The Coming of the Quantum Cats

24 August 1983

9:20 A.M, Senator Dominic DeSota

When I got back to my home away from home, the stockade in the J-3 parking lot, I found out I had missed breakfast. I was also missing six of my fellow prisoners. There were a dozen or so of the base's permanent party soldiers still there, including a couple shamefacedly wearing "PW" stencils on their shirt backs and picking up leftover cafeteria trays from where the others had left them. A different soldier, with a green armband, was watching them with an automatic pistol held loosely before him. One of Major DeSota's, no doubt.

But of the few civilians who had shared the canvas cots in the parking lot with me the night before, there were none. This upset the corporal who had brought me back. He motioned me inside the fence while he muttered worriedly to the other guard. It didn't worry me. I had other things on my mind.

I had one other thing: Nyla Bowquist!

I don't know how to say how shattering it was to see my dear lover in an Army uniform, with traces of blackout makeup still on her face, a gun over her shoulder, looking at me with no recognition at all.

Now that I had time to think I realized that it was likely enough that there would be another Nyla in their time, just as there was another Dominic DeSota—and, no doubt, another Marilyn (but who would she be married to there?) and another Ferdie Bowquist and a whole other cast of characters. The other Dom DeSota wasn't at all the same as me. There was no reason the other Nyla should be. This one was no famous concert violinist. She wore her hair shorter and her eyes less made up. And her clothes—well, it was an army uniform, after all. My Nyla dressed beautifully, but this one hadn't had the freedom of choice.

But so heartbreakingly similar! And she hadn't known me at all! Or—that was not exactly true—she had known me as a copy of that other Dominic, whom she had known, all right (but not, I thought, in the biblical sense). I wondered if I would see her again.

And wondered instantly if I would ever see my own Nyla again. And wondered at myself! Here I was in the middle of huge, fantastic, and frightening events, and the thing that filled my mind was the woman I was having an--affair with—

"You! Prisoner DeSota!" growled the corporal, and I realized he'd been waving at me. "Come on, your people have been moved. I have to take you to the assembly point."

I looked at the other prisoners, who only looked back at me in the opaque, I-only-work-here expression of enlisted men in a situation not covered by orders. "Where's that?" I asked. But the only answer I got was a nasty twitch of the machine-pistol.

It wasn't far. It was right back the way we had come, to the Officers' Club just across from the Cathouse.

I'd been in it before. Many times. It was a sort of lounge where the people working could sit for a cup of coffee and a short conversation away from their desks, or take their latest load of information memos to read over in peace. It looked as it always had, except that there were nine people in it who clearly didn't want to be there. Two of the civilian scientists were pacing back and forth, glaring out the windows. Colonel Martineau was sitting talking to one of the women, whom I recognized as a mathematician brought down from ITT, and therefore one of my constituents. "Edna," I said, nodding. "Colonel."Just as though I had happened to drop in for a Coke and nothing strange was going on at all.

"We wondered where you were," said the colonel.

"I was being questioned by that nasty other Dominic DeSota. Made me miss breakfast."

"If you have any quarters," he said, "there's a vending machine right out in the hail, and the guard'll let you use it." I didn't, but Dr. Edna Valeska did—just like our own, except that the face was Herbert Hoover's. A soft drink and a couple of Twinkies didn't make a meal, but at least they informed my stomach my intentions were good. Out of habit, Colonel Martineau made a round of the room while I was getting them, checking windows (shake of the head; armed guards outside), checking the other doer (locked), listening to the telephone (dead). Then he sat down and watched me eat. "We've all been questioned," he said. "What interested them most seemed to be you, Dom—anyway, that first man who looked like you. The one that disappeared."

"They asked me the same thing," I said, mouth full of lardy sugar. "I didn't see any harm in telling them what I knew—which wasn't much, of course. Should I have stuck to name, rank, and serial number, which I don't have?"

He looked at me in surprise. I was surprised too; I hadn't realized how edgy I was. "I think we have to play this one by ear, Senator," he said, placating me. I grinned to show I was sorry, and Edna Valeska perched on the couch next to me to get into the discussion.

"The good news," she said gloomily, "is that we have proof now that the Cathouse Project works. The bad news is they got it before us, and they're using it; and the even worse news is that there seems to be more than one other time-line involved. There's no other explanation that saves the facts."

