies are confusing . .

. especially to me.) With the helmet on I could see what that other Dan was seeing, feel what he

was feeling, hear everything he heard. To all intents and purposes I was there-not counting that I

couldn't do anything, just observe.

It had not occurred to me that the same kind of helmet could be used to give me a sort of briefing

lecture instead, but if that was what Pinkie had in mind, I was all for it. I said chattily,

"That's better. There's no reason for us to argue, is there? We're both on the same side. You work

for the Horch. I was taken prisoner by the Beloved Leaders. And the enemy of my enemy is my

friend, right?"

Pinkie wasn't listening. It was fitting the helmet over my head, and I didn't resist. I waited

complacently until it had flipped the earflaps into position, expecting some sort of lecture with

diagrams, or-well, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was pretty sure it was going to be

helpful in some way.

It wasn't.

It not only wasn't helpful at all, it was bloody awful.

As soon as everything was snapped down I found myself indeed in another place, but it was not any

place I would have chosen. I was lying flat on my back, and I was looking up at a couple of the

Christmas trees. And I was yelling. The one standing over me was an unfamiliar golden color, and

it was methodically ripping my clothes off. I was struggling to stop it, but there wasn't any use

to that. I was tightly fettered to a kind of operating table. I couldn't move a muscle.

Not even when Gold-glass began to operate.

It started by pulling out my toenails, one by one.

Then, as my yells of protest turned to agonized screams of pain, it did even worse. With one set

of its twiglets it grasped me by my private parts, and with others it began to hack away.

See, the virtual reality those helmets provided didn't feel at all virtual. It felt bloody damn

real. The pain was real. My screaming was real. I was fully aware that I was, for no reason I

could understand, being slowly and painfully tortured to death, and I was bellowing with agony

accordingly.

Gold-glass didn't seem to care about my screaming one way or another. It went right on with what

it was doing. And then, as it gouged a slit in the skin of my belly from breastbone to the

beginnings of my pubic hair, and then began methodically flaying the skin off my body, the pain

passed the point of being endurable.

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I endured it, though. I kept on enduring it, for much longer than I would have thought possible,

until the machine's rummagings in my belly seemed to hit something crucial. Then, I think, I died.

And then the other Christmas tree, the real, pink-colored one, lifted the helmet off my head, and

I was once again cowering on that chinaware floor, still screaming, but intact.

I had my clothes on again. I was alive again, and-not counting the headache that still persisted-

as far as I could tell, in as good shape as I had ever been, toenails, balls, bowels and all.

That is, physically I was all right, though the memory of the pain was nearly as bad as the pain

itself. And Pinkie said, "Now you will answer our questions about those conspecific persons called

'Scuzzhawks.' "

CHAPTER FOUR

From then on I answered all its questions, all right. I had learned that that was a good idea.

When I hesitated, all it had to do was gesture toward the box with the helmet. Then I stopped

hesitating right away.

See, no matter what you've heard, nobody ever holds out against serious, protracted physical

torture. The body doesn't allow it. When real agony starts, the body cuts the volitional part of

the brain right out of the circuit. It doesn't matter what your intentions are. First you suffer,

then you scream, then you do whatever the person inflicting the pain wants you to do, including

giving away every secret you ever knew.

Bureau doctrine told us there were things we could sometimes do about it, provided you had a

chance to do them-including, as a last resort, biting down on a capsule of one of the Bureau drugs

that turn off all physical sensations, so the guy who's interrogating you can do any horrible

thing he likes and you just don't feel a thing. Provided, that is, that you've had a chance to get

the capsule into your mouth ahead of time. Even that doesn't really solve the problem. You know

exactly what is happening when the guy starts inflicting major and irreversible damage on the only

body you own. Then you almost certainly talk anyway.

I didn't have to go the way of irreparable body damage. The pain was enough. I talked, and kept on

talking, for a very long while.

I don't know how long, exactly. The only way I had of measuring time was by the internal clocks of

my belly, bladder and bowels. By their count, that first round of questioning went on forever. I

told the glass machines everything there was to tell about the Scuzzhawks, Green-glass taking it

all down with his microphones and lenses. That wasn't the end of it. Then Pinkie switched without

a pause to questions about the precise nature of their smuggling operation, and what "smuggling"

meant in the context of Earth's more or less independent political entities called "nations," each

with its own laws about what was forbidden or taxed. And then it wanted a detailed catalogue of

all the sorts of things that were smuggled-dope, money for laundering, weapons-and then what the

weapons were used for. Which led to many more questions on some large subjects. Crime. Terrorism.

