The Coming of the Quantum Cats

26 August 1983

6:40 A.M. Nicky DeSota

I was dreaming that Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller had asked me to arrange the mortgage for a six-hundred-million-dollar apartment complex along the lake, only she wanted to start with a down payment of one hundred fifty dollars because all her money was tied up in dimes . . . and then when I finally got the papers ready to sign she couldn't do it because she didn't have any thumbs. And then, as the bumping of the plane landing woke me up, the first thing on my mind wasn't where I was, or what was going to happen to me, but whether Mr. Blakesell had known I was arrested in time to get someone to cover my three mortgage closings. There wasn't anything I could do about it, of course.

There wasn't anything I could do about anything, because I was handcuffed to the back of the seat in front of me. My first long-distance flight in one of those new big Boeing four-engine jobbers should have been a real thrill. What it was was a pain. I mean, real pain. I was aching from being in that same seat for eleven hours, and two intermediate stops, and God knows how many hundreds, or even thousands, of miles; but the big ache had been with me even before they put me on the plane in the first place, wobbling up that ladder with my hands cuffed behind me and that ugly FBI man, Moe Something-or-other, threatening all kinds of doom if I spoke, or tried to get away, or tried to take off the hat and veil they'd made me wear so nobody would know who I was. He knew all about those aches too. He'd given me most of them.

I will say for the FBI boys and girls, they really know how to hurt you without leaving marks.

Across the aisle, the other prisoner was awake inside his own hat and veil. I could see his head moving. His guard was snoring as lustily as my own as we bumped interminably along runways that seemed to go nowhere.

At least I was out of the holding tank in the Chicago headquarters, where I'd spent most of the last—what was it? Days, for sure, though nobody would tell me how many. It had been pretty bad, in there with that bunch of social undesirables—muggers on the way to the concentration camps, currency speculators held for trial—but it was better than the times they took me out to ask me more questions. I hadn't told them anything, of course. I hadn't had anything to tell—but, my God, how I wished I had!

And then Moe had come in, waking me up, and dragged me out. And we'd wound up in this plane, going God knew where.

No. Both God and I knew where, now, because through the veil and the tiny window I could see a gaudy, foreign-looking terminal, with a big sign that said:

WELCOME TO

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

ELEVATION 5196 FEET

New Mexico, for heaven's sake! What in the world did they want with me in New Mexico?

Of course, Moe wasn't going to tell me. The stewardess came by and tugged his shoulder to wake him, and he leaned over to wake the other guard, but all he said to me was, "Remember what I told you!" I remembered. He made us wait until all the other passengers had got themselves out of the plane. Then he made us wait some more, while mechanics came out to turn the big propellors around a few revolutions and a truck backed up with 100-octane gasoline to refill the tanks.

Then somebody waved to us from the terminal door.

Moe unlocked my handcuffs and we left, me trying not to stumble as we clambered down the steep aisle to the stairs, and then down the stairs. The other prisoner followed behind us with his own guard; and they whisked us through an airport terminal that looked as though it had been built as a set for some Latin-American musical comedy. People stared. The overly curious were pushed roughly out of the way—there weren't too many of them, because the FBI goons weren't hard to recognize, and most people turned the other way fast. Into a car, me and Moe on the jump seats, the other prisoner and his guard behind us. A city police car pulled out ahead of us, and we went blasting away, God knows how fast, through city streets and out onto a two-lane highway that snaked away up into the hills.

We drove for nearly an hour. We wound up at a crossroads, two empty highways stretching to the compass points, and a filling station with a motel behind it. The sign over the office said "La Cucaracha Travelers Rest," which was not a name I would have given to a motel.

I also wouldn't have put armed guards in the driveway.

The guards were, however, a little decorative touch that I had begun to get used to. So there were good signs and there were bad signs. The bad sign was that I was still under arrest. The good sign was that I wasn't being taken to Leavenworth or one of the camps, where I would disappear from sight until they got good and ready to let me out—if ever. This was a permanent island in the FBI archipelago. They could not mean to keep me here for very long. They might even let me go.

Alternatively, what part of me might come out of the Cucaracha Motel might be only enough to send home to bury.

I wasn't given enough time to worry. My silent colleague and I were hustled into one of the cabins and ordered to sit on the edge of the bed and keep quiet, while Moe stood inside the door, glaring a us, and the other one stood right outside. We didn't have long to wait, though. The door opened from outside. Moe moved out of the way without looking to see who it was.

