The Coming of the Quantum Cats

26 August 1983

7:40 P.M. Senator Dominic DeSota

All that afternoon I had been staring longingly out the window at the pocket-sized swimming pool in the courtyard, sweating by the bucket and my sunburn tormenting me every minute. It wasn't just the sunburn or the heat that tormented me. Somewhere not far from here-but hopelessly walled away from me by whatever it was that separated one time-line from another—my country was being invaded, and somebody wearing my face had gone on television to give aid and comfort to the invaders. I could not remember any case in the history of the United States since the Civil War when any elected U.S. senator had done anything like that, What were my colleagues thinking of me?

What was Nyla Bowquist thinking of me?

I didn't even know what I thought of myself any more. The last forty-eight hours had been the worst of my life. It had been a terrible shock to find out that the Cathouse represented some kind of reality, and that there were infinite numbers of worlds just like my own, many of them with a Dominic DeSota, indistinguishable from me by any test. I had been taken prisoner by one of them. I had knocked out a woman who was, exactly, the woman I loved, and been held prisoner by another copy of her, not quite exact because of her mutilated hands. I had kidnapped a man. I had suffered the shock of invasion of my country by my country. And I had suffered the damnedest worst case of sunburn, trudging through the empty desert without food or water, of my life, and it hurt.

One way or another, it all hurt . . . and they wouldn't even let me get in that pool to cool off.

It wasn't forbidden, exactly. It was just something that could not be permitted by anyone but that other Nyla, and she was off on some errand of her own. The washbasin in the corner was no substitute. Every half hour or so I would splash water over my bare skin; on the quarter hour I would try gingerly to put on some of that useless sunburn cream they'd dug up for me. Those things gave me something to do. They didn't help much.

What also didn't help was the presence of my involuntary traveling companion, Dr. Lawrence Douglas. Most of that long day he lay unmoving in the bed. That I could understand. He'd gone through most of what I had: the same sunburn, the same endless hours of heat and thirst, wandering through the empty desert. And worse. Not only had he managed to get himself snake-bitten, and had the antivenom shots that were almost as bad as the bite, but he'd been shot full of pep juice of some kind so Nyla No-Thumbs could interrogate him. I hadn't been there to share it, but when they put him back in our room, by then unconscious again, he'd had bruises to add to the burn.

I didn't try to wake him.

I didn't have to wake him. When I turned unexpectedly away from the washstand I caught his eyes on me. He closed them at once, but not in time. "Oh, hell, Douglas," I said wearily, "if you want to sleep, sleep; if you want to wake up, wake up; but what's the use of faking it?"

For another stubborn minute he kept them closed, but he couldn't keep it up forever. He dragged himself out of the bed, looked around for the toilet that didn't exist, and then, without speaking, urinated into the washbasin.

When he finished I snapped, "At least rinse the damn thing out!" I had. He didn't look around, but he turned the taps on full, sloshed the water around, drank, as a dog drinks, lapping the water out of his cupped hand under the tap, all without speaking.

"If you wet your hair, it'll help a little," I told him. "Also I've got some sunburn cream."

He straightened up slowly, then bent again to do as I suggested with his hair. Over his shoulder he muttered something. It could have been "Thanks." I decided to assume it was, and when he turned back to look for the sunburn cream I managed a smile.

He didn't smile back. Even allowing for everything, I have never seen a man look more hopeless, resentful, and depressed.

Of course, I was in no good mood myself. Apart from the things that had happened, I was feeling itches and twitches I didn't like. I felt I was under constant observation, though I could never catch the guard peering in the window. And I felt another itch I liked even less. "Look," I said, "it's no good sulking."

He paused in putting cream on his tomato-colored face to look at me sourly. "So what is good, would you suggest?"

"Well, you could satisfy my curiosity about something, because I've been thinking. When I got up on the scaffolding where you were working on the portal and you went through it with me—"

He barked a nasty laugh. "When you forced me at gunpoint," he corrected.

"Yes, all right. When we wound up ten feet in the air on the other side, because you didn't tell me there was going to be a drop," I amplified, for no better reason than to spread a little guilt back on him. "I thought we were going back to my time. Then, while you were sleeping, I thought about it."

He groaned. "DeSota, if you're coming to any point, will you please get there?"

"The point is, what were you doing?"

"Trying to escape," he said shortly.

"To here? But this isn't your own time, is it?"

"This primitive hellhole?" he snarled. "No!"

"Then—"

"Then why didn't I try to get back to my own? Because I don't have one, DeSota! Not any more! There's only one thing I want now, and that's out."

He flung himself back on the bed. "But, listen—" I began reasonably.

He shook his head. "Forget it," he said.

And, along about that time, I did. Not because of what he said. Because a car roared into the driveway and stopped out of sight. I craned my neck to see what was happening. No luck. I heard car doors slam, and distant voices—rumble from a man, higher-pitched, cheerful sound of a woman's voice. A voice I knew well. And a moment later Nyla appeared, walking toward the pool, shedding clothes as she got near. She didn't bother to glance at our window. She got to the edge of the pool, tested the water with a bare toe, slid out of the last of her underwear, and dived cleanly into the pool, the thumbless hands pressed together over her head.

And that other itch that I had not wanted tt feel came rushing back to fill my nerve ends with longing.

If Nyla No-Thumbs didn't look at us, we certainly looked at her. I could see one of the guards, half hidden by a porch pillar at the motel office, eyes missing nothing of that handsome, familiar body. Even Douglas lifted himself off the bed to join me at the window. "Hell of a good-looking putain," he muttered.