Why such aberrations were permitted to continue when they obviously interfered with the orderly

workings of government and commerce.

Then, without warning, the lights went out in the camera lenses. The green-glass machine that had

been operating them turned to the wall and a door opened. And the pink one said, "Go through there

and attend to your biological needs. We will resume when you have finished."

I hesitated. Perhaps I hesitated a moment too long, because my headache was still slowing my

reflexes, but the machine wasn't patient. It reached out toward me in a way I didn't like. I

turned and hurried to the doorway.

CHAPTER FIVE

The biological-needs room was a twin of the one I'd just left: bare walls of the same yellow

chinaware, no windows, no pictures. The big difference was that there were three doors instead of

two-all securely locked against my immediate attempts to open them-and in addition to the

chinaware chest against the wall (also unopenable by me), there was a pile of food on a low

chinaware table.

The food at least was familiar. I had seen it all before. In fact, I had seen a lot of it. We had

been living on identically that same grub for months, me and Pat, in all her copies, and Rosaleen

Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin and Martin Delasquez. Apart from a few unfamiliar and unappetizing ropy

twists of something smelly and purplish, it was the food Dopey had copied for us when we were his

prisoners, duplicated from the stores on the Starlab orbiter we had been snatched from. Apples.

Corn chips. Heaps of dried or irradiated meals in cans and jars and cartons, every one of which I

was totally sick of. When I first saw that pile of rations it made me suddenly aware that I was,

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as a matter of fact, pretty hungry. When I realized it was the same boring stuff I'd eaten much

too much of already, a lot less so.

There were a couple of jugs of water beside the stack of rations. I took a swig out of one of them-

it tasted flat, as though it had been distilled-but while that relieved one biological need, it

just made another one worse.

I had to pee.

I looked doubtfully at the floor. When we were captives of Dopey and his Beloved Leaders, our cell

had this trick floor that doubled as a sewage-removal system. Any waste that hit the floor was

absorbed and carried away without leaving even a stain. Even human waste.

This canary-yellow porcelain stuff was something else again. It didn't look promising. However,

nature was not to be denied. I selected a corner of the room and let fly; and when I was through I

watched, without much optimism, to see if the urine would seep away.

It didn't.

I said, "Shit." All right, that's a trivial thing. But it was one more damn blow, on top of a lot

of others. You have to remember that, just hours before, my future had seemed really bright: home,

safe, with the dear Pat Adcock I had just discovered I loved.

But I wasn't home. I wasn't safe. Pat was God knew where, and I was worse off than ever.

Literally, now I didn't even have a pot to piss in.

So I did the only thing I could do. I fell back on my Bureau training.

I took a deep breath. I crammed some corn chips into my mouth, popped open a random jar (chicken a

la king, it was, and really unpleasant in its cold and slimy state). I looked around the room to

see if any curious eyes were observing me-didn't matter if they were, of course-and I began to tap

systematically at the walls and chest and doors.

Now, why did I do that?

It wasn't out of any real hope. I didn't see that I had an ice cube's chance in Hell of ever

getting back to NBI headquarters in Arlington with whatever odd bits of information I might learn

through all this poking and prying. I did it anyway, because it was my job.

Back in basic training, the meanest of my drill instructors had explained that to us, while we

were lined up, as sweating and stinking and sodden as we were, right after the obstacle course and

just before the five-kilometer run. DIs rarely show sympathy.

This one had none at all. "What are you, tired? You don't know what tired is yet. You assholes are

gonna be a lot worse off than this before you've put your twenty years in! Times you're gonna be

exhausted and shitting your pants, but that don't let you off nothing. Whatever happens, whatever

the bad guys do to you, you do your job. If they beat the piss out of you, if they cut off your

balls and gouge out your fuckin' eyes, you don't forget what I'm saying. You ain't paid to give

up. You're paid to keep on doing what you're missioned to do, so, if there's a miracle and you get

out alive, you can report on every goddam thing you see and hear. Any questions?"