Nyla Christophe strode in, her hands clasped behind her.

She was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. I could not see her expression, but I could tell that she was gazing at us thoughtfully—I could feel the burning, like acid, where her eyes raked across my face. But her voice was only normally unpleasant when she said, "All right, you guys, you can take those dumb veils off now."

I was glad enough to do that, because I was stifling inside that thing in the desert heat. The other fellow moved more slowly and unwillingly; and when the veil was off his expression was scared, resentful, unhappy—all the things I would have expected; but what I hadn't expected was that the face that wore the expressions belonged to Larry Douglas.

What I was absolutely certain of was that Larry Douglas was at least in part responsible for the last four or five days of misery. How, I didn't know. Why, I couldn't even guess. So I was not in the least sorry to see him caught in the same trap he'd helped me into . . . only that just made it all even more confusing! If he had passed on to Nyla Christophe all the things I'd told him when he dragged me down to see that beat-up old movie actor downstate, why was he a prisoner too? And what were we doing in New Mexico?

The good part of that was that Douglas seemed as baffled as I. "Nyla," he said, his voice unsteady with anger he was trying not to show, "what the hell is this all about? Your guys come and grab me, drag me out of bed, won't tell me a word—"

"Sweetybumps," she said cheerfully, "shut up." Even with the dark glasses on he could read enough of her expression to swallow hard. He shut up. "Better," she said, and, over her shoulder, "Moe?"

Rumble from the apeman: "Yes, Miss Christophe?"

"Is the mobile lab here yet?"

"Parked right behind the cabins, all ready to go."

She nodded. She took off hat and glasses and sat in the one lumpy armchair the room possessed, extending a hand without looking. Moe put a cigarette into it, and followed with a light. "It is possible," she said, "that you two guys are in the clear on this particular matter. We need you to check some things out."

"Oh, good, Nyla," cried Douglas. "I knew it was just some mistake!"

And I managed to say, what I am ashamed to admit I hadn't really been thinking about for some time, "What about my fiancee and those others, Miss Christophe?"

"That depends, DeSota. If the tests come out the way I think they will, they'll all be released."

"Thank heaven! Uh—what tests are we talking about?"

"The ones you're going to have right now," she said. "Get on with it, Moe." And she left the cabin, while the other goon came in with an armload of stuff, followed by a man in a white jacket and another armload.

I couldn't help cringing, but it turned out that not even Moe was going to beat me up again. What they had in mind took longer, but was nowhere near as unpleasant—well, it wasn't exactly fun. They took my fingerprints and my toe prints. They measured my earlobes and the distance between the pupils of my eyes. They took blood and saliva and skin samples, and then they made me pee into a bottle and move my bowels into a paper cup. It took a long time. The only thing that made it less obnoxious was that my obnoxious fellow prisoner—the mystery-man Larry Douglas, my co-conspirator from the Carson coffee shop and fellow traveler to the Reagan place in Dixon, Illinois—was doing the same.

And liking it even less. Neither Moe nor the other guard liked it a whole lot, either. They went outside, watching through the window, while the lab technician took his samples and signs, so Douglas and I were able to talk a little. The first question I asked him was the one I'd been brooding on for a long time: "What the hell are you? Some kind of undercover Fed?"

He had a hangdog look, but even a whipped dog can snarl. "None of your damn business, DeSota," he snapped. He watched my blood being sucked up into a syringe, holding his own arm where the silent lab man had just done the same to him.

"Well, what are you? Nyla Christophe's boy friend, or fink, or prisoner?"

He said simply, "Yes." Then he let down his pants so the lab man could take a chunk out of the flesh of his butt. "If I were you, DeSota," he said darkly, "I'd worry about myself instead of some other guy. Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in?"

I laughed in his face. All the aches and miseries of my body told me how much trouble I was in. "Anyway," I pointed out, "she said we might be in the clear here, so what have I got to worry about?"

He looked at me with pity and contempt. "That's what she said," he agreed. "But did you ever hear her say anything about letting you go?"

