Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

It was like ice water in the face.

The portal was in service again. Messages were coming through. The hottest one was for me: I was ordered to report to Tac-Five on the double. One of our prisoners, the other Dom DeSota, had escaped to some other time-line, they didn't even know which one, and he'd taken our pet scientist, Dr. Douglas, with him.

The last time I had been on the home side of the portal it was dark night. We followed the tapes along the sandy duckboards, with no more light than the blue riding lights from the trucks that had brought us down, stumbling, choking on the dust, shivering from the desert night-time chill—scared. Up on the mesa the big troop-carrying helicopters were landing with no more lights than the trucks. Hand-held flashlights guided them in with their second echelon soldiers and the specialists who would follow to set up a portal generator, none of us sure what we would find.

Now it was all different. Hot sun baked the duckboards. A desert wind peeled plumes of sand from the lip of the excavation right down into my eyes. Ratface Magruder was pacing up and down in front of his staff car, waiting for me. He thumbed me inside and we spun sand all the way up to the mesa. There I could see that bulldozers had smoothed away even the skid marks of the helicopters, so that when the Russian satellites came over they would see nothing to make a liar out of the archaeological-excavation story.

One thing was the same. I was scared.

I was scared in a way I have never been before, because fear of getting shot at or having to shoot somebody else is a physical fear that you can turn your mind away from, at least for a while. What I was afraid of now was not a speculation. It was a fact. If the senator escaped, he was at least helped in the escape by the fact that he was wearing GI fatigues. And I had given him the fatigues.

Magruder didn't say a word to me on the way up. He didn't even look at me. He was glaring out the window, his lips tight. I couldn't blame him, exactly; his ass was in the wringer along with the rest of us. I made myself stiff as a statue, hanging with all my strength to the seat belt I didn't dare buckle, to keep from being thrown into him.

Hoping he would forget I was there.

We stopped with another spray of sand and Magruder jumped out. He stood there, glaring. What he was glaring at this time was Sergeant Sambok and the civilian technician, Dr. Willard, assistant to the missing Dr. Douglas. He'd left them standing at attention in the sun while he went down to get me in person. Sunstroke? I don't know how they missed it. It wasn't a thing that General Magruder would have worried about, because the sun would never bother him. He was meaner than the sun. He kicked a clump of buffalo grass, spat, and jerked a thumb at the trailer. "Inside, you three," he ordered.

It wasn't any better inside the trailer. It was cooler, but not so much because of the air-conditioning as because of the chill that came from Magruder. When he looked you in the eye, your eyeballs froze. With all the worry I had myself, I had a little left over for Sergeant Sambok. Maybe even for Dr. Willard, too, because he wasn't even in the service. He'd just happened to be standing on the scaffolding with Larry Douglas when the make-believe me came puffing up with the carbine over his shoulder, pushed Douglas through the upper portal, and jumped after him. There hadn't been a thing Willard could have done about it—though that didn't seem to interest General Magruder—because he was a little guy and, like all the civilians on the project, unarmed.

Nyla Sambok was a different case. She answered Magruder's questions briskly and completely. "Yes, sir, the senator was my prisoner. Yes, sir, I allowed him to overpower me and take my weapon. Yes, sir, I was negligent. No, sir, I have no excuse." —But "completely" is the wrong word, because there was something in her tone, and something in her eyes, that said there was more to it than that. Once I'd sat on a rape court-martial, a nurse captain who'd been caught out on the obstacle course one night by a green draftee who thought that all women really wanted it, no matter how hard they resisted. The captain had looked the same way. Full of resentment and fury, and as much against herself as against the trainee.

Of course, there couldn't have been anything like that with the other Dom DeSota? —And then Magruder turned to me, and I forgot all about Sergeant Sambok's troubles, having plenty of my own.

Not ninety minutes before I'd been sitting in judgment on Private Dormeyer. Up and down the yo-yo goes.

They called him Ratface Magruder for a good reason. Not much chin and a hell of an overbite; and to make it worse he wore a stick-out mustache with more wax in it than hair, under a long, pointy nose. I could almost see the nose quivering as he sat there, thinking, frosting us all as his gaze moved around, tapping with his fingers on the leather cushion of the couch. He kept us waiting while he thought things through.

Then he said, "There are some things you should know."

We waited.

"The first thing," he said, "is that their fucking President hasn't given us an answer to President Brown's message, so we are going to have to implement Phase Two."

We waited some more.

"The second thing is that I had requested a HU-70 troop-carrying helicopter to transfer the prisoners. I was overruled, because somebody was worried about the Russky satellite seeing it, so they sent those chickenshit little choppers instead."

We waited some more, only with a little less foreboding of doom—was he saying that there was some excuse? Because if they'd sent the right helicopter, all the prisoners would have gone at once, and the problem would never have arisen. It wasn't much of a hope, but it was the best I'd had for a while-and a blighted one, because of course he wasn't excusing us, he was just rehearsing the story he was going to cover his own ass with. He said: "Make no mistake. You three are still in the deep shit. You, DeSota, because you gave him a uniform. Shut up."—as I started to explain—"You, Sergeant, for letting him get your weapon away from you. And you, Willard, for letting that son of a bitch Douglas play around with the portal in the first place without a senior officer present. Not to mention letting the two of them get through."

"General Magruder," said Willard desperately, "I am here as a civilian consultant, and if there are any charges to be brought against me I have the right to have a lawyer present. I demand—"

"No you don't," Magruder corrected him. "What you do, Willard, is you volunteer to accompany these two, who are now ordered to Boiling Field."

"Boiling Field?" cried Willard. "That's Washington, D.C., isn't it? But—"

Magruder didn't tell him to shut up. He didn't have to; he looked at him, and the objections froze on Willard's tongue.

Outside I had heard the flutter of a chopper's rotors. As Magruder opened the door I saw it sitting there, the vanes turning slowly, the pilot peering out toward us.

"That's yours," said Magruder. "It'll take you to the airport where a MATS C-ill is waiting for you. Phase Two is about to begin."

When the old man, peering out of his apartment door, could hear no noises on the stairs he scuttled down to the mailbox. The precious brown envelope from the Welfare was there. He retrieved it, hurried back up the uncarpeted steps, let himself in, and snapped all three locks behind him. Now if he could just make it to the Seven-Eleven, he would have food and money for the next weeks. He did not even feel the faint puff of—something—that touched him; but as he turned he saw that his apartment had been ransacked! In just that minute, the old TV was gone, the shelves over the stove in the kitchen alcove had spilled out their sparse contents, the worn couch cushions were thrown on the floor. Moaning, he opened the door to his bedroom to see if his precious hoard of papers had been touched . . . There was someone in his bed. A man. With his throat cut and his eyes glassy; the face was contorted in fear and pain . . . and the face was his own.