Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

When I came out of the dressing room the sergeant wasn't critical. "Looking sharp, Major," she complimented.

"What did you leave him in?" I asked, peering at myself in the mirror, and when she grinned I knew the answer. He wouldn't get cold in that August heat in his underwear, but still Take him my spare fatigues," I ordered. "They're in my B-4 bag." Fortunately for him, I liked my fatigues a little loose, so he could undoubtedly get into them.

"Yes, sir," said Sergeant Sambok. "Sir?"

"What is it?"

"Well . . . if you're going to wear his clothes and he's going to wear yours, wouldn't that be a little confusing? I mean, suppose he got to you and knocked you out and changed clothes. How would I know which was which?"

I started to open my mouth to tell her she was a fool. Then I closed it again. She was right. "Good thinking," I said. "Tell you what. I'll be the one who knows your full name, okay?"

"Yes, sir, Anyway, as long as he's in the stockade and you're not..."

"That's right," I agreed, but then I felt what I'd been unwilling to let myself feel for the last couple of hours.

I wanted to confront this other self of mine. I wanted to sit and talk to him, hear his voice, find out where our lives had been the same and where they differed. It was an itchy, quivery sort of thought, like getting ready for the first time you do dope, or the first sex; but I wanted it.

I didn't have time to think about it just then, because I was on. The cameramen gaped at my snappy civilian clothes, the signals captain grinned openly, but it was time for my television debut, ready or not.

More not than ready. They've always got to swing a mike into position or switch a camera or send somebody out into the hall to stop somebody else's chattering, but in a moment the corporal who was acting as director cried, "Stand by, sir!" He listened to his headphones for a moment, and then began to count. "Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . ." For the last counts he used his fingers, two fingers, one finger, then the single finger stabbed at me and the green light over the camera went on and the prepared speech began to roll.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the camera, "I am Dominic DeSota." That was no lie; I was. I didn't say I was Senator DeSota, though the fact that I was now wearing his clothes might have carried that implication. There wasn't much more to my speech:

"An emergency has required this action to take place. I ask that every American listen to this broadcast with an open mind, and with the generous heart of all we Americans. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the President of the United States."

And the photons of my face and neck and that other Dominic's suit and tie and shirt went flocking into the camera and came out as electrons; as electrons snaked through the cables of the base studio to the microwave dish on the roof, were reconverted to photons of a different frequency, and, as radio signals, were hurled across the valley to the transmitter towers of KABQ bounced up into the air and through it, to a satellite thousands of miles away in space and showered down on the television sets of the United States. This United States. And what they would make of it, and of the President who was not their President, I could only wonder.

The whole Signal Corps detachment was in uniform, but there was still a lot of civilian in their blood. Reservists, called up for the emergency, they were almost all veterans of the networks. They'd arranged themselves some civilian comforts. There was a pot of coffee brewing in the lounge outside the studio, and a plate of packaged cakes and junk foods—someone had liberated the local PX.

I poured myself a cup, listening to President Brown's voice coming over the monitors: ". . . as the President of the United States, speaking to you who are also the President of the United States, and to the American people . . ." He looked nervous but well rehearsed as he read the lines written for him. ". . . at this point in our history we are confronted with a terrible despotism out to conquer the world . . ." and ". . . the ties of blood and common devotion to the principles of freedom and democracy . . ." and on and on. It was a pretty good speech; I'd seen the text beforehand. But the important thing wasn't anything in his speech. It was the fact that we were in control.

The same voice was coming from a control room just down the hall, door open. I carried my cup down to peer inside. There they had not one but a dozen monitors, almost all of them showing the President's earnest face, saying the same things. But there were also a couple of screens that showed other faces, looking serious and even more earnest: John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, a couple I didn't recognize. They were doing commentary already. That was a surprise, until I remembered that the President's speech was only four minutes long. It had played once and was being rerun by the stations that had been caught off guard and didn't have an instant response ready; the others were already reacting.

I looked at my watch. Midnight local time. It would be two A.M. in the big cities of the East Coast, but I doubted very many of the population would be sleeping. And in California the citizens would be tuning in for their late-night news and getting a kind of news they hadn't expected.

Served them right. Why should they be fat and happy when we were facing the terrible struggle for the freedom of the world?

Even a commander of assault troops has to sleep sometime. I got nearly five hours. When I woke up it was with the smell of bacon and coffee. I was in the chief scientist's office, making use of the chief scientist's eight-foot couch, and Corporal Harris was setting a tray down next to my head. "Sergeant Sambok's compliments, sir." He grinned. "We occupied the officers' club last night."

The eggs were nearly cold, because they'd been carried, but the coffee was hot and strong. It was just what I needed to get me going.

First stop was the studio again. The soldier-technicians had been joined by three civilians, an old woman, a young woman, and a bearded man of no particular age. I stopped the Signal Corps captain, jerked a thumb at the civilians clustered in front of the monitors, and raised an eyebrow. "Them?" he said. "Them's scientists, Major. Anyway, that's what they say they are, and their orders are okay."

"Doing what?"

He shrugged. "Monitoring responses to the President's message, they say. It's some kind of political-science study, you know?" I didn't know. "Anyway," he said sourly, "there's damn little to study, because there hasn't been diddly-shit coming out of this President they got here."

That wasn't the kind of news I wanted to hear. "You could check with Tac-Five," he added as an afterthought, but I was already on my way back to the Cathouse. The base was nice and calm in the hot desert morning. I wasn't. Dry as the air was, I was sweating into my second-day's-wearing fatigues (maybe I shouldn't have been so generous with my spares!), and beginning to feel worried.

General Ratface Magruder was where you'd expect a general to be at seven o'clock in the morning, namely asleep, but I got Colonel Harlech. He was not a friendly soul. When I asked him about the civilians, he pruned me back to the trunk in half a dozen words. "They're authorized and none of your business, Major," he snapped. "What's the status of your base?"

"All secure, sir." Hoping it was so, because actually I hadn't checked out my own troops. "Still no sign of rebound here."

"Unwanted visitors?"

"Nothing reported, sir." At least not to me. "Sir? May I ask about Dr. Douglas?"

Rusty chuckle. "He's in his tent under guard and scared shitless. What's the current status on enemy signal interceptions?"