Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

There was no reason for that. There was every reason in the world why I should have been tense and scared, and should have shown it in taut muscles and twitchy nerves. There was nothing in sight or sound that was reassuring in the least. I was lying on a hard pallet in a room that looked as much like a morgue as anything else I'd ever seen. There were a dozen other pallets, each with a body recumbent on it. It even smelled medicinal and nasty, as I thought a morgue should.

The person who was whispering sweetly in my ear wasn't reassuring, either. She didn't have any face. Or he didn't; you couldn't tell, because there was nothing but a flesh-colored blankness between hair and chin. It moved a little as the voice spoke but showed no features at all. She (or he) was saying, "You will be well treated, uh, Senator, uh, DeSota, and you will be completely at liberty." And he was looking at me (or she was), though I could see no eyes, because s/he was touching me here, touching me there, and everywhere he (she) touched there was a tingle or a pang.

Something was being done to me. I just let it happen.

And that was another thing. I let it all happen. I don't mean I wasn't shaken up—no, scared—hell, terrified! But whatever my conscious mind told my head to be, my body was relaxed and compliant. It did what it was told. It didn't even need to be told in words; touch and gesture was enough, and instantly my body held still, or turned over, or presented a part of itself for the occasion.

It occurred to me at once that I'd seen something like that before, when Nyla No-Thumbs and the others were zapped into sleepy-by before we were rescued from the New Mexican motel. But they had just been asleep. This was much, much worse. And then I had been only an observer. I had not had this present indignity of having my body roll over and elevate its rump for a final shot.

It was at that point I realized I was naked. I might not have realized it then if the voice hadn't said, "You can get up and get dressed now, and then proceed into the hover."

My obliging body pulled on a pair of shorts, a pair of tennis shoes, and a sort of T-shirt from a rack—they all fit snugly, less because they were my size than because they were a kind of fabric that didn't care what size I was. Then my body obligingly walked after the (wo)man and out of the doorless cubicle. No, there weren't any doors. No, one didn't magically appear. All that happened was that she/he walked up to the wall, and kept on walking, and so did I—along with seven or eight equally complaisant bodies belonging to people wearing the same beige one-size-fits-all beachwear.

And, as a matter of fact, we were at a beach. Or close enough. We were at a kind of an airport, curious mixture of the shiny-new and the terminally decrepit, on a hot, hot summer day, with the saltmarsh smell of seawater and dead fish strong on the breeze and waves glinting across a roadway. Behind the stump of a flagpole a cement block had letters picked out in seashells embedded in the surface. The snows of winter and summer suns had done them a lot of harm, but I could still make out what they said:

FLOYD BENNETT FIELD

Behind the squat, white building we had just come out of (there was no door in the outside wall, either), a delta-winged plane came in with a ripping sound of jets at a hundred miles an hour, dropped flaps, rotated its engines, and sat down a few yards beyond the building. It rolled a couple of feet and stopped. The building, on the other hand, began to move. It shuddered, picked itself up, and slid over to the plane; while a quarter of a mile off to one side a bloated-bellied blimp was slithering in to a landing at another new white building. I turned to the happy zombie next to me and said, "Dorothy, I don't think we're in Kansas any more."

He gave me an irritated look. Then the look changed. "Don't I know you?" he asked.

I took a harder look at him. "Dr. Gribbin?" I said. "From Sandia?"

"Bloody hell," he said. "And you're the Yank congressman. What the hell is going on, do you know?"

Well, how do you begin to answer a question like that? As I was casting around for an answer, a voice from behind me saved me the trouble. "It's parallel time," said Nicky DeSota eagerly. "Do you understand about quantum mechanics? Well, it seems that Erwin Schroedinger, or maybe it was one of the people who came after him, proposed a long time ago that every time some kinds of nuclear reactions occur, which can go either way, they go both ways. This means that—"

I turned away to keep from laughing. Here was the mortgage broker explaining Schroedinger's famous conundrum to one of the world's great experts on the subject! But Nicky had an advantage Gribbin had not: he had seen it all happen. Another man in the same shorts and blouse was wandering toward us to listen to Nicky expound. I didn't pay attention. I was looking at this strange world around me, wondering why I was there, whether I would ever get back to a sane life in the Senate—well, strike that; but at least in the Senate it was a kind of insanity I was used to-and wondering, most of all, where my love had gone. There were women in our group, but none of them were familiar. And there was another woman, this one wearing the same white overall, gloves and boots included, that the faceless person who was trying to shepherd us into the bus was wearing. The one with a face was talking to the bus driver, but when she saw us approaching she jumped and hurried away as though we were lepers.

I didn't then know how apt that thought was.

I turned back to Nicky and Gribbin. "We'd better get on that thing," I said.

Gribbin gave me a puzzled look. Then the look deepened, as he glanced from Nicky to me. "You two chaps are the same!" he cried.

Nicky grinned. "That's part of it," he agreed. "Didn't you notice? You two are the same too." And he was pointing to the other man, standing with his jaw hanging; who took one look at Gribbin, another at Nicky and me.

He felt his own face as though he had never noticed it before. "Bloody hell," said the second John Gribbin. Which summed it all up perfectly.

Whatever kind of happy pills they had given us, it was apparent that they were beginning to wear off. My fellow sheep were begin-fling to talk back to the faceless shepherd, not always politely. But as the drug level in my body declined, my rational self-confidence seemed to increase. Like Nicky, I had had this experience before. It didn't make it pleasing. It did make it a little less nerve-racking.

As far as I could tell, Nicky and I were the only two so fortunate in that bunch. None of the ones who had been with us in Washington were here now. I could live with that easily enough as far as it concerned the other Dom, not to mention the two Larry Douglases and the Russians. The fact that Nyla wasn't with me was a lot harder to take. I wanted very much to ask somebody if I would ever see Nyla again, but everybody else had questions of his own, and they were a lot more scared and angry about it than I. "What's going on here?" demanded one of the Gribbins, and the faceless person said:

"You'll be briefed on the hover. Please get on now; it's waiting." And as she, or he, turned away, a man on the other side grabbed her (or his) sleeve. He had the kind of scowl that says, I don't know what I'm into, but when I find out somebody's going to pay, and he was insistent.

"I'm needed at the lab!" he protested. "There's a top-level meeting right now, and if I'm not there it's going to cost us half our grant for the next fiscal year—" He stopped indignantly, because the faceless one was laughing at him.

"The things you people worry about," he/she said indulgently. "On the hover! Now. Please."

I decided there wasn't any better alternative than to do as asked, so I boarded the thing. I took a seat up near the front, just behind the glassed-in compartment that held the driver, and Nicky slipped into the one next to me.