The Coming of the Quantum Cats

23 August 1983

10:20 P.M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P.

It was just the purest chance that the first prisoner I took was myself.

I would have seen me sooner or later, of course. We knew I was there. Maybe "I"—that "I" who was now my prisoner—did "me"— the me who nailed him—a favor, because one of the reasons I got command of the first assault detachment through the portal was that Senator Dominic DeSota was there. (Senator! How had that happened? How had I risen so high in his timeline, and only to the damn dumb rank of field officer, and reserve at that, in my own? But that other DeSota's position was going to help me elevate mine. . .

"They're ready, sir," said Sergeant Sambok.

"Good-oh," I told her, and followed her back upstairs to the office of the chief scientist. I didn't have time to think about the grammatical games we were learning to play—the "I" that watched "me" through the peepers, the "them" that were "us." I didn't have time to wonder at what I'd wondered at a time or two before, either—namely, at the curious coincidences between that Dom DeSota's life and my own. Our lives were different in tremendous ways. But both of us had wound up involved in the parallel-time situation— and not, of course, just "both" of us, because there were all those other Dominic DeSotas in all the other times. The tech advisors had no time for such questions. I knew that was so, because I'd asked them. All they would say, not counting mathematics, was mumblemumble, after all, we Dominic DeSotas had genes in common; had boyhoods in common, anyway up to whenever the point of separation was; we'd read the same books and seen the same movies. So naturally we set into similar molds. .

"Right in here, sir," said the sergeant, and I walked through the door she held open for me into the office of the operating head of the Cathouse, as these people had amusingly named their parallel-time project.

The Signal Corps lieutenant said, "You're on in thirty seconds, Major."

"Right," I said, and sat down at the desk. It was clean—the chief scientist was one of those security-conscious guys, no doubt. The only thing on it was the Signal Corps microphone with the wires that led to the backpack transmitter on the lieutenant's helper. I tested the drawers. Locked, but we'd take care of that in a minute.

"Break a leg, sir," said Sergeant Sambok, grinning at me through her camouflage makeup, and I was on.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the microphone, "this is Dominic DeSota. Urgent circumstances have led to the necessity for a precautionary action at Sandia Base and nearby. There is nothing for you to fear. In one hour we will make a television broadcast through the local stations. All networks are urged to carry it live, and at that time the necessity for this action will be made clear."

I looked at the lieutenant, who drew his finger across his throat. The corporal with the backpack moved a switch, and I was off the air.

"See you later, Major," the lieutenant said, and followed his crew out of the room.

I leaned back, testing the leather chair. These people did themselves well; there were paintings on the wall and carpeting on the floor. "How'd it go, Nyla?" I asked.

She grinned. "Really well, Major. If you ever get out of soldiering, you ought to get into radio."

"I'm too big to fit into those little-bitty sets," I told her. "Have you notified Tac-Five this building is secure?"

"Yes, sir. Tac-Five says, 'Well done, Major DeSota.' The follow-on echelons have taken the next six buildings too. The whole area is secure."

"The prisoners?"

"We set up a stockade in the parking lot. Corporal Harris and three men are guarding them."

"Fine, fine," I said, pulling at the locked drawers again. I'd taken over the chief scientist's office, but unfortunately the chief scientist had been off the base at the moment. He had taken his keys with him. An annoyance, not a problem. "Open this up for me, Sergeant," I said, and Sergeant Sambok studied the locks for a moment, gauged the angle of possible ricochets, then placed the muzzle of her carbine a few inches from the lock. As she shot it out, .25 caliber bullets whined across the office.

The drawers opened with no further trouble. Inside was the usual mess of disorderly stuff you find in a neat man's desk, but among the mess were a couple of notebooks and a whole drawer of files. Of course, we'd watched these people pretty closely for months before we opened the portal, but Dr. Douglas would want to look the papers over. "Orderly," I said. Sergeant Sambok nodded, and a private popped in from the hallway. "Take this stuff back to the sally port," I ordered, juggling a slim, expensive-looking gold cigarette lighter engraved Harrah's Club, Lake Tahoe. It would have made a fine souvenir, but I put it back and slammed the drawer shut.

After all, we weren't thieves.

Sergeant Sambok was standing by the door, and something about the look on her face made me ask, "What else, Sergeant?"

"Private Dormeyer is AWOL," she said.

