Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

He flung himself back on the bed. "But, listen—" I began reasonably.

He shook his head. "Forget it," he said.

And, along about that time, I did. Not because of what he said. Because a car roared into the driveway and stopped out of sight. I craned my neck to see what was happening. No luck. I heard car doors slam, and distant voices—rumble from a man, higher-pitched, cheerful sound of a woman's voice. A voice I knew well. And a moment later Nyla appeared, walking toward the pool, shedding clothes as she got near. She didn't bother to glance at our window. She got to the edge of the pool, tested the water with a bare toe, slid out of the last of her underwear, and dived cleanly into the pool, the thumbless hands pressed together over her head.

And that other itch that I had not wanted tt feel came rushing back to fill my nerve ends with longing.

If Nyla No-Thumbs didn't look at us, we certainly looked at her. I could see one of the guards, half hidden by a porch pillar at the motel office, eyes missing nothing of that handsome, familiar body. Even Douglas lifted himself off the bed to join me at the window. "Hell of a good-looking putain," he muttered.

I could have killed him.

To feel anything of the sort, of course, was purest insanity. I told myself that. I couldn't help it. Because for quite a while now what had been filling the cracks in my mind, the parts I didn't want to explore, was Nyla. Each Nyla. All the Nylas. Nyla Bowquist, my true-love violin virtuosa; Nyla Sambok, girl paratrooper; Nyla NoThumbs. Nyla Christophe, who was—obviously never married, because who would marry her?—zealot law enforcer, commander of goons and rubber hoses and secret prisons.

And they were all the same one. I didn't need fingerprints or urine analyses to know that. I felt it in my groin, with an intensity seldom matched since I was fourteen years old, peering through the cracked partition to the girls' locker room at the Y.

There were so many incongruities that I didn't know where to begin to look for a handle to them. That first one, the sergeant—she was bad enough, as a shock to my nervous system. But at least, after that first appalled recognition, she made some kind of sense. If she wasn't a concert violinist, at least she was a music teacher, if not a civilian, at least only a draftee. My own beloved could have gone the same way, given a few acts of God one way or the other in her early life.

But this one!

This thumbless one . . . without kindness, without love . . . most of all, without thumbs! I could not recognize my darling in her at all.

But I could recognize my darling's body. My own body knew it at once.

I almost understood that overwhelming itch, because I'd heard of such things—no, not such things; but something similar. One of my old political drinking buddies had told me something once, at one of those beery four A.M. sessions when you're exhausted from speeches and handshaking and watching the election results come in, and everybody else has finally gone home. He said he'd caught his wife in an affair with another man. When he couldn't doubt it any more, he was pained and furious—and something else. He was incredibly horny. All through the fights and scenes and confrontations, the biggest thing on his mind was to make love to her, as often and as forcefully as he could. To take this familiar stranger, this hostile love, this person whom he had suddenly discovered that, having thought he knew her intimately and totally, he hardly knew at all—to take her to bed, because the burning and yearning in his crotch outweighed every other feeling he had.

Staring out of that window, I wanted Nyla very badly indeed.

Any Nyla at all.

Grotesque? Of course! I knew just how grotesque it was. And yet I couldn't help thinking—what would it be like without thumbs? In what ways would our lovemaking change? For instance, she did sometimes mischievously tweak my useless little nipples while I was tweaking hers; we had giggled over the differences between hers and mine, and the impossibility of ever knowing whether what tiny tickle I felt when she pinched mine was in any way like what she felt in hers. But, thumbless, she couldn't do that-or not exactly that— or what would it be like, really?

I cannot put in words how badly I wanted to know.

Spang went the window screen as the big guard, Moe, came up from the side and caught me staring. He slapped it with the flat of his hand and I pulled away, tiny flakes of rust stinging my eyes. "Got hopes, have you?" he jeered. "Forget it! She's not for jailbirds like you, even if she is treating you better than you deserve." He disappeared and I heard him unlocking the door. "God knows why she thinks you rate it," he grumbled, motioning us out, "but she brought you some food. And she says you can eat it in the owner's apartment, and it's got air-conditioning."

The food was Mexican, on cardboard plates and just about cold—well, nothing was cold, really, in that part of New Mexico, but no more than room temperature. And the room was, as promised, cooled down to the merely uncomfortable by a wheezing, rattling box in the window of the large living room. It wasn't enough. Our two doubles were there with us, along with the guard, Moe, and body heat was enough to drive the temperature right back up again.

I sat next to the other DeSota and we eyed each other. "Hi, Dom," I offered. He looked surprised.

"They usually call me Nicky," he said. "Say; did you see her out there? And they busted me for just going topless!" I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, but once started talking he kept right on. "Are you really a United States senator?"

"Since 1978, right. From Illinois."

"I've never talked to my senator before," he said, and grinned. "Especially when he was me. What should I call you?"

"Under the circumstances, Dom is good enough. And you? Nicky? That's funny—I mean, I don't know why. Even when I was a kid, my mother didn't call me Nicky."

"My mother didn't, either, but when I was training for the job my counselor advised a change. 'Dominic' sounded too much like 'dominate,' he said, and customers would be put off by it. I'm in mortgages." He hesitated, mouth full of refried beans. "Dom? How'd you get to be a senator?"

Meaning, of course, when I'm just nobody. But how do you answer something like that? I couldn't say, "Because I'm a winner and you're a wimp." That would be unforgivable and, worse, untrue, since we were the same person. What had happened in his world to make my gentle fiddle player a ruthless hunter of men, and me a wide-eyed innocent?

I didn't get a chance to find out. In came Moe, lugging a cardboard carton as though it were heavy, and behind him Nyla Christophe. She had her clothes back on now, a skirt and a modestly long-sleeved blouse, though from the way they molded themselves to her I wasn't at all sure she had anything underneath them. "Enjoyed your dinner, fellows?" she asked cheerfully. "Now you've got to sing for your supper. I went in to the Albuquerque office to talk to Washington on a secure line, and it's working out just the way I thought. There'll be orders for us all tonight!"

She nodded to Moe, who put the box down on the floor and began pulling stuff out of it. A big thing with two turntables that he plugged into a wall outlet, a couple of huge reels of magnetic wire, a microphone the size of my fist on a long cord.

The other Larry Douglas, the one who had not come with me through the portal, said worriedly, "Nyla? What kind of orders are we talking about?" She grinned and pointed an index finger up toward the sky. "Washington?" he squealed, his voice changing with sudden tension. "But, listen, Nyla, I don't know diddly-shit about any of this—"

"You do now, lover," she said fondly. "Moe? You ready to record?" -