I was stupider in those days. I said, "Sir! How are we going to see anything if they've gouged out

our eyes?"

She had an answer for that. She said, "You! Fall down and gimme thirty!"

So-having nothing promising to do-I did what I coulddo.

I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get out of this place, and find some way to get back to

the transit machine, and zap myself back home. I didn't quite see how I was going to arrange that,

but the first step was to gather information.

So I tapped the walls and tried the doors every way I could think of. The doors stayed locked.

They were perfectly ordinary doors that swung open on hinges the way a door should do- nothing

exotic or super high-tech, except that they didn't seem to have any handles. However I pushed or

kicked them, they didn't move. Neither did the lid of the chest, when I went back to that. I

didn't give up. I rummaged through the pile of food to see if there was anything hidden under it,

and I even took one fairly nauseating taste of the purplish stuff, and I pulled and tugged at the

unknown object behind my right ear, trying to figure out what that was all about. I could tell a

few things about it. It was about the size of a pigeon's egg. It was smooth-surfaced, either metal

or ceramic-when I tapped my fingernail against it, it sounded more ceramic than metal, but I

couldn't be sure. It was ribbed, and the skin of my scalp seemed to have grown right around it as

though it belonged there, the way your gums surround your teeth.

But that was all I could tell about the thing. So I went back to my tapping and probing, because,

even if there wasn't any drill sergeant around to make me do push-ups if I didn't, that was my

job. And while I was hard at it, nibbling at some kind of dried fruit bar while I did, one of the

doors opened. It let in another couple of those glassy robots-one bronze, one cherry red; I didn't

think I had seen either of them before-along with my former captor and present traveling

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companion, the little alien creature with a body like a peacock and a face like a nasty-minded

cat, Dopey.

The robots stood silently communing for a moment, but I didn't see what they were up to. I was

looking at Dopey. It was clear that the ugly little creature had been having at least as hard a

time as I. His decorous little muu-muu was stained and, where it opened for his peacock plume, it

was shredded. The plume itself was muddily dark, with none of its usual shifting iridescent

colors. Dopey's fur had stains of its own, his belly bag was missing and he was wearing a

decoration I hadn't seen before. It was ribbed like my patch and gold in color, which my own might

well have been since I couldn't see the thing. The only difference was that his patch was on top

of his head instead of behind one ear. He gazed at me blearily out of those kitten eyes and

groaned.

"We are in terrible trouble, Agent Dannerman," he informed me. Then he waddled over to the food

and began attacking the purplish stuff without another word.

I didn't need to be told that we were in trouble, but there was a good side to it. Now I had

someone I could talk to without penalty.

What stopped me was the presence of the Christmas trees. I eyed them warily, but they were

ignoring me. They had busied themselves with domestic chores. The cherry-colored one was mopping

my little pool of urine from the floor, while the other did something to the porcelain chest that

opened it up. Inside the chest was a heap of something that looked like oatmeal. The bronze one

tapped the side of the chest with a thrust of branches and pointed another cluster at me. "This is

to contain your excrements," it said. "Do not continue to soil the floor." And then the two of

them left.

I had been a captive before, but this was the first time I had been given a litter box, like some

old lady's pet cat. The place was full of humbling experiences.

But we were alone, and it was my chance to talk to Dopey. I followed him to the food stacks and

said, "All right, as you say, we're in trouble. But where are we in trouble? And how did we get

here?"

He chewed greedily for a moment before he answered. Or didn't answer, actually. He said, still

chewing, "If you have eaten all you wish, Agent Dannerman, you would be well advised to sleep now.

You may not get many opportunities."

Well, I knew that, but what he said sounded odd to me. I couldn't quite think why. Then I realized

that Dopey had spoken to me in English.

That was when I became aware that I hadn't been speaking English with the Christmas-tree machines.

I had been talking to them in their own chirpy language, of which, I could have sworn, I had never

known a single word.

CHAPTER SIX

Well, I was exhausted and I still had the residual headache, but I figured out the explanation for

that fast enough. It had to be the thing they'd stuck on my head that accounted for my sudden

fluency in Horch. The important thing was that, in whatever language, I now had someone who might

answer some questions for me.

"Just tell me what happened," I coaxed.