"Shit." Her look expressed concurrence with my opinion. "There's no AWOL under combat conditions. If the MP's get him, they'll call it desertion." More concurrence. "Damn it, Sergeant, somebody's got to know where he's gone! Find him. I want to keep this in the company."

"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it myself."

"Yes, you will," I told her. "Take ten minutes to find out where he is. Then meet me at the sally point."

My assault party was the first one through, but we'd attained our objectives. There were three hundred more troops on the base now—ours, I mean, not counting the ones we were taking prisoner—and I had nothing to do any more until it was time for the television broadcast. That wouldn't happen until the TV station in Albuquerque was secure, so that we could get it on the network. I headed down for the sally point in the basement of the building. Once it had been a pistol range, but when our peepers found it, it wasn't used for much of anything.

That made it perfect for us. We got our whole party across before anyone knew we were there.

Sandia was an old military base, in our time as well as theirs.

The difference was that in our time it had stayed small. In theirs it had grown immense. There were square miles of desert and hill inside its barbed-wire boundaries.

There were not, however, very many of their troops actually deployed anywhere on the base. The perimeter was guarded more by electrons than by men, with a post only every quarter mile or so along the fence. Of course, that must have seemed like plenty of protection to the base commandant. Outside of a paratroop drop, which would have given plenty of radar warning, there was no way any sizable number of enemies could get up to the wire without being detected in plenty of time to summon reinforcements unless, like us, they came from inside. When I got to the sally port there was already a map of the base tacked up on the wall, with the secured points in red crayon. The key parts had been the Cathouse and its immediate neighbors, the MP barracks, the headquarters, the signals exchange, and the radio station. We now owned them all. The few troops who had thought they were guarding them now realized how badly they had failed, in our stockade.

Troops were still coming in. They weren't needed, but it did no harm to have them—what if the previous occupants, against all logic, decided to fight? Bright floodlights racked along the wall showed the column of twos emerging from nothingness. They broke step, marched to a wall, fell out, were assembled again by their officers and noncoms, and marched off to reinforce the troops already in place.

It was a weird sight. If you positioned yourself right next to the sally portal, in the same plane as the plane of the portal itself, it was even weirder. Toes, feet, legs, fists, bellies, heads appeared in that order. If you got behind the portal plane, you could see-what would you guess? Raw meat and guts? The insides of those transported soldiers? Nothing of the kind. You couldn't see anything at all. Because from behind, the whole rectangle of the sally portal was featureless, lightless, unrelieved black. From in front there was nothing much, either. Just the troops emerging from the portal, and behind them the dusty walls of the old pistol range.

"Major?" It was Sergeant Sambok again. She looked around and lowered her voice to say, "I think I know where Dormeyer went."

"Good work, Sergeant," I said.

She shook her head. "He's off the base. He sneaked out somehow. He's gone into Albuquerque. The thing is, he lived—he lives here. In Albuquerque, I mean."

Not so good. But it wasn't her fault. "You did right," I said, and indeed she had. For a reservist, Nyla Sambok was a first-rate soldier. The funny thing was that she'd been a music teacher in civilian life, married to a harpsichord player. They'd both got their scholarships by joining the Reserve and they'd both been activated in the call-up; a lot of reservists were bitter, but Sambok was good enough and soldier enough that I'd requested her to come down with me from Chicago to take over this detachment. The fact that she was a great-looking woman didn't hurt any, either. But I've never messed around with the enlisted personnel. Only thought of it, now and then.

"Tac-Five will be on the horn for you in about two minutes," she went on. "I got the word as I was coming in."

"Fine," I said, "but I've got an idea. Go down to the stockade and bring back Senator DeSota's clothes for me."

Even Sergeant Sambok could look surprised. "His clothes?"

"What I said, Sergeant. You can leave him his underwear, but I want all the rest. Even the socks."

A quick flash of comprehension crossed her face. "Right, Major," she said, grinning, and was gone, leaving me to wait for TacFive's call.

Two-way communication across the skin that separates parallel times is harder than one. They had to shut down the portal and collapse the field to get the energy, but when the portal officer nodded I picked up the phone and General Magruder didn't keep me waiting. "Well done, Major," he barked. "The President says the same. He's been following this very closely, of course."

"Thank you, sir."

"Now we go to Phase Two. Are you ready for your television broadcast?"

