Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

He stopped, waiting. Nyla was thinking. "So you defected," she said.

"I helped them," he corrected. "I didn't have any choice, did I?"

"And you could help us," she said and smiled, all sex and sunshine again.

"Now, wait a minute!" he objected. "I—! Maybe I could try, but— Look at that wire recorder! If that's the best you can do, you don't even have solid-state technology. I need something to build on, you know!"

She said gently, "How about building on the entire resources of the United States government?" And when he frowned: "You did it for the-what do you call them? The Gamma people-"

"But they threatened to beat the hell out of me-"

He stopped short, gazing at her.

She smiled. She waited a moment to let it sink in. Then she did something I would not have expected. She got up, still smiling, walked over to him and sat on the arm of his chair, her hand on his far shoulder, her body pressed against his head. If I had suspected she wore nothing under the blouse before, now I was sure of it. She toyed with his ear. "We don't threaten," she said silkily. Another pause, while Douglas glared around the room: trapped animal being offered bait. "On the other hand," she went on, her voice softer and huskier, "we do reward. Oh, yes, hon, we reward. I would personally reward you every way I could."

I could almost smell the pheromones steaming out of her.

So could the local Larry Douglas. "Bitch," he whispered, so softly that I could barely hear him, though he was right next to me on the edge of the bed. "You know what she's up to? She's ambitious, old Nyla is. She's going to use this to get right out of the FBI, right up to the top. And when she gets that poor son of a bitch in bed, he'll do anything she wants—believe me, I know!"

He stopped, because Moe was glowering at us.

He hadn't stopped in time. I swallowed, and my saliva had a sudden bitter taste of rage. How crazy that was! I was jealous! I was jealous of the little rat sitting next to me, so hotly jealous I could barely keep my hands off him, and for what? Because he had bedded this other Nyla!

Crazy.

It was worse than crazy. I knew it. I didn't care. If I could have pushed a button and exterminated the bastard, I would have done it in a hot minute. Not just him. The one she was whispering to across the room too—especially him! Not just even him. I was willing to extend my detestation to all Larry Douglases, or even look-alikes, like my old acquaintance and drinking buddy, His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador, the Honorable Lavrenti Yosifovitch Djugashvili.

It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get.

I was so filled with rage and jealousy inside my own head that I hardly noticed when Nyla sat up straight, scowling. She glared at the window. "Moe," she ordered, "close the damn blinds! I don't want the whole world gaping in here!"

"Chief," he protested, "nobody's looking in—"

"Close them!" And she turned back, all smiles again, to the man who was obviously responding to whatever it was she had been whispering.

And I was on fire.

It was obsessive. I wanted to possess that woman, right then, and I was willing to kill anybody who challenged me for her. I was paying so little attention to anything else that I hardly noticed the faint thwick sound that came from nowhere, was distracted only on the surface of my mind when Moe, turning away from the window, seemed to trip and fall forward, crashing into the wire recorder. I did not fully come back to reality until Nyla herself jumped up, face suddenly full of shock and anger, opening her mouth to yell— There was another thwick.

Nyla, too, fell like a brain-shot deer. I could see a tiny feathered dart gleaming out of the thin fabric over one shoulder.

We looked at each other in amazement. And then all questions were answered for me as there was a quick puff of air pressure, like a door slamming closed on a tight, tiny room, and there, grinning at me, was me. That other me that wore the funny coveralls. "Hello, again," he said, nodding. "Here, give me a hand, let's get her out of the way."

The Douglases were quicker at following orders than I; they jumped, however bewildered, and tugged the sleeping woman out of the middle of the floor.Just in time. Another quick, silent pulse of pressure, and a tall, cylindrical metal object appeared on the floor. "Just keep quiet, please," the new Dominic ordered. He pulled open a panel on the cylinder, fussed with what was inside, and looked up, waiting.

A shimmering oval of blackness spread itself before us.

"Looks like it's working," he said, and shrugged. He was smiling. I found myself smiling back—whoever he was, whatever he represented, it was not likely to be worse than what I had here. He glanced around the room. "We'd better not hang around," he said, "but I think we ought to take these two along with us. Let's get the woman through first."

By then I was functioning well enough to help, though it was no great effort for four of us to lift Nyla's sleeping form through the black oval. It was, however, truly eerie—not just to watch her disappear, inch by inch, but to feel unseen hands on the other side catch her and pull her through.

The apeman was a lot harder. But there were four of us, not counting the help on the other side. "Now all of you," ordered the Dominic-in-charge. We obliged: the wimpy Dominic wonderingly, the ratty Douglas resentfully, the snakebitten Douglas fearfully— and me fairly fearfully, too, as I followed them.

Hot dark night, except for floodlights. I came out on a rough platform of wood, with two men in civilian clothes grabbing my arms. "Just move away, please," one of them said, eyes on the spot I'd come from.

In a moment the black cylinder appeared.

In another moment Dr. Dominic DeSota of Paratime Alpha popped into sight. "Got it all," he crowed, looking delighted with himself. "You fellows, welcome to Paratime Alpha—and you, Doug"—turning to the fearful one—"welcome home."

But Douglas-Alpha did not look in the least joyful about it.

Out in the northwest suburbs a householder finished his second cup of coffee, stretched, found his White Sox cap to keep the sun out of his eyes, and put it on. Vacation time was the time to get caught up on the chores around the house, and the back lawn needed mowing. As soon as he opened the sliding door to the patio he stopped short, marveling. "Marcia, "he called, "come look! We've got hummingbirds in the marigolds! We never had hummingbirds before!" And he watched his wife 'sface as she came up to see, first the polite curiosity, then the smile of pleasure. . . then the other expression that followed and wiped the smile away. He could not understand the sudden shock on her face, until he turned and saw what was eating the hummingbirds.

27 August 1983

12:30 A,M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P.

You can't see much out of the windows of an Army transport jet, but as we banked steeply somewhere over the Capitol I could see the whole District spread out under us. It didn't look warlike. They had the floodlights on the White House and the Lincoln Memorial, and there were long lines of car headlights and taillights because everybody in Washington was out to celebrate T.G.I.F. night. . . . No! Right along the Potomac there were only a few lights on the roads, and they didn't look like the usual car traffic. Some were single bright spotlights. Some were the faint glow that comes from the slitted headlamps of military vehicles. I leaned across the aisle to the dozing infantry colonel and tapped his shoulder. "If those are what I think they are," I yelled, "won't the Russian satellites spot them?"

He peered past me to see what I was talking about. "Oh, yeah." He grinned. "They're practicing for the Labor Day parade. What did you think?"