I had to swallow hard before I could ask, "What the hell are you talking about, Douglas?" He shrugged, looking at the medic. He let me stew until the man had taken all the little bits and trickles and probings he wanted and departed with them. Neither of the guards came in after that, though we could see them sitting on the rail, fanning themselves as they gazed out across the highway. A streamliner was arrowing along the rail line just across the highway, and I thought with a sudden pang of Greta. I repeated, "What are you talking about? She said she'd probably let us go-"

"Not 'us,' DeSota. 'Them.' The witnesses, who don't know anything. You're a whole different animal. You know a lot."

"I do?" I searched my brain, came up empty. "Good lord, man, I don't even know what she wants with me!"

He said gloomily, "The big thing you know is that there's something to know, and t-hat's the biggest thing of all. How did you manage to be in two places at once?"

"How the hell do I know?" I cried.

"But you know that it happened," he pressed. "So you know that it's possible. So you know that somebody—say a criminal— could do something, say commit a murder, in one place, and have a hundred good witnesses to swear that he was someone else. Jesus, boy! Do you know what that would mean to somebody like me? I mean, somebody who needed that kind of alibi?" he corrected himself.

"But I don't know how it was done!" I wailed.

He said sourly, "So I found out. Wake up, will you? Do you think Nyla's going to let you go home and tell people that such things can be?"

I sat down, shaken. -

I could see the logic to what he said. The stories were that the FBI camps were full of people who were unfortunately in possession of information that couldn't be allowed to become public. If I was one .

If I was one, my next stop wouldn't be Chicago. It would be a road gang in the Everglades, digging drainage ditches and fighting off alligators-or cutting down trees for that endless road in Alaska. Anywhere. Wherever. The exact place might be in doubt, but what was sure was that, wherever it was, that would be my permanent address, at least until the time came when my secrets were no secrets any more.

Or until I died. Whichever came first. And I was pretty sure that after a year or two in the camps, I wouldn't care which came first.

When the shadows of the flagpole outside had nearly disappeared, because the sun was straight up, they brought us ham and cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and terrible lukewarm coffee out of a machine—both from the filling station in front of the cabins. I was starving, but I took no pleasure in them. I slowly put them away, and was ready with the empty cup and wrappings when the door opened to take them out.

Only it wasn't Moe or the other guard come for that. It was Moe, all right, but he stepped aside, and after him entered Nyla Christophe. She had a sloppy grin on her face. In one thumbless hand she held a bottle of champagne, cradled against her chest so it wouldn't fall. "Congratulations, boys," she said. "You passed. You're exactly the same."

Neither Douglas nor I said a word. She pouted. "Aw, hon," she said to Douglas, giggling a little—it wasn't really a reassuring giggle, "don't you see this is my way of telling you I'm sorry. Glasses, "she said, in quite a different tone, and the second goon stumbled in his hurry to get into the room with his tray of thick hotel tumblers. She jerked her head. The two of them left, and she gave the bottle to Douglas. "That's the way, sweetie," she said, watching him as, looking more at her than at what he was doing, he began to peel the foil off and thumb back the cork. "Glad to see you haven't lost your touch." There was something in his worried (but faintly belligerent) and her tender (but not so faintly mocking) expressions that told me I didn't know all that was going on. Whatever the relationships between them, they were not just a matter of Federal agent and informer.

Then pop went the cork.

Douglas poured. Nyla Christophe accepted the first glass, wrapping all four fingers around it securely enough. "Know what I'm talking about?" she asked. With a hiccup-this bottle of champagne, I thought, wouldn't be her first that day. I shook my head. She said, "Thought not. The tests came out perfect. Same blood, same bones, same prints. You're the same guys—and my report's on the way to headquarters, and that's where I'll be before long myself. So let's drink to Nyla Christophe, next maybe deputy chief of the whole damn bureau!" -

I drank her damn champagne. I drank it because I didn't particularly want to make her angry, and partly because a guy like me doesn't get imported French champagne every day, and most of all because I didn't know what else to do. Maybe Douglas was right! Maybe this was so big a thing that Nyla Chris tophe really could get a big promotion out of it - . . and in that case maybe he was right about the rest of his nasty remarks too.

I wondered what Greta would do when I just never showed up again. Maybe they'd let me write? At least to say good-bye?