"Yes, sir." Meaning that I wasn't, actually, but I would be as soon as Nyla Sambok got back with the clothes.

"The TV station and the microwave links are secure; they'll have the circuits open in half an hour. They've already got the President's tape ready to go, as soon as you do the introduction."

"Yes, sir."

"Good." Then his tone changed. "One other thing, Major. Any sign of rebound?"

"Nothing new, sir. I think we're still interviewing the locals, though."

"Urn. Any more unwelcome visitors?"

"No sign of any, sir."

"Keep your eyes open," he said harshly, and hung up. I recognized the tone. It was the voice of fear.

Half an hour later, walking over to the base's television studio in the hot desert night, with the same stars blazing overhead that blazed over my own America, I was feeling some of that fear myself. An MP jeep patrol cruised past, headlights swiveling from side to side. They paused long enough to take a good look at me and my assault-force armband, then picked up speed and moved on. They didn't challenge me. They didn't ask for I.D.

I could have been one of those unwelcome visitors. I could have been that other me who seemed to have been everywhere. And, if I had been, all I would have had to do was get a scrap of green cloth to pin around my sleeve and they would never have known the difference. And then— And then what would that other me have done?

That was the scary question. So far they had watched and pried. But they had done nothing at all.

I couldn't really blame the MP's for sloppy security, because they obviously didn't see the need for being tight. We had taken over the base without a shot being fired, against opposition that consisted mostly of sleepy-eyed sentries being struck dumb with astonishment when our troops pulled them in. What a way to run America! I wondered what it would be like to live in a country where important bases were guarded by only a handful of Regular Army troops, where there had been no draft or call-up of reserves. If I'd been left to finish my postgraduate courses at Loyola instead of being activated into the reserve, what would I be by now?

A senator, maybe?

It was not the kind of speculation that I could afford to get into, while I still had an important part of my job to finish.

Sergeant Sambok was waiting for me at the studio with Senator DeSota's clothes, as promised. I found a dressing room and slid out of my coveralls. He dressed himself well, that other Dom DeSota; shirt, tie, socks, shoes, pants, sports jacket—everything was good cloth or good leather. The cut was peculiar—his fashions were not the same as ours—but I liked the feel of the silky shirt and the soft, crisp-creased slacks. They could have fit a little better. The other Dom was a good size fatter than I, which was a satisfaction, even if it did spoil the cut of the clothes a little.

When I came out of the dressing room the sergeant wasn't critical. "Looking sharp, Major," she complimented.

"What did you leave him in?" I asked, peering at myself in the mirror, and when she grinned I knew the answer. He wouldn't get cold in that August heat in his underwear, but still Take him my spare fatigues," I ordered. "They're in my B-4 bag." Fortunately for him, I liked my fatigues a little loose, so he could undoubtedly get into them.

"Yes, sir," said Sergeant Sambok. "Sir?"

"What is it?"

"Well . . . if you're going to wear his clothes and he's going to wear yours, wouldn't that be a little confusing? I mean, suppose he got to you and knocked you out and changed clothes. How would I know which was which?"

I started to open my mouth to tell her she was a fool. Then I closed it again. She was right. "Good thinking," I said. "Tell you what. I'll be the one who knows your full name, okay?"

"Yes, sir, Anyway, as long as he's in the stockade and you're not..."

"That's right," I agreed, but then I felt what I'd been unwilling to let myself feel for the last couple of hours.

I wanted to confront this other self of mine. I wanted to sit and talk to him, hear his voice, find out where our lives had been the same and where they differed. It was an itchy, quivery sort of thought, like getting ready for the first time you do dope, or the first sex; but I wanted it.

I didn't have time to think about it just then, because I was on. The cameramen gaped at my snappy civilian clothes, the signals captain grinned openly, but it was time for my television debut, ready or not.

More not than ready. They've always got to swing a mike into position or switch a camera or send somebody out into the hall to stop somebody else's chattering, but in a moment the corporal who was acting as director cried, "Stand by, sir!" He listened to his headphones for a moment, and then began to count. "Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . ." For the last counts he used his fingers, two fingers, one finger, then the single finger stabbed at me and the green light over the camera went on and the prepared speech began to roll.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the camera, "I am Dominic DeSota." That was no lie; I was. I didn't say I was Senator DeSota, though the fact that I was now wearing his clothes might have carried that implication. There wasn't much more to my speech:

"An emergency has required this action to take place. I ask that every American listen to this broadcast with an open mind, and with the generous heart of all we Americans. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the President of the United States."

