Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

When the faceless person called it a hover I translated that into "ground-effect machine." So it was. I'd never been in a hovercraft, but when I felt the throbbing and bouncing underneath us, and we began to slippy-slide over cracked concrete toward the road, I knew.

I use the word road loosely. That's what it had been. It had not been maintained for a long, long time. It stretched wide and empty before us, heading straight for a distant city skyline. But I could see the purpose of the hovercraft; nothing on wheels could have handled the potholes and the curling edges of asphalt. The biggest holes had been roughly filled, the jaggedest edges bulldozed away, and someone had pushed off onto the side an occasional boxy old heap of rust that had once been an automobile. There were places where the cattail marsh had so completely reclaimed the roadbed that I could not see asphalt at all, only mown bulrushes with birds scattering out of our way as we whirred toward them. I stared at that remote skyline every time the hover turned enough to bring it into sight. Something about it looked familiar. .

Bouncing around with excitement in the seat next to me, Nicky DeSota cried, "It's New York! Gosh! I've never been in this part of New York!" He nudged me, grinning. "Did you notice? This thing's air-conditioned!"

"That's nice," I said; because all that he said was true, and interesting, but I was watching what was going on up ahead of us. The driver's compartment was closed off from our part of the van with a glass window. It had its own entrance, and the wo(man) who had led us to the bus was inside it. What I was watching was what s/he was doing. What she was doing was revealing herself to be a she. She ducked her face into her hand and pulled, and—wow!— that flesh-colored blankness slipped off. There was an actual face there. In fact, rather a pretty one. She wriggled out of the top of her jumpsuit, revealing more proof of femininity, and then she turned to look back at the fifteen or twenty of us in the hovervan.

"Good morning," she said through an intercom.

Next to me Nicky cried, "Good morning!" So did a couple of the others, like fifth-graders on a school trip-which was about the way I felt.

"By now," she said, "your tranks should be wearing off, so let me explain what has happened to you. There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that within the next ooty-poot days you will be able to move freely anywhere in the world you like, and it is rather a nice world. The bad news is that you will never leave it." She smiled sweetly. There was a moment's silence, then questions called out from all over the bus. The sweet smile did not fade. "I have not turned on your phones yet," she said, "so I can't hear you just now. Take a few minutes to talk among yourselves. Then I will give you a short talk on what has happened and why, and what you can expect, and then there will be time for questions. The trip to your hotel will take about totter-tot minutes."

She gave us a last smile and turned back to the driver.

It is hard to give a coherent and consecutive account of the trip—there was too much going on. Probably if I could remember being born it would be just as hard to describe it, because I was overwhelmed with the revolutionary newness of it all. We all were—or all but Nicky. I envied him the way he took it all in stride and exulted in the wondrous new strangeness of it.

I could not share it. More than anything else, I was wondering if I would ever see Nyla again. .

Any Nyla.

By the time the woman began her orientation talk we had left the salt water behind. We were gliding along a wide avenue between rows of fallen-down frame buildings and burned-out one-story stores. Two or three times we slowed to let another hovervan pass in the opposite direction, the drivers waving at each other. The ones going out were all empty. There were no other human beings in sight. I saw turtles as big as meat platters sunning themselves along the road, and once a coiled snake that I was nearly sure was a rattler. It did not move, though its head was raised and the beady eyes stared at us. I saw a fox chasing a rabbit, frantically zigzagging along what had once been a sidewalk, until the whoosh from our fans blew both of them over and I lost them behind us.

And I listened.

The first part of what she told us was a sentence of exile. "Uncontrolled exploitation of the paratime portal," she said reprovingly, "will lead to chaos, so we have stopped it. We have transported the principal experimenters, as well as all persons who were in displaced times, to this planet. At the same time we have rendered all paratime research centers uninhabitable by means of induced radiation. We had no choice in this matter. The alternative was destructive to everyone."

I stretched and yawned. We were going up a slight incline, with tall, unkempt trees reaching out over us from both sides. Ahead of us was a circle with twenty-story apartment buildings, the tallest I'd seen close at hand. They had all the windows broken out, and ivy climbed their sides. "Until dye years ago," the woman was saying, "this planet was uninhabited by humans. There was a long war, they called it the World War, and somebody started using biological weapons. It wound up with everybody dead. All primates, in fact— there aren't even any gorillas left—but nearly everything else survived." She glanced at the back of her wrist as though she were consulting notes. "Oh, yes, you don't have to worry about the disease any more; that's one of the things you were inoculated against at Reception. And, of course, for all the organisms you all carried— shocking mix of bugs you people had." She dimpled a smile at us. Maybe there was some tranquilizer left. We smiled back. "Anyway, some of the paratimes began using the planet for colonization purposes—people who were displaced from their homes for one reason or another, usually drought or something of the sort. And, of course, there's always a few people who just want to pioneer. But that makes it good for you, because there's a whole infrastructure waiting for you. You won't have to go out and gather roots! This is one of the few cities that we've got working—more or less working—though, so mostly you'll want to resettle on farms. After all, food is the most important thing!"

This time nobody smiled back. Whatever any of us had been back home, it wasn't farmers.

I began to wonder just what socially useful skills a former United States senator, with a law degree and not much else, might have to offer in a new world.

We slid down a long hill toward a taller building still, a skyscraper with a clock at its top. (One face told me that it was a quarter past three, another, missing a minute hand, only said that it was somewhere between ten and eleven.) There were rusted trolley tracks under us, and just ahead an elevated train structure, also rusty. I didn't like the idea of snaking under it and through its pillars. But the driver knew what he was doing. We slowed to a crawl for a couple dozen blocks, then picked up speed again as the tracks veered off to the sides.

"Are there any questions?" the woman asked brightly.

Nicky was first off the mark. "What's a 'totter-tot'?" he called.

The woman looked puzzled. "What?"

"You said it would take totter-tot minutes. I think that's what you said."

The pretty face cleared. "Oh, I was forgetting. You're all decimal, aren't you? Let's see, that would be, um"—she glanced at her wrist again—"the whole trip will take about forty and five minutes. About, um, twenty minutes more. Any other questions?"

One of the Dr. Gribbins had his hand up. "A big one, miss," he said. "I'm a quantum-dynamicist. I don't know bugger-all about pushing a plow."

"Of course," said the woman sympathetically. "That's a real problem, here. What we really need are farmers, construction workers, and engineers. There will be retraining programs, though." She smiled brightly at fifteen people who had suddenly stopped smiling back.