Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I said, "Shut up, honey. We're going for a little walk."

It wasn't little, and it wasn't a walk, exactly. It was climbing down those stairs, and it was fourteen stories—twenty-eight flights—while even in that interior well of the hotel we began to hear the sounds of firing in the streets, and now and then in the actual halls outside the fire doors.

It was enough to make a person nervous. It even made my Larry nervous. "Nyla, for God's sake," he gasped from behind me. "What are you getting us into? These people will shoot first and ask questions later!"

I was running out of steam, too, and glad enough to stop for a minute. "Nobody does that, asshole," I said. "They'll look at us and they'll ask, and then what? Whichever side they are, none of us is on the other, are we?" Except for Nyla Bowquist, I added to myself; but who would shoot her? "Anyway, it's only three more floors."

And so it was, but what I hadn't counted on was that Washington in that time must have been a high-crime area. The stairwell doors were the kind that only opened from one side. Worse than that, they were fire doors, sheet steel with hinges that wouldn't melt away in the first blaze. I looked at Moe doubtfully. "Think you can get it open?" I asked.

He didn't answer, unless a dismal grunt was an answer. He backed up across the landing, lunged forward, and kicked the door right at the lock with all his weight, two hundred and some pounds of it— It didn't budge. The noise was loud, the results nothing. Moe hopped on one foot, rubbing the other and looking sourly at me. I shrugged. "Try again," I said, but before he could either do it or argue about it the door opened. A soldier in olive-green fatigues was standing there, pointing an automatic rifle at us, looking scared, but not as scared as I was.

"Who the hell are you people?" he asked.

How I would have handled it I don't exactly know. Maybe it was because we were in strange surroundings that made him bold, maybe it was just because he had more breath left than the rest of us; but for whatever reason Moe took over on his own. "Easy with the gun, friend," he said with a grin, putting his ankle down. "These are VIP's I'm trying to get away from the fighting. I'm FBI. I'm going to take my badge out of my pocket to show you, and I'll do it real slow—"

And he did; and the soldier was young enough, and dumb enough, to come close enough to look at it, and that was his mistake. Oof he said, as Moe sank the knife into his belly and pulled it up before I could stop him.

So we had the way clear to Bowquist's room; and we also had a weapon; but, most of all, we now had the problem of finally having committed a criminal act that someone would not take lightly in the place where we could be punished for it.

There was a note pinned to the pillow in Nyla's room:

Nyla dear,

They are making me leave the hotel I'm going to try to get to Senator Kennedy's house to wait for you. I hope you're all right!

Amy

I didn't really care much about the absent Amy. What I saw that I liked was the open closet, with hangers of dresses, slacks, and blouses; and the bathroom with the working shower. I left Moe in charge of the shaken hostages and I got under the shower.

It felt good, and the shower is a place where I do my best thinking. I needed to do that. The situation had taken a turn I hadn't planned on.

It was good that we had a weapon. I'd never seen that particular one before, but it had a safety and sights and a trigger and a banana clip of ammo, and I had no doubt I could handle it. A lot of people don't think that I can use a gun, missing thumbs as I am. Quite a few of them have lost money betting on that, and one or two have lost more than money. When you've fired everything in the FBI armory, you don't have much trouble figuring out almost anything else that is built to explode gunpowder at one end and drive a bullet out of a barrel at the other.

This is not a womanly grace, but then I haven't had much time to concentrate on being a woman.

I'm not talking about making love, because I can dig up at least a dozen men to testify that at being female I am first-rate in any league. I mean the other kind of thing. The Nyla Bowquist kind of thing. The hair just right, the tiny touch of makeup that made the eyes brighter, the way of walking on spike heels as though they weren't there at all. This is the kind of thing I think about when I'm standing under the hot shower, with my conscious mind more than half turned off, letting my head wander where it might.

This time it didn't wander far. There was too much to drag it back to reality, and a lot of reality was nasty.

It was bad that now we had a corpse to explain.

As a practical matter, that might not be important—there were plenty of corpses around, with all that gunfire. I didn't like it, though. I've never been an easy killer. I don't like the people who work for me to kill except when absolutely necessary, either, and before long I would make sure that Moe regretted what he had done.

Before long. Not right away; because right away I had other things to do.

By the time I finished rinsing my hair I thought I had something pretty well worked out. I wrapped a towel around my wet hair, not bothering with the rest of me, and pushed the door open. I got three attentive male stares, ignored them, and spoke to Bowquist. "I'd like to borrow some underwear," I told her, politely enough.

"In the drawer," she said, pointing. She was a lot too well bred to say anything about my nakedness, but as I pulled the drawer open I saw her suppressing a smile. Panties, stockings, bras—they were all neatly folded; Amy must have been a treasure. I selected a matching set in white silk and dressed while I talked.

"What we're going to do," I said, "is steal a portal. Then we're going home."

That changed the look on everybody's face. Especially the men. I've noticed about men that while a naked body always interests them, there is something especially exciting about one that's all damp and rosy from the bath; they can't wait to get it sweaty and soiled again. But I took their minds off that pretty fast. Moe nodded, accepting it as a directive. The other Larry looked stunned. And my own Larry snarled, "For God's sake, Nyla, don't you know when you're well off? Stay here! Forget going back!"

I shook my head. "Maybe you can forget it, sweets," I said, "because, to tell the truth, you've got no future back home anyway. But I work for the Bureau, and they expect something from me. I'm going to deliver."

"Aw, hell, Nyla," he grumbled. "Do you want to go back to where you can go to jail for wearing shorts three inches above the knee? This isn't such a bad place! Once they get this war thing straightened out—" Then his mind caught up with his mouth, and the look on his face changed from angry to apprehensive. "What do you mean, no future?"

I said comfortably, "You couldn't figure on protection from me forever, could you? I would say you're just about used up, sweetmeat. . . . Will you hand me those slacks, Bowquist?"

"But Nyla! You and I have something going!"

"Aw, Larry, who are you kidding? You were running your own little rackets, a swindle here, a little larceny there. I don't blame you for figuring out that meeting me was your big break. Screwing an FBI bureau chief was a great way to find out if we were getting close to you. But we were, hon. I just didn't tell you."

"Nyla!" He was beginning to sweat. The other Larry, on the other hand, was beginning to look a little more cheerful: the worse things got for somebody else, the less oppressive his own problems seemed. They were two of a kind—slippery good looks, charm, meanness inside and all.

"No hard feelings," I said, zipping the slacks and admiring myself in the mirror. They weren't as tight as I would have liked them, but then I would be trying to avoid attention, not attract it. I patted his shoulder. "I got what I wanted, too, you know. I would put you definitely in the top ten of all the men I've ever known in the bed department, and besides I knew you'd fink for me. As you did." I took the towel off my head and felt the hair. Still pretty wet. "Bowquist, have you got a hair dryer I can borrow?"