He looked at me, and then at the remainder of his meal. Then he made the body-wriggle that was his

version of a shrug. "Very well, but you should have deduced it for yourself, Agent Dannerman. When

we entered the transit machine we were transmitted to your Starlab, you and I along with the

others. But, of course, once a pattern has been constructed in the machine for transmission, it

remains available, so that from that pattern copies may be made at any time. As, you will recall,

I had previously made copies of your Dr. Adcock for you."

I didn't have to be reminded of that. I remembered everything there was to remember about Pat

Adcock.

"Therefore it should not surprise you that the Horch made copies of us so that we could be

questioned."

"But where are we? I certainly don't recognize this place-is it some kind of Horch base?"

"It is now," he said sourly. "Nevertheless it is the same base, on the same planet in the same

globular cluster that we were in before. I do not know by what treachery the Horch were able to

break into our transmission channels, but it enabled them to surprise and occupy this base-at

great cost in lives and materiel, of course, but the Horch do not care about such things. Of

course, the Horch have obviously made some changes in the structures to suit their own purposes. I

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assume from the changes that some time has elapsed since we were transmitted."

"How much time?" I demanded. He just did that body-twitching shrug again. I tried another tack.

"About the questioning, Dopey. They're asking some pretty funny questions. Wouldn't you think

they'd want to know the important stuff about Earth, like our technology, what kind of weapons we

have, like that?"

"But they surely know all those things already, Agent Dannerman," he said, looking surprised.

"They are simply filling in gaps in the knowledge obtained from the others of us whom they have

already copied and questioned. Did you think we were the first?"

As a matter of fact, that was exactly what I had thought. I wished I could go on thinking it,

because if they had questioned other copies of Dopey and of me, it was unpleasantly likely that

they had also done the same thing, with the same brutal tactics, to Rosaleen and Jimmy and Martin

. . . and to Pat.

To my own Pat.

My own Pat, whom I knew to be a pretty self-willed person when she chose to be. She wouldn't have

taken any more guff from the Christmas trees than I had, at first. And then they would have done

to her what they did to me.

That was not something I could bear thinking about. While I was thinking about it anyway, because

I couldn't help myself, Dopey was going about his own business. He didn't speak to me again. He

finished his meal, decorously relieved himself in the litter box, then selected a spot on the

floor and crouched down, tucking his head under his plume for a nap.

I couldn't let that happen, because I needed to get the image of Pat being ripped open by a robot

out of my mind. I said, "Wait a minute, Dopey."

He pulled his head back out again and regarded me crossly. "You are willful, Agent Dannerman," he

complained. "Did you not understand what I said about sleeping when we could?"

"I did, but I wanted to ask you something. Why do they have to torture us?"

That made him wrinkle up his little cat mouth in annoyance. "Because they want truthful answers,

of course."

"But can't they just make us do whatever they want?" I touched the ribbed thing behind my ear. "By

putting some kind of controller in with this language thing?"

He blinked the cat eyes at me. "Controller?"

"Like the one the Beloved Leaders implanted in you," I explained. "So you would have to do

whatever they wanted."

He made an indignant noise and stood up straight on his tiny legs, glaring at me. "You are so

stupid, Agent Dannerman! Why do you think I have a controller implanted in me by the Beloved

Leaders?"

I looked at him in surprise. "Don't you?"

"Of course not! There is no need for that! I am a rational being, as are all of my people, and so

we know where our interests lie." His pursy little mouth was twitching and his plume was angry

red, but then he calmed down enough to explain. "The bearers which you call Docs do require such

devices to be of value to the Beloved Leaders, because they are very willful beings. The warriors

also need to be controlled. The reason for this is that in the course of their duties many of them

must inevitably be dispatched to the Eschaton. Although they have been informed that this 'death'

is actually a boon, not a tragedy, their natures prevail. They are not able to rid themselves of

their instinct for self-preservation which would interfere with their duties. For the rest of us

servants of the Beloved Leaders, my people included, self-interest takes a different form. We are

glad to obey the Beloved Leaders, because we know what they can do to us if we fail them." He

didn't seem sleepy anymore, just scared. His plume faded to a bilious green as he said, "You do

not know the Beloved Leaders, Agent Dannerman. You have never even seen one. I have been more

fortunate-not once, but three times. One even spoke to me, though not in person, of course. It was

while I was monitoring your planet from the orbiter Starlab, and a Beloved Leader addressed me on

a screen to give me an order. I was very frightened, Agent Dannerman. If you are not also

frightened, it is because you do not understand the immensity of their power, or the consequences

of their wrath. Do you really think your pitiful little planet can withstand the Beloved Leaders?

