Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

All the way down on the early flight to Arlington Dannerman was pondering the question: Should he tell Hilda Morrisey that he and Anita Berman were getting married? Or maybe he should just lay the ultimatum on her: either she got his back pay for him, so he could have some kind of decent life, or he quit the Bureau.

Well, she wasn't at the headquarters. She was off at Walter Reed Hospital, and when he tracked her down there she was standing on the loading dock, giving urgent orders to a flock of serious-looking junior agents, and she wasn't interested in his problems. "Resign? Bullshit, Danno. State of emergency; nobody's quitting; I tried the same thing myself. But as long as you're here you might as well be useful."

So five minutes later Dannerman, borrowed stunstick in hand, was marching with five others down a hospital corridor toward the Doc whom, according to Hilda's orders, he was supposed to "restrain." Although the creature was facing them, he didn't seem aware of their presence. He was simply standing there, pale, ugly and immense, in that next-to-dead trance state the things assumed when they had no orders.

But, damn it, the creature was big. The stunstick wasn't much comfort to Dannerman. He would have preferred a riot gun, but they weren't supposed to hurt the Doc, only tackle him if he gave any resistance. Even the stunsticks were to be used only as a last resort, because Hilda had warned them that they didn't know enough about a Doc's metabolism to know if the damn thing might kill him.

Dannerman hadn't been that close to a Doc since the flight home from Calgary. He had almost forgotten the spicy-sour stink of the thing, or how preposterous he looked with his foamy "beard" and six ill-assorted arms. The topmost right arm was the one Hilda had assigned for Dannerman to deal with, and naturally it was one of the big, muscular ones. He was just trying to figure out where to grab it when the other Doc appeared, moving quickly and silently toward his twin from behind. He wore that dumb-looking metal-mesh babushka Dannerman had seen on TV and he wasn't alone; just behind him were Hilda and half a dozen more of the Bureau guards, all trying to be as quiet as they could-

Not quiet enough. Or maybe it was that the immobile Doc had caught the scent of his fellow at the last moment; but just as the one with the babushka was reaching out to wrap another length of the material around the target's head the creature sprang into action. And then it got noisy. It didn't matter where Dannerman tried to grab that gorilla-strong upper arm, either. He didn't get the chance. As he was reaching out for it the flailing arm caught him and slammed him straight across the corridor and into a wall.

Linguistics Team report NBI Eyes Only

The task of providing a translation methodology for the language employed by the "Docs" is without precedent in our discipline. There are of course no loan words or cognates, nor any evident grammatical morphology relevant to any Earthly language or dialect. Lacking linguistic markers, our present line of investigation relies on attempts to identify the "words" (or lexically unitary parts of speech) by analyzing such traits as time depth and sound diversity, and to categorize them in the Bu"hlerian three-modality functional model (expression, arousal and description). So far, however, none have been identified.

A dozen human beings turned out to be no match at all for a fighting Doc; but the one with the babushka was another matter. He had one of those great arms around the throat of his twin from behind, and all of the other arms frantically trying to stretch the metal mesh around his head. It didn't happen right away, because the captive Doc was doing everything he could to avoid it; but when the shawl was in place everything stopped. The attacking Doc mewed, a sharp, high-pitched cat's yowl, to the other, who abruptly let go of the unfortunate guard who had managed to grab him. He stood up, shedding guards, mewing back excitedly to the other, adjusting the shawl for himself.

That seemed to be it, and wonderfully no one appeared to be seriously hurt.

"Let him go!" Hilda gasped, triumphant. "That does it. Is everybody all right? Fine, now we get them down to the operating room."

The operating room didn't look like an operating room anymore; all the usual equipment had been pushed out of the way and something that looked like a torture rack had been constructed on the floor-ten huge metal manacles of varying sizes, bolted to the cement, looking capable of holding an elephant.

Whether they were capable of holding a Doc was another question, and the two of them, yowling those high-pitched feline sounds at each other, were testing them with all their strength. As Dannerman and the others took their gallery seats Hilda was jubilantly explaining what was going on. "See, as long as they've got those things on their heads they're out of Dopey's control, but they've still got some kind of bugs inside them. So what we do now is we operate, only in order to get them they might have to remove the shields, and then- Well, then see for yourself." She pointed proudly at what was going on in the operating room before them. One of the Docs was lying down, while the other fixed the clamps around arms, legs, neck. "So now we're going to do it," Hilda finished with satisfaction, and then looked at Dannerman in a different way. "Come here a minute while they're getting organized," she said. And, when they had moved out of anybody else's earshot: "Listen. Are there any more of you Dannermans around?"

He looked startled. "Jeez, I hope not. Why are you asking?"

She sighed. "I don't really know. It's just that that other Doc's been drawing pictures again, and one of them showed one of you guys along with what looked like a Horch. Any idea what that means?"

"With a Horch? No. I never saw any of those."

She looked pensive for a moment. Then she shrugged, and added in a friendlier tone, "Oh, and by the way, Danno, congratulations. Can I be your best man?"