Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

But what about the other one?

He surely did not look like any kind of success. Rumpled business suit—and long pants at that! Imagine long pants in August! He didn't sound that way, either. He talked like somebody whose world wasn't much to begin with, and lately had gone definitely sour.

Still, I could see him livening up before my eyes. When the pulseur took off he was really shaken—closed his eyes, pressed his whole body back against the seat as though he were trying to disappear inside it. I made sure I had an airsick bag ready as we stood on our tail at eight hundred kilometers an hour. I couldn't blame him.

He'd never been in a pulseur before, and not too often in even the clumsy old piston-engine walruses of his time.

I did not know if I would have done any bitter in his place. No, wrong. I knew I would not.

I wasn't sure I would have done as well as the senator, either, though the fact that he had was encouraging. He was next to Nicky, helping him get the plastic off his scrambled eggs, watching me to see what I was going to say. When I didn't say anything for a moment, trying to figure out how to begin, he did. "Dom," he said, "I appreciate being rescued, but I've got responsibilities in my own time. Can you get me back there?"

"I hope so, Dom," I said.

He looked at me appraisingly. "You could have saved a lot of trouble if you'd told me what was happening the first time we met," he offered.

"I do what I'm told to do, Dom," I said. "There's a lot at stake here." The woman snickered; she'd had a lot of practice listening to people talk generalities when the specifics were embarrassing. I flushed. "I'll tell you anything you want to know," I said, "because you all have a right to that much, but let me start with the basics. Accord? You all know by now that there are parallel times. An infinity of them. We can't reach them all, not even by peeping—well, that's what 'infinity' means, after all. The only times we've been able to reach so far have diverged sometime within the last ninety or ninety-five years. Only a few hundred of those, actually, but there are some interesting ones. In some of them the Communists took over the whole of Europe by 1933, with that supreme military genius Trotsky running the country. Then there's a whole set where Franklin D. Roosevelt escaped assassination and lived to become President. So the country was spared the military takeover and the interregnum, when it turned out there was nothing in the Constitution to say who became President when a President-elect died before assuming office, and so Garner and Hoover both claimed the office—until the Army stepped in and imposed martial law. Then there were—"

"Dom," said the senator patiently, "I guess we've got nothing better to do as long as we're on this airplane, but I don't know if history is the thing we're most interested in."

"I was only giving some illustrations."

"Sure. But we understand about parallel times—well, no, that's a lie. I don't understand. But enough to go on: every time some, I don't know, goofatron in the whatsicle splits there's a whole new universe created, right? Something like that? Well, why don't you first come to the nearest one instead of some world that's really a lot different, in a lot of ways?"

"Ah," I said, nodding, "that's a good question." I felt solid ground beneath my feet; I'd been through this with Senate committees and budget planners often enough. "First I'll give you the technical answer: it's because of what Steve Hawking calls 'permeable-fixed n-space contiguity,' if that's any help." I knew it wasn't. Snort from Moe, the anthropoid, varying expressions of polite detachment from the other men. Nyla Christophe was the only one who showed friendly concern, curiously enough. She gave me an encouraging nod as she dexterously scooped up her scrambled eggs. She didn't look at what she was doing, didn't drop a crumb, thumbless or not. And she didn't miss a word. "I'll give you an analogy. Think of the relationship between the time domains as a coiled spring, with each time strung on it, one after another, like a bead. If you number every bead, of course number five is right before bead number six, and right after bead number four—they're neighbors. But the spring is coiled. So time five may actually be touching time number six hundred and fifty-two, and on the other side of that one is maybe time number fifteen hundred and something, depending on what the radius of curvature is. Are you following me so far?"

"Maybe," called Christophe, speaking for all of them.

"Right. Then—I hate to do this—but, you see, the spring isn't curved in normal three-dimensional space. It's in n dimensions, and I don't know what n is. So proximity makes a difference—that's why we haven't been able to reach times where the split occurred more than ninety or ninety-five years ago, except in occasional fugitive glimpses. But the 'nearest' isn't the 'easiest' to reach, or anyway not always. Have I lost you?"

"Just about," said Nicky, smiling for the first time. "But it's fun to keep trying to understand!"

I said helpfully, "If you get a chance, there's an Asimov called The Intelligent Man's Guide to Quantum Mechanics."

"No, thanks," said Nicky. "But keep on, please."

"Well, that's about enough for theory. Some of you knew that already, of course." I glanced neutrally at our renegade Larry Douglas, who scowled and went back to his orange juice and roll. "So we developed the peeper, and then the portal. I don't want to go into the technology of that stuff. For one thing I can't—"

"But you're the fellow who invented it," balled Christophe.

I shrugged. "If it's credit you're giving—well, no. Certainly not single-handed. We had Gribbin and Hawking from England, Sverdlich from Smolensk—and, of course, we had all the French emigre scientists after Bartholomew Two, so we had a solid base of mathematicians and nuclear physicists available. But if you're blaming me— Well, I'll take that." I took a deep breath. "Because what we hadn't counted on was ballistic recoil."

I don't know what sort of reaction I had expected. I got three different ones—four, if you count the flic, who looked worried. Larry looked despondent. The other Larry and the two FBI people looked opaque: the poker face was a Tau trait, I had discovered, probably because it was not a time when you wanted other people to know what you were thinking very often. And the two Dominics looked interested. I took a swallow of my cooling coffee-I hadn't even touched the solid food yet—and tried to explain:

"There's a tension between the worlds. Call it a skin. Once it's punctured anywhere, it is weakened everywhere: It's a little like that heat-sealed plastic wrapping that the meat comes in in supermarkets, you know?" They didn't. "Like the stuff your eggs were wrapped in," I said. "It's in a state of tension. When we puncture it anywhere it takes a lot of power, but then the skin is weaker— thinner—in other places. It's hard to predict just where the other places will be, because the geometry is fractal—well, never mind that; it's just hard. But it thins. At first radiation is all that gets through; then gases. Then—more than gases." I looked at our own Larry. "Since you, uh, left," I told him, "we've come across some bad ones. Large areas open, causing violent storms. And—well, there was one that killed a lot of people. Time Eta had built apartments over an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Two diesels and four or five flatcars came through at eighty kilometers an hour, right into the lobby of a building, before it closed again."

Nicky put his hand up. "Doc? There were some stories about loud noises around a little airfield—could they have been that? From a time where they had rocketships, like this one?"