The Coming of the Quantum Cats

24 August 1983

12:30 P.M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P.

This base we had captured was stuffed fuller of goodies than a Christmas stocking. The goody I appreciated most was the base commandant's office. It had its own private base commandant's dining room, with kitchen attached; and in the base commandant's private freezer the cooks had discovered half a dozen of the thickest, juiciest, most marbled steaks I ever put a tooth to. It came out even. There were six of us to eat them: Lieutenant Colonel Tempe, heading the nuke research detachment; the MP major, Bill Selikowitz; the Signal Corps captain; two other captains who were Tempe's adjutants; and me. We were the most rank on the base—on our side, anyway—and rank had its privileges. We ate off a linen tablecloth with linen napkins and sterling silver, and if the glasses had only water in them, at least they were Danish crystal. Outside the big picture window on the fifth-floor dining room of the base headquarters we could see the sixty-odd buildings we had captured, with Selikowitz's MP's patrolling in their jeeps. It was hot out there, but in our little castle the air-conditioning was working just fine.

We were six happy guys.

One of Colonel Tempe's adjutants was chortling over the dumb projects they'd uncovered—a group of weirdos trying to read the enemy's minds; binary chemical weapons of the kind we'd tried, and discarded, five years before; laser guns that would fry an enemy soldier at a distance of three miles, provided he stood still for at least ten minutes without ambling out of the beam.

That was the comic relief. These people had wasted more money on dumb ideas than we had. But not all their ideas were dumb! By the time we got to the apple pie and ice cream, Colonel Tempe was telling us the serious stuff. The rest of us listened hard; in another forty-eight hours it would no doubt be classified down to a whisper, but we were getting it right from the source. At nuclear weapons these people had us outclassed six ways from Sunday. "Cruise missiles," he said. "Like little jet planes that come in under the radar, too fast to be intercepted, with built-in maps so they always know where they're going. Multiple warheads; you launch them in one piece and they separate, ten miles up, and six different missiles hit six different targets. And submarines."

That took me by surprise. "Submarines? What the hell is special about submarines?"

"These are nuclear-powered, DeSota," he said grimly. "Big bastards. Ten thousand tons and better. They can stay underwater for a month, where the enemy can't find them; and each one of them carries twenty nuclear missiles with ten-thousand-mile range.Jesus! Never mind your damn sneak-attack biologicals! If we could get just one of those damn submarines through a portal, the Russians'd have to lie down and die for us!"

Suddenly the pie didn't taste as good any more.

"But we walked right over them," Selikowitz objected.

The colonel nodded. "They weren't expecting us," he said. "Now they know where we are."

"Oh, come on, Colonel," I put in. "They're not going to nuke their own base?" It was meant as an argument, but halfway through it turned into a question.

Nobody wanted to answer it. Not even the colonel. He attacked his pie in silence for a moment, then burst out, "We're doing this all wrong, damn it! We should've gone right for the top! Hit the White House. Grab their President. Tell her what we were going to do, and then it's all over before the Russians and their damn satellites begin to get curious about this damn 'archaeological dig' out in the desert!"

They were all looking at me; I began to wish I hadn't opened my mouth. Who was Ito defend the decisions of the Chiefs of Staff? All of us knew how hard the debate had raged, and none of us, especially not me, had had any voice in which way the vote went.

Still—

"Colonel," I said, "let's look at facts. Fact one. It doesn't matter what kind of weapons these people have, they can't use them against our interior because they can't get at us. The only way they could do that would be with a portal, and the reason we came here first was to preempt the possibility they'd build one."

"They were nowhere near," complained one of the adjutants.

"They might have made it pretty fast," I said. "Once they knew it was possible, that answered a lot of questions. We couldn't take that chance. Now we've got this base, and there's no way they can retaliate against us—whatever we do."

The colonel looked at me hard, then gave me a frosty grin. "You're a good company man, DeSota," he said, and tapped his empty cup with a fingernail. It rang out, like the bell at the end of a round. It was the very best china.

