Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

"What did you call her?"

"Nyla. Nyla Bowquist. Is something wrong?"

"Oh, hell, "she said, busy with her keyboard again. "You're that Dominic DeSota. I just can't keep you straight—same room number and everything; it was a woman named Greta that said no. Yours—" She frowned at the screen, tapped out a command for a double check, and then looked up at me with a smile of heavenly gold. "Your request was for Nyla Christophe Bowquist, and she accepted. She's already at Floyd Bennett for preliminary disinfection. She should be here in the hotel by tomorrow morning."

Staff Sergeant Nyla Sambok wasn't a staff sergeant any more, because nobody was. The American Army had been disbanded, along with the Soviet, by the League of Nations' peacekeeping forces. She still wore her uniform, however, dirty and wrinkled though it was. She didn't have anything else. As she waited in the Indianapolis terminal for the train home, the ex-captain on the bench next to her was listening to a little radio. It was repeating the terms of the one and only message her world had received to explain what had happened. We have removed all of your temporally displaced persons and your researchers in paratime physics, as well as inducing radioactivity to make your research centers unusable. No further research in this area is permitted. Nyla Sambok didn't need to hear it again. She only wished it had come earlier. The submarine-launched cruise missiles the Americans had not known the Soviets owned had been only marginally effective. Still, they had taken out Miami, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. The bomber-launched smart bombs the Russians had not known the Americans owned had done the same for Leningrad, Kiev, Tiflis, Odessa, and Bucharest. It was the prevailing opinion that the worst was over, since the exchanges appeared to be under the limit for a nuclear winter to follow. It would be months, though, before anyone knew.

Yr 11—110 111—111, mo 1—010, da 1—100, Hr 1—000, mn 1—111

Nicky DeSota

Mary Wodczek, the pilot of the blimp, came back to wake me up when we were somewhere over Scranton, or anyway where Scranton used to be. "Wakey-wakey," she called through the door. "New York in about an hour."

I called out thanks and crawled out of the crew bunk, shivering. They kept the living spaces in the blimp at what was supposed to be a bearable temperature, but it wasn't anything like Palm Springs. While I was getting up enough courage for a shower Mary called again, to make sure I was awake, "You know we're going to be airborne again before sundown, don't you?"

"Go fly your blimp," I advised through the door. I heard her friendly laugh, and then she was gone. Before my nerve failed me I stumbled into the little shower. It wasn't as cold as I had feared. It was warmer than the air, anyway, but all the same I was glad to get out of it and into some clothes, so I could get started on this day.

It was a holiday for the collective, which was why I was able to take the time—that, and working a weekend or two to build up some reserve. We might call it the toddy-ott of ooty-pod, but we still celebrated the twelfth of October as Columbus Day—anyway, most of us did. You couldn't expect the displaced Arab and African date growers who farmed outside our crop areas to get all mellow about the discovery of America. Columbus Day was just one more American eccentricity to them; the Ethiopian who ran our pumps had asked me when we put the tree up to decorate for the Columbus bunny.

Most of us were U.S.-born, though, and nearly all of us were cats. I mean the involuntary kind of cats. The farm community had been set up originally by the restless colonists from the twenty-era congeries, but they weren't that fond of farming. As we PeetyDeepies moved in, they moved out, to do what they considered more interesting things in this new world.

That suited me well enough. We were all equal in the Desert Agricultural Consort. That's not to say that any of them knew anything about Tau-America—my America. I hadn't found a single person who had ever heard of the Moral Might Movement. They didn't have rich Arabs buying up everything in sight—the only Arabs were part of the collective, just like me. They didn't have laws prohibiting drinking by those under thirty-five, or prohibition of abortion or contraception, and there wasn't any rule about how much of your skin you had to keep covered up. (Except the natural law, of course. No sane person wanted to expose too much skin to the California desert sun.)

What I had first called this new world to myself was Eden. The name was fair enough. And, although I wouldn't have guessed I'd like farming, it beat the dickens out of calculating mortgage rates in Chicago.

What made it even better, of course, was that my special skills kept me away from stoop labor, except now and then when a crop had to get in right then. Learning the binary arithmetic had been a bit of a strain, but once that was out of the way I took over all the financial problems for the collective. I was a solid asset to the consort, and they treated me that way. They were sorry to see me take off for New York.

Not many people had ever been sorry to see me leave before.

So, as the blimp swayed gently down toward the old New Jersey swamps and I counted over my crates of avocados and lettuce, I was actually looking forward to going back home. My real home. The one around Palm Springs.

It was very nearly what I had dreamed of as a kid. When I was young I was very religious—I didn't have much choice, did I? The Moral Might Movement was getting itself together, especially in the suburbs of Chicago. I wanted to be Good. Mostly what I wanted was to avoid getting crisped for eternity in the fiery flames of Hell, where (so Reverend Manicote assured me every Sunday) I was almost certainly going to go if I drank, missed Sunday school, or went skinny-dipping. He also mentioned Heaven now and then. That was sort of like Tahiti in my six-year-old mind; I knew it was there, but didn't see much chance of ever visiting it in person—at least, not without a really good lawyer to find a loophole in the rules. I mean, how could God possibly forgive my weighty six-year-old burden of sin? I'd told lies. I'd stolen nickels from my mother's purse. I'd shown disrespect to my elders. Oh, I was a bad one, all right! But I did daydream sometimes about what Heaven would be like if I ever found a way there. And what I dreamed was close enough to the Desert Agricultural Consort, even to the fact that, as Reverend Manicote had assured us, there was no marrying or giving in marriage in Heaven. That was true enough for me in California. There were women there-more than forty percent of the population was female-but they had mostly come to join husbands or lovers, and there wasn't much of a pool left over for single men like me.

But that was what I had wangled the New York trip to do something about.

We floated down to the Great Meadow, where winchmen were waiting to grab our cables, and I peered out the cabin window. New York City hadn't changed much. There was no real reason it should have-it was only about six weeks since I'd headed out for my new job in California, but, my goodness, it seemed a lot longer.

As soon as we were secure I stepped out into a rainy, chilly New York October day, and got my tennis shoes full of mud on the first step.

Herby Madigan was waiting for me on the pad, trying to peer past me to see what was in the cargo hold. He grabbed the manifest out of my hand before he even said hello and ran his eye down the list. "Tomatoes?" he asked indignantly. "What'd you bring us tomatoes for? We've still got plenty from Jersey and the Island."

"In a couple of weeks you won't have," I told him, "and then you'll be begging us. Anyway, there's dates and avocados"—his eyes lit up—"and I've put in some cases of oranges and coconuts, just to show."