Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I should have known that it was hard to keep secrets from myself. I was never a dummy, not even in this senator incarnation. He'd twigged to the thing that was most on my mind—or one of them.

I said slowly, "He's from another parallel time, Dom."

"I guessed that much," he said impatiently. "Did he visit you before?"

"No. Not exactly. Not him." I didn't want to tell him any more

about the visitor we had had—the one we had managed to catch and detain, who was now sitting in his tent under guard on the other side of the portal, sweating with fear that his people would find him and do something bad to him for helping us develop the portal. "But we did have a visitor. Maybe more than one."

"Keep talking."

I said, "Have you ever heard of 'rebound'?"

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning 'bouncing back.' When you go through the skin, or whatever it is, that separates one time from another, there's some kind of conservation effect. Things begin going in the other direction."

He frowned. "You mean other people being thrown back and forth?"

"Not just people. It's complicated. It depends on how badly the skin is torn. Sometimes it's just energy—light, or sound. Sometimes it's gases drifting back and forth, or small things—birds flying, maybe. Sometimes it's a lot more."

"And that's happening here?"

I said unwillingly, "Seems to be, Dom. And Snot just here."

He stood up and went over to the window. I let him think it out. Over his shoulder he said, "It sounds like you people are really screwing the bird, Dom." I didn't answer that. He turned around, looking at me. "I wish you'd get me a cigarette," he said testily. "This stuff is hard to take calmly."

I debated for a moment whether to hardnose him on that, decided not to. "Why not? They're your lungs." I poked at the intercom on the desk until I figured out which button connected with the orderly room and told Sergeant Sambok to bring up some smokes. "So," I said, "we want to get this thing squared away. Are you going to help us?"

He said simply, "No."

"Not even when it's as risky as I'm telling you? Not even when your country is defenseless against us anyway?"

"You got into it, Dominic. You get out of it by yourself," he said definitely, and turned toward the door as Nyla Sambok appeared with a carton of tax-free PX cigarettes.

And all of a sudden my friendly other self changed from the self-assured name/rank/serial-number-only prisoner to something brand-new.

What the hell had happened to him? He was staring after the sergeant as if he'd seen a ghost. I never saw such an expression of astonishment, and rage, and worry on any human face—least of all on my own!

A man named Dominic DeSota sat before a screen, his fingers busy on a keyboard, analyzing and recording. Without lifting his fingers he spoke into a tiny microphone that curved around his cheek, "Boss? This one's the farthest of yet. There don't seem to be any vertebrates in it at all."

24 August 1983

9:20 A.M, Senator Dominic DeSota

When I got back to my home away from home, the stockade in the J-3 parking lot, I found out I had missed breakfast. I was also missing six of my fellow prisoners. There were a dozen or so of the base's permanent party soldiers still there, including a couple shamefacedly wearing "PW" stencils on their shirt backs and picking up leftover cafeteria trays from where the others had left them. A different soldier, with a green armband, was watching them with an automatic pistol held loosely before him. One of Major DeSota's, no doubt.

But of the few civilians who had shared the canvas cots in the parking lot with me the night before, there were none. This upset the corporal who had brought me back. He motioned me inside the fence while he muttered worriedly to the other guard. It didn't worry me. I had other things on my mind.

I had one other thing: Nyla Bowquist!

I don't know how to say how shattering it was to see my dear lover in an Army uniform, with traces of blackout makeup still on her face, a gun over her shoulder, looking at me with no recognition at all.

Now that I had time to think I realized that it was likely enough that there would be another Nyla in their time, just as there was another Dominic DeSota—and, no doubt, another Marilyn (but who would she be married to there?) and another Ferdie Bowquist and a whole other cast of characters. The other Dom DeSota wasn't at all the same as me. There was no reason the other Nyla should be. This one was no famous concert violinist. She wore her hair shorter and her eyes less made up. And her clothes—well, it was an army uniform, after all. My Nyla dressed beautifully, but this one hadn't had the freedom of choice.

But so heartbreakingly similar! And she hadn't known me at all! Or—that was not exactly true—she had known me as a copy of that other Dominic, whom she had known, all right (but not, I thought, in the biblical sense). I wondered if I would see her again.

And wondered instantly if I would ever see my own Nyla again. And wondered at myself! Here I was in the middle of huge, fantastic, and frightening events, and the thing that filled my mind was the woman I was having an--affair with—

"You! Prisoner DeSota!" growled the corporal, and I realized he'd been waving at me. "Come on, your people have been moved. I have to take you to the assembly point."

I looked at the other prisoners, who only looked back at me in the opaque, I-only-work-here expression of enlisted men in a situation not covered by orders. "Where's that?" I asked. But the only answer I got was a nasty twitch of the machine-pistol.

It wasn't far. It was right back the way we had come, to the Officers' Club just across from the Cathouse.

I'd been in it before. Many times. It was a sort of lounge where the people working could sit for a cup of coffee and a short conversation away from their desks, or take their latest load of information memos to read over in peace. It looked as it always had, except that there were nine people in it who clearly didn't want to be there. Two of the civilian scientists were pacing back and forth, glaring out the windows. Colonel Martineau was sitting talking to one of the women, whom I recognized as a mathematician brought down from ITT, and therefore one of my constituents. "Edna," I said, nodding. "Colonel."Just as though I had happened to drop in for a Coke and nothing strange was going on at all.

"We wondered where you were," said the colonel.

"I was being questioned by that nasty other Dominic DeSota. Made me miss breakfast."

"If you have any quarters," he said, "there's a vending machine right out in the hail, and the guard'll let you use it." I didn't, but Dr. Edna Valeska did—just like our own, except that the face was Herbert Hoover's. A soft drink and a couple of Twinkies didn't make a meal, but at least they informed my stomach my intentions were good. Out of habit, Colonel Martineau made a round of the room while I was getting them, checking windows (shake of the head; armed guards outside), checking the other doer (locked), listening to the telephone (dead). Then he sat down and watched me eat. "We've all been questioned," he said. "What interested them most seemed to be you, Dom—anyway, that first man who looked like you. The one that disappeared."

"They asked me the same thing," I said, mouth full of lardy sugar. "I didn't see any harm in telling them what I knew—which wasn't much, of course. Should I have stuck to name, rank, and serial number, which I don't have?"

He looked at me in surprise. I was surprised too; I hadn't realized how edgy I was. "I think we have to play this one by ear, Senator," he said, placating me. I grinned to show I was sorry, and Edna Valeska perched on the couch next to me to get into the discussion.