Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

It did not seem to reassure him at all. "Civilians!" he cried. "But why don't they— I mean, at least they could— Aren't they evacuating the noncombatants, for God's sake?"

"I believe there is some of that, yes," I said, puzzling over his reaction: he had already told me that his family was a thousand miles away, in his Chicago home.

"I've got to get back," he said strongly.

"We're going to do that, Dom," I said. "I think. You understand that it isn't up to me. But that's what I've recommended. In fact, I've recommended that we all go through to Washington, D.C., Epsilon—that's your time, Senator—to show them what is happening, and offer whatever help we can. Almost all, I mean," I added, glancing at our own Larry Douglas, who shrugged, unsurprised.

There was an interruption from the other Larry Douglas. "I don't want to go back anywhere," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I claim sanctuary!" he said forcefully. "I don't want to go back to my own time, because of, uh, political persecution, and I don't want to go skylarking around to get involved in whatever damn wars are being fought anywhere. You got me into this mess. You owe me something. I want to stay here."

The big goon rose threateningly in his seat. So, immediately, did the flic-de-nation, reaching for the holstered dartgun at his side. Christophe put her hand on Moe's shoulders, and the big man subsided at once, though the look he gave Douglas-Tau was murderous.

"We can talk about that later," said Christophe pleasantly. "Let's deal with one thing at a time. You said there were three problems. You've only told us two of them."

"Ah, yes," I said somberly. "The other new element in the equation. We're being peeped ourselves. We don't know who, or for what purpose. But it's happening."

Christophe chortled. "Welcome to the club!"

Our Larry said pettishly—brave with the flic between him and her—"Oh, shut up, you. Dom? Is this something new since I, uh, left?"

I nodded. "We don't know the source. We can't trace it back— there's indications that they're using technology a lot better than anything we've got. But we get instrument readings from at least fifty places. Somebody's watching us, and they've been doing it, now, for about three months."

"So you're in the same spot we were a few days ago," said the senator neutrally.

"I'm afraid so," I said.

He pursed his lips, thinking it through. "And what are you going to do now, Dom?" he asked. "Are you going to send me back to my own time?"

"I think that's what they've got in mind for you, Dom," I said. "In fact, I think we're all going. You because you live there. Me and Larry because we can tell them things they need to know to defend themselves. And the others because—well, because they're living proof of the existence of other worlds." And because they're a nuisance, I thought but did not say out loud: a couple of FBI people and a mortgage broker, who needed them in our time?

I took a forkful of my scrambled eggs at last. They were cold and awful, but I didn't have much appetite anyway.

When the cleaners entered the McCormick Place auditorium to get ready for the Winter Sports Show, the lights disturbed a bat. "How the hell did that get in here?" complained the supervisor; but the big question was how to get rid of it before the show opened. That question solved itself The bat blundered around wildly. Finally it blundered out through the big loading-dock doors, as snowmobiles were being carried in. No one there thought of it again. No one knew that it was of any importance—until, over the next weeks, feral cats, wide-ranging suburban dogs, and ultimately human beings began dying of the rabies virus the bat had brought with it.

27 August 1983

8:40 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist

They kicked me out of my pretty suite in the hotel. Even Slavi couldn't prevent it, because the whole top part of the hotel was taken over by the President and her staff when the White House was occupied; but he made the manager give me a room on the fifth floor. It was all right. There was a bed for me, and a bed for Amy. She didn't mind listening to me practice, and there certainly was no other reason in the world why either of us needed privacy. Not for my dear Dom's visits, because Dom wasn't around. Not even for my phone calls from my husband in Chicago, because there were very few of those. Not even Ferdie could get through the clogged lines to Washington most of the time.

That was a mercy, because I still had not made any sensible decision about what to say to Ferdie.

I hadn't made very many sensible decisions of any kind, it seemed to me. Staying in a war zone wasn't sensible in the first place. Effectively I was trapped. The airport was in enemy hands, so were all the bridges over the Potomac, so might be almost any road leading out of the capital, because the troops of the other guys were turning up in at least patrol strength almost anywhere. By the time I had finished dithering about whether to catch the next flight to Rochester, there wasn't any next flight to Rochester, and there were firecracker sounds from all over the city that were scary.

The radio said the gunfire wasn't serious. I didn't agree. When I looked out the window and saw the smoke from Anacostia, or the top chopped off the Washington Monument because those other guys had thought our guys had an artillery spotter up there, it looked serious enough for me.

So when jock McClenty knocked on my door I opened it scared.

I didn't expect good news. I couldn't imagine where good news might come from, that mean and rainy Saturday night. When I saw Dom's assistant, with the Secret Service man standing beside him, my first guess was that we were all being arrested. "Mrs. Bowquist," said jock, "it's the senator. He's back. He's right here in the hotel, and he sent us to bring you to him."

Well, that was it. I cried. Buckets. I don't know why, exactly, I guess most likely because I had been storing up tears unshed for so many different reasons that any nudge would spill them over the top. Out of my eyes they came. I was still crying when we got to the penthouse, although it took quite a long time-we had to go clear down to the lobby, pass through city police at one checkpoint and Secret Service people at another before we got into an elevator in a different bank.

Sniffling into the fifth or sixth Kleenex the Secret Service man had given me (how nicely they train those people!), I got out and looked around. It was a suite that made my old suite look like a peasant hut in Cambodia. Duplex. Ankle-deep. carpeting. Cathedral-style windows in a salon with fifteen-foot ceilings. The first person I saw was Jackie Kennedy, standing by a window and talking to somebody, and the second person I saw was the somebody himself.

It was Dom DeSota.

"Dom!" I yelled, and hurled myself at him, still sniffling.

It was Dom, all right, but he didn't hug me as Dom would have, he didn't say what Dom would have said to me, he didn't even smell like Dom. He smelled of pipe tobacco and a wholly different brand of aftershave, and most of all he did what Dom would never have done.

He pushed me away.

He did it gently—even kindly—but he pushed me away all the same; and so I wasn't in the least surprised when Jackie put her hand on my arm and said, "Nyla, dear? It's the wrong one."

Well, that was all right, as it turned out, because the right one was there too. He was halfway up the circular stair that went to the President's private quarters on the level above, but when he saw me he came whooping and leaping down and I got my hug after all. He didn't say anything at first. He just held me. I held him back, meaning it—meaning it so much that if Marilyn and Ferdie themselves had been there, cameramen on one side of them and their divorce lawyers on the other, I wouldn't have given up one squeeze or one moment. Then he loosened his arms a little, and looked at me, and kissed me; and then he said, "Oh, love!"—glancing back at the stairs.