Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"I'm the one you got into this trouble in the first place, schmuck," he said bitterly. So he wasn't Lavrenti Djugashvili or the scientist; he was the con man from Time Tau.

"I'm not the one you think I am," I told him. "I'm the senator; Nicky's my roommate, in the Plaza."

"I hope he rots there," he said. Then he put down the phone and shrugged. "Hell, I guess I don't mean that. No sense hanging on to hard feelings, right? Want a cup of coffee?"

Well, he was trying to be nice. And he had coffee! There were advantages to knowing a con man, even here and now, I could see. So we sat and talked for a while. I told him what little there was to tell about Nicky and me. He told me more than I wanted to know about himself. He'd roomed the first night with Moe-the FBI man! He saw my look and shrugged. "Like I say, no use carrying a grudge any more, is there?" But Moe had found another Moe-another identical copy of himself, and the two of them had decided to room together. More than that, they'd found out there was still a third one, and they'd made plans to go off together when they left quarantine—maybe to sign up for construction on the new natural-gas pipeline that was going to go from Texas to somewhere in Southern California, maybe join an advance crew in one of the cities that hadn't been refurbished yet, maybe get into dam building down in Alabama, the place they called Muscle Shoals. There were always plenty of jobs for big guys with brawn. And did I know that Nyla was in the hotel?

Sudden rush of hope and shock. But, of course, the Nyla he was talking about wasn't my Nyla. It was the FBI woman.

I drank the rest of the coffee without tasting it, listened to the rest of Larry Douglas's gossip without hearing it. What was on my mind was a moral question, and it filled my mind. The Nyla I loved was hopelessly out of reach.

Was I willing to settle for another Nyla?

I did not even consider the question of whether that other Nyla, that hard-bitten policewoman, would settle for me. That didn't really matter. The answer I was looking for was in my head, not hers. Who was it I loved? Was it the physical, corporeal female human being with whose body my body found so much pleasure? Was it the traits and graces of the Nyla who played so beautifully on the violin and behaved so warmly, kindly in all the intercourse of the world? Would I have loved Nyla Bowquist less if she had been less able to show me the difference between Brahms and Beethoven-or less used to the glamour and excitement of the elite world we both moved in? Would I have loved her, in short, if she hadn't been famous?

Or—getting rapidly down to basics, the kind of question that never has an answer that makes sense-what did I mean by "love," anyway?

When you get into that kind of navel-gazing soul-searching it isn't too easy to keep track of what is happening in the real world. It wasn't surprising when Larry Douglas's prattle slowed down, then stopped.

I came to. He was gazing at me disagreeably. "Sorry," I said. "I was thinking."

He sniffed. "Mind telling me what it was you came here for?" he asked.

"I was looking for Dominic DeSota—the other one, the scientist."

"Oh, them. There's a bunch of them that spend their time talking about paratime and all that stuff. There's a couple of me there too. You'll find them in the bar, probably."

I did. It was as he described. There were ten or eleven people in the bar, nursing beers and talking animatedly. Two of them were Larry Douglas, four were Stephen Hawking in one state of health or another, two were John Gribbin, of whom I had met two examples at Floyd Bennett Field. They didn't even look around when I came in. They were, as the con man had said, comparing notes.

I went behind the bar and picked out a can of beer for myself, half listening to them, mostly thinking about my own problems. It wasn't hard to think, because their conversation didn't disturb me a bit. I didn't understand a word of it. "We started with oltron fission," one of them would say, and another would cut in, "Hang on a minute. What's an oltron?" And the first would say something like, "Uh, it's charged, it's light, it has a point-five variance-" and the other would say, "Variance?" And then they would start drawing particle-reaction diagrams until one of them would say, "Oh, you mean a Neumann body! Right. And it splits into an aleph-A and a gimmel, sure." And they would be off again. I let it all wash over me until the Dominic DeSota turned around to reach for his beer and saw me there.

"Oh, hi, Dom," he said. "Back already? Listen, Gribbin here says they used vanadium targets in the accelerator and got nearly twice the brilliance. What do you think of that?"

I grinned at him. "Not much," I confessed. "I'm the one who's a senator when he's back home, Dom. The one you were with in Washington when we got snatched."

"Oh, that one," he said, amused. "Well, I'm not that Dom either. He's off checking up on his wife."

I winced. "Well, tell him I was looking for him," I said, turning away, wishing I'd been as lucky as he. If only they'd caught my Nyla up in the sweep, instead of the No-Thumbs woman . . . and then . .

I stopped, swallowing hard.

"Hey," I said. "They didn't snatch his wife, did they? She was in her own time, and she wasn't working on paratime!"

"No, of course not," said the other Dom. He gave me a puzzled look. "He applied for her to join him, that's all. He just went to see when she's coming in."

"Applied . . . to join. . . . You mean . . . "

And he did mean just what I thought he meant. That was policy. The kidnappers weren't inhuman. They were willing to let us bring our families over, provided our families were willing to come.

All I had to do was apply.

Forty minutes later I was in the Biltmore Hotel, waiting my turn to—to, I guess the word is propose. I wasn't alone. There were fifty men in line with me on the same errand. We didn't talk much, because each one of us was busy rehearsing the speech we were about to make. When I felt a tap on my shoulder I flinched.

But it was only Nicky. "You, too, Dom?" he said, grinning. "I've just finished. Now if Greta will only say yes

Suddenly we were the center of attention, as the men before and behind me in the line turned to hear what the man who had already done it had to say. "She didn't answer?" I asked.

"Answer? No! You don't talk to her directly," he explained. "They don't have enough channels for that, I guess. What you do, you go into a room and they sort of film you—I don't suppose it's really film—anyway, you say what you have to say. Then they locate your wife, or whatever, and transmit it to her. What did you call those things? Holograms? It will be a sort of hologram image of you, and you can talk for one minute. Then it's up to her—"

Then it would be up to her.

What do you say to a woman to make her give up a world that loves her for the sake of chancy adventures in exile? All the time I was inching ahead in the line, all the time I was giving information about Nyla Bowquist to the attendant who would have to locate her, I invented reasons. Not reasons. Bribes. Airy-fairy promises of what our life would be like. . . . As if I knew any of that!

And when at last I was in front of the lens, with the bright lights glaring into my eyes, I abandoned the reasons and the bribes. All I could find to say was, "Nyla, my darling, I love you. Please come here and marry me."

By Saturday we were wholly germ-free and ready to start our new lives. By Saturday the woman at the Baltmore desk was already tired of seeing both Nicky and me. There were only a limited number of channels to other times, she explained, and very heavy demands on all of them. No, she didn't know whether Nyla had even received my message yet. Yes, Nyla would be told everything she needed to know about what this world was like and how to get here. No, she couldn't even guess how long it would take. Sometimes it was less than a day, but some people hadn't had a response even three weeks later. .