Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I didn't want to wait three weeks. I didn't want to be lonely that long ... especially when it might happen that all I would get at the end of the three weeks was the knowledge that I would be lonely forever.

Meanwhile I had to fill my time one way or another. Nicky had the same problem, but he didn't seem to have the same trouble doing it. When he wasn't working he was exploring; when he wasn't exploring he has hunched over the data-machine terminal in our room, trying to learn as much as he could. About the third time I came to him to ask how many ooties went into a oddy-poot he said, "Really, Dom, how are you going to get along here if you can't even make change?"

"It's so confusing, Nicky. All those ones and zeroes."

"It's binary arithmetic," he corrected me. "One equals one. One-oh equals two. One-one equals three—" And he drew me a column of figures:

1 1

10 2

11 3

100 4

101 5

"Sure, Nicky, sure," I groused, "but what do you do when you get up to those ten or twelve digit numbers? How do you even say the suckers?"

He said seriously, "What you do, Dom, is learn the pronouncing codes."

"Why should I? No, no, I know," I said, to head him off, "the reason I should learn is that I'm stuck here, and when in Rome you learn to use Roman numbers, right? Only it's dumb! Maybe there's some little saving in time or something; but it must have cost them millions to switch over from decimal to binary."

He laughed. "You know what it cost them? Bear in mind, they've put all their data into electronic storage. So they pushed a button somewhere and the machines did a global search-and-replace. All at once. All over the world. All over all the worlds that were involved; and from then on it was standard."

I gazed at him. "That's computer talk," I said. "You've learned a lot since you got out of your own time."

"I didn't have the choice, Dom," he said, "and sooner or later you're going to realize that neither do you. Here. I'll get you started." And he punched out some commands on the machine and got up. "Start by learning how to count," he ordered, and left me to it.

Of course, he was right.

So I got serious. I took my mind off me and my problems, I even took it off Nyla, and I tried to concentrate. What Nicky had called up for me was an old document called On Binary Digits and Human Habits, and it told me all I wanted to know about binary arithmetic and the way to write it and say it.

The writing conventions were easy enough. The custom was to write numbers in binary in groups of six digits, with a hyphen in the middle, 000-000. When there were more than six digits they used commas, just as we used to for thousands and millions: 000-000,000-000. I laboriously converted the present year into binary, and 1983 came out as:

1-111,011-111

It looked pretty dumb to me.

Then, reading on, I discovered that they pronounced each group of six according to some cockamamy rule that looked ridiculous at first, but got easy after I'd studied the table for a while. You pronounced each three-digit group slightly differently, according to whether it was before or after the hyphen, but that was only to make saying the words easier:

Binary Pronunciation Pronunciation alone

quantity in first group or in second group

000 ohly pohl

001 ooty poot

010 ahtah pahtah

011 oddy pod

100 too too

101 totter tot

110 dye dye

111 teeter tee

So numbers like "ten"—i.e., 1-010—became "ooty-pahtah" and "fifty," or 110-010, became "dye-pahtah," and when Nicky came back into the room I was able to tell him, "Four months or so from now, on New Year's Eve, I am going to wish you a Happy New Ooty-tee, oddy-tee."

"Well done, Dom," he grinned, "but that's this year. Next year will be 1984, and that's ooty-tee, too-pohl."

I groaned. "Hellfire. I don't think I'll ever learn all this stuff."

He said cheerfully, "Sure you will, Dom. After all, as I said, you don't have any choice."

I couldn't spend all my time mooning over Nyla, or even learning. There were decisions to be made. Not just decisions; we had to go to work. We could not stay in the Plaza forever, because the quarantine quarters had to receive thousands of new cats, arriving every day. Nor could we go on halfheartedly working at chambermaid and busboy jobs, because there were no free rides in Eden. There couldn't be. Before the mass transfers there had been hardly fifty thousand venturesome pioneers on the whole planet, whether malcontents or heroes. Now nearly two hundred thousand cats had already been transported to strain the resources available, and the number would more than double before the transfers were complete. Every one of us needed food, housing, all the million little gadgets and services and conveniences that made up civilized life. Food most of all. I had never been even a backyard gardener, but my first job-hunting trip was up to the north end of the park, where crews were busy harvesting lumber, pulling stumps, plowing fields, sowing winter crops. My second was down to the Brooklyn Bridge, where there were engineers testing the strength of the cables and supports, and forty times as many people chipping rust and slapping on paint to get the old bridge ready for service again. My third and fourth and fifth were all over the city, where the jobs were repairing water mains and power lines, or checking out apartment buildings to see if any could be made livable for the winter, or collecting scrap that would (somehow) be transported to the steel mills that would (somehow) be put back in operation to create new plows, and cars, and I-beams out of the discards of the old times, pending the day when the Mesabi iron mines could (somehow) be started up again for ore. Oh, there were jobs, all right! There were more jobs than there were people. It was just that none of them seemed to be for a man whose basic skills were making speeches, running fund raisers, and conniving to trade a pilot-training program here for a slum-clearance project somewhere else.

"It'll be fine," Nicky encouraged. "Gosh! They need everything, Dom, and sooner or later they'll need government people too. You'll make out, and so will I. When Greta comes—" He clasped his hands with a seraphic smile. "A home! A wife! A family—a big house, with a half acre of ground, surrounded by tall hedges so we can go skinny-dipping any time-"

"I've got an interview," I said, and left him with his dreams. I wasn't lying. The "interview" was with the woman at the Biltmore, and she recognized me at once. "Dominic DeSota, right? Just a minute." And she huddled over her comset, studying the screen.

And then her expression clouded.

I could feel what was coming even before she found the words she was looking for. "I'm really, really sorry," she began, and didn't have to end.

I had a smile all ready, saved up for some time when I would need a smile a lot. When I put it on, wonders, it worked. "Those are the breaks of the game," I said, grinning at her. "Well, honey? You doing anything special tonight?"

The smile might have fooled her, but I could see that the tone of voice was a dead giveaway. She was a good person. She had probably already had to tell five hundred of us Peety-Deepies that their nearest and dearest couldn't really see their way clear to a new life in a new place. "A lot of people get really frightened about paratime travel," she said.

The smile was beginning to ache, but I held on to it and made an effort at conversation. "Who doesn't?" I asked, and managed a shrug. "Nyla's as brave as anybody, but this kind of thing is an awful lot to ask. I don't blame her. If the positions were reversed, I'd probably say no, thanks, too—anyway, I'd have to think it over pretty hard. . . ." I trailed off, because the woman was looking puzzled.