"That's the way it looks to me," I agreed, "but who are these other ones?" Shakes of the head. "Christ. I'm not used to this kind of stuff."

Flash of a grin from Edna. "Who is?"

"Well, but it's your project!" I protested. "If you don't know what's going on, who does?"

"I said I wasn't used to it, Senator. I didn't say I didn't understand it—part of it, anyway." She saw my eyes on her cigarettes and plucked one out for me. "For instance," she said, lighting us both up, "we know quite a lot about the time-line of our visitors—the invading ones, that is; the one where you're a major in the army."

"We do?"

"To be sure. They're invading because they want to get at an enemy in their time through the back door—the same as we were preparing to do."

"Dr. Valeska," I said, "we weren't preparing. The mission of the Cathouse was to study feasibility. There were no operational plans."

She shrugged, dismissing the distinction as without enough difference to matter. "There's one other solid deduction, and one other fact. The deduction is that, although they've got pretty far along with time-crossing, there is at least one other time-line that's got farther. The one that produced the first Dominic DeSota."

I noticed that not only had the others in the room begun to cluster around to listen, but even the guard in the doorway was flapping his ears in our direction. Well, why not? Maybe I could read something from his expression. "How do you know that?" I asked, watching the guard out of the corner of my eye.

"Because these other people-we'll call them Population One—can slip one person through at a time and pull him back from the other side. I don't think Population Two—the invaders—can do that." The frown on the face of the guard made that seem plausible, I thought. Edna Valeska was noticing it, too, I could tell. "So," she said, "there's another player in this game."

"So we might have an ally," I said hopefully. "The Population One people might be as vulnerable as we are, only to Population Two."

The guard was goggling at us now, and the look of worry on his face was comforting. We were talking about things that he didn't want to think about. I turned to smile at him. Mistake. He glowered at me and backed away, his weapon stiffly at port arms, no expression at all on his face any more. But that was a kind of confirmation too.

"On the other hand," said Edna Valeska, "if the Population One people were going to do anything for us they had every chance to warn us. They didn't do that."

That was true enough, and I began to feel as discomfited as the guard. "So what's the other fact we know about the Population Two people-the invaders?" I ask.

"The Soviet Union is their principal enemy."

I said, "Yes, so it seems. But that's hard to believe! After the nuke war, when the Chinese did the decapitation bit in 1960, bombing Moscow and Leningrad—"

"Right, Dom," Colonel Martineau put in, "but, you see, in their time that didn't happen. We've pieced that all together, from the things we found out when we were questioned. The Soviets had only one big outside war. Around 1940, I think. They got into a war with Finland, and the Germans got involved—"

"The Germans!"

Martineau nodded. "The Germans didn't have their revolution. A man named Hitler took power, and the war was pretty bad. The Russians won, and after the war they occupied most of Eastern Europe, under their leader, Josef Stalin."

That was toughest of all to swallow. "Now, wait a minute! I know who Stalin was! He ran the country for a while until his assassination. His grandson's a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. He's the Russian ambassador to the U.S. We play bridge. He's a good friend of—some friends of mine," I finished, not wanting to mention Nyla Bowquist. I caught a glimpse of the guard, more cautious this time, but once again definitely listening. "Old Joe," I lectured, "was killed by some kind of Georgian separatist underground. And the English had had their general strike that turned into a revolution. They went socialist, the way they still are, and the Russian Litvinov got to be boss of the U.S.S.R. because he had good English connections. Had an English wife, as a matter of fact. And then, after 1960, the Germans had their counterrevolution and the kaiserin came back, and now they and Japan are the big competitors . . . " I trailed off. I wasn't scaring the guard any more. I was just boring him. Not to mention what I was doing to Edna and Colonel Martineau.

The colonel shook his head. "None of that happened in their time," he said. "For the last thirty-odd years they've only had two real superpowers, the Russians and the Americans. And they want to knock out the competition."

The guard wasn't only bored. He wasn't even listening any more. There was a faint stir from the front of the O's Club, and he was watching whatever was happening there. By then all of us in the room had been casting sidelong glances at our living litmus paper to see when what we said produced a reaction, and when it stopped reacting the conversation died.

"Oh, hell," said one of the junior scientists, and shrugged to say that it was a general comment with no specific follow-up planned.

Edna Valeska fretted, "Hell and damn. My husband's going to be worried sick. He never wanted me to take night duty. I wish I could let him know I was all right."

