Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"Yes, and in those lines Lyndon Johnson was President twenty years ago, and before that you were. Only—" He hesitated, as though it were hard to say it. "Only in that time you were assassinated in office, Senator. By a man named Lee Harvey Oswald."

Jacqueline either swallowed or gasped—the sound was somewhere in between. Jack glanced worriedly at her, then back at Dom. His expression was as divided as her sound. For the top half of his face his eyebrows were quirked with mild curiosity; but his jaw muscles were clenched. "Lee Harvey Oswald? Wait a minute-was it—yes, I remember, the guy who shot the governor of Texas?"

"The same one."

"Remackable," said Jack Kennedy. There didn't seem to be anything else for anyone to say. It was a conversation-stopper. Then Jack shook himself. "My poor wife," he said, smiling and patting Jackie's hand. "Do you know what kind of a widow she made, Dr. DeSota?"

"I, uh, don't remember exactly," that Dom said apologetically, and for some reason I didn't think he was telling the truth. Jack nodded absently. He thought the same, it was clear; but he was saved from having to ask questions by a major with gold braid dripping from his shoulders. He came into the room, fresh-shaved, hair neatly brushed, eyes as weary as any man's I have ever seen; he looked as though he hadn't slept for two or three nights running, and probably he had not.

"Senator DeSota?" he said tentatively, looking from one Dominic to another. "The President will see you now. All three of you, sir," he added. And Dom, my Dom, hugged me, kissed my cheek, and got up to leave me.

I sat down with the Kennedys. I suppose we talked. I'm not sure what we talked about, because my mind was too full of things. Including the other Nyla. Although we had discontinued our staring match, we had not lost interest. She was standing by the buffet table, dexterously if thumbless sly slicing bits of cheese for herself and her anthropoid companion. Although I didn't catch her eyes on me, I was sure that every time I looked toward her she had just looked away. I wasn't in any doubt about that impression, because I was doing the same for her. It almost seemed to me that she was more interested in me than I was in her, or anyway interested in me in a different way. Not just idle curiosity. Purposeful, although I couldn't imagine what the purpose was.

I decided that she and I needed to talk.

I didn't put the decision into practice, though, because just as I was making up my mind to go over to her, Lavrenti Djugashvili, the real one, came in, smiling, mopping his brow, gazing curiously at the other Nyla before coming over to me. "So very confusing!" he said, kissing my hand and then Jacqueline's. "Such a difficult day!"

"You brought your boys over?" Jack Kennedy asked.

"Oh, yes, of course, Zupchin and Merejkowsky, two brilliant physicists from Lenin Theoretical Studies Institute. Then I was advised my own presence no longer desired," he added wryly.

"Gave you a hard time, did she?" asked Senator Kennedy sympathetically.

Lavi shrugged. "I speak no evil of your President," he said, spreading his hands to show how fair-minded he was being, "but it is clear to me she does not like Communists, myself very much included."

The senator also demonstrated his fairness. "I don't speak much good of the lady myself," he said, "because she's in the wrong patty. All the same, she's got a lot on her mind, Lavi. They've captured her husband. They've taken over her White House. She doesn't want to be reasonable right now, and most of all she doesn't want to be the first American President since 1812 to have an enemy occupy her capital."

"Oh, yes, to be sure," Lavrenti agreed. "Especially since there is this new activity from the invaders He paused, looking at us. "You have not been informed? But even on the television the news is there for all to see! Surely there is such a device somewhere in this palatial apartment? Come, let us find it!"

There was indeed such a device, although it was hidden behind the doors of a carved mahogany breakfront, and, yes, there was plenty of news on it for us.

None of it was good.

We tuned in in the middle of live-action shots of hard fighting. It wasn't in some faraway land. It was only blocks away from us, at the far end of the Mall, all around the Capitol. Tanks and personnel carriers seemed to be coming from around the Supreme Court building, fanning out to take the Capitol in pincers from both sides. There were bodies there. The camera zoomed in to take a closer look at some of them, and I wished it hadn't. Cut to another shot, and we were looking at a file of tanks. Peculiar ones. I did not quite understand why they seemed peculiar until Lavi choked out something—it sounded angry and dirty, but I couldn't tell what, because it was in Russian. He switched to English to say, "Is a new weapon, Dominic!"

And then the proportions sorted themselves out. They were tanks, but they were tiny—not more than six or seven feet long, only knee-high off the ground, and each one with a great gun swinging from side to side over its body like the whip of a scorpion. "Have nothing like this in Soviets," Lavi said plaintively.

"We don't in this America, either," said Jack Kennedy. "Radio-controlled, I bet! Sweet Baby Jesus, look at that sucker shoot!" Because those cannon weren't for show, they were firing on the Capitol, and at each round great mushrooms of masonry and smoke popped out of the Capitol walls.

The scene changed. We were looking at NBC's war room, very much like the election-night headquarters they trotted out every year. Behind Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor was a wall-to-wall situation map of the District of Columbia, and they were explaining what had been happening.

They didn't have to say much. The pictures said it all. Nearly a quarter of the city was now shaded red—red for occupying forces— the area around the Capitol where we had just been looking, the White House, the Ellipse, and most of the space around the Washington Monument, a big section along the river, and spotty areas all over the District. And along most of the perimeters there were flashing red lights that signaled actual combat going on right now.

Brokaw was pointing to the Capitol. "The most recent breakthrough," he said, "began without warning just forty-five minutes ago at First Street and Constitution Avenue. Simultaneously fighting broke out at nearly every other point in the city where our troops face theirs." He named them, one by one, and then began a recap. "Incongruously," he said, "there has been constant telephone contact between the headquarters of the invaders, in the White House, and ours, at an undisclosed location somewhere within the District. It is known that the invaders have captured three Cabinet members and at least three-quarters of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and their immediate staffs, as well as several senators, congressmen, and other major figures of government. Ronald Reagan is himself a captive. All of the hostages, as our government has termed them, have been allowed to make taped voice messages that have been transmitted by telephone. Here is the voice of General Westmoreland—"

I had heard it. I didn't hear it again. I was looking at Nyla Christophe, and this time she was looking back at me. From the little Dom had whispered to me I had expected, I don't know, a kind of Gestapo agent combined with Mata Han. She didn't look like that. What she looked like was me. She was sitting on her hands, so I couldn't see them. What I could see was a woman of my age, my face, my body—well, no, perhaps she was six or eight pounds slimmer than I, but that certainly was not to her discredit—a woman whom I might have seen look back at me out of my mirror any morning. I knew that she had instilled fear. I had never done that, no, not to anyone at any time; I didn't think it was possible for me to cause physical fear in anyone, ever. But I had not grown up in a world that cut a young woman's thumbs off for shoplifting. She didn't speak to me, though there seemed to be nothing hostile in the way she studied my face. I didn't speak to her, either, though I was beginning to feel that if we did talk, if somewhere the two of us might somehow sit down together over a just-us-girls-together dinner (it would be mostly salads, with perhaps one small cocktail to make it festive), we might, in fact, get along very well.