It cannot. As I have told you, you are a fool. Their scout vessels found your Earth once. They

will find it again, if indeed they have not already done so.

"It is true that these evil Horch and their machines are also extremely powerful. I do not think

they will prevail against the Beloved Leaders, though. When the Eschaton comes, I believe it is

the Beloved Leaders who will rule. Rule all of us. For eternity. And oh, Agent Dannerman, I have

failed them, and so I am very, very frightened of what that eternity will be."

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CHAPTER SEVEN

That was the end of Dopey's conversation. He put his head under his plume again and kept it there.

I thought I heard him sobbing for a few moments, but then he was quiet.

I fell asleep then, too, not because I wanted to but because I couldn't help it. When the green-

glass machine woke me up Dopey was still in his corner, making the faint, muffled snickering sound

that did him for snoring, and an idea was forming in my mind.

I didn't have much time to think it out, because Greenie was already snaking one branch of its

twiglets under my right arm to get me up, then hustling me back to the interrogation room. But on

the way I remembered doctrine.

Basic Bureau tradecraft said that if you couldn't get your interrogators to give you the

information you wanted, perhaps you could at least lead the questioning in such a way that even

the questions were informative. In practice sessions, back in my training days, it had seemed like

something that might work. I'd never tried it in the field, but it was worth a shot. It was

something to do, when the only alternative was simply to give up.

It seemed that the machines had heard all they wanted to hear about the Scuzzhawks. Now the topic

of the day was sex. What did sexual intercourse feel like? If it was pleasurable, why did some

human beings deprive themselves of it? How often had I had sexual intercourse, and under what

circumstances, and with what persons, and why? Why was sexual intercourse with another person

preferable to masturbation? What forms of sexual experience other than direct stimulation existed,

and what did I mean by "fetishism" and "masochism"? How was it possible that some of my

conspecifics could achieve sexual gratification just by inflicting pain on others?

I did what I could. I answered every question, and tacked on a little question to each answer.

Masturbation: didn't the Horch masturbate? Hugging and kissing: I supposed the Horch had their

equivalents. And didn't some Horch get a charge out of hurting other Horch? Without exception,

none of my questions got an answer. Mostly they were ignored. Sometimes Greenie cautioned me to

stick to straight responses. Twice it gestured toward the porcelain box that held the helmet,

which was enough.

And the questioning went on and on. When it stopped at last it was only long enough for me to

relieve myself and cram down a few bites of food, and then it started again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I don't know how long the interrogation sessions went on. I tried to keep count of them, but there

wasn't much point to that. The number didn't tell me much, because I had no good measure of how

many hours each lasted, or how long I was allowed to sleep when I did. I didn't know, either,

whether it really mattered for me to keep on sounding the walls, trying to peer past the doors

when they were opened, even, once, deliberately falling against one of the Christmas trees to see

how they felt. (They didn't feel like anything I had expected. No needle stabs, no feeling of

chill glass spikes against my skin; the thing caught me and cradled me as though in an instantly

created form-fitting basket of its twigs and set me back on my feet, and I had learned nothing at

all.)

I wished for Dopey's presence so I could ask him more questions. That didn't happen often. We

seemed to be on different schedules; once when Green-glass woke me up I caught a glimpse of him,

sound asleep. But when I was allowed back in the biological-needs room he was gone.

And the questions didn't stop. Sports: how were players selected for football teams, and why would

any sentient being risk life and limb in so violent an activity? Currency: What determined how

many Japanese yen were given for one American dollar? What caused "inflation"? Why did humans play

board games? How was "ownership" of land areas determined? What was the role of the stock market?

And I was reaching the ragged edge of fatigue.

I wasn't getting very far with trying to slip questions in, either. I was pretty sure that the

robots were very familiar with that little stratagem, and I thought I knew why: they had dealt

with Dan Dannermans before, and they knew our tricks.

