Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I hadn't expected him to, because I'd already heard how pissed he was at the disruption of his home life with troops and equipment, not to mention the disruption of his schedule because he had had to cancel every appointment with every person who wasn't cleared to know what was going on . . . which was almost everybody. "There you are," he snapped to sweet-faced, bland-smiling Nancy Davis. "I've got to talk to you, right now!"

She wasn't fazed in the least. Affably, she said, "Certainly, Mr. President. What can I do for you?"

"You can tell me what the hell kind of person you are," he snarled. "You don't respond to my public messages at all! What does it take to get you to act?"

"I guess you mean that other me, Mr. President," she said, smiling. She really had a dimple when she wanted it—a triumph, I was sure, of the cosmetic surgeon's art. "I don't know if I can tell you that. After all, I'm not really the President—here."

"Make believe you are, for God's sake!" he roared. "Do you have any idea what's resting on this? I'm not talking about this cockamamie other world, I'm talking about here. The Russians are getting really nasty about the 'parade preparations' and the 'archaeological study site' in New Mexico, and there are too many people involved. It's only a question of time till the word gets out, and what are they going to do then?" As she opened her mouth he said, "No, that's not what I'm asking you—what the hell would you know about that? I'm asking you about you. The other you. Would it help, do you think, if I canceled this operation and tried to get you, the other you, on the phone? President-to-President? A one-on-one talk?"

"Why, I think that would depend on what you said, Mr. President," she said thoughtfully.

"I'd say the truth!" he barked. "Might be an interesting change, at that."

"Well," she said slowly, "I rather think, Mr. President, that I'd remember my oath of office. I suppose it's the same one you took. To defend the United States against all enemies, domestic or external—even if they're both domestic and external, so to speak. What I would not do, I think, is allow my country to be invaded by anybody at all without fighting back with everything I had—even if the invaders were my own country."

He glared at her, baffled. Then he glared around the room, particularly at the uniformed men. I think that was the only time in my life when I was glad I was a lowly field-grade officer, with no responsibility for high-level planning. I would not have liked to be on the Combined Chiefs of Staff right at that moment.

Then he sank slowly into a chair, gazing into space. One of his flunkies whispered urgently in his ear, but the President shook him off. "So we've got a war on our hands after all," he said.

No one responded to that.

There was a lot of silence in the room. The anxious flunky glanced at his wristwatch, then at Jerry Brown. Without looking at him, the President said, "I know. It's probably academic by now. Take a look out the window and see if it's started."

The aide was a youngish man, no more than thirty-five, but he looked more like a hundred as he moved stiffly toward the long green drapes.

He didn't have to, actually, because by then we could all hear the racket of truck motors and tank diesels starting up.

Then everybody was at the windows. There were three of them, and instinctively we left the one in the middle for the President's solitary use. He made his way slowly over and stood gazing thoughtfully and silently at the hot August night outside, while all the rest of us crowded around the other two.

What we were looking at was the South Lawn, usually reserved for photo opportunities with visiting heads of state or Easter egg hunts for the Washington children. Someone had built a huge, flimsy tarpaulin structure to shield something from eyes in the street or overhead, but from our window we could see what it contained: the huge black rectangle of a portal, like a movie screen before the picture has started to show, only black. Even though I'd done it before, it was unnerving to look at that thing and imagine plunging into it.

It was even more unnerving when the first squadron of six whippet tanks roared through and disappeared, churning up the already battered grass . . . after them a dozen personnel carriers with combat-ready machine-gunners and Rangers . . . after them a company of paratroops in camouflage suits on foot .

The President sighed and turned away. He walked out of the room, his ducklings waddling after, into the corridors that were also beginning to get noisy with the inside part of the operation. And the ones of us still left in the room looked at each other.

Because we knew that we were likely to be next.

It all went pretty briskly after that—as you might expect, because it was all downhill. People were rushing around, flinging orders in all directions; the sparks flew. I felt the tingle. I worked myself up to a fair-to-middling case of jitters, mostly over the question of how I was going to find something so heroic to do that it would placate even old General Ratface Magruder. Then they hustled us out of the Green Room, up a stair, down a hall, past guards with rapid-fire weapons at the ready . . . and there we were. In the Oval Office itself. Occupying the very seat of majesty.

It didn't look the way any seat of majesty was supposed to look. It looked like moving day, with a little bit of a mad-scientist laboratory for dessert. The big presidential desk had been shoved against a wall. Thousand-dollar armchairs and five-thousand-dollar couches had been stacked against another. And in the center of the room a rectangle of copper tubing surrounded nothing, like an empty picture frame. It filled the center of the room floor-to-ceiling, with the squat boxes of the portal field generator on one side of it and the control panels on the other.

The field was down.

Nothing was happening but yelling and confusion, because that scarey, velvety black nothing did not fill the rectangle. You could see right through it, and what I saw was a full bird colonel whimpering with rage and frustration, while his technicians ripped the panels apart, trying to find the blown fuse that had crashed the portal. Three-quarters of a platoon of assault troops stood glowering before the panel, while their captain helped things along by yelling at the back of the colonel's head, A captain should not talk to a colonel like that. The colonel was too deep in misery to hear it.

It was not a peaceful scene.

The portal master came toward us. She was a major. She wasn't yelling at anyone. Her face showed no expression at all but terminal weariness. She told my corporals, "You're on hold. We only got eight men through before it crashed, and you might be scrubbed. Stay out of the way."

Colonel-corporal Frankenhurst gave us a jerk of the head, meaning do it, but tarried to ask, "How's it going on the other side?"

We tarried to hear. Needlessly. It was a dumb question. The portal master didn't try to answer it. She just turned and plodded away; because, of course, she didn't know. She couldn't. Once the troops were through that portal they were gone. They could not be seen or heard. They could not come back to report. They could not even get a message through until a portal generator was through and operational on the other side. If we had had a peeper working but in this rig the peeper field was tied to the portal itself, and neither was working. We didn't know a thing. .

And then we did, and it was bad. The operation was a tactical surprise, a complete success in every way but one. We hadn't done what it was set up for. Madame President had been hustled away through an exit no one had mapped.

Within ten minutes two-way traffic was established on all floors, but by then it didn't matter any more. We took prisoners by the score. We had flushed guards and Secret Servicemen out of every butler's pantry and clothes closet. I saw President Reagan's own military attache, a brigadier general in full-dress uniform, wearing an expression of fury and resentment—"why was it me?" We even had the First Gentleman, caught going back for the videocassettes of his old films, but we didn't have the one we wanted.