I was willing to let the argument stop there. The colonel was right. But he was also wrong: we'd taken over Sandia with no casualties at all, not counting one guard with a broken arm because one of Selikowitz's MP's had been a little too rough with the hand-to-hand combat. If we'd stormed the White House, there would have been people dead. On the other hand—

On the other hand, there were too many other possibilities for me to figure out. The weaponry these people had! If we could just take back that submarine—or some of those multiwarhead and cruise missiles— But we didn't have the power, on this side of the portal, for anything that big. We could take blueprints, sure. Even any of the weapons, part by part. But sooner or later the Russians were going to take a closer look at that big hole in the desert we'd called an archaeological survey site, and if they saw weaponry .

"Major?" The pretty private who was filling the coffee cups was also distributing flimsies to some of us. "These came while you were eating," she said.

"Thanks," I said, and couldn't help grinning. There was only one for me, but it was a TWX from the President of the United States!

It said:

On behalf of the American people I commend you

and the officers and enlisted personnel of the 456

Special Detachment, A.U.S., for meritorious service

over and beyond the call of duty.

I looked around the table, grinning in spite of myself. No matter that all the others were grinning too—they'd got their own commendations, no doubt. Never mind that the President probably—no, undoubtedily!—hadn't written it himself, doubtless didn't even know my name; it was a canned citation from the War Department, of course. Never mind that the President was the weak-kneed jerk he was—I never voted for the son of a bitch. All the same! A commendation, by name, from the President was going to look very good in my 201 file. And there was more. Six medals! A Legion of Merit for me. A Bronze Star for Sergeant Sambok. Four others to pass out to whoever I chose to name.

It was not a bad morning's haul; and the only thing wrong with it was that Bill Selikowitz had got more than the rest of us. He was frowning over something the orderly had muttered in his ear, and when he looked up it was to me. "Dom? My patrols have just picked up one of your guys, coming toward the base at ninety miles an hour in a stolen car, with an Albuquerque cop right behind him. Private Dormeyer. He took off for town without leave, and it looks like he tried to kill a civilian."

What I wanted was Sergeant Sambok, because she knew the whole detachment. I couldn't have her. She was on the other side of the portal, escorting the prisoners, and there was some technical malfunction and the portal was down.

What I had was my adjutant, Lieutenant Mariel, fresh out of OCS and about as much use as two tails on a cow. She was waiting for me in my office. "What—what are we going to do?" she managed to get out, and remembered to add, "Sir?"

"We're going to clean this up," I told her. "Damn it, Lieutenant! I wanted Dormeyer brought back quietly!"

"They couldn't find him," she said abjectly. "I- sent Privates Weimar and Milton to his home address, but he wasn't there-and you know, sir, the city's real messed up, with some of our troops guarding communications points, and nobody knows if the enemy's going to react—"

"Save the excuses, Lieutenant," I ordered. I'd forgotten that Dormeyer was a local boy—in our time, anyway. That wasn't too good; a commanding officer is supposed to know his troops. "An adjutant's supposed to know the troops," I told her. "Was Dormeyer acting suspicious in any way before he took off?"

"No, sir! Not that I know, sir. He did get a seven-day compassionate about a month ago, sir—wife was killed in a car smash. I suggested dropping him from the unit because he'd missed training, but you said to keep him in—"

"Get him in here," I said. "I'll talk to him. No, wait a minute— let me talk to the cop first."

I didn't need this. I didn't want my commendation spoiled. I didn't want old General Ratface Magruder getting on my case because some asshole private got himself into trouble. The one good thing I knew was that Bill Selikowitz turned the whole thing over to me; there wouldn't be anything on paper—

Provided I could handle it. And when I saw Officer Ortiz that began to look possible. He was a big, square, old-time cop who wore his Smokey the Bear hat as if it had grown there and looked around my office as though he owned it. "Never been here before, Major," he said. "I guess you know there's a lot of questions being asked about what you guys are doing."