It was not good news for me, what Nyla Christophe said, but Larry Douglas thought it was for him. "That's swell, hon!" he enthused. "Boy! You'll show them in Washington. And, listen, I've got a lot of ideas for you! This business of establishing two identical identifications—did you ever think what that might mean to the bureau? I mean, infiltrating subversive organizations, for instance? I don't know exactly how it works, of course, but . . . "

Christophe let him go on, a dreamy smile on her face. While he was still talking she came over beside him and ran her hand down his back in a friendly way. "Sweetie," she said affectionately, "you're a real jerk."

He swallowed. "You—you don't want to take me with you?" he stammered.

"Take you? That's the fucking last thing I would do, Larry hon."

He blazed up. "Then let go of me, damn it! You've got no business sweeting me up like that!"

She let her smile grow deeper. She was actually quite good-looking when she wanted to be. I thought I saw actual dimples above the corners of her mouth. "Larry," she said sweetly, "maybe there are some other people who can get on my back for making love to somebody when I don't really mean it, but you're sure not one of them."

I had no idea what she was talking about. He obviously did. His face went gray. "You don't know shit about it," she told him. "It's a lot bigger than you could possibly guess." She glanced at me. "Want to know what's going on?" she asked.

Oh, boy, did I! I didn't have to answer. She knew the answer and went right on, "Let me start from the beginning. Suppose—"

She hesitated. Then she shrugged and grimly raised her right hand, the four fingers spread and the missing thumb nakedly, shockingly obvious. "Suppose I hadn't got into trouble with the law when I was seventeen. Suppose I grew up in a normal way. My life would have been a lot different, wouldn't it?" I nodded, meaning I guessed so but I was too lost to have a useful opinion; Douglas just went on looking stricken and grim. "So there might have been one life in which I grew up just the way I did—the way I am now, right? And there could have been another one in which I became, oh, I don't know. A musician. Maybe a concert violinist."

Her expression didn't really change, but I got the idea from something in her eyes that she was waiting to see if I would laugh at that idea. I didn't laugh. "See, I would have liked that at one time," she said. "And the thing is that you can't say one of those possibilities is real and the other is just imaginary. Not any more. Because they're both real. All the possibilities are real, maybe. It's just that we only live in one possibility, and we can't see the others."

I darted a glance at Douglas. He was as lost as I was, and a lot more scared—probably, I thought with a sinking feeling, because he knew more than I did about what was likely to happen to us.

"Hell with that," she said suddenly. "Come on, I'll show you. Moe!"

The door popped open, and the bigger goon filled the doorway. Nyla pushed past him, beckoning for us to follow. It was unbelievably hot outside in the sun. Her footsteps were unsteady—partly sun; partly high heels in the sand; mostly, I thought, either champagne or pure delight in her probable future. She led the way to another cabin, with a previously unobserved FBI man hulking in front of it. When Nyla Christophe nodded he threw the door open. She peered inside, then nodded to Douglas and me.

"Take a look," she invited. "Here's two good possibilities for you."

I still did not have an idea in the world what she was talking about, but I did what I was told. There were two men in the room. One was over in the corner, gently patting cream onto one of the worst cases of sunburn I'd ever seen. He had no shirt on, and he was lobster red to just above his wrists, and down to a V around his neck. With his hands over his face I couldn't get a good look at him.

The other was closer, and not moving. He lay flat on his back on one of the beds, his eyes closed. Snoring. He looked like he'd had a hard time. I don't mean just the routine hard time that you expected when you were an FBI prisoner, I mean he looked half dead. And he looked— -

"Douglas!" I yelled. "It's you!"

Douglas didn't say a word. It hit him harder than it did me. He was strangling, eyes popping. I could see he was trying to ask a question, so I asked it for him. "What's the matter with him?" I asked.

Nyla Christophe shrugged. "He'll be okay. Sunstroke and exposure, and he got himself bitten by a rattlesnake. But he's had all his shots, and the doc says he'll be good as new tomorrow. But you didn't take a good look at the other guy yet, did you?"

And so I did. And he turned and looked at me. And the face was sunburned and raw, and the expression was grim, but the face was a face I knew very well.

"My God," I said. "He's got to be the guy from Daleylab!"

"Close," said Nyla Christophe cheerfully, "but he says he's not. He says lots of things, DeSota, things you wouldn't believe; he's been talking steadily ever since the train crew picked the two of them up in the desert last night. He says all those possibilities are really real and that there's plenty more like him around—in one of those possibilities or another. But you're kind of missing the point, DeSota. What he mostly says—and what all the tests say, every one of them—is that he's you."