Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

There were mutterings back and forth in the van, but no clearcut questions came out of it. Probably none of us wanted to know the answers to the questions we had yet to ask. Personally I was craning my neck to see ahead, because I had caught a glimpse of a bridge. It scared me. I did not think I wanted to cross the East River on a bridge that had not had a coat of paint for half a century.

The woman was still smiling. "If any of you would like to start work at once, there are job openings in your hotel. We need cooks, cleaners, chamber-workers, and so on. You have to be self-sufficient for that sort of thing, you see, during the period of quarantine. And you will be paid for your work."

I wasn't listening. I was bracing myself as we seemed to be heading for the crumbling approach to the bridge, then relaxed as we turned away—then braced myself again as we slowed down at the water's edge. Were we going to take a ferry? Swim across? Stop here, with the promised land just visible across the water, moldering skyscrapers and all?

It was none of the above. We didn't stop. We slid down a muddy, bulldozed bank to the river; and we slid right on across the water, exactly as easily and surely as we had been gliding over the pitted old city streets. At the far end was the remnant of a pier. Nude bathers were sitting on the end of it, gazing at us incuriously. They were far more interested in one of their own, who had surfaced a few dozen yards away, pushing back his goggles and spluttering with pleasure as he waved the four-foot fish flopping on the end of his spear.

At least we were now in a part of New York where I had been before. I recognized Canal Street, though the signs were long rusted away, I didn't know any of the side streets we wound through—navigation was harder in densely built Manhattan—but I did recognize, or almost recognize, Fifth Avenue when we reached it. It was puzzling that there was no Empire State Building at what otherwise definitely looked like Thirty-fourth Street, and curious that over the next wide intersection there was the remains of a spidery traffic-control booth, elevated above the street.

We stopped there for a moment, while both the driver and the guide put their flesh masks back on. "Almost there," the woman called cheerily. "It's called the Hotel Plaza. A little moth-eaten and moldy, maybe—but, my, what a beautiful view you get of the Central Park wilderness!"

By the time we were checked into rooms in the old hotel and given a meal, a lot more had been explained to us. We had a new identity. We were "Paratemporally Displaced Persons" or PeetyDeepies for short. We were in quarantine for a week, long enough for the nasties in our circulatory systems to surface, if any had been missed by the shots and sprays we'd received while asleep. And, although we would get out of the hotel in a matter of days, we would get out of this particular paratime never.

We were there for keeps.

It took a lot of the joy out of the old Plaza Hotel. The woman hadn't lied to us. It was a nice place, basically. It had even been a nice place, I remembered, in my own A.D. 1983. A stately old dowager of a place with historic associations—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived there, and had gone to play at midnight in the fountain outside.

Of course, it had not been maintained for sixty years. There hadn't been anybody alive in this world to maintain it. That showed. There was a funny, nasty smell in the ground-floor restaurant, as though animals had denned there now and then. (They had.) A quarter of the windows were gone, though most of them had been temporarily replaced by some sort of plastic film in the process of getting the place ready for us to occupy. The water from the plumbing ran rusty now and then, and there were whole floors where it didn't run at all. And the furnishings were deplorable, especially the beds. Cotton had turned into mold, mold had turned into dust, the springs of the mattresses had turned into rust. Before we slept that night Nicky and I had to sweat and struggle new bedding up from the stacks in the lobby: bare wooden slats to stretch across the sides of the bed, still raw and sap-smelling from the sawmill, and clever air mattresses to put on the slats, compartmented and very comfortable once we had puffed ourselves scarlet to fill each of the compartments with lungpower alone. We didn't have to worry about blankets, of course. Not in New York in August, in a hotel that had never known what air-conditioning was.

Not everything in the room was a moldering antique. One thing was very new. At first I thought it was a television set, although it was a little puzzling that a sort of keyboard was attached. When Nicky experimentally pushed the "On" switch the screen lighted up, rosy background with sharp black letters that said:

HELLO.

WHAT IS YOUR P.I.D.?

Since neither of us knew what a P.I.D. was we couldn't satisfy its curiosity, and it stubbornly refused to satisfy any of ours. No matter what other keys or buttons we pushed nothing happened; the only key that worked was the one marked "Off."

The day went fast. By the time the sun went down we had made our bed-sitter suite habitable-more or less habitable. That is, we'd collected towels and pillows and extra sets of clothing and soap and all the other things that insured survival. We had discovered how to open the plastic-sheet windows to let some air in—mixed blessing, because with the air came hordes of mosquitoes out of the rank vegetation in what had once been well-groomed Central Park. The lights in our room attracted them, so we turned the lights out.

We were tired. I showered and brushed my teeth, and while Nicky was doing the same I gazed out at the view of the park, as good as our guide had promised, if somewhat stranger. Just before us in the park was a busy scene, temporary buildings with people moving around and vehicles; but a quarter of a mile farther was only blackness. Bright stars shone in the sky, a sight I had never seen from New York City in my lifetime.

It was a dead city. Only the little space around the hotels was the focus of infection where life was beginning to invade it again.

And it was an empty city—for me it was a wholly empty city, because Nyla Bowquist wasn't there.

It struck me as a sad wonder that Nyla had been in that hotel, maybe in that very room, in our own time. I knew that she stayed in the Plaza when she played at Carnegie Hall, only a few blocks away. Perhaps she had stood at that very window. What she would have seen was manicured lawns, a playground, a lake, hansom cabs lined up at the entrance to the park, and a million cars, taxis, and trucks creeping along the streets that bounded it. What I saw was the bubble-shaped temporary structures, and the lights of a blimp floating down to a landing on one of the clearings. .

I became conscious of Nicky standing behind me, still damp from the shower, running a comb through his hair. "Isn't it wonderful, Dom?" he asked.

I looked at him with resentment—unjustified resentment, because it certainly was not his fault that he wasn't Nyla. "What are you talking about, Nicky? It's exile. We're stuck here forever."

He said, with audible sympathy in his voice, "I know it's tough on you, Dom, because you had a lot to lose. Me, maybe not so much. But it's not just exile. It's a whole new world. Eden! They've given us a new start in life."

"I didn't want a new start in life," I said, "and anyway, they didn't do it for our sake."

"Well, sure, Dom," he said, turning modestly to slip on a pair of pajama pants. "But you have to admit they've put a lot of effort into this. Just fixing up this part of the city for us—do you have any idea what kind of work that means? Getting the water running again when some of the pipes would have ruptured? Starting an electrical generating system?Just cleaning up the garbage-and I don't mean just rotted-out bedclothes. There must have been people in this place when they all died. Bodies. Skeletons, anyway, and somebody had carted them all off before we got here."