And the photons of my face and neck and that other Dominic's suit and tie and shirt went flocking into the camera and came out as electrons; as electrons snaked through the cables of the base studio to the microwave dish on the roof, were reconverted to photons of a different frequency, and, as radio signals, were hurled across the valley to the transmitter towers of KABQ bounced up into the air and through it, to a satellite thousands of miles away in space and showered down on the television sets of the United States. This United States. And what they would make of it, and of the President who was not their President, I could only wonder.

The whole Signal Corps detachment was in uniform, but there was still a lot of civilian in their blood. Reservists, called up for the emergency, they were almost all veterans of the networks. They'd arranged themselves some civilian comforts. There was a pot of coffee brewing in the lounge outside the studio, and a plate of packaged cakes and junk foods—someone had liberated the local PX.

I poured myself a cup, listening to President Brown's voice coming over the monitors: ". . . as the President of the United States, speaking to you who are also the President of the United States, and to the American people . . ." He looked nervous but well rehearsed as he read the lines written for him. ". . . at this point in our history we are confronted with a terrible despotism out to conquer the world . . ." and ". . . the ties of blood and common devotion to the principles of freedom and democracy . . ." and on and on. It was a pretty good speech; I'd seen the text beforehand. But the important thing wasn't anything in his speech. It was the fact that we were in control.

The same voice was coming from a control room just down the hall, door open. I carried my cup down to peer inside. There they had not one but a dozen monitors, almost all of them showing the President's earnest face, saying the same things. But there were also a couple of screens that showed other faces, looking serious and even more earnest: John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, a couple I didn't recognize. They were doing commentary already. That was a surprise, until I remembered that the President's speech was only four minutes long. It had played once and was being rerun by the stations that had been caught off guard and didn't have an instant response ready; the others were already reacting.

I looked at my watch. Midnight local time. It would be two A.M. in the big cities of the East Coast, but I doubted very many of the population would be sleeping. And in California the citizens would be tuning in for their late-night news and getting a kind of news they hadn't expected.

Served them right. Why should they be fat and happy when we were facing the terrible struggle for the freedom of the world?

Even a commander of assault troops has to sleep sometime. I got nearly five hours. When I woke up it was with the smell of bacon and coffee. I was in the chief scientist's office, making use of the chief scientist's eight-foot couch, and Corporal Harris was setting a tray down next to my head. "Sergeant Sambok's compliments, sir." He grinned. "We occupied the officers' club last night."

The eggs were nearly cold, because they'd been carried, but the coffee was hot and strong. It was just what I needed to get me going.

First stop was the studio again. The soldier-technicians had been joined by three civilians, an old woman, a young woman, and a bearded man of no particular age. I stopped the Signal Corps captain, jerked a thumb at the civilians clustered in front of the monitors, and raised an eyebrow. "Them?" he said. "Them's scientists, Major. Anyway, that's what they say they are, and their orders are okay."

"Doing what?"

He shrugged. "Monitoring responses to the President's message, they say. It's some kind of political-science study, you know?" I didn't know. "Anyway," he said sourly, "there's damn little to study, because there hasn't been diddly-shit coming out of this President they got here."

That wasn't the kind of news I wanted to hear. "You could check with Tac-Five," he added as an afterthought, but I was already on my way back to the Cathouse. The base was nice and calm in the hot desert morning. I wasn't. Dry as the air was, I was sweating into my second-day's-wearing fatigues (maybe I shouldn't have been so generous with my spares!), and beginning to feel worried.

General Ratface Magruder was where you'd expect a general to be at seven o'clock in the morning, namely asleep, but I got Colonel Harlech. He was not a friendly soul. When I asked him about the civilians, he pruned me back to the trunk in half a dozen words. "They're authorized and none of your business, Major," he snapped. "What's the status of your base?"

"All secure, sir." Hoping it was so, because actually I hadn't checked out my own troops. "Still no sign of rebound here."

"Unwanted visitors?"

"Nothing reported, sir." At least not to me. "Sir? May I ask about Dr. Douglas?"

Rusty chuckle. "He's in his tent under guard and scared shitless. What's the current status on enemy signal interceptions?"

