Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"In the bathroom," she said, getting up to get it, but I stopped her.

"You get it and plug it in for me, Larry," I said, to my own Larry. Resentfully he disappeared and I heard him knocking around in the cabinets. "Now, what we're going to do is make a trade. We've got something they want. They've got something I want."

"What's that, boss?" rumbled Moe, frowning over the difficult concepts.

"What they've got is a portal. What we've got is hostages." I smiled pleasantly at the other Nyla and the other Larry. "Bowquist is the one they'll be most anxious to ransom, I guess," I said, "judging by the way her boyfriend was hugging her. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a portal. Leaves you, Dr. Douglas. I gather they want you a whole lot—"

"Oh, no, "he yelled. "Listen, don't turn me over to them! I've got a better idea."

"I'm listening," I said, still smiling.

"We'll borrow a portal, maybe—I don't know how, but we'll figure something out. We'll go back to your time. I'll teach you how to build them, just the way I did for the others! The way you wanted me to! I'll work myself to death for you, I swear I will!"

I thought it over. "Might be simpler in some ways," I conceded. "Question is, how do we get to a portal?" I turned to Bowquist. "Maybe that's where you come in," I said. "Do you think if we talked real nice to your boyfriend he could get us the use of a portal, just for a little while?"

"I have no idea," she said, very cool, very remote. These sleazy goings-on were not part of her world. I had to admire her. Part of me wished I could be more like her; part of me was bitterly complaining that I could have been, would have been; if things had gone a little differently for me, because after all I was her—"What?"

"I said," she repeated, "that something seems to have happened to your own boyfriend." She was looking at the bathroom door.

It took me a second to understand what she was talking about. Then I realized she was right. The sounds from the bathroom had stopped some time ago, but no Larry came out. I got to the door in nothing flat.

There was nowhere to hide in there, not under the sink, not even in the shower cubicle, with its curtain pulled back just the way I had left it to show no one inside.

He wasn't there. There was absolutely no way he could have got out. But he wasn't there.

For the first time in a very long time, I was really scared. I turned to Moe, over by the window, opening my mouth to tell him to look under the bed or something. Moe's expression was puzzled— Then there was no expression on his face at all. There wasn't even a face to have one on.

Like that.

I was looking at him, and then I was looking through him. He wasn't there any more. I saw the window, and the gun he'd taken away from the soldier he'd killed lying on the sill, but of the man who had stood in front of them there was no sign at all.

I felt suddenly naked as well as scared. I don't mean just skinbare, as when I came out of the shower; I mean helpless and defenseless. I jumped for that gun out of pure reflex.

I never got to it.

The room flicked away. . .

And I was gone too.

They had crossed over the wet green fields of Ireland and were two hundred miles out over the Atlantic before they finished checking the tickets. It wasn't the most fun job in the world. The passengers were itchy and irritable. They knew something was wrong. There had been the unexplained wait before they left the gate at Heathrow, the whispered conferences among the cabin crew, the unusual request for everyone to show tickets again after they were airborne. It had to be done, though. 640 boarding passes had been issued. 640 tickets had been picked up at the gate. Only 639 passengers were on the plane. Somebody, somehow, had entered the mobile gate at one end and never come out at the other. When every seat in both levels and all six compartments had been cross-checked against the printout, including all eighteen lavatories and nine baggage spaces, they still had no answer, but at least they had a name. "Well," said the purser glumly, "at least we know we didn't count wrong. But what do you suppose they're going to tell the family of this Dr. John Gribbin?"

27 August 1983

10:50 P.M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P,

Being a major is not really being a major when you have no troops to command, and they had taken mine away from me. There was fighting going on. At a quarter of eleven every gun we had put through the portals began firing at once. The fighting was bloody. I knew this because I was watching the reentry portal under the bridge, and I could see the casualties coming back. But I wasn't taking any part in it. I was standing around with my thumb in my butt, waiting for someone to tell me where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to do.

The whole operation was beginning to look very bad. Maybe even terminally bad. The new troops going through the portal south of the bridge weren't heads-up, eyes-bright, combat-ready killers. They slouched into the big black square and didn't talk. And the ones coming back— The medics had their hands full with the ones coming back.

Through the return portal I could hear the sounds of gunfire and the whomp of mortars and grenades. Even the air that came through was bad air. It was a hotter, damper August there than in our own time, and it smelled. It smelled of burning and of dust and shattered plaster. It smelled of sewers ripped open with shellfire, and of the diesel stink of the tanks.

It smelled like death.

Under other circumstances, it might have been a nice night. I could imagine strolling along here by the river, with my arm around a pretty girl, being very happy. It was hot, but what else would you expect of Washington in August? It was sultry, but not unbearable, and though there weren't any stars in the sky, there was the constant zap-zap of our strobes, dozens of them now. I did not really think they were fooling the Russian satellites any more, but they were pretty to look at as they flashed against the patchy clouds.

However, the circumstances were bad. I was a long way from being a hero. At least they'd got me some other clothes to wear— slacks and a sport shirt, probably from the nearest K-Mart—so I didn't have to look like a fool in that rented tux any more. But that didn't stop me from feeling like one. What I was more than anything else was in the way. I stepped back to avoid a half-track lumbering back through the portal with a cargo of stretchers, and I bumped into another rubbernecker, as idle as I. "Sorry," I said, and then saw the general's stars on his collar. "My God," I said.

"No," said General Magruder sadly, "it's just me, Major DeSota."

It isn't easy to feel sorry for a general, especially a general like Ratface Magruder. But this was a whole other man than the one who had chewed his way all up and down my ass back in New Mexico. He had a doomed look about him, and it didn't take long to find out why. All it took was asking him, as politely as I could, which aspect of the operation he was commanding, and him telling me shortly, "None of them, DeSota. I've been reassigned. Fort Leonard Wood. I'm flying out in the morning."

"Oh," I said. There wasn't anything more to say. When a general gets pulled out of an ongoing operation to take over a training post you don't have to say another word. I guess my face showed what I was thinking. He grinned at me. It was not a friendly grin.

"If you're still worried about a court-martial," he said, "forget it. There's about a hundred people ahead of you in line."

"That's good to hear, sir," I offered.

He looked at me with surprise and contempt. "Good?" He rolled the word around in his mouth. "I would not have said 'good' about any of this." He glared at the portal, where a limping sergeant was leading a woman with second-lieutenant's bars sewed onto her fatigues and her head wrapped in bloody bandages. He burst out, "That stupid bitch President! Why did she make us do it?"