Frederik Pohl The far shore of time

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left us alone for it.
It wasn't exactly a home-cooked meal. It seemed they didn't do much cooking,
because both of them worked for a living. Dan-that Dan-was in charge of Camp
Smolley's resident aliens, their Dopey and
Mrrranthoghrow; he told me that right now the job mostly amounted to
monitoring all the Dopey's contacts to keep him from learning anything about
the captured sub and Beert. It wasn't a demanding job. The Dopey's contacts
were few; he had been well and truly interrogated long since, and there
weren't many questions left to ask him.
Dan M. was waiting for me when I got to the apartment. He offered me a drink,
and I took it gladly-
it was the first I'd been allowed since I got back. "Pat'll be along in a
minute," he told me, as he poured the Canadian and ginger ale-naturally he
didn't have to ask what I preferred. As I was holding the copper-mesh babushka
out of the way with one hand in order to lift the glass to my lips, he gave me
a disapproving look. "Why don't you take that thing off?" he asked. "We aren't
going to be talking any military secrets here, are we?"
"Well, Hilda said-" I began, and then reconsidered. Hilda, after all, wasn't
there, and the thing certainly was a damned nuisance. I slipped it off and set
it down on the floor next to my chair.
"Better?" he asked. "Fine. Now you can look over the menu and see what you
like." He scrolled the screen for me, offering comments. The gazpacho was more
or less all right, but they made it with canned tomatoes; the soup of the day,
though generally canned, was better. He didn't recommend any of the fish, but
the steaks were pretty good. So I studied the menu with care, not so much
because
I was having trouble making up my mind as because I was feeling a little
uneasy. It was the first time the other Dan and I had been alone together.
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It didn't seem to be bothering him much-well, he'd had the practice. He
freshened my drink without being asked, and politely offered to show me around
the apartment. I said no. I could see the workroom and bathroom from where I
sat; the kitchen was only a little appendage off the main room, and I had no
interest in visiting the bedroom he and Pat shared. I don't mean that I was
consumed with jealousy, exactly. I just didn't choose to look at their bed.
While he was placing our orders with the kitchen Pat came in, looking exactly
as I expected her to look. "Sorry," she said. "Pell is such a pain in the ass
sometimes." She took a quick look at the screen, made her choices and then sat
down next to me, explaining what Marcus Pell had done to make her late. It was
her job to take the Threat Watch synoptics as they came in from the
Observatory and dumb them down enough for Marcus Pell to understand. That was
a tricky tightrope for her to walk. If she didn't make them simple enough for
him to grasp at the first hearing, he complained she was wasting his time. If
she simplified them too much-as tonight-he got suspicious and demanded to know
what she was leaving out.
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I listened to her story, but not attentively. What was mostly on my mind was
less what she was saying than the mere presence of Pat herself beside me. This
was the precise Pat I loved, the Pat
I had made love to back on the prison planet; this was the exact, specific,
identical physical body that I had undressed and explored, and had yearned to
do the same to again for all that long time I spent with the Horch.
Of course, so had this other Dan Dannerman with the mustache.
I wondered if he felt any jealousy, with me sitting right there in the room
with them. For that matter, I wondered if I did. I definitely felt something.
When Pat passed me the salt and our fingers touched, I was aware that that was
the hand that had caressed me. . . .
And, of course, the same hand that had caressed him as well.
That was a jolting thought. On the other hand, Dan M. was definitely me,
wasn't he? And was it possible for me to be jealous of myself?
I didn't know the answer. This whole question of living in a world that
contained more than one of me took a lot of getting used to, and I was nowhere
near that point.
I don't know what Dan M. made of my absentmindedness, but he surely noticed
it. What he said after a moment, kindly, was, "I guess you'd like Patrice to
come back, wouldn't you?"
I thought for a moment, then came to a conclusion. I did want her to come
back, if only to sort out what, if anything, I felt for the carbon copy of the
woman I loved. I said, "Yes."
"She didn't really want to leave, Dan," Pat said reassuringly. "She didn't
have any choice about getting back to the Observatory. We're all working for
the Bureau now, Patrice, too; she has to keep me posted on Threat Watch so I
can pass the data along."
I mulled that over. "Aren't there a couple of you Pats there already?"
She gave me a forgiving smile. "Pat Five has her hands pretty full with the
triplets, and it needs both Patrice and P. J. to handle the job at the
Observatory, Dan. They work in shifts. There's all the administrative work to
do, the stuff I used to hate-signing payroll checks, travel vouchers have to
be approved, somebody has to keep the interns in line-especially keep them
from flirting with the Bureau spooks these days. And then there's the regular
staff, Kip Papathanassiou and Pete
Schneyman and all. Some ways, they're the hardest part of the job. Patrice
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says they keep barging in on her at all hours, all of them, because they're
not getting the observing time to keep up with their Cepheid counts or
gravitationallensing studies or whatever. Observing time! They know perfectly
well that every big telescope is fully committed on Threat Watch. . . . And
then there's
Threat Watch itself. Patrice and P. J. have the synoptics to prepare every six
hours and send me so I can tell the deputy director what's going on. Now and
then, when there's something special, I
even get to brief the President." She nodded her head approvingly. "That's the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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