Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

We all stood up, even us women. It wasn't a mark of respect so much as a sort of declaration of sympathy. When he was gone, Senator Kennedy rang for the butler to serve us nightcaps. "Poor Lavrenti," he said. And then, "Poor us, too, for that matter, because I don't see just what to do, either."

Bad back or not, the senator decided to drive me back to my hotel himself. Jackie came along for the ride. It wasn't a pleasure jaunt. The rain was coming in sheets and the streets were slippery with emulsified oil. -

All three of us fit easily in the big front seat. We didn't talk much, not even Jackie, who was helping her husband scan the road nervously—since both his younger brothers had died in car accidents, one drowned, one burned, she was uneasy about cars. I had my own thoughts. It was not much past ten o'clock. Nine in Chicago. Ferdie would surely still be awake. Should I call him? Did I have the right to, for Dom's sake? Did I have the right not to, for Ferdie's sake?

So I hardly noticed when we slowed down with an unexpected traffic jam ahead of us, until the senator leaned forward irritably. "What the hell?" he muttered, trying to peer past the cars stalled right in front of us.

"What is it?" asked Jackie. "An accident?"

It was no accident.

Kennedy swore. Through the windows of the car ahead I saw something coming toward us in the other lane. It was fast and big, but it didn't have the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It had no proper lights at all, just a single bright spotlight that flick- flick'd back and forth across the road, like the blade of a windshield wiper, and the light illuminated something that stuck out of the vehicle itself.

It looked almost like a cannon.

"My Jesus God Almatty," said the senator, "it's a fucking tank."

Jackie cried out—so did I, I'm sure. The senator didn't wait. He backed the big Chrysler around in a quarter-circle high-speed turn, banging the muffler against the curb on the far side of the street, cramped the wheel as far as it would go, and floored it. He skidded out onto the highway maybe thirty yards ahead of the tank, accelerating all the way up to ninety miles an hour on that meandering river road, and I kept seeing that huge cannon sticking out in front of the tank. Aiming now straight at us. The senator felt it, too, because at the first cross street he stood on the brake. We fishtailed to a stop— almost a stop; oh, say, about forty miles an hour—and he manhandled that car around the corner.

A taxi was coming the other way.

I have never felt closer to death. We stopped. So did the other car, but not with anything to spare. Our front bumper was almost touching the taxi driver's door, and the man inside was already rolling his window down to sob and scream at jack.

Who paid him no attention.

We had stalled the engine. jack didn't even try to start it again. He opened his door and leaned out, grunting at the twisting he was giving his back, to stare as the tank went past, fast and serious, followed by half a dozen troop-carrying trucks. I could see the gleam of helmets in the street lights as they passed, and behind them was another tank.

"Remarkable," said Jack Kennedy.

"Why are we putting tanks like that on the Street?" I demanded. He turned to look at me. jack is an elderly man, but I had never seen him look quite that old before. He put one arm around Jackie protectively.

"We ain't," he said. "Those are not ours. We don't have any tanks that look like that."

The veterinarian was twenty-four years old and she was terrified. She soaped herself and rinsed herself six times, as ordered, and came out naked and wet to the farm bedroom where the army captain was waiting. She did not even think about being naked in front of him as he passed the counter wand slowly over every inch of her skin, listening to the sporadic rattle of radiation. "I think you got all the dust," the officer said at last. "You say you found the cattle just like this? And that dust all over everything?" She nodded, eyes big and frightened "You can get dressed, "he finished "I think you're all right. "But he watched her go with fears of his own. Radioactive fallout! Somehow half a square mile had been coated with high-level radionuclides—here, no more than forty miles from Dallas, with no war going on that he knew about and no source of the fallout reported anywhere. It was a puzzle with no answer. And it was a fear that shook him to his bones—what if it had happened forty miles away, in the heart of the city itself?

26 August 1983

6:40 A.M. Nicky DeSota

I was dreaming that Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller had asked me to arrange the mortgage for a six-hundred-million-dollar apartment complex along the lake, only she wanted to start with a down payment of one hundred fifty dollars because all her money was tied up in dimes . . . and then when I finally got the papers ready to sign she couldn't do it because she didn't have any thumbs. And then, as the bumping of the plane landing woke me up, the first thing on my mind wasn't where I was, or what was going to happen to me, but whether Mr. Blakesell had known I was arrested in time to get someone to cover my three mortgage closings. There wasn't anything I could do about it, of course.

There wasn't anything I could do about anything, because I was handcuffed to the back of the seat in front of me. My first long-distance flight in one of those new big Boeing four-engine jobbers should have been a real thrill. What it was was a pain. I mean, real pain. I was aching from being in that same seat for eleven hours, and two intermediate stops, and God knows how many hundreds, or even thousands, of miles; but the big ache had been with me even before they put me on the plane in the first place, wobbling up that ladder with my hands cuffed behind me and that ugly FBI man, Moe Something-or-other, threatening all kinds of doom if I spoke, or tried to get away, or tried to take off the hat and veil they'd made me wear so nobody would know who I was. He knew all about those aches too. He'd given me most of them.

I will say for the FBI boys and girls, they really know how to hurt you without leaving marks.

Across the aisle, the other prisoner was awake inside his own hat and veil. I could see his head moving. His guard was snoring as lustily as my own as we bumped interminably along runways that seemed to go nowhere.

At least I was out of the holding tank in the Chicago headquarters, where I'd spent most of the last—what was it? Days, for sure, though nobody would tell me how many. It had been pretty bad, in there with that bunch of social undesirables—muggers on the way to the concentration camps, currency speculators held for trial—but it was better than the times they took me out to ask me more questions. I hadn't told them anything, of course. I hadn't had anything to tell—but, my God, how I wished I had!

And then Moe had come in, waking me up, and dragged me out. And we'd wound up in this plane, going God knew where.

No. Both God and I knew where, now, because through the veil and the tiny window I could see a gaudy, foreign-looking terminal, with a big sign that said:

WELCOME TO

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

ELEVATION 5196 FEET

New Mexico, for heaven's sake! What in the world did they want with me in New Mexico?

Of course, Moe wasn't going to tell me. The stewardess came by and tugged his shoulder to wake him, and he leaned over to wake the other guard, but all he said to me was, "Remember what I told you!" I remembered. He made us wait until all the other passengers had got themselves out of the plane. Then he made us wait some more, while mechanics came out to turn the big propellors around a few revolutions and a truck backed up with 100-octane gasoline to refill the tanks.