"I wish the same thing," I said.

The colonel nodded. "In my line of work my wife's had to get used to this kind of thing—well, not this kind of thing, I mean, but not being able to call her all the time. I know it's different for civilians. I bet you're worried about your wife, Dom."

"What? Oh, sure," I agreed, and didn't add, Her too.

They fed us again before noon. It was canned spaghetti and meatballs out of the dregs of the Officers' Club kitchen supplies, but there was plenty of milk and decent coffee. "Fattening us up for the kill," said one of the junior scientists gloomily, and, on cue, our new guard came into the room with his machine-pistol at the ready, followed by Nyla. Sergeant Nyla Sambok, that was, with two more armed privates at her side.

She looked us over politely. "If you'll finish your coffee," she said, "we're about ready to take you to more comfortable quarters."

"Where's that?" asked Colonel Martineau.

"Not far, sir. If you'll come along now, please." The voice was Nyla's own. So was the "please"—a nice touch, I thought, under the circumstances. The way her troopers unshipped their weapons to cover us wasn't. Whether we had finished our coffee or not, we moved.

We didn't have far to go. Outside the air-conditioned club the desert heat hit us all between the eyes, but we weren't in it long. Out the door. Across the wide and empty base street. Into the front door of the Cathouse, and clattering down a flight of steps to a big, cluttered basement room. Once it had been a pistol range. Now it was full of people with the green invader armbands, some OD-painted things like generators, but with heavy cables snaking outside to where we could hear diesels thudding away . . . and a tall, rectangular screen of featureless jet black.

That was the first time I ever saw a portal. I didn't have to be told what it was. It was simply a blackness hanging in the air, almost big enough to fill the room from side to side; and it was scary. Colonel Martineau snapped: "Sergeant! I demand to know what your intentions are!"

"Yes, sir," she agreed. "An officer will brief you. This is for your own comfort and safety, sir."

"Bullshit, Sergeant!"

But she simply agreed, "Yes, sir," and walked away. She was no longer around to answer questions, and the armed guards obviously had all their answers in their ammo clips.

I watched her go over to the side of the room, where my good old doppelganger-Dominic was standing, with a man who looked somehow odd. Two ways odd. His face was vaguely familiar; and he seemed to be a civilian in borrowed fatigues, like me. He wore no rank insignia, like me; and like me he did not have a green armband.

He was not a prisoner, though, because he was standing before a tail console, making adjustments to some sort of instrumentation. Major Dominic was watching him closely; so was an enlisted man with a carbine. His guard? And if he needed a guard, and wasn't one of us, who was he?

Nyla-the-Sergeant was getting orders from Major-me. She nodded and came back to us. "You'll be going through in just a minute," she informed us.

"Now, hold on, Sergeant!" snapped the colonel. "I demand to be told where you're taking us!"

"Yes, sir," she said. "The officer will explain it all." Martineau subsided, fuming. I took my turn.

"You're Nyla Christophe, aren't you?" I asked sunnily.

Blink of surprise. For the first time she looked at me as though I were a human being, not just a lump of captive meat to be moved around at will. The carbine in her hands remained steady. It wasn't pointed at me, exactly, but it only needed a quarter-turn of her body to zero in on my belly. "That's my maiden name," she agreed cautiously. "Do you know me?"

"I know the one of you that's in my time," I said, and smiled. "She's my . . . friend. She's also one of the world's greatest violinists."

She looked at me curiously at hearing "friend," but I got her full attention when I said "violinist." She looked at me searchingly for a moment. She gave a quick glance toward the major, then back to me. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

I said, "Zuckerman, Ricci, Christophe. They're the top three violinists in the world today. This world. Last night Nyla played with the National Symphony before the President of the United States."

"The National Symphony?" I nodded. "My God," she said, "I've always wanted— Are you bullshitting me, Mr. DeSota?"

I shook my head. "In my time you're married to a real-estate developer in Chicago. Last night you played the Gershwin Violin Concerto, with Rostropovich conducting. Two months ago your picture was on the cover of People."

She gave me a look, partly puzzlement, partly skepticism. "Gershwin never wrote a violin concerto," she said, "and what's People?"

"It's a magazine, Nyla. You're famous."

"It's true, Sergeant," chimed in the colonel, listening intently. "I've heard you play myself."

"Yeah?" She was still skeptical, but she was also fascinated.

