Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

The other was closer, and not moving. He lay flat on his back on one of the beds, his eyes closed. Snoring. He looked like he'd had a hard time. I don't mean just the routine hard time that you expected when you were an FBI prisoner, I mean he looked half dead. And he looked— -

"Douglas!" I yelled. "It's you!"

Douglas didn't say a word. It hit him harder than it did me. He was strangling, eyes popping. I could see he was trying to ask a question, so I asked it for him. "What's the matter with him?" I asked.

Nyla Christophe shrugged. "He'll be okay. Sunstroke and exposure, and he got himself bitten by a rattlesnake. But he's had all his shots, and the doc says he'll be good as new tomorrow. But you didn't take a good look at the other guy yet, did you?"

And so I did. And he turned and looked at me. And the face was sunburned and raw, and the expression was grim, but the face was a face I knew very well.

"My God," I said. "He's got to be the guy from Daleylab!"

"Close," said Nyla Christophe cheerfully, "but he says he's not. He says lots of things, DeSota, things you wouldn't believe; he's been talking steadily ever since the train crew picked the two of them up in the desert last night. He says all those possibilities are really real and that there's plenty more like him around—in one of those possibilities or another. But you're kind of missing the point, DeSota. What he mostly says—and what all the tests say, every one of them—is that he's you. "

At this hour of the night the big underground parking garage was deserted, and the lawyer wished he hadn't worked so late as he tried to remember where he'd left his car. You never could find a policeman when you needed one! He felt he needed one now—two rapes, a murder, nobody knew how many mugg'ings in the garage in the past few months. Then he rounded a corner and saw two uniformed men patrolling, with tommy guns slung over their shoulders. "Good evening, " he said, feeling better at once—until he observed that their uniforms were gray-green shoulderboarded things, with forage caps quite unlike the checkerboarded ones of the Chicago police force. Worse, when they challenged him he recognized the language. Russian! Instinctively, he turned and ran, his shoulder blades crawling. He heard a burst of shots, but no bullet struck him. And when, stuck at a dead end, he turned, sobbing, to confront them, they were gone.

26 August 1983

7:40 P.M. Senator Dominic DeSota

All that afternoon I had been staring longingly out the window at the pocket-sized swimming pool in the courtyard, sweating by the bucket and my sunburn tormenting me every minute. It wasn't just the sunburn or the heat that tormented me. Somewhere not far from here-but hopelessly walled away from me by whatever it was that separated one time-line from another—my country was being invaded, and somebody wearing my face had gone on television to give aid and comfort to the invaders. I could not remember any case in the history of the United States since the Civil War when any elected U.S. senator had done anything like that, What were my colleagues thinking of me?

What was Nyla Bowquist thinking of me?

I didn't even know what I thought of myself any more. The last forty-eight hours had been the worst of my life. It had been a terrible shock to find out that the Cathouse represented some kind of reality, and that there were infinite numbers of worlds just like my own, many of them with a Dominic DeSota, indistinguishable from me by any test. I had been taken prisoner by one of them. I had knocked out a woman who was, exactly, the woman I loved, and been held prisoner by another copy of her, not quite exact because of her mutilated hands. I had kidnapped a man. I had suffered the shock of invasion of my country by my country. And I had suffered the damnedest worst case of sunburn, trudging through the empty desert without food or water, of my life, and it hurt.

One way or another, it all hurt . . . and they wouldn't even let me get in that pool to cool off.

It wasn't forbidden, exactly. It was just something that could not be permitted by anyone but that other Nyla, and she was off on some errand of her own. The washbasin in the corner was no substitute. Every half hour or so I would splash water over my bare skin; on the quarter hour I would try gingerly to put on some of that useless sunburn cream they'd dug up for me. Those things gave me something to do. They didn't help much.

What also didn't help was the presence of my involuntary traveling companion, Dr. Lawrence Douglas. Most of that long day he lay unmoving in the bed. That I could understand. He'd gone through most of what I had: the same sunburn, the same endless hours of heat and thirst, wandering through the empty desert. And worse. Not only had he managed to get himself snake-bitten, and had the antivenom shots that were almost as bad as the bite, but he'd been shot full of pep juice of some kind so Nyla No-Thumbs could interrogate him. I hadn't been there to share it, but when they put him back in our room, by then unconscious again, he'd had bruises to add to the burn.

I didn't try to wake him.

I didn't have to wake him. When I turned unexpectedly away from the washstand I caught his eyes on me. He closed them at once, but not in time. "Oh, hell, Douglas," I said wearily, "if you want to sleep, sleep; if you want to wake up, wake up; but what's the use of faking it?"

For another stubborn minute he kept them closed, but he couldn't keep it up forever. He dragged himself out of the bed, looked around for the toilet that didn't exist, and then, without speaking, urinated into the washbasin.

When he finished I snapped, "At least rinse the damn thing out!" I had. He didn't look around, but he turned the taps on full, sloshed the water around, drank, as a dog drinks, lapping the water out of his cupped hand under the tap, all without speaking.

"If you wet your hair, it'll help a little," I told him. "Also I've got some sunburn cream."

He straightened up slowly, then bent again to do as I suggested with his hair. Over his shoulder he muttered something. It could have been "Thanks." I decided to assume it was, and when he turned back to look for the sunburn cream I managed a smile.

He didn't smile back. Even allowing for everything, I have never seen a man look more hopeless, resentful, and depressed.

Of course, I was in no good mood myself. Apart from the things that had happened, I was feeling itches and twitches I didn't like. I felt I was under constant observation, though I could never catch the guard peering in the window. And I felt another itch I liked even less. "Look," I said, "it's no good sulking."

He paused in putting cream on his tomato-colored face to look at me sourly. "So what is good, would you suggest?"

"Well, you could satisfy my curiosity about something, because I've been thinking. When I got up on the scaffolding where you were working on the portal and you went through it with me—"

He barked a nasty laugh. "When you forced me at gunpoint," he corrected.

"Yes, all right. When we wound up ten feet in the air on the other side, because you didn't tell me there was going to be a drop," I amplified, for no better reason than to spread a little guilt back on him. "I thought we were going back to my time. Then, while you were sleeping, I thought about it."

He groaned. "DeSota, if you're coming to any point, will you please get there?"

"The point is, what were you doing?"

"Trying to escape," he said shortly.

"To here? But this isn't your own time, is it?"

"This primitive hellhole?" he snarled. "No!"

"Then—"

"Then why didn't I try to get back to my own? Because I don't have one, DeSota! Not any more! There's only one thing I want now, and that's out."