Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"Just that I had this call from the Pentagon, Senator. It's peculiar. Routine call from Sandia, just checking to make sure you were there."

Sandia was a research facility in New Mexico. I sat up straighter. "Well, I'm not."

"Exactly, Senator," he said, and I could almost see him nodding earnestly, pleased that I'd got the point. And pleased, too, that the military had somehow screwed things up again, because Jock always enjoys catching the Pentagon in some kind of goof.

As a matter of fact, I enjoyed that too. I would have been pleased to explore that one a little further, but the sound of fiddling in the next room had stopped.

"Keep on top of it, Jock," I ordered. "Talk to you later."

"Right, Senator," he said—a little enviously, I thought. I didn't blame him. Nyla's a spectacularly good-looking woman, which would account for a certain amount of envy from anyone, but it also happens that Jock is a music buff. He never missed one of Nyla's performances. Sometimes, when I was in the box she'd put aside for me, I'd look down and see him along about the twentieth row, gazing at her with that look of patient adoration.

When I opened the door to the bedroom I wondered what kind of gaze he would have given her as I saw her now—shimmying her hips to slide the dress down over them, bare on top, the Guarnerius safely back in its case. She gave me a haughty look. "You've still got your clothes on," she accused.

"That's easily remedied," I said, and proved it to her with no trouble at all.

In the normal course of events there was just no way that a married man like me could be having an affair with.a married woman like Nyla Christophe Bowquist. Our worlds just didn't intersect. I was a failed physicist who'd gone into law and then politics. Nyla was something special. She'd grown up wild and crazy—she said so herself—and if it hadn't been for the luck of the Juilliard School scholarship auditions she probably would have wound up in jail. Or some worse place.

Instead she wound up N*Y*L*A C*H*R*I*S*T*O*P*H*E B*O*W*Q*U*I*S*T, with a duplex on Lake Shore Drive-and a husband in investment banking—while I've got a condo on Marine—and a wife who's into ambition. If my wife, Marilyn, had her way, I'd wind up President. If I had my own way, maybe I'd still wind up President, but I'd have a different First Lady. The funny thing is that Marilyn got us together in the first place. Didn't mean to, of course, but she was the one who thought it would be really good for my image if I let them put me on the Chicagoland Arts Council. That's where I met Nyla. We sat next to each other at a fund-raising dinner on a Wednesday, appeared together on Terkel's radio show on a Friday morning, and were in bed together Friday night. Chemistry? That's the word they use, but whatever it was it worked between us.

When we were spent and lying back against the heaped pillows, smoking that alter-lovemaking cigarette that tastes the best of all, I took note of the faraway look in her eyes and asked, "What are you thinking about?"

"Us," she said.

"Me, too," I said. I stretched to reach for an ashtray, without quite letting go of her left breast, and when I had juggled it to where we could use it, I added, "I was thinking how different things might have been if we'd met a different way."

"Or at a different time," she said, nodding.

I nodded back. "Like if we'd met before you married Fred-or I married Marilyn. If the two of us had come together by chance, without either of us being married to someone else. What do you think?"

"About what, Dom?" she asked, stubbing out the last of her cigarette.

"Do you think we would have married each other?" I asked.

She lay back for a moment, poking the tip of her tongue into my ear in a friendly way. Then she said, "Of course." There wasn't really any "of course" about it, though. We didn't have that much in common, not counting what we had in bed. I don't know much about music—country and western's about as far as I go-and Nyla actively hated most of what I did in politics. And, for that matter, if we were all that gung ho to be married, there were such things as divorce courts. Neither of us had kids, neither was dependent on a mate financially, and the voters don't worry about a senator's marital history the way they used to. If remarriage after a divorce kept you out of office, Reagan would not be President now.

No, what kept us from being married was only that neither of us wanted to take the chance. That was why Nyla said "Of course" again, very positively, and then sat up. "Now I've got to start thinking about getting dressed. Join me in the shower?"

"Of course," I said, and did. "Of course" is a thing we said to each other a lot, to cover up doubts about things that weren't "of course" at all. We splashed and soaped each other happily in the shower; but not for long, because just as we had finished soaping each other's parts satisfactorily, the bathside phone began to chirp at us.

"Oh, hell," said Nyla. "No, let me get it, Dom." There was another "of course." Of course I let her get it, since it might easily have been from someone who should not know that I was answering her phone—manager, husband, reporter, fiddle fan who'd somehow managed to get the number of her suite-lover's wife, even— but we both knew it was not likely to be any of the above. It wasn't. It was who I suspected it would be, because who else would still be in the office on a Sunday evening? Nyla handed it to me, making a face; she didn't much like Jock. Or at least didn't like the fact that he knew about us. She had left the phone soapy with her soapy hands, and my own soapiness nearly made me drop it. But I managed to say, "Yes, Jock?"

Then I did in fact drop it, or barely caught it by the cord as it was heading for the bottom of the shower stall. "It's about that query from Sandia," he said. "It's from the Cathouse, Senator."

That's when I had the trouble with the phone, because the Cathouse was not usually something we talked about on an unsecured phone. "Yes?" I snapped.

"They've called back, Senator. They say they've checked fingerprints, voiceprint, I.D. picture—everything's a match. They've got this man in custody, and he says he's you. And, Senator, so do they."

A recent widow, sleeping badly in the unaccustomed emptiness of the king-sized bed, ha lf heard and ha If dreamed a sound of screaming. When she was fully awake it didn't go away. Puzzled, she went to the window. There was nothing there but the quiet lawns of her condo village. She opened the windows—not easily; people in hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar condos seldom sought outside air—and the screams were instantly louder, with smells of rotting garbage. Was someone being raped? Murdered? But neither of those were conceivable to her, in the quiet elegance of Cabrini Gardens.

22 August 1983

2:50 A.M. Senator Dominic DeSota

There weren't that many flights from Washington to Albuquerque on a Sunday night, and none of them were nonstop. For a while I thought I'd have to call up the Air Force and get help from them. Jock finally managed to get me on TWA, leaving National at nine o'clock. It was four hours' travel time and two time zones, and luckily I was able to sleep a little between Kansas City and Albuquerque. That was the end of civilian comfort. After that it was military all the way. It didn't seem as though any of the War Department people ever slept. They picked me up outside the sleepy terminal in a staff car and raced through the deserted highways and freeways to the entrance to the Sandia base. My driver was a WAC MP lieutenant. The guards saluted her on sight. They demanded no I.D., but as we pulled away from the guard post an MP personnel carrier started up behind us. It followed us all the way across the base, past the solar-power installation, past the nuclear area, to Building A-440.