Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

The thing I always tried to keep in mind was that I could've been some kind of pinko myself, if Gramp had kept his principles when he came to America. Back in Russia he was a bank robber and a revolutionary. When it got too hot for him there he came to Ellis Island, still hanging on to some of the profits from the bank robberies, but leaving all the revolutionary ideas behind. That's how J. Douglas and Sons got started; and J. Douglas and Sons is where the money came from to put me through Yale. But suppose Gramp had had to leave the rubles behind and skedaddle out of the country with nothing but a lot of half-baked political ideas, like his buddy Lenin? And what would I have turned out to be, without those good poli-sci courses at Yale to keep me straight?

Straight as a string, I let myself into the big studio apartment on the fourteenth floor. There were no lights, but the shades on the big picture window were wide open and enough illumination seeped in from the street for me to undress and slip into the bed. I put my arm around my girl, cupping a breast, and whispered in her ear. "Nyla, sweet?"

She woke up easily and fast, as she always did. Her voice wasn't even thick as she asked, "How'd it go?"

"That," I said, bringing another hand to bear, "you can judge for yourself when you hear what I got on my wire recorder."

She turned toward me, nuzzling into my neck. "Are you going to play it for me?"

I said, "Why, yes, honey, I absolutely am. But first there's some other business I'd like to take care of, if you don't mind making a quick trip to the bathroom first

She lay relaxed in my arms, "Not necessary," she said. "After all, I knew you were coming, so it's all taken care of in advance. . .

And I see you're ready too." And so I was. If I hadn't been when I slid under the covers, I was by now. Lacking a couple of thumbs had never been a handicap to Nyla Christophe, in bed or anywhere else.

There was a bad time in eastern Iowa. Farmers who through adversity were used to flood, drought, and legislative tinkering with their price supports woke to a new disaster. From Muscatine to the edge of the Quad Cities, twenty miles and more, the sky was covered with a gi'een-gray, oily cloud. When the cloud settled, it blanketed three-quarters of a million acres of prime corn, soy, and mung with a carpet of locusts. Locusts! No one in Iowa had ever seen a locust swarm before! And when they rose to fly on, only stubble remained.

21 August 1983

4:50 P.M. Nicky DeSota

When you're a mortgage broker you don't have any Sundays. Sundays are the days when your customers are off work, so if you want to get the breadwinner at home with the housewife, Sunday is your best bet. It was a beautiful day, with fleecy white clouds sailing over the trees of the Mekhtab ibn Bawzi Forest Reserve and the pool sparkling at me as I drove past. No pool for me that day. No church. No sneaking off to watch the Cubs game. No anything but calculating down payments and points and the pitfalls in transferring a Torrens title; I didn't even get a chance to look at the Sunday paper until almost five o'clock that evening, and that on the interurban down to the city. I caught the 4:38 out of Elk Grove, grabbed a paper as the train began to move off, and spent ten minutes on the really important news stories—you know, the ones in the sports section, about the Cubs and the Sox and how far ahead the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the standings. With only about a month left to play, the Cubs were ten and a half games out. The situation wasn't impossible, no. But it didn't justify a lot of time spent poring over the standings, so before long I turned to the main news section.

Now, of course I hadn't forgotten that crazy drive down to Dixon. I guess I really hadn't been worried about my own position before that. Scared, yes. You can't help being scared when the FBI gets hold of you. But not worried, because after all I knew that I wasn't there and I had plenty of witnesses to prove it.

So, in a way, it was Ron's big hot-air promises to help me that really started me worrying. I kept waiting for the phone to ring, and,

I don't know, some radio news reporter from the NBC Blue Network or somewhere to ask me what my feelings were about the demonstration in Chicago that day.

Well, there hadn't been any calls. There hadn't been any demonstrations, either, or at least none that made the first couple pages of the Tribune. The big news story was about President Daley coming back to Chicago to break ground for his library—that was the Tribune for you. (A tiny box at the bottom of the page told about renewed fighting between Lithuania and Russia, with the Russians charging aggression in the League of Nations.) There was also a story about the horribly loud roaring and screaming noises in the sky around Old Orchard Field (the Army Air Force denied any knowledge of what caused them), and all in all we were nearly into the Loop before I got to page seven and the headline that said:

FORMER MOVIE STAR ARRESTED ON

CHARGES OF SLANDERING U.S. & FBI

So old Ron was in the slammer.

Not only was old Ron in the slammer, but when I read the story more carefully the things he was accused of having said—the FBI were "fascists"; it was a citizen's duty to "resist" them—were things he had said while I was sitting right there.

There had only been four people at that table. I didn't suppose Ron had turned himself in, nor that his wife had done it; I knew I hadn't.

My mystery pal Larry Douglas had put the finger on him.

He had deliberately dragged me down there-no, even before that. He had sought me out and got me indebted to him. Then he had taken me down there for the specific purpose of getting old Ron Reagan in trouble. Why? I couldn't guess. I didn't care. The one thing I was sure of was that Larry Douglas was bad news.

I really began to worry about that; but by then it was a little too late.

The Twentieth Century Limited was due in at six P.M. exactly. I had left myself plenty of time to get there. But I was almost late, because as I was coming along Randolph sirens screamed up behind me and stopped, six cars blocking the street just ahead of my car. My heart was suddenly in my mouth.

It wasn't me they were after. It wasn't anyone they were after. They were just doing their duty to the rich and famous, convoying a limousine that was a football field long and with hubcaps of silver. Arab, of course, Big Arab. I thought for a moment it might be old Mekhtab ibn Bawzi himself, though he hardly ever came out in public any more. No, not quite, but it was his firstborn son, Faisal ibn Mekhtab. Faisal wasn't ever hard to recognize, because you never saw him in public without the egg-sized ruby he wore around his neck and the six hard-nosed bodyguards who never took their eyes off it. Not even the city cops got between the bodyguard and Faisal. What the cops were there to do was to hold us gape-eyed civilians back while Faisal, in white robes and tarboosh, minced across a scarlet carpet to enter a big new A & P supersuq. He was officially opening it. That made sense; he owned the whole chain, after all. The radio reporters, eyes respectfully averted, put a microphone in front of the august lips; camera bulbs flashed; a truckload of musicians struck up a medley of happy songs; and with golden shears, Faisal clipped the scarlet ribbon in the doorway.

It was interesting, kind of, but it took a good twenty minutes before he minced back into his Cadillac and the whole procession evaporated as rapidly as it had formed. So I found a place to park, and got into the station about five minutes of the hour, with my mind all full of rich Arabs and nasty FBI women and treacherous Larry Douglases, and hardly at all of my lady-love, Greta. I didn't always meet her at the station when she came back from the New York run, but I tried to when possible. Especially on a Sunday, like today, when the weather was nice, and the two of us might take a walk down along the lakeshore, or go to the zoo. Of course, a stewardess worked for a living, and if she'd been up all night with cranky passengers or train-sick kids, then we'd just jump on the interurban and I'd take her home ...