Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

After all, we weren't thieves.

Sergeant Sambok was standing by the door, and something about the look on her face made me ask, "What else, Sergeant?"

"Private Dormeyer is AWOL," she said.

"Shit." Her look expressed concurrence with my opinion. "There's no AWOL under combat conditions. If the MP's get him, they'll call it desertion." More concurrence. "Damn it, Sergeant, somebody's got to know where he's gone! Find him. I want to keep this in the company."

"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it myself."

"Yes, you will," I told her. "Take ten minutes to find out where he is. Then meet me at the sally point."

My assault party was the first one through, but we'd attained our objectives. There were three hundred more troops on the base now—ours, I mean, not counting the ones we were taking prisoner—and I had nothing to do any more until it was time for the television broadcast. That wouldn't happen until the TV station in Albuquerque was secure, so that we could get it on the network. I headed down for the sally point in the basement of the building. Once it had been a pistol range, but when our peepers found it, it wasn't used for much of anything.

That made it perfect for us. We got our whole party across before anyone knew we were there.

Sandia was an old military base, in our time as well as theirs.

The difference was that in our time it had stayed small. In theirs it had grown immense. There were square miles of desert and hill inside its barbed-wire boundaries.

There were not, however, very many of their troops actually deployed anywhere on the base. The perimeter was guarded more by electrons than by men, with a post only every quarter mile or so along the fence. Of course, that must have seemed like plenty of protection to the base commandant. Outside of a paratroop drop, which would have given plenty of radar warning, there was no way any sizable number of enemies could get up to the wire without being detected in plenty of time to summon reinforcements unless, like us, they came from inside. When I got to the sally port there was already a map of the base tacked up on the wall, with the secured points in red crayon. The key parts had been the Cathouse and its immediate neighbors, the MP barracks, the headquarters, the signals exchange, and the radio station. We now owned them all. The few troops who had thought they were guarding them now realized how badly they had failed, in our stockade.

Troops were still coming in. They weren't needed, but it did no harm to have them—what if the previous occupants, against all logic, decided to fight? Bright floodlights racked along the wall showed the column of twos emerging from nothingness. They broke step, marched to a wall, fell out, were assembled again by their officers and noncoms, and marched off to reinforce the troops already in place.

It was a weird sight. If you positioned yourself right next to the sally portal, in the same plane as the plane of the portal itself, it was even weirder. Toes, feet, legs, fists, bellies, heads appeared in that order. If you got behind the portal plane, you could see-what would you guess? Raw meat and guts? The insides of those transported soldiers? Nothing of the kind. You couldn't see anything at all. Because from behind, the whole rectangle of the sally portal was featureless, lightless, unrelieved black. From in front there was nothing much, either. Just the troops emerging from the portal, and behind them the dusty walls of the old pistol range.

"Major?" It was Sergeant Sambok again. She looked around and lowered her voice to say, "I think I know where Dormeyer went."

"Good work, Sergeant," I said.

She shook her head. "He's off the base. He sneaked out somehow. He's gone into Albuquerque. The thing is, he lived—he lives here. In Albuquerque, I mean."

Not so good. But it wasn't her fault. "You did right," I said, and indeed she had. For a reservist, Nyla Sambok was a first-rate soldier. The funny thing was that she'd been a music teacher in civilian life, married to a harpsichord player. They'd both got their scholarships by joining the Reserve and they'd both been activated in the call-up; a lot of reservists were bitter, but Sambok was good enough and soldier enough that I'd requested her to come down with me from Chicago to take over this detachment. The fact that she was a great-looking woman didn't hurt any, either. But I've never messed around with the enlisted personnel. Only thought of it, now and then.

"Tac-Five will be on the horn for you in about two minutes," she went on. "I got the word as I was coming in."

"Fine," I said, "but I've got an idea. Go down to the stockade and bring back Senator DeSota's clothes for me."

Even Sergeant Sambok could look surprised. "His clothes?"

"What I said, Sergeant. You can leave him his underwear, but I want all the rest. Even the socks."

A quick flash of comprehension crossed her face. "Right, Major," she said, grinning, and was gone, leaving me to wait for TacFive's call.

Two-way communication across the skin that separates parallel times is harder than one. They had to shut down the portal and collapse the field to get the energy, but when the portal officer nodded I picked up the phone and General Magruder didn't keep me waiting. "Well done, Major," he barked. "The President says the same. He's been following this very closely, of course."

"Thank you, sir."

"Now we go to Phase Two. Are you ready for your television broadcast?"

"Yes, sir." Meaning that I wasn't, actually, but I would be as soon as Nyla Sambok got back with the clothes.

"The TV station and the microwave links are secure; they'll have the circuits open in half an hour. They've already got the President's tape ready to go, as soon as you do the introduction."

"Yes, sir."

"Good." Then his tone changed. "One other thing, Major. Any sign of rebound?"

"Nothing new, sir. I think we're still interviewing the locals, though."

"Urn. Any more unwelcome visitors?"

"No sign of any, sir."

"Keep your eyes open," he said harshly, and hung up. I recognized the tone. It was the voice of fear.

Half an hour later, walking over to the base's television studio in the hot desert night, with the same stars blazing overhead that blazed over my own America, I was feeling some of that fear myself. An MP jeep patrol cruised past, headlights swiveling from side to side. They paused long enough to take a good look at me and my assault-force armband, then picked up speed and moved on. They didn't challenge me. They didn't ask for I.D.

I could have been one of those unwelcome visitors. I could have been that other me who seemed to have been everywhere. And, if I had been, all I would have had to do was get a scrap of green cloth to pin around my sleeve and they would never have known the difference. And then— And then what would that other me have done?

That was the scary question. So far they had watched and pried. But they had done nothing at all.

I couldn't really blame the MP's for sloppy security, because they obviously didn't see the need for being tight. We had taken over the base without a shot being fired, against opposition that consisted mostly of sleepy-eyed sentries being struck dumb with astonishment when our troops pulled them in. What a way to run America! I wondered what it would be like to live in a country where important bases were guarded by only a handful of Regular Army troops, where there had been no draft or call-up of reserves. If I'd been left to finish my postgraduate courses at Loyola instead of being activated into the reserve, what would I be by now?

A senator, maybe?

It was not the kind of speculation that I could afford to get into, while I still had an important part of my job to finish.

Sergeant Sambok was waiting for me at the studio with Senator DeSota's clothes, as promised. I found a dressing room and slid out of my coveralls. He dressed himself well, that other Dom DeSota; shirt, tie, socks, shoes, pants, sports jacket—everything was good cloth or good leather. The cut was peculiar—his fashions were not the same as ours—but I liked the feel of the silky shirt and the soft, crisp-creased slacks. They could have fit a little better. The other Dom was a good size fatter than I, which was a satisfaction, even if it did spoil the cut of the clothes a little.