I nodded sincerely. "What about you, Nyla?" I asked. "Do you play the violin?"

"I teach it," she said. "I did until the call-up, anyway."

"So you see?" I exclaimed, beaming. "And—"

And that was as far as it went. "Sergeant Sambok!" called a captain, standing by the screen. "Move them out!"

That was the end of it. She was all business then, my Nyla. If she looked at me at all again, it was with the same impersonal interest that the hammer man in an abattoir might give a steer coming up the ramps "Move on, please," she said to all of us, but this time the "please" meant nothing at all.

"Now, listen, Sergeant," Colonel Martineau began, but she was having no more of it. She gestured with the carbine. The colonel looked at me and shrugged. We moved. We lined up in single file, along yellow lines that had been painted so recently on the floor that parts of them were still tacky. There was a broad yellow stripe just before the ominous blackness, like the wait-here line at a customs counter in an airport. The new captain stopped us there, one eye on us and the other on the vaguely familiar civilian.

"When I give the word," he said, "you'll just walk straight ahead through the portal, one at a time. Wait until you are called; that's important. You'll find the other side is the same level as this one, you don't have to worry about stumbling or anything. Anyway, there will be personnel on the other side to help you if necessary. Remember, only one at a time—"

"Captain!" rapped Colonel Martineau, summoning up one last effort. "I demand—"

"No you don't," the captain told him, not rudely, just as anyone with a tricky job might tell somebody else to butt out until the job was done. "You'll have a chance to make any complaints on the other side . . . sir." The "sir" was an afterthought. The tone made it clear that it wasn't to be taken seriously. The captain was a lot more interested in the civilian at the console than in anything any of us might say.

The civilian was interesting enough, actually. He was obviously making some sort of complex balancing adjustment. It appeared that he was trying to keep a red dot on one scale opposite a green one on another. When the red dot drifted away he turned knobs until he got it back. When they were together he called over his shoulder, "Move them out!"

And Dr. Edna Valeska, looking as though she were praying, cast an imploring look over her shoulder at us, shuddered, and walked into the blackness, where she simply disappeared.

All the other eight of us sighed at once. "Next," rapped the captain, and Colonel Martineau followed. The black swallowed him up with no more trace than it had left of Edna Valeska.

I was next in line.

I was standing no more than six feet from the mystery civilian. He gave me a quick look over his shoulder.

And I twigged. Skinny, far more harassed-looking, but the same man. There was no question about it. "Lavrenti!" I exclaimed. "You're Ambassador Lavrenti Djugashvili!"

His guard snapped, "You crazy? Don't bother Dr. Douglas now!"

"Wait a damn minute," protested the civilian. "You! What did you call me?" -'

"Djugashvili," I said. "You're the Ambassador of the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Djugashvili."

He looked at me fretfully for a moment. "My name's not Djugashvili," he said, returning to his board. He juggled dials for a moment, before nodding to the captain to scoot me through the portal. "But my grandfather's was," he called, just as I stepped into the blackness.

When I was a kid I had an active fantasy life, and it concentrated on two subjects. One was space travel. The other was sex. The principal reason I wanted to become a scientist, back as a sophomore at Lane Tech, was so I could visit other worlds. I never lost that fantasy, exactly, it just sort of slowly evaporated away over the years.

The other I never lost at all. I had the best collection of dirty books on the Near North Side. Porno flicks hadn't got out in the open yet, but there were places where you could pay two dollars and get into the back room of a coin-machine arcade or a sleazy bookstore and watch grainy black-and-white films from Tijuana and Havana. (For a long time I wasn't entirely sure that a man could make love to a woman without wearing black calf-length stockings and a mask.) I traded lies with all the other guys in the chess club and on the tennis team, and I put myself to sleep every night in the timehonored adolescent way, with my imagination carefully writing the scenario of the perfect seduction: the gossamer negligee, the chilled wine by the bed, the silken sheets. .

And then came the Fourth of July. Peggy Hofstader.

Her apartment house was near enough the lake to watch the fireworks, and there was nobody on the roof but us, and I'd managed to score two bottles of warm, nasty-tasting beer. And when the fireworks were blattering out their rackety-bang, all-over-the-sky finale, and I felt Peggy's hand reaching toward where no hand but mine had ever gone before, I realized my bluff was called. Fantasy had suddenly become real. All unprepared, I was making my debut, and what did you do with all those arms and legs and parts and places?

