Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"They probably wanted all that for their own purposes, anyway," I objected.

"But we're getting the benefit of it," he pointed out.

"We're being exiled here, sure. That's for their own good too. They were worried about what would happen to them if this paratime stuff went on, not us."

He looked at me thoughtfully as he climbed into his bed. "They didn't have to go to all this trouble," he said. "I mean, transporting us here, feeding us, housing us, giving us clothes—"

"Sure they did! How else could they have stopped research?"

"Well," he said, settling himself under the sheet, "I can think of some people who would have taken care of it a different way. They could have just killed us, you know. Good night, Dom."

After the French-Indochinese wars there were a whole bunch of tribes that couldn't get along with the new governments. Some of them came to America. There was one colony of hill people who wound up in my own state, eighteen hundred refugees who hadn't ever seen a train, a television set, a gas stove, or a vacuum cleaner. Talk about culture shock! But it wasn't learning how to drive cars and run lawnmowers that threw them the hardest. It was the things we take for granted. How to pop open a beer can. How to use a credit card. Why the red light meant stop and the green light meant go. Why you should not urinate other than in an approved receptacle, even if you modestly went behind a tree. When I led the state's congressional delegation down to welcome those Meos, just outside of Carbondale, I was sorry for them, and a lot amused by them.

If any of them had been with me in the Plaza; they could have gotten even. I was as lost and confused as they, and this time it was harder to see the humor in it.

Nicky and I spent the whole first day just learning rudimentary survival skills in the new world. At the end of the day what I had mostly learned was that it was even harder than it looked. It helped a lot that we had that console in the room, because it was not only a television set but a phone, a computer, and an alarm clock. Once we found out what our Personal I.D.'s were-any ten-letter word or phrase we chose; I picked "Nyla my love"—we could unlock its memories and skills, and patiently it taught us most of what we needed to know. From the menus it offered us we could find the answer to almost any question, even to some we had not thought to ask. It told us, for instance, that our room and board wasn't exactly free. We had been given a credit to draw on, but sooner or later we would have to pay it back or starve. How could we pay it back? Well, there were jobs in the hotel if we wanted to get a head start: making beds, cleaning out rooms on the floors not yet finished, serving food, moving furniture. Then when we were released from quarantine there were a thousand projects that needed workers, all over the continent, even all over the world—a whole technological infrastructure needed to be completed. The volunteer colonists who had preceded us had done a lot, but there just were not enough of them to do the job.

Nor could I see where I was going to be of much help. What they needed was pipe-fitters, construction workers, motor mechanics, electricians—people with the skills to build and fix. There weren't any openings for U.S. senators. There weren't very many for quantum physicists, either, which seemed to comprise a large fraction of us Peety-Deepies. The ones that were most useful, I thought, would be the cats—the people who were out of their own time-mostly the twenty-two-year-olds of the invading army, of whom hundreds were in our hotel and thousands more scattered around the other temporary quarters in the city.

One of the things the comset in our room would do for us, once we learned how to ask, was to locate all the other Paratemporally Displaced Persons. The master list was purely alphabetical, and that was hopeless—there were nineteen Stephen Hawkings alone, not to mention nine Dominic DeSotas. (Fortunately only four of us were still in the city, the others having completed their quarantine and reassignment and gone on somewhere else.) But there was also a list reordered by time of origin. There were nearly sixty from my own time. .

But none of them was Nyla Christophe Bowquist.

When we went down for our morning bloodletting on the third day Nicky was nervous. It was an occasion for some nervousness, in a way, because it was important to us to be healthy. Heaven knows, we seemed healthy. We had arrived from our various paratimes positively reeking of germs and viruses and nastinesses of every kind, but our hosts did not tolerate disease. Smallpox, tuberculosis, cancer, and the common cold no longer existed in their worlds, nor did flu or venereal disease or even the caries of tooth decay. They didn't want them brought in. So they had given us any number of shots while we were still unconscious, and they checked the results with a drop of our blood twice a day. What was important about it was that clean blood meant privileges. If we were still clean today, we could switch from the backbreaking labor of shifting furniture to the more refined tasks of serving food. If we stayed clean through the morrow, we would even be permitted to go out into the Street! At least as far as the other hotels on the street, so that we could look for lost friends from our own time, if not actually to cross over and breathe the same air as the natives at their goings-on in the park.

Still, that wasn't enough to make anybody really nervous. When we'd each given our drop for the morning I asked him what he was worrying about. "The future, Dom," he said indignantly. "My future. This is a fresh start I've got and I want to make something of it—only—only there doesn't seem to be much need for mortgage brokers in this Eden."

"Or for senators," I said. He wasn't listening.

"There's banking, I guess," he said, leading the way as we threaded through the stacks of furnishings in the Palm Court. "I didn't see anything like that listed, but it stands to reason—only this damn arithmetic drives me crazy." He was doing better than I was, at that; binary numbers scared me so much I hadn't even begun to try to understand them, as long as our comset was willing to translate into decimal for us uneducated ones.

I guess what I had said had slowly been percolating through his fog of concentration, because he blinked at me and said, "Oh, yeah. You too. Well, I don't know, Dom, what did you do before you were a senator?"

I laughed. "I was a lawyer."

"Aw," he said sympathetically. "They don't have much of that around here, either, do they?" He stopped and nodded to the foreman of our work detail. "Reporting in, Chuck," he said. "What have you got for us to do this morning?"

"Plenty," Chuck said tersely. He was a black man, still wearing the uniform with the lieutenant's bars on it. He had been a tank commander in the invasion army and thus my enemy, although that didn't seem to matter much any more. What made the difference for us was that he had arrived twenty-four hours before us, so he was a foreman and we were tote-and-carry labor. "There's seventy-five new ones coming in this afternoon, so the ninth floor needs to be cleaned out. Get on it, you two."

By then I wasn't surprised any more to be given orders by someone who was a Peety-Deepy, just like us. That was about all we saw. Even the woman who took the blood from our fingertips was a Cat—well, of course we were all Cats, because this planet had been empty of human beings entirely five years earlier. But there were Cats and there were Cats, and the original colonists stayed out of the quarantine hotels. Now and then we'd see one, complete with face mask and coveralls, coming in to pick up the blood samples or hand out orders. They didn't linger.

So what I knew about the original colonists was scanty, mostly from what we could glean from the comset. The original settlers didn't come from a single paratime. They were from a whole congeries of them, eighteen or twenty different worlds. The way in which they were most different from us was only in that they had learned of the existence of, and managed to establish communication with, each other nearly twenty-five years earlier.