Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

How peaceful those bygone days seemed! I'd had everything I ever wanted, and hadn't known it.

In the big train room the dispatchers were busy posting arrival and departure times. It's kind of exciting being in Union Station, because from there you can go almost anywhere in the world— anywhere in America, anyway. There were trains coming in from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City and New Orleans and Washington, D.C., and departures for Boston and Minneapolis and Detroit and Houston. There were grinning redcaps wheeling bags with fussy passengers trotting worriedly beside them, and honeymoon couples being kissed good-bye by their families, and vacationers dragging themselves across the terrazzo floor with suitcases full of sandy seashells and straw hats and damp bathing suits. Apart from an occasional trip with Greta, and business now and then to Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, I didn't travel much. Maybe that's why Union Station always seemed so exotic to me. And so — I don't know—competent. You can set your watch by the trains; they take off on the click of the minute, come in just as the clock hand jumps to the dot.

For which reason I was astonished to see that up on the train board, next to TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED, a dispatcher was putting up the word delayed.

I hurried to the crew lounge to see if I could find out why, half hoping that the dispatcher had made a mistake and Greta would be there waiting for me. She wasn't. No one seemed to know why, either. I caught up with another stew just as she was coming out of the women's locker room. She'd worked with Greta a time or two, but had switched to the prestigious Los Angeles Superchief run as soon as she'd accumulated enough seniority. She gave me a look of astonishment. "The Twentieth Century late? No, Nicky, that can't be; it's never late."

And she went off to make a phone call and came back looking worried. "Funny," she said. "They stopped it in the yards. Put on a new engineer."

"That doesn't sound good," I said, throat suddenly dry—had something gone wrong? An accident? An engineer who had a heart attack, or went crazy, or— There was no limit to the catastrophes my mind could invent.

But I didn't invent the right one.

I sat there for twenty minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when it did happen it was not good at all. It came in stages. Stage one was a trainman, hurrying in, looking scared. "You won't believe this," he called to a buddy as he entered. "They stopped the train in the yards. Took off the stewardesses, the conductor, the porters, the two other trainmen, the engineer, the fireman—only reason they didn't take me, I guess, is that I'm just pulling a relief shift, it's not my regular run. Clean sweep! Said something about conspiracy. . ."

Stage two was when I recovered from all that enough to hear someone ask who "they" were . . . and heard the answer, by then not unexpected at all: "FBI."

And stage three was when I started to go out of the lounge and

two neat young men fell into step beside me, one on each side, efficiently grasping my arms.

Nyla Christophe was standing at the Official Use Only door they took me through, her hands locked behind her, looking satisfied. She had every reason for that.

Silly me.

I had failed to see how simple this problem was from the point of view of Chief Agent Nyla Christophe. Eyewitnesses that gave me an inconvenient alibi? No problem. Just arrest the witnesses. A witness in an FBI jail, to all intents and purposes, no longer existed as a witness at all. So there was a nice, simple case to be made on the basis of photographs and fingerprints, and no need to worry about confusing details. No problem at all—for Nyla Christophe.

But for me, oh, yes! Lots of problems! And the worst of them just beginning.

The pilot of a Transcontinental and Western Airline luxury liner, coming into Chicago from the south, called Meigs Field to announce his approach. Clouds veiled the city, but he wasn't worried. Chicago didn't have any of those hundred-story buildings like New York; it had something to do with the fact that the city was built on alluvial soil, no bedrock anywhere near, soit wasn't easy to put up skyscrapers. It made things a little easier for pilots of the big trimotors . . . except that this time, as he looked up, he suddenly saw a huge tower where none should have been. He turned desperately to miss it. When he looked back, it was gone, and all thirty-eight of the rich and adventurous passengers behind him, who chose to take the plane in seven hours instead of the train in fifteen, were cursing his name.

21 August 1983

7:20 P.M. Senator Dominic DeSota

I had drowsed off on the couch, waiting for Nyla to show up from the airport. When she did get to the hotel I guess she just decided to let me sleep. I might have expected it. She always liked to get right into a quick practice session as soon as she checked in, even before she unpacked, even before she used the, bathroom sometimes. "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" she asks, and then gives the answer, "Practice, practice, practice! And when I put it off it just gets that much harder to do, Dom dear." So what woke me was the sound of the Guarnerius from the next room-one of the unaccompanied Bach chaconnes. I recognized it pretty easily. I wouldn't have, even a year or so earlier, because classical music was one of the many things that a career in politics hadn't left time for, but having a love affair with Nyla Bowquist had been educational in a lot of ways. That was only one of them.

I got up and walked into the bedroom. There she was, standing before the fireplace with her back to me, sawing away on the old fiddle with her body swaying in time. I walked up behind her and reached up under her raised arm to cup her right breast. She didn't miss a beat. Eyes closed, bow bouncing over the strings, she said, "Give me two more minutes, honey."

"And what am I supposed to do for those two minutes?" I asked her.

She sang it over her shoulder to the bars of the music:

"Order up some champagne—

"Or turn down the bedclothes—

"Or you could just start getting naked."

I kissed the back of her neck. "I'll try number three," I said. I didn't really start to undress. One of the other things I'd learned from Nyla was that it was more fun when we did it together. I went back into the living room—no, I guess you'd call it something classier than that, the salon, maybe. I knew she wouldn't be two minutes. More like a quarter of an hour. When she's on tour Nyla's always afraid she's going to forget something important—how to finger a passage, or the best way to break a three- or four-note chord. So when she practices she does it all, and it takes time. I sat back down on the huge couch and picked up the phone.

While I was dialing my office number I gazed around. I was glad I didn't have to try to put this hotel bill on my expense account. The taxpayers would never have stood for it. Neither would the IRS, if any normal human being had tried to claim that a four-room suite was a necessary business expense. But that's one of the beauty parts of being a concert violinist. Nyla always claims she needs the extra space to practice before her concerts. As a matter of fact, she more or less does. As a matter of strategy, she never gets asked that question by an IRS auditor, because her hotel suites are always engaged and paid for by the management of the concert hall where she is playing; the bill never appears on her cash flow at all.

When my office answered I asked for Jock McClenny. He recognized my voice, of course, so I just said, "I'm at the usual place, Jock. Anything urgent going on?"

"Not a thing, Senator. I'll give you a shout if anything comes up.

"Fine," I said, getting ready to hang up. I knew he'd call if necessary, and also knew that the chance was very small that anything would come up important enough for Jock to call me at Nyla's hotel. He cleared his throat in a way that stopped me. "What, Jock?" I asked.