It was a good thing for me that Peggy knew my lines better than I did. I needed all the help I could get.

There wasn't anybody to help me now.

In a wholly different way, I was up against the same shuddery, scary, exciting thing. There was another world on the other side of that blackness.

I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. And I walked into it.

What did it feel like?

Mostly it felt like nothing at all. I've been to a couple of science fairs where they had air doors separating the rooms, currents of ascending air mixed with water vapor so it looked as though a cloud were hanging in the doorway; they project pictures or advertising messages on them, and you walk right through them. This felt like even less of a world-crossing transition than that. It was just that at one moment I was in a shooting range in the basement of a building, noisy, filled with people, lit by banks of flickering fluorescent lights .

And then I took a step, and suddenly I was at the bottom of an excavation. I stood on duckboards, in the hottest August sunlight New Mexico can produce. Scaffolding rose around me, supporting curious machines like TV cameras with round wire shields over where their lenses ought to be. A cherry picker stood idle beside one of them, with a man idly looking down at me from the cup. Scoopedout sandy walls surrounded me. A roaring truck motor was breaking my eardrums just a few feet away.

I didn't have time to study the scene. There were two soldiers standing there to grab my arms and pull me forward. "Into the truck," one of them ordered, and turned to get the next prisoner who came stumbling through. I climbed into the truck—unremarkable Army six-by-six with board seats around the sides and a soldier manning a light machine gun, pointed toward us, squatting on the cab. When all nine of us were aboard, the truck motor roared even louder; the vehicle jerked forward, and we climbed up out of the excavation onto a mesa where two Army helicopters stood by, their rotors slowly turning. "Out," ordered the guard, who had followed us into the truck, and one by one we jumped down as the truck roared away. The guard who did the talking, watching us carefully, backed away to exchange a few words with the pilot of one of the helicopters. We all looked at each other.

We were up in bare, sandy hills. I could see the barracky buildings of an actual Army base a mile or so across the mesa—the original Sandia, I supposed. Nearer there was a tractorless OD-painted trailer body, windows showing that it was some kind of an office, on the lip of the excavation. And across the excavation were two or three other trailers, but not offices: they carried generators, thudding away, and the cables went straight down to the machines at the floor of the pit.

I was gasping from the sun in a minute, and so were the rest of us, but we were all too keyed-up to worry about heatstroke. Edna Valeska tugged at my sleeve. "They had to dig to get down to basement level," she said, pointing.

"What?"

"They wanted to come out in the basement of the building," she explained, "and there wasn't any building here. So they had to dig."

"Oh, yeah." It didn't seem important. To tell the truth, I'd had too many things to react to, I didn't know what was important and what was not any more. I could see two more figures appear out of the black rectangle: Nyla-the-Sergeant, and the man who looked like, but said he wasn't, Djugashvili. They exchanged words, and Nyla turned away to get into a jeep. "What about the scaffolding?"

"At a guess," said Dr. Valeska, "that was a matter of positioning too. They wanted to bug us. To look into the laboratories. Some of them were on the top floor."

It sounded rational enough, though I was no longer sure about what constituted rationality, either. One of the juniors put his finger on the central question.

"What do you think they're going to do with us?" he asked, his voice quavering.

Nobody had a good answer for that. Colonel Martineau came closest. "I think that's what we're going to find out from the sergeant," he said, as Nyla Sambok's jeep spun sand from its wheels while she parked it behind us.

She didn't tell us, though—at least not right away. She was called, scowling, over to the colloquy between the guard and the copter pilots. "Colloquy" was too mild a word; it was becoming a straight-out argument, and they weren't keeping their voices down.

We didn't have to wonder long about the subject of the disagreement. It was like that old puzzle of the missionaries and the cannibals crossing a river. Each helicopter could hold five persons besides the pilot. There were nine of us—nine prisoners—and one guard made ten. Two loads. Only neither of the pilots was willing to take a chance with carrying five of us enemy maniac desperadoes without an armed guard.

"Aw, shit," said Sergeant Sambok at last. "Get on with it. You take four, you take four, and I'll keep the odd one here until one of you gets back." And as they grudgingly started loading us into the choppers, she spun and pointed to me. "Leave that one," she said. "I'll hold him for the next trip."