At least he hadn't come in breathing fire and demanding the perpetrator. I said, easy man-to-man talk, "I guess guys like you and me just have to follow orders and let the people on top worry about why, right? Have a cigar." When he took two I could see the talk was going the right way. I had more than half expected that he would give us an argumen^t on the basis of local law, or jurisdiction, or anything that would make enough trouble so I couldn't deal with the poor slob Dormeyer's troubles myself. I needn't have worried. Ortiz was used to getting along with whoever had the reins of power. He was forty or so, twenty years on the force; he'd seen everything and been fazed by none of it. He'd got a call while patrolling in his radio car in a part of Albuquerque our troops hadn't bothered with, so he entered the home of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Dingman. He found the elder Dingman's away, their daughter Gloria Dingman hysterical, a Mr. William Penderby groggily coming to on her bed, where he'd been just about strangled by our own Private Dormeyer. It wasn't too big a deal. What made it touchy for Officer Ortiz was that on the way in he'd walked right by Private Dormeyer, sitting dazed at the wheel of the Dingrnan girl's car, and by the time Ortiz figured out that that was the man to arrest, Dormeyer had jumped the ignition and was on his way back to base. And, no, he wouldn't mind waiting around while I interviewed the perpetrator, only would it be all right if he phoned in to let the station know where he was?

Certainly I wouldn't mind. I didn't slap him on the back, but I walked him to the door, and ordered Lieutenant Mariel to get him to a phone as soon as she got Private Dormeyer into my office.

Give him that much, he wasn't a bad soldier. He'd come out of whatever craziness had driven him up the wall. He stood at a brace and answered all my questions clearly and briefly. Yes, he'd gone AWOL. Reason? Well, he'd been really shaken up by his wife's death and somebody told him that there was an exact copy of every one of us in this time-so he'd gone looking for his copy of her . . . and finding her there, and alive-and with this other guy in her bed!— had been more than he could handle. No, he hadn't killed the man. Gloria had dragged him away and he'd gone outside to sit in the car and cry. And when Officer Ortiz reported that the victim was no worse than bruised I saw daylight.

I sent Dormeyer back to duty with a warning. I did, this time, pat Officer Ortiz on the back; and I turned him over to Selikowitz's MP corporal. "Escort Officer Ortiz back to his car and let him go," I ordered. "Make sure he knows we're here as friends, not invaders." And to Ortiz, with half a wink, "You mind a suggestion, Officer? You'll be the first from your side to come out from our occupied zone, so you're going to get a lot of attention from the TV news people. Don't let them get you for nothing!" And I watched him go with satisfaction, and turned back to the real world.

It was like ice water in the face.

The portal was in service again. Messages were coming through. The hottest one was for me: I was ordered to report to Tac-Five on the double. One of our prisoners, the other Dom DeSota, had escaped to some other time-line, they didn't even know which one, and he'd taken our pet scientist, Dr. Douglas, with him.

The last time I had been on the home side of the portal it was dark night. We followed the tapes along the sandy duckboards, with no more light than the blue riding lights from the trucks that had brought us down, stumbling, choking on the dust, shivering from the desert night-time chill—scared. Up on the mesa the big troop-carrying helicopters were landing with no more lights than the trucks. Hand-held flashlights guided them in with their second echelon soldiers and the specialists who would follow to set up a portal generator, none of us sure what we would find.

Now it was all different. Hot sun baked the duckboards. A desert wind peeled plumes of sand from the lip of the excavation right down into my eyes. Ratface Magruder was pacing up and down in front of his staff car, waiting for me. He thumbed me inside and we spun sand all the way up to the mesa. There I could see that bulldozers had smoothed away even the skid marks of the helicopters, so that when the Russian satellites came over they would see nothing to make a liar out of the archaeological-excavation story.

One thing was the same. I was scared.

I was scared in a way I have never been before, because fear of getting shot at or having to shoot somebody else is a physical fear that you can turn your mind away from, at least for a while. What I was afraid of now was not a speculation. It was a fact. If the senator escaped, he was at least helped in the escape by the fact that he was wearing GI fatigues. And I had given him the fatigues.

Magruder didn't say a word to me on the way up. He didn't even look at me. He was glaring out the window, his lips tight. I couldn't blame him, exactly; his ass was in the wringer along with the rest of us. I made myself stiff as a statue, hanging with all my strength to the seat belt I didn't dare buckle, to keep from being thrown into him.

Hoping he would forget I was there.

