Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

It gradually became clear to me that she and I were not the only ones staring at each other. Lavi Djugashvili had got up to leave, and now he was hesitating. He was studying the two men named Larry Douglas. He whispered to Jack Kennedy, looked perplexed, shook his head, finally spoke up. "Mr. Douglas? May I have a word with you—with both of you, perhaps?"

"Why not?" said one of them—I had no way of telling which.

"I observe," said Lavi, "that we resemble each other very closely. Is it possible that we are related?"

One of the Larry Douglases laughed. "Hell, man, that's a chintzy way to put it. We are a hell of a lot related, you bet. We have the same two parents, and the same four grandparents."

"You mean Grandpa Joe," said the other one, nodding.

"I mean all of them," said the first one. "Grandpa Joe is only the famous one. He was pretty hot stuff eighty or ninety years ago— robbing banks in Siberia, outwitting the law, all that. He came to America when it got too hot for him in Russia and used some of his bank-robbery money to open a fabric wholesaling business in New York. He got pretty rich."

"Same with mine," cried the other one. "Did yours end the same way? Killed by some guy with an ice pick in his summer home in Ashokan?"

"It wasn't an ice pick, and it was winter, and it was in Hobe Sound," said the first one, "but, yes. They said it was political. He'd taken this money that was supposed to go to the Communist cause, you know. That your story, too, Ambassador?"

Lavi stared at them. Then he said heavily, "Up to a point, yes. Only my grandparents didn't leave Russia. Grandpa Joe stayed on, and he got to be pretty famous, under his party name of Stalin." He passed a hand over his face. "All this," he said, "is very disturbing. Please excuse me. I must in any case return to my embassy, but you two gentlemen . .. this situation . . . one would like to discuss—" He stopped and shook his head.

I could not help it. I stood up and put my arm around him. He was astonished. So was I. But he hugged me back, and we stood there for a moment. Then he released me, stepped back, kissed my hand, and said, "I must go—"

He stopped in the middle of the sentence, frowning.

I am sure I was frowning, too, because I heard what he heard. That inaudible distant exchange of gunfire was no longer either inaudible or distant, It came from the street just below.

Nobody was looking at me. I became aware that the whole room was looking at the staircase going up to the President's private quarters on the floor above. The Secret Service guards at the bottom were no longer standing around, watching us all for any sign of threat. They were moving around the great salon, ordering everybody to back up against the walls. As one came near he called, "I'm Jenner, Secret Service. The President is being evacuated."

"Evacuated!" snapped Senator Kennedy. "What's the problem, Jenner? Are we in danger?"

"Possibly so, sir. If you want to leave, you can go as soon as the President's clear. There's a way out through the underground garage. But stay put while her party is leaving. Please," he added, and then as an afterthought, "Sir."

And down the stairs came the President with her entourage. More Secret Service people, three of them women; some District Police with Captain Glenn leading them; the WAC liaison colonel carrying the nuclear-weapons codes; four or five staffers trying desperately to talk to the President even while she was walking down the stairs, one hand on the banister. And she was answering each one of them. I've never agreed with Nancy's politics, but she really looked presidential, even in retreat.

As soon as the President was in the elevator the remaining Secret Service man called something up to the upper-floor suite, and the people who had been with the President were allowed to come down. One big gaggle of them I recognized at once: Dom, in fact all three Doms, along with the two Russians, and a couple of other no-doubt scientists fresh from their meeting with the President.

They stopped almost at the bottom. I stopped too. There was a sudden mutter in the room, people catching their breath, making sounds of astonishment and concern. I didn't know what it was— exactly. I did think that suddenly there were fewer people coming down the Stairs than I thought there should have been, but I wasn't looking at them.

Then there was a sort of chill in the air and a—I guess you should call it a silence. The kind of ear-popping silence that you get in a jet when suddenly you adjust to a pressure change.

Then, "Pardon me," said a voice from behind me, a voice I knew very well, "but shouldn't you and I have a talk, Nyla?"

"Of course, Nyla," I said, and turned to look myself in the eye. She was smiling.

There was something about that smile that made me look down. She held her thumbless hands together, just at waist level, and peeking out from between them was the sharp, serrated blade of a knife from the buffet table, pointed at me.

Before the man's head was an object—perhaps it should be called an image—about the size of a beach ball. It was composed of points of light. Seen from outside, a galaxy might look like that, if the galaxy were densely enough packed with stars. Most of the points of light were pale blue, but within the sphere were angry tracings of green, yellow, orange, even red, like the radiating lines of gangrene around an infected wound. Over the sphere was a line of what might have been mirrors reflecting the man's concerned face— except that they were not mirrors. Some of the images had longer hair or shorter or less. Some were tanned and some pallid, some fatter, some thin. "Now that we've synched," said the seated man, "I think we can see the extent of the problem. I've measured harmonics up to sixth-order already, and still propagating. "He paused to look at the other faces for disagreement. There wasn't any. "If this goes on, "he said evenly, "I project a nine-nines probability that within one standard year the disturbances will be effectively both plenary and irreversible."

28 August 1983

12:10 A.M. Agent Nyla Christophe

With all that was going on, no one paid much attention as Bowquist and I moved toward the pantry. If they had looked carefully at her face, they might have seen something that would make someone ask a question, until I told her to smile. Then she smiled. Next to the pantry was a bathroom, and next to the bathroom was the door to the stairs.

No one saw us go through it.

"We wait here a minute, Bowquist," I said, looking at her. She was a good-looking woman. She had ten pounds on me, ten pounds that I had sweated off with a lot of misery on the exercise machines and judo pads, but they looked good on her. She wasn't in any way fat, only rounder than I. What's more, she smelled a whole other way. I use perfume now and then. Why not? Men like it, and I like to have men like everything about me when we're headed for bed. But she wore it as a matter of course; and also there was the way her hair was done. It was a good four inches longer than the way I kept it, and turned into soft waves. "Who's Bowquist?" I asked.

"Ferdinand Bowquist is my husband," she said. She didn't act frightened, though she probably was. I would have been.

"I thought so. Seemed to me you were pretty squeezy with that senator, though."

She didn't answer that. Well, I wouldn't have, either, but for some reason I was glad to see that this pretty, respectable woman wasn't beyond fooling around a little now and then. "What are you going to do with me?" she asked.

I said, "Very little, love. I heard you say you've got a room in this hotel. We're just going to borrow it for a little while."

The door opened. I had expected it to. And through it came Moe, shepherding the two Larrys, as I had expected. The strange Larry was sunk in gloom, but my old bedmate Larry was cranky. "Nyla," he said, "are you crazy? I don't know what you're trying to do, but you can't—"