Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I hated it.

It was a thousand times worse than the three-way mirrors in the clothing stores. It was as bad as it could be.

This other I had my face, my hair color, even my little thinning patch on top. My everything. Almost everything, for there were small differences—he was maybe six or eight pounds lighter than I, and what he was wearing was no garment I had ever owned. It was a one-piece coverall made out of some shiny forest-green fabric, with pockets all over the chest, and where trouser pockets would have been if there had been separate trousers. There were even pockets on the sleeves and over the right thigh. Perhaps all those pockets once had held my other self's valued possessions. No more. They had been searched and rifled, no doubt by the colonel's troops.

I made myself say, "Dominic. Look at me."

Silence. The other Dominic didn't answer, didn't look up, didn't respond at all—though I could tell from the stubborn way he set his head that he had heard me clearly enough. No one else in the room spoke, either. The colonel watched closely but was silent; and while Colonel Martineau didn't speak none of his men were likely to.

I tried again. "Dominic! For God's sake tell me what's happening."

The other I kept his eyes on the floor for a while longer. Then he looked up, but not at me. He gazed over Martineau's head at the clock on the wall, making some sort of calculation. Then he turned to me and spoke. "Dominic," he said, "for God's sake, I can't."

It was not a satisfying answer. Colonel Martineau opened his mouth to say something, but I waved it shut again. "Please," I said.

That other me said regretfully, "Well, Dom, old buddy, as a matter of fact the reason I'm here is that I wanted to tell you something. By 'you,' " he explained, "I don't mean second-person-plural or even single-other-person-than-myself. I mean you-Dominic-DeSota, who is, as you know, also me."

The colonel was looking suddenly furious. It took me a different way. "Oh, Dom," I said sorrowfully to myself, "how many times I've wished to myself that I'd outgrow playing that sort of game. Spit out what you wanted to tell me, why don't you?"

"Because it's too late, Dom," he said. "Too late for goddam what?"

"The thing I was going to warn you about, you know?"

"I don't know!"

"But you will. It's happening. And the next time we meet"—he offered a grin, but it looked more as though he were crying—"it won't be me you are meeting." He stopped there, started to speak again, hesitated, glanced at the clock— And then he disappeared.

When I say he "disappeared" that is the exact right word, but it may give the wrong image. The other Dominic DeSota didn't "disappear" by ducking out of sight into a closet or something. Nor did he turn transparent like an actor in a TV sci-fi show. He just disappeared . At one instant he was there. At the next he was not.

And a pair of handcuffs, locked around no wrists at all, clattered to the floor where he had been.

Things like that simply do not happen in my life. I had no reactions preprogrammed for flagrant violations of natural law, and neither did Colonel Martineau. He looked at me. I looked at him.

Neither of us said a word about the disappearance, unless "Holy shit!" is a word. I think I heard that whisper from the colonel.

"Any idea what he was talking about, Colonel?" I asked—just to make sure. "No? I thought not. Well, what do we do now?"

"Beats the hell out of me, Senator," he said. But although a commanding officer of the Army is allowed to say that, he is not allowed to mean it. I-Ic called in a sergeant and issued orders for search parties to look for my missing other self; the sergeant looked bewildered and the colonel looked resigned, because we all knew how little use that was going to be. "Do it, Sergeant," he said, and watched the noncom start off. "Well," he said to me at last, "one good thing. He said whatever it was was happening already, so we're sure to find out before long what this is all about."

"I wish I were sure that was a good thing," I said. And, as a matter of fact, when it turned out to be true, ten minutes later, it also turned out not to be a good thing in any way at all. Out of the room we went and down the hall, the colonel's little detachment of troops following in hangdog route step, wondering where they'd screwed the bird. And coming toward us was another detachment of troops, a dozen of them or so. They were in route step, too, but not the least hangdog. They were wearing combat fatigues instead of dress sun-tans, and they carried funny-looking, short-barreled carbines slung over their shoulders. The carbines didn't stay slung. "Hup," said a noncom when they were half a dozen yards away. The detachment stopped. The troopers sank to their knees. The carbines revolved off their straps and were aimed right at us.

An officer stepped forward from the middle of the detachment. "Holy shit," said Colonel Martineau again, and I didn't have to ask why.

The officer was wearing the same combat gear as the troops, but you could tell he was an officer because he carried a pistol instead of a carbine. There was something else I could tell about him right away, and he confirmed it when he spoke. "I'm Major Dominic DeSota of the United States Army," he said, in a voice I knew very well, "and you are all my prisoners of war."

He said it clearly enough, but there was a strain in his voice. I knew why. The words were addressed to the colonel, but the man's eyes were stuck on me, and the expression on his face was one I knew well. It was the same expression I wore myself. I said, "Hello, me." The other guy's expression hardened. "I thought you'd disappeared," I went on. "Was that some kind of a joke?"

He jerked his head at a soldier, who stepped up behind me and grabbed my arms. Something cold and harsh bit into my wrists, behind my back, and I knew I'd been handcuffed. "I don't know what you mean about disappearing," the other me said, "but there's no joke. You're all in protective custody."

"For what?" demanded the colonel, accepting handcuffs of his own.

"Just while we straighten things out with your government," the "I" assured us. "We have to explain to them what they're going to do, and you're prisoners until they agree. That's your best option, see? If you don't like it, you do have one other choice. You can offer resistance. Then you won't be prisoners any more, just dead."

A combo driver, hunched high in the cab of his big John Deere, drove slowly down the rows of early beans, thinking of nothing more serious than a cold beer and the Sox game he was missing on TV, when he heard from behind him the zap-zap-zap of high-speed cars passing and the rrrrawr-rrrrawr of sixteen-wheel semis. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a huge diesel beanng down on him. Frantically he wrenched the wheel of the combo. He spoiled a dozen rows, but when he looked back there was nothing there.

23 August 1983

9:10 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist

It was really disappointing to be in Dom's hometown without Dom there, but I kept busy, There's always plenty to do getting ready for a concert. There are press interviews. There are cocktails before the performance, mixing with the heavy donors to the National Symphony. Most of all, there are rehearsals. Ten minutes of rehearsal with the orchestra uses up an hour of my time—worrying about it beforehand, trying to remember all the cuts and tempi and intonations we'd agreed on afterward. One would think that rehearsing with Mstislav Rostropovich ought to be easier than most, because Slavi started out as a cellist himself. Not a bit of it. He is an endless fusser. He can drive you crazy fidgeting over the dynamics for one oboe, or the exact number of microseconds a note should be syncopated. I don't mean that I don't like working with him. He has a wonderful sense of humor, for instance. In fact, I love the man.