Then I thought I saw an opening.

The questioning turned to religion. What was the nature of the religious experience? What evidence

did the priests and preachers have for the existence of a "God" or a "Heaven"? Or, for that

matter, of a "Hell," or some other form of postlife reward or punishment for transgressions?

And all of a sudden, I saw what I had been waiting for. I had something to tell them that I was

pretty sure would dislodge some data for me. "Excuse me," I wheedled, the very model of a prisoner

beaten down past the point of resistance, trying to curry favor with his captors, "but if you

permit, I can tell you a story from my personal experience that might illuminate some of these

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questions for you."

Green-glass paused, its needles stirring in silence, apparently thinking that over. Then it spoke.

"Do so," it said.

What I wanted to tell the machine about was a memory of my grandmother, from when I was six or

seven years old. That was when my parents began to make me spend a few weeks each summer at Uncle

Cubby's place on the Jersey shore.

Uncle Chubby was J. Cuthbert Dannerman, the one with the money. I didn't specially want to be

spending summers in his house. Uncle Cubby wanted it, because he liked having kids around now and

then, possessing none of his own. And my father, who hadn't done nearly as well with his career as

his older brother, wanted me to be there, too, because he was well aware that when Uncle Chubby

died there would be a considerable estate for someone to inherit.

Well, that part didn't work out for me, for one reason or another, but those summers in New Jersey

turned out not to be so bad. After I had cried myself to sleep for a week or so I began to enjoy

myself. My cousin Pat came along most summers, for the same reasons. Unfortunately she was a girl,

but at least she was someone to play with, and after a while her gender turned out to be an asset.

That was when we discovered some interesting new games, like I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me

Yours.

The bad part of the summers was that Grandmother Dannerman was there, too.

Grandmother Dannerman was a dying old woman, but she was taking her time about it. She was

bedridden, feeble and incontinent. There was always a faint smell of old-lady pee in her bedroom,

although the big windows that looked down to the river were generally open wide. After her fifth

or sixth major operation she had got religion, and she wanted me and Pat to have it, too. She

explained that when she died she was going to go to Heaven, because she had been a good Christian

woman. She fully intended to see us there with her, so once a day, after our naps and before we

were allowed to go swim in the river, she taught us Bible stories in her tiny, wheezy voice.

That was a drag. It did make playing Doctor under the boat deck half an hour later a little more

exciting, but it never had the effect on us that Grandmother Dannerman intended. She didn't make

us want to go to Heaven. She told us there was no sin there, and what was the fun of someplace

where you weren't allowed to sin a little?

That was then. This was now, and I thought I had finally found a good use for Grandmother

Dannerman's sermons. I told them to the green-glass Christmas tree and, obedient to my training, I

did my best to put a little spin on them. The angels in the old lady's Heaven: Were they sort of

like the way the Horch would be at the Eschaton? Did the bright, angelic swords of fire correspond

to the weapons of the Horch? When we all got there, would we spend our time singing and playing

music and never, ever doing anything the Horch might consider a sin?

That's what I tried.

It didn't work very well. Green-glass didn't want questions from me. Green-glass wanted only

facts. The first couple of times I tried throwing in a question it simply ignored what I asked.

Then it instructed me to stop doing that. And then it got worse.

See, I couldn't stop. I was convinced that I had no other way of gaining information, and I kept

on doing it, and so the Christmas tree took its inevitable next step.

That was the second time I got the helmet. It was just as agonizing as before; but it had a

surprising result.

I expect I screamed a lot. When Green-glass at last took the helmet off my head and I lay there,

shaken and miserable, I saw that something had changed. One of the room's doors had opened.

Something I had never seen before was looking in at us.

It was a pretty hideous specimen.

What it looked like, more than anything else, was a scaled-down model of one of the dinosaurs I'd

seen in the museums when I was a kid-an apatosaurus, they called that kind-only this one was

standing on its hind legs and wearing a kind of lavishly embroidered jogging suit. Its arms

weren't like a dinosaur's, though. They were lightly furred and as sinuous as an elephant's trunk,

and so was its long, long neck, with a little snaky head at the end of it that darted around

inquisitively. It had a round little belly that was covered by a circular patch of embroidered

gold-it almost looked like a particularly fancy maternity dress-and I recognized it at once from

the pictures Dopey had shown us when we were his captives.