"Sure, Sarge," whined one of the guards, "but the major said—"

"Move it," ordered Nyla. And they did. When the choppers were airborne she turned to look at me analytically. I guess I didn't look like too much of a problem to deal with for a healthy woman with a carbine. She gave a short nod. "No sense frying our brains out here," she said. "Let's get inside the trailer."

The blessed thing was air-conditioned.

It was also empty. Apparently it was for the use of the helicopter people, and there weren't any of them left. She let me go in first and waited until I was well clear of the doorway before she followed. She moved into a corner and expertly flipped a couple of quarters out of her fatigue pocket to me. "There's a Coke machine over there," she said. "I'm buying. . . . Open it and put it down on the table," she added, and then added one more thing, "Please."

She sat back and took a long pull at the Coke, watching me. I did the mirror-image same. At close range, with just the two of us there in the room, she looked more like my Nyla than ever. Oh, sure, wearing some sort of getup for a Halloween party. But Nyla Christophe Bowquist, to the life.

She wasn't, of course. She was Nyla Somebody Else. But whatever name she went by, she looked as pretty and as desirable as my Nyla ever had, and that was very much. I don't mean just sexually, though there was all of that; but there was more than that, too. I liked her. I liked the half-humorous perplexed look she gave me. I liked the way she leaned back, with her breasts making her fatigue blouse look like a couturier creation. And when she spoke, I liked the sound of her voice.

"What about it, DeSota? What is that stuff you were telling me?"

"You're a concert violinist, and one of the greatest who ever lived," I told her.

"Don't I wish! I'm a music teacher, Mr. DeSota. I admit I always wanted to be up there with an orchestra. But I never made it."

I shrugged. "You had the ability," I said, "because in my world that's exactly what you did. And one other thing I didn't tell you about you in my time-line . . . and me."

She gave me a funny look. She didn't say the word what? She made her eyebrows say it for her.

"We were lovers," I answered. "I loved you very much. I still do."

She gave me a different kind of funny look. There was surprise in it, and suspicion. But it was also tentatively pretty warm. It was almost a singles-bar kind of look, though I didn't think this Nyla was any more of a singles-bar person than my own. I know what the look was. It was the look that Roxane must have given Cyrano de Bergerac when she found out that it was he, and not that dumb hunk Christian, who had written her those lovely letters. And she said:

"That's a new one on me, DeSota."

"It isn't a line, Nyla."

She thought for a moment, then looked around and grinned. "Under the circumstances," she said, "it might as well be. Let's talk about something else. What's this about a Gershwin concerto? He died young, you know." I shrugged; I really didn't know much about him. "He left a lot of good stuff," she went on, watching me get up and pace over to the window. "All the pop stuff, of course. And then the Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F, the American in Paris . . . but honest, he never wrote anything for violin."

I was looking down at the portal, where the not-really-Djugashvili was playing with the same sort of console he had on the other side. I shook my head decisively. "Wrong, Nyla. Absolutely wrong. I'm not expert in classical music, that's for sure. But some rubbed off from hanging around with you—with the other Nyla. The Gershwin I've heard many times. It's full of melodies, which makes it easier for a guy like me. I think I could even whistle it—wait a minute." I walked around, trying to remember the lovely, rippling opening theme Nyla played so beautifully on the solo violin. When I managed to try it I knew I didn't do it justice-but it's the kind of definitively beautiful music, like some of the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, that sounds good even when it's butchered.

She frowned. "I never heard that, But it's pretty nice."

And she pursed her lips to try it herself.

And I leaned forward to her puckered lips and kissed her.

She kissed me back.

I'm nearly sure she kissed me back. I could feel those nice, dry, soft, warm lips opening under mine, but I didn't wait to make sure. I gave her the edge of my fist on the back of the neck, as hard as I'd ever done in judo class.

She dropped like a rock.

That sort of hand-to-hand combat was all theory to me. I'd never done it before, except as ritualized exercise. I hadn't planned to do it then, although one part of my brain, all along, had been screaming to me that Nyla's fatigues and my fatigues were absolutely indistinguishable, bar the fact that she wore a green armband and carried a carbine, and I had neither.

When she fell I was not absolutely sure I hadn't hit her too hard.

But when I put my hand on that familiar breast under that very unfamiliar fatigue blouse I could feel that the heart and lungs were going strong.

"I'm sorry, sweet," I said. I pinned her armband onto my sleeve. I took her carbine off the floor and slung it over my shoulder. And I left without looking back.