Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I didn't ask why.

My conversation with Dorothy hadn't been exactly joyous. Neither was this one. I started out with two big worries—the invasion of Epsilon by Gamma, and ballistic recoil. The call didn't ease either of them. It made them worse. "The events we were monitoring," Harry said tersely, "are still proceeding. And as to the other thing— have you seen the TV news?"

"How the devil would I get time to watch television, Harry?"

"You might want to make time," he said gloomily. "There are intrusions popping up all over the place—we can't get instrumentation around fast enough to check them all. But when you get a thunderstorm on three tables of a Sunday-school picnic and clear skies everywhere else, you don't need instrumentation to know what's happening." Then he added a new worry. "The secretary wants to know why you brought those Tau people back."

"But Douglas spilled his guts to them," I protested. "That's policy! You set it yourself—limit knowledge, keep the ones who don't have it from getting it."

He stared at my picture. "You were sent to bring Douglas back, and to rescue one involuntary emigre, the senator. Nobody told you to manufacture four new emigres. What are you going to do with them now?"

Since I didn't have an answer to that, I was glad to hang up and let the executive type have his turn at the phone.

I made my way back up the aisle to the midships stew coop. On the way I passed the two other Dominics, both of whom wanted to talk. I didn't. I gave a friendly wave to each and kept right on going. They would have to wait. I had to think about what Harry Rosenthal had asked me.

The stews were busily pulling bubbles of scrambled eggs out of the microwave, but when I said, "Steerage, please," they didn't argue. They knew what they had in steerage. One of them broke off long enough to put me on the little elevator, and it carried me down to the X-class passenger compartment below.

Airlines use the below-decks passenger space in the widebodies for all kinds of purposes. Some put first-class bars there. One or two filled them with seats they sold at a cut rate-there wasn't any easy way of getting out of them if there was trouble, and so they weren't exactly popular with most travelers. Trans-Continental used them for couchettes-dormir on long flights, and sometimes for special purposes on shorter ones.

We were a very special purpose.

We were even more special than what they ordinarily euphemistically meant by a "special purpose," which is to say for transporting prisoners. There weren't any prisoners here, exactly. There were the two FBI people from Tau and their Larry Douglas, who had committed no crimes anybody in our world cared much about. Then there was our own Larry Douglas. Whose status was pretty murky; whose trial, if he ever had one, would set about a million precedents—I'd already heard the lawyers argue about what "jurisdiction" meant in his case. No prisoners. The flic-de-nation who was sitting by himself, reading an in-flight magazine, wasn't a guard.Just a precaution.

I came in from the front of the compartment. There was room for thirty people in it, and our lot didn't crowd it at all. The FBI woman and her anthropoid were sitting at the far end of one row, whispering to each other. More accurately, the woman was whispering and the bruiser was listening humbly and respectfully. Neither of them looked up. Their Larry Douglas was across the aisle, wistfully trying to get invited into the conversation. They weren't interested. And our own Larry was sitting with his head down in the first row, imaging hopelessness. He didn't look up either, but I knew he had seen me come out of the elevator.

I looked at him for a moment. What a lot of hell this man had unleashed! When we found out for sure what he was doing—when the people he was working for made the quantum leap from talk to deployment—we had to decide what to do about him. I voted for going after him. It was a close decision. My first impulse was to send him some token of our esteem, like a pack of rabid wolves. Though I didn't say it, it seemed still like an attractive idea.

Though I hadn't said it, he lifted his head and whined, "I couldn't help it, Dom! They were going to torture me!"

I was surprised to hear a contralto laugh from farther back in the compartment. The FBI woman had quit conspiring to listen; it seemed she'd heard that song before. "It's true," he said desperately. "And anyway it's your fault, Dom."

That jolted me. I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but he was ahead of me. "You could have stopped it! You could have come after me. Why weren't you peeping me the whole time?"

The gall of the man! That was back in the early days of the project, long before we had had the resources to mount both portal and peeper at the same time. "We didn't because we couldn't," I snapped. He gave me a rebellious look.

The bruiser took a hand in the conversation. "What are you going to do with us?" he growled.

The woman looked on silently. It was like hearing a puppet speak when its owner is absent; I was almost surprised to find the ape was capable of articulate speech at all. "As an attorney," he boomed—bigger surprise still—"I got to tell you you're violating our civil rights like a million different ways, Charlie. You been keeping us incommunicado, which is depriving us of our habeas corpus; you ain't read us our rights or charged us with no indictable act or deed; you kept us from the right of consultation with our lawyer—"

"You just said you are a lawyer," I protested.

"Even a lawyer has a right to a lawyer," he said virtuously, "so what the hell about it, Jackson?"

I looked helplessly at the woman. "Is this goon really an attorney?"

She shrugged, grinning. "Says he is. That's how he got into the bureau. Personally I think he bought it from a diploma mill. Anyway, what about it?"

"What about what?"

"What are you going to do about us?" she asked politely. "Because, honestly, Moe's right. You must have some kind of laws around here, and I'm willing to bet you're breaking a whole bunch of them."

She was a lot too close to what I believed myself for me to be comfortable with the conversation. I tried diversion. "What would you do if you were me?" I asked.

"Why," she said, grinning, "I'd save up my money to pay off a hell of a huge damage judgment, once we get to court, and I'd probably start arranging my affairs for the next ten years in the slammer."

And that, too, did not seem at all unrealistic. I mean, given a good lawyer on their side, and a few bad breaks on mine. This sort of thing was not at all what I had been prepared to risk when I signed up for the project.

And it was all so unfair! I'd seen the bruises on Nicky DeSota's body. I'd heard him say what this pair had done to him. Civil rights? What civil rights had they given him?

And yet in their own time they weren't lawbreakers. They were the law!

I said slowly, "I don't think you really know what you're up against."

"Then tell us," she invited.

I hesitated. Then I reached back and picked up the phone. When the head stew answered, I said, "Will you ask the gentlemen in 22-A and 22-F to step down here? And, oh, yes, how about some breakfasts all around?"

It's a queasy feeling looking at yourself. I'd had it often enough before through the peepholes, looking at one Dominic DeSota or another in one time-line or another—it was even queasier when I couldn't find any Dominic DeSota at all. (Or sometimes no anybody, but I don't like to think about those time-lines.)

The worst part was wondering where I had gone wrong. Or sometimes where I had gone right—but always different. I couldn't say that Senator Dom had gone wrong. Even in the ill-fitting and dirty fatigues, munching his not very good hash browns, he looked like somebody who had made something of his life.