It was the Enemy. I guess my screaming had attracted it, and so I was in the presence of a living,

breathing Horch.

When the Horch entered the room the Christmas trees stopped what they were doing, their twiglets

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turning deferentially toward it. It did not speak to them. It came toward me, arms and neck

swaying, and it darted its little head at my face, sniffing and staring into my eyes. Then the

long neck whipped the head away and the creature turned toward the door to the biological-needs

room. The door opened at once and the Horch passed through, followed by the rosy-pink robot.

What they were doing there, I could not see, though I could hear sounds from inside the room. The

Horch and the Christmas tree were twittering to each other, though I couldn't make out the words.

There was something else going on, too: squeaking, gasping noises I couldn't identify. Then the

Horch came back into the interrogation room, didn't speak, simply left it again through one of the

other doors, with that long neck curved back and the snaky little eyes peering at me.

Rosy-pink buzzed back on its little roller-skate wheels to where I lay. It didn't comment on the

visit from the living Horch. It didn't resume the questioning, either. "Attend now to your

biological needs," it said, and that was the end of that session.

The mystery sounds had come from Dopey. He wasn't alone, either. A bronze-colored Christmas tree

was holding him down while a pale yellow one was doing some obviously painful things to him.

It looked like a torture session to me, and that was both surprising and wrong. I mean sinfully

wrong, a violation of order and propriety. Interrogations didn't take place in the biological-

needs room! No prisoner likes to see changes in the rules, because changes are almost always bad,

so I squawked a feeble sort of protest. It didn't go any further than that. The pale yellow one

extended a clutch of branches menacingly in my direction, and I took the hint. I shut up. I

couldn't help watching, though. Every time the machine touched Dopey he twitched and squeaked in

pain, though they weren't asking him any questions. Then, abruptly, they released him and rolled

out of the room.

As soon as they were gone I knelt beside Dopey. He was breathing hoarsely, obviously hurting. "Are

you all right?" I asked.

He turned the kitten eyes on me. "No, Agent Dannerman, I am not all right," he gasped. "Leave me

alone."

I couldn't do that. "Did you see that thing? It was a living Horch, wasn't it?"

Dopey gave me a look of disdain. "Of course," he said, pulling himself together. He stood up

uncertainly, then limped toward the water jug.

I followed. "You weren't surprised to see him?"

He took his time about answering, drinking from his little cupped hands. It seemed to revive him.

"The Horch rule here," he said, licking his lips. "What is surprising if one looks in on our

interrogation? Did you expect it to be kinder than its machines?"

As a matter of fact, I had, sort of. "He looked like he was inspecting the way we were treated," I

said, unwilling to give up what little hope I could find. "I thought he might do something to help

us, maybe."

He gave me a look of contempt and said his favorite thing: "You are a fool, Agent Dannerman.

Kindness from a Horch!"

"Not kindness," I said stubbornly. "Common sense. If we get sick, we won't be any good to them."

"In which case," he said, "they will simply scrap us and make new copies. Now I wish to sleep."

He looked as though he needed it. "All right," I said reluctantly. "I forgot they'd been torturing

you."

He gazed at me with an expression of blended contempt and woe. "Torturing me? No, Agent Dannerman,

they were not torturing me. They were doing worse. They were giving me medical treatment to keep

me alive. Now let me sleep!"

CHAPTER NINE

Day followed day, and the pointless, endless questioning went on, on the robots' capricious choice

of subjects. Childhood games: How many players were necessary for hide-and-seek? Were Little

League baseball players paid like their adult colleagues? Theater: What had Christopher Marlowe

written besides Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta? What was the function of the chorus in Greek

drama?

Those questions puzzled me at first. I certainly knew a lot about theater, because that's what I

had majored in in college, but why did they ask me about the parts I didn't know instead of the

early-twentieth-century playwrights I had studied?

It took me several days to figure it out, and when I did the answer gave me no pleasure. The

robots had asked all the obvious questions already, but they had asked them of some other Dan

Dannerman. As Dopey had said, now they were simply filling in the gaps that remained.

Along about then that living Horch dropped in again on my interrogation. This time he didn't come

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Frederik Pohl - The far shore of time

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