Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

Then somebody waved to us from the terminal door.

Moe unlocked my handcuffs and we left, me trying not to stumble as we clambered down the steep aisle to the stairs, and then down the stairs. The other prisoner followed behind us with his own guard; and they whisked us through an airport terminal that looked as though it had been built as a set for some Latin-American musical comedy. People stared. The overly curious were pushed roughly out of the way—there weren't too many of them, because the FBI goons weren't hard to recognize, and most people turned the other way fast. Into a car, me and Moe on the jump seats, the other prisoner and his guard behind us. A city police car pulled out ahead of us, and we went blasting away, God knows how fast, through city streets and out onto a two-lane highway that snaked away up into the hills.

We drove for nearly an hour. We wound up at a crossroads, two empty highways stretching to the compass points, and a filling station with a motel behind it. The sign over the office said "La Cucaracha Travelers Rest," which was not a name I would have given to a motel.

I also wouldn't have put armed guards in the driveway.

The guards were, however, a little decorative touch that I had begun to get used to. So there were good signs and there were bad signs. The bad sign was that I was still under arrest. The good sign was that I wasn't being taken to Leavenworth or one of the camps, where I would disappear from sight until they got good and ready to let me out—if ever. This was a permanent island in the FBI archipelago. They could not mean to keep me here for very long. They might even let me go.

Alternatively, what part of me might come out of the Cucaracha Motel might be only enough to send home to bury.

I wasn't given enough time to worry. My silent colleague and I were hustled into one of the cabins and ordered to sit on the edge of the bed and keep quiet, while Moe stood inside the door, glaring a us, and the other one stood right outside. We didn't have long to wait, though. The door opened from outside. Moe moved out of the way without looking to see who it was.

Nyla Christophe strode in, her hands clasped behind her.

She was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. I could not see her expression, but I could tell that she was gazing at us thoughtfully—I could feel the burning, like acid, where her eyes raked across my face. But her voice was only normally unpleasant when she said, "All right, you guys, you can take those dumb veils off now."

I was glad enough to do that, because I was stifling inside that thing in the desert heat. The other fellow moved more slowly and unwillingly; and when the veil was off his expression was scared, resentful, unhappy—all the things I would have expected; but what I hadn't expected was that the face that wore the expressions belonged to Larry Douglas.

What I was absolutely certain of was that Larry Douglas was at least in part responsible for the last four or five days of misery. How, I didn't know. Why, I couldn't even guess. So I was not in the least sorry to see him caught in the same trap he'd helped me into . . . only that just made it all even more confusing! If he had passed on to Nyla Christophe all the things I'd told him when he dragged me down to see that beat-up old movie actor downstate, why was he a prisoner too? And what were we doing in New Mexico?

The good part of that was that Douglas seemed as baffled as I. "Nyla," he said, his voice unsteady with anger he was trying not to show, "what the hell is this all about? Your guys come and grab me, drag me out of bed, won't tell me a word—"

"Sweetybumps," she said cheerfully, "shut up." Even with the dark glasses on he could read enough of her expression to swallow hard. He shut up. "Better," she said, and, over her shoulder, "Moe?"

Rumble from the apeman: "Yes, Miss Christophe?"

"Is the mobile lab here yet?"

"Parked right behind the cabins, all ready to go."

She nodded. She took off hat and glasses and sat in the one lumpy armchair the room possessed, extending a hand without looking. Moe put a cigarette into it, and followed with a light. "It is possible," she said, "that you two guys are in the clear on this particular matter. We need you to check some things out."

"Oh, good, Nyla," cried Douglas. "I knew it was just some mistake!"

And I managed to say, what I am ashamed to admit I hadn't really been thinking about for some time, "What about my fiancee and those others, Miss Christophe?"

"That depends, DeSota. If the tests come out the way I think they will, they'll all be released."

"Thank heaven! Uh—what tests are we talking about?"

"The ones you're going to have right now," she said. "Get on with it, Moe." And she left the cabin, while the other goon came in with an armload of stuff, followed by a man in a white jacket and another armload.

I couldn't help cringing, but it turned out that not even Moe was going to beat me up again. What they had in mind took longer, but was nowhere near as unpleasant—well, it wasn't exactly fun. They took my fingerprints and my toe prints. They measured my earlobes and the distance between the pupils of my eyes. They took blood and saliva and skin samples, and then they made me pee into a bottle and move my bowels into a paper cup. It took a long time. The only thing that made it less obnoxious was that my obnoxious fellow prisoner—the mystery-man Larry Douglas, my co-conspirator from the Carson coffee shop and fellow traveler to the Reagan place in Dixon, Illinois—was doing the same.

And liking it even less. Neither Moe nor the other guard liked it a whole lot, either. They went outside, watching through the window, while the lab technician took his samples and signs, so Douglas and I were able to talk a little. The first question I asked him was the one I'd been brooding on for a long time: "What the hell are you? Some kind of undercover Fed?"

He had a hangdog look, but even a whipped dog can snarl. "None of your damn business, DeSota," he snapped. He watched my blood being sucked up into a syringe, holding his own arm where the silent lab man had just done the same to him.

"Well, what are you? Nyla Christophe's boy friend, or fink, or prisoner?"

He said simply, "Yes." Then he let down his pants so the lab man could take a chunk out of the flesh of his butt. "If I were you, DeSota," he said darkly, "I'd worry about myself instead of some other guy. Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in?"

I laughed in his face. All the aches and miseries of my body told me how much trouble I was in. "Anyway," I pointed out, "she said we might be in the clear here, so what have I got to worry about?"

He looked at me with pity and contempt. "That's what she said," he agreed. "But did you ever hear her say anything about letting you go?"

I had to swallow hard before I could ask, "What the hell are you talking about, Douglas?" He shrugged, looking at the medic. He let me stew until the man had taken all the little bits and trickles and probings he wanted and departed with them. Neither of the guards came in after that, though we could see them sitting on the rail, fanning themselves as they gazed out across the highway. A streamliner was arrowing along the rail line just across the highway, and I thought with a sudden pang of Greta. I repeated, "What are you talking about? She said she'd probably let us go-"

"Not 'us,' DeSota. 'Them.' The witnesses, who don't know anything. You're a whole different animal. You know a lot."

"I do?" I searched my brain, came up empty. "Good lord, man, I don't even know what she wants with me!"

He said gloomily, "The big thing you know is that there's something to know, and t-hat's the biggest thing of all. How did you manage to be in two places at once?"