Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"I am now, chief," he reported, having threaded tape from one reel to another. He flipped a switch, and inside the crisscross metal on the front of the box I could see vacuum tubes—vacuum tubes!— begin to glow.

"So what we're going to do now," said the woman who wore the coveted body I loved, "we're going to take all your statements over again. Don't go volunteering any extra information," she said darkly, directly at that Douglas. "Just answer what I ask you. The director isn't going to want to hear anything about what you were doing in Chicago, or whether you like the treatment you've been getting. Just the essentials; because I'm going to have this whole thing wrapped up before we get on the plane!"

Considering all the questions I had been asked, considering the circumstances of what all of us had to say, I could not see this particular series of interviews ending much before daybreak. I was wrong about that. Nyla Christophe knew exactly what she wanted to have on the record, and asked only what she wanted to know. Nicky DeSota was up first. On request he gave his name, his address, and something called his Civilian Registry Number. After that there were only two questions:

"Have you ever been inside Daleylab?"

''No.''

"Have you ever seen the man present here who resembles you and describes himself as Senator Dominic DeSota before today?"

''No.''

Nyla jerked her head and swept him away, and the local Larry Douglas took his place. For no more elaborate an interrogation. It was the same two questions, except that the man present who resembled him was "Dr. Lawrence Douglas." He gave the same answers, and I was on stage.

I took longer. She ordered, "Start with your being advised that someone like you had been captured in a secret military installation in New Mexico and tell us your story." And she just listened, prompting me with what-happened-next sort of questions and nothing more, except that when I got to the soi-disant major-me who had taken me prisoner, she put in, "Was this man the same as the one who allegedly disappeared while in custody? No? Or the same as the one here present? No? So then you say there are at least four of you? Yes? Then go on."

And I went through the whole thing, even my knocking out the other Nyla, except that I didn't mention the kiss, and most of all I didn't mention that she was indeed a Nyla. "Sergeant Sambok" was description enough. I wasn't asked for more. "And then we landed in deep sand, and there was nothing in sight but desert. There was nobody around. It was burning hot. We had to get out of sight as fast as we could, or anyway we thought we did. We headed southeast, as near as we could tell from the sun. We walked for hours, getting thirstier all the time. Then Douglas said he'd heard that some of the cactus had water inside them, and he tried to pull one of them out of the sand, and there was a snake under it." I hesitated, wondering how much detail the woman wanted. I'd heard the rattles before I saw Douglas jump back, with the snake dropping off his sleeve. It wasn't very big, and the fatigue fabric was tough, so not much venom got in. The funny thing was that he hadn't made a sound,just looked more astonished than any other human being I had ever seen. "By then we had come to a railroad line. We just stayed there until the train crew spotted us."

"Right," said Nyla No-Thumbs, nodding to the apeman. He clicked off the recorder and began the laborious task of changing reels. If Nyla had no thumbs, this man was all thumbs, but she was patient. She had dismissed me entirely. She was devoting all her attention to my involuntary traveling companion, who looked uneasy. I could understand why, because there was something in the gaze she bent on him that I could not quite identify. It was almost— but how could that be?—seductive; and at the same time there was an unmistakable threat. She gave him a warm, sweet smile. "You're on next, hon," she said.

If the first three of us had managed to fill only one reel, this Dr. Lawrence Douglas looked likely to fill every one of the half-dozen spares Moe had brought. Nyla's questions were sharp and to the point; from time to time she referred to a notebook to make sure she was missing nothing.

He started with a surprise. "In the first place," he said, glancing at me with considerable dislike, "the time-line I was kidnapped from is Paratime Gamma. That's not my original one, but—"

"Just a minute, hon. What's 'Gamma'?"

"It's what we call it," he said wearily, "because you have to have some way of identifying them. My own is Alpha. This one is Tau. The senator's is Epsilon—that's the one that's being invaded—and the one I was just in, - the one that's doing the invading, that's Paratime Gamma."

"Go ahead."

"Paratime Gamma didn't invent the portal. We did in Alpha."

"Who's 'we,' hon? Did you invent it?"

"Nobody invents that kind of thing by himself, not things as complicated as the portal—it's like asking who invented the atomic bomb. I was part of the team, but I was only an aprиs-doc when I came on. The ones who made the theoretical breakthroughs were Hawkings and Gribbin in England, and in the United States Dr. DeSota. Got that part straight?"

He wasn't really being sarcastic, just trying to make sure she understood, but off in his corner Moe made a sort of warning growl in his throat. Nyla shook her head without looking at the goon. "Go on," she said, and this time there was no "hon."

He said obediently, "At first all we could do was peep. That means, we could look through the barrier. We could detect radiation, you see; and after a while we began to get real vision. Not for all the paratimes. Some are accessible, most aren't. Dr. DeSota says it's because of resonance effects—we're 'out of tune' with most of the lines. Actually, there is an infinite number of them, of course. When I—uh—when I left, there were about two hundred and fifty that had been mapped, but for most of them we could detect nothing more than a kind of smeary blur. Is this what you want to know?"

"What we want to know, sweetie," said Nyla, "is everything. If you could just peep, how come you're here?"

"No, no," he said, patiently enough, "that was just at first. That was when I joined, along about the beginning of August 1980. In October we were able to send objects through without retrieving them. And by January 1981 we sent a person through. Me." He added ruefully, "I volunteered."

"And how do you do that?" asked Nyla.

He said, still patient—barely patient, "There is not any person in this room who would have the faintest idea what I was talking about if I told you."

Nyla was keeping very good control of herself, but if I had been Douglas-Alpha I would have watched myself pretty closely. She said shortly, "Try."

Douglas must not have liked the look he saw on her face, because he swallowed and hurried on. "I don't mean you wouldn't understand because you're stupid. I mean there are only two ways to describe it. One is with the words we had to coin as we went along— the portal device generates a stream of green-dip chronons which heterodynes against the natural flux of red-flow chronons. Do you see what I mean? Gibberish, right? And the other way is mathematical and, please, you'd need to know at least basic quantum mechanics to have a hope of following it."

I saw what he meant. So did Nyla, but all she said was, "Tell us what the dates were."

He shrugged. "Dr. DeSota's doctoral dissertation was, I guess, the first rigorous proof that there were quantum effects of the kind Schroedinger proposed. That was about 1977. It's what made me go back for my doctorate. Then he and Elbert Gillespie detected the actual chronons in 1979, and developed the peeper a few months later. Then, like I said, I went through to Gamma."