He meant listening in on radio and TV. "No clear pattern, sir. They do keep repeating the President's broadcast. He comes through loud and clear."

Colonel Harlech didn't actually say shit. He just made a noise close enough to be clear, muffled enough to be deniable. Harlech was one of Magruder's own hotshot warriors, and everybody knew what they thought of the President. Who had opposed a preemptive strike vigorously . . . until the chiefs of staff let him know they had plenty of military prisons for politicians who got in the way of what they considered the essential defense of the United States.

When I got off the cross-time phone with the colonel I debated going back to the studio for a word with the poli-scientists. It would be interesting to hear their theories about why a militarily active U.S. society like ours got a jelly-backed President like Jerry Brown, while this other one, fat and peaceful, had elected the fire-breather, Reagan. But I was a soldier, not a scholar; and there were things I was more curious about than that. I yelled for an orderly, and when Corporal Harris stuck his head in the door, I ordered him to go down to the stockade and bring back the prisoner, Senator Dominic DeSota.

He sat there in my fatigues, looking so much like me that it was embarrassing. I couldn't take my eyes off him, and he was studying me just as hard. He wasn't scared. At least he didn't look that way. What he looked was partly resentful and mostly interested—a quality I have always admired in myself. "You're a ballsy guy, Dominic," I told him. "Tell me. How's this thing going to go?"

He stretched thoughtfully before he answered; he'd been sleeping, too, and on something not as comfortable as the chief scientist's couch, no doubt. "You mean how is President Reagan going to respond to armed invasion?" he asked.

"That's the hard-nosed way to look at it."

"It's a hard-nosed thing to do, Dominic. What do you hope to gain from this?"

"Peace," I said, grinning. "Victory. The triumph of democracy over tyranny. I don't mean your tyranny, of course. I'm talking about our mutual enemy, the Russians."

He said patiently, "Dom, I don't have any Russian enemies. The Russians just don't signify in the world—my world. They would have starved if we hadn't fed them after their shoot-up with China."

"You should've let them starve!"

He sighed, disliking me. "So you come along and invade us. Without warning." He shrugged. "You tell me how it's going to go. You're making the play."

"It's going to go our way, Dom." I said and grinned. "The sooner you guys understand that, the easier it's going to be for you." He didn't answer that. I wouldn't have, either. I tried being friendly. "It's our country, whichever side of the barrier we're on," I said persuasively. "You ought to cooperate, because we have the same basic interest, the good of the United States of America. Right?"

"I sure as hell doubt that, Dom," he said.

"Aw, Dom, come on. You might as well take my word for that because, after all, you don't have much to say about it, do you? We've got you by the ying-yang . . . speaking of which," I added, "how's your prostate?"

That surprised him. "What are you talking about? I'm too young to have prostate trouble."

"Yeah," I said. "That's what I thought when they told me. Better have it checked."

He shook his head. "DeSota," he said, looking a lot braver and more determined than I thought I might have in his place-pleasing me, because that made me think maybe I would have—"let's cut out the bullshit. You invaded us without warning, and that's a pretty dirty thing to do. Why did you do it?"

I smiled. "Because it was there. Don't you know how these things go? We had a problem, and we saw a technological solution. When you get the technology you use it, and we got the technology." I didn't bring up the question of how we got it, which after all was not very relevant. "See, old buddy, you're faced with what we call a nonnegotiable situation. Our President tells your President what we want to do. You let us do it. Then we go away again and that's the end of it."

He gave me a searing look, "You don't believe that, do you?" he asked.

I shrugged. We knew each other well enough to know that neither of us would believe it. I hadn't thought beyond the objective of the exercise—officially—but I knew as well as I do that once we had used their time-line to take care of the major enemies in our own, we would not very likely go away. There would always be other little jobs we could use them for.

But that was too far in the future for me to worry about— though I could see why that other me would worry, a lot. I said, "Get back to the question. Will your President listen to ours without a struggle? In my time the Reagans and Jerry Brown weren't exactly buddies."

"What's that got to do with it? She'll do what she has to do. She's sworn an oath to protect and defend the United States—"

"Yeah, but which one?" I asked. "Our President swore the same oath, and he's carrying it out." Reluctantly—being a wimp; but I didn't say that. "And the best way for old Nancy to protect you folks would be to let us do what we want. Do you have any idea of what the alternative is? We have all the muscle! You want us to push some anthrax into the White House? Smallpox-B into Times Square?" I laughed at his expression. "What's the matter, did you think we were just talking hydrogen bombs? We wouldn't want to mess up a lot of good real estate."