We stopped with another spray of sand and Magruder jumped out. He stood there, glaring. What he was glaring at this time was Sergeant Sambok and the civilian technician, Dr. Willard, assistant to the missing Dr. Douglas. He'd left them standing at attention in the sun while he went down to get me in person. Sunstroke? I don't know how they missed it. It wasn't a thing that General Magruder would have worried about, because the sun would never bother him. He was meaner than the sun. He kicked a clump of buffalo grass, spat, and jerked a thumb at the trailer. "Inside, you three," he ordered.

It wasn't any better inside the trailer. It was cooler, but not so much because of the air-conditioning as because of the chill that came from Magruder. When he looked you in the eye, your eyeballs froze. With all the worry I had myself, I had a little left over for Sergeant Sambok. Maybe even for Dr. Willard, too, because he wasn't even in the service. He'd just happened to be standing on the scaffolding with Larry Douglas when the make-believe me came puffing up with the carbine over his shoulder, pushed Douglas through the upper portal, and jumped after him. There hadn't been a thing Willard could have done about it—though that didn't seem to interest General Magruder—because he was a little guy and, like all the civilians on the project, unarmed.

Nyla Sambok was a different case. She answered Magruder's questions briskly and completely. "Yes, sir, the senator was my prisoner. Yes, sir, I allowed him to overpower me and take my weapon. Yes, sir, I was negligent. No, sir, I have no excuse." —But "completely" is the wrong word, because there was something in her tone, and something in her eyes, that said there was more to it than that. Once I'd sat on a rape court-martial, a nurse captain who'd been caught out on the obstacle course one night by a green draftee who thought that all women really wanted it, no matter how hard they resisted. The captain had looked the same way. Full of resentment and fury, and as much against herself as against the trainee.

Of course, there couldn't have been anything like that with the other Dom DeSota? —And then Magruder turned to me, and I forgot all about Sergeant Sambok's troubles, having plenty of my own.

Not ninety minutes before I'd been sitting in judgment on Private Dormeyer. Up and down the yo-yo goes.

They called him Ratface Magruder for a good reason. Not much chin and a hell of an overbite; and to make it worse he wore a stick-out mustache with more wax in it than hair, under a long, pointy nose. I could almost see the nose quivering as he sat there, thinking, frosting us all as his gaze moved around, tapping with his fingers on the leather cushion of the couch. He kept us waiting while he thought things through.

Then he said, "There are some things you should know."

We waited.

"The first thing," he said, "is that their fucking President hasn't given us an answer to President Brown's message, so we are going to have to implement Phase Two."

We waited some more.

"The second thing is that I had requested a HU-70 troop-carrying helicopter to transfer the prisoners. I was overruled, because somebody was worried about the Russky satellite seeing it, so they sent those chickenshit little choppers instead."

We waited some more, only with a little less foreboding of doom—was he saying that there was some excuse? Because if they'd sent the right helicopter, all the prisoners would have gone at once, and the problem would never have arisen. It wasn't much of a hope, but it was the best I'd had for a while-and a blighted one, because of course he wasn't excusing us, he was just rehearsing the story he was going to cover his own ass with. He said: "Make no mistake. You three are still in the deep shit. You, DeSota, because you gave him a uniform. Shut up."—as I started to explain—"You, Sergeant, for letting him get your weapon away from you. And you, Willard, for letting that son of a bitch Douglas play around with the portal in the first place without a senior officer present. Not to mention letting the two of them get through."

"General Magruder," said Willard desperately, "I am here as a civilian consultant, and if there are any charges to be brought against me I have the right to have a lawyer present. I demand—"

"No you don't," Magruder corrected him. "What you do, Willard, is you volunteer to accompany these two, who are now ordered to Boiling Field."

"Boiling Field?" cried Willard. "That's Washington, D.C., isn't it? But—"

Magruder didn't tell him to shut up. He didn't have to; he looked at him, and the objections froze on Willard's tongue.

Outside I had heard the flutter of a chopper's rotors. As Magruder opened the door I saw it sitting there, the vanes turning slowly, the pilot peering out toward us.

"That's yours," said Magruder. "It'll take you to the airport where a MATS C-ill is waiting for you. Phase Two is about to begin."