"But biological weapons are—" He stopped, thinking. He'd been going to say that they were against international law or something.

I explained, "After Salt II we had to do something. We pretty much gave up nukes. So we worked on other things."

"What's 'Salt II'?" he asked; then, immediately, "No, the hell with that, I don't want history lessons from you. All I want from you is for all of you to go the hell back where you came from and leave us alone, and I doubt you'll do that. If it interests you, you make me want to puke."

What a feisty little devil he was! He made me almost proud but also mad. "Bullshit, Dom!" I yelled. "You would have done the same thing! You were getting ready to, one way or another—otherwise why were you working on this Cathouse project?"

"Because—" he began, and stopped. His expression was a good enough answer. He changed the subject. "Have you got a cigarette?" he asked.

"Gave it up," I said with satisfaction.

He nodded, thinking. "I really didn't believe it would work," he said slowly.

"But you were in there trying, boy, weren't you? So what's the difference? We're not doing anything you wouldn't have done if you'd finished your research ahead of us."

"That's—that's doubtful," he said. Honest of him. He hadn't said, "That's untrue."

"So will you help talk your President into it?" I pushed.

No hesitation this time. "No."

"Not even to save a lot of lives, maybe?"

He said, "Not even for that. No surrender, Dom And I'm not sure I would want to buy a few American lives with a few million Russians, either."

I looked at him in amazement. Was it possible that I—in any incarnation---could be such a softheaded fool? But he wasn't looking softheaded. He leaned back in his chair, studying me, and suddenly he seemed taller and more sure of himself. "So what's the thing that scares you, Dominic?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" I sparred.

He said, reasoning it out, "Sounds to me like you've got a worry you're not telling me about. Maybe I can't guess what that is. On the other hand, maybe I can. The reason I came down here was because there was another one of us snooping around. He seemed to know what you were going to do. If I were you, I think I'd be real worried about him. Why? Who is he? What's going on?"

I should have known that it was hard to keep secrets from myself. I was never a dummy, not even in this senator incarnation. He'd twigged to the thing that was most on my mind—or one of them.

I said slowly, "He's from another parallel time, Dom."

"I guessed that much," he said impatiently. "Did he visit you before?"

"No. Not exactly. Not him." I didn't want to tell him any more

about the visitor we had had—the one we had managed to catch and detain, who was now sitting in his tent under guard on the other side of the portal, sweating with fear that his people would find him and do something bad to him for helping us develop the portal. "But we did have a visitor. Maybe more than one."

"Keep talking."

I said, "Have you ever heard of 'rebound'?"

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning 'bouncing back.' When you go through the skin, or whatever it is, that separates one time from another, there's some kind of conservation effect. Things begin going in the other direction."

He frowned. "You mean other people being thrown back and forth?"

"Not just people. It's complicated. It depends on how badly the skin is torn. Sometimes it's just energy—light, or sound. Sometimes it's gases drifting back and forth, or small things—birds flying, maybe. Sometimes it's a lot more."

"And that's happening here?"

I said unwillingly, "Seems to be, Dom. And Snot just here."

He stood up and went over to the window. I let him think it out. Over his shoulder he said, "It sounds like you people are really screwing the bird, Dom." I didn't answer that. He turned around, looking at me. "I wish you'd get me a cigarette," he said testily. "This stuff is hard to take calmly."

I debated for a moment whether to hardnose him on that, decided not to. "Why not? They're your lungs." I poked at the intercom on the desk until I figured out which button connected with the orderly room and told Sergeant Sambok to bring up some smokes. "So," I said, "we want to get this thing squared away. Are you going to help us?"

He said simply, "No."

"Not even when it's as risky as I'm telling you? Not even when your country is defenseless against us anyway?"

"You got into it, Dominic. You get out of it by yourself," he said definitely, and turned toward the door as Nyla Sambok appeared with a carton of tax-free PX cigarettes.

And all of a sudden my friendly other self changed from the self-assured name/rank/serial-number-only prisoner to something brand-new.

What the hell had happened to him? He was staring after the sergeant as if he'd seen a ghost. I never saw such an expression of astonishment, and rage, and worry on any human face—least of all on my own!