I could have killed him.

To feel anything of the sort, of course, was purest insanity. I told myself that. I couldn't help it. Because for quite a while now what had been filling the cracks in my mind, the parts I didn't want to explore, was Nyla. Each Nyla. All the Nylas. Nyla Bowquist, my true-love violin virtuosa; Nyla Sambok, girl paratrooper; Nyla NoThumbs. Nyla Christophe, who was—obviously never married, because who would marry her?—zealot law enforcer, commander of goons and rubber hoses and secret prisons.

And they were all the same one. I didn't need fingerprints or urine analyses to know that. I felt it in my groin, with an intensity seldom matched since I was fourteen years old, peering through the cracked partition to the girls' locker room at the Y.

There were so many incongruities that I didn't know where to begin to look for a handle to them. That first one, the sergeant—she was bad enough, as a shock to my nervous system. But at least, after that first appalled recognition, she made some kind of sense. If she wasn't a concert violinist, at least she was a music teacher, if not a civilian, at least only a draftee. My own beloved could have gone the same way, given a few acts of God one way or the other in her early life.

But this one!

This thumbless one . . . without kindness, without love . . . most of all, without thumbs! I could not recognize my darling in her at all.

But I could recognize my darling's body. My own body knew it at once.

I almost understood that overwhelming itch, because I'd heard of such things—no, not such things; but something similar. One of my old political drinking buddies had told me something once, at one of those beery four A.M. sessions when you're exhausted from speeches and handshaking and watching the election results come in, and everybody else has finally gone home. He said he'd caught his wife in an affair with another man. When he couldn't doubt it any more, he was pained and furious—and something else. He was incredibly horny. All through the fights and scenes and confrontations, the biggest thing on his mind was to make love to her, as often and as forcefully as he could. To take this familiar stranger, this hostile love, this person whom he had suddenly discovered that, having thought he knew her intimately and totally, he hardly knew at all—to take her to bed, because the burning and yearning in his crotch outweighed every other feeling he had.

Staring out of that window, I wanted Nyla very badly indeed.

Any Nyla at all.

Grotesque? Of course! I knew just how grotesque it was. And yet I couldn't help thinking—what would it be like without thumbs? In what ways would our lovemaking change? For instance, she did sometimes mischievously tweak my useless little nipples while I was tweaking hers; we had giggled over the differences between hers and mine, and the impossibility of ever knowing whether what tiny tickle I felt when she pinched mine was in any way like what she felt in hers. But, thumbless, she couldn't do that-or not exactly that— or what would it be like, really?

I cannot put in words how badly I wanted to know.

Spang went the window screen as the big guard, Moe, came up from the side and caught me staring. He slapped it with the flat of his hand and I pulled away, tiny flakes of rust stinging my eyes. "Got hopes, have you?" he jeered. "Forget it! She's not for jailbirds like you, even if she is treating you better than you deserve." He disappeared and I heard him unlocking the door. "God knows why she thinks you rate it," he grumbled, motioning us out, "but she brought you some food. And she says you can eat it in the owner's apartment, and it's got air-conditioning."

The food was Mexican, on cardboard plates and just about cold—well, nothing was cold, really, in that part of New Mexico, but no more than room temperature. And the room was, as promised, cooled down to the merely uncomfortable by a wheezing, rattling box in the window of the large living room. It wasn't enough. Our two doubles were there with us, along with the guard, Moe, and body heat was enough to drive the temperature right back up again.

I sat next to the other DeSota and we eyed each other. "Hi, Dom," I offered. He looked surprised.

"They usually call me Nicky," he said. "Say; did you see her out there? And they busted me for just going topless!" I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, but once started talking he kept right on. "Are you really a United States senator?"

"Since 1978, right. From Illinois."

"I've never talked to my senator before," he said, and grinned. "Especially when he was me. What should I call you?"

"Under the circumstances, Dom is good enough. And you? Nicky? That's funny—I mean, I don't know why. Even when I was a kid, my mother didn't call me Nicky."

"My mother didn't, either, but when I was training for the job my counselor advised a change. 'Dominic' sounded too much like 'dominate,' he said, and customers would be put off by it. I'm in mortgages." He hesitated, mouth full of refried beans. "Dom? How'd you get to be a senator?"

Meaning, of course, when I'm just nobody. But how do you answer something like that? I couldn't say, "Because I'm a winner and you're a wimp." That would be unforgivable and, worse, untrue, since we were the same person. What had happened in his world to make my gentle fiddle player a ruthless hunter of men, and me a wide-eyed innocent?

I didn't get a chance to find out. In came Moe, lugging a cardboard carton as though it were heavy, and behind him Nyla Christophe. She had her clothes back on now, a skirt and a modestly long-sleeved blouse, though from the way they molded themselves to her I wasn't at all sure she had anything underneath them. "Enjoyed your dinner, fellows?" she asked cheerfully. "Now you've got to sing for your supper. I went in to the Albuquerque office to talk to Washington on a secure line, and it's working out just the way I thought. There'll be orders for us all tonight!"

She nodded to Moe, who put the box down on the floor and began pulling stuff out of it. A big thing with two turntables that he plugged into a wall outlet, a couple of huge reels of magnetic wire, a microphone the size of my fist on a long cord.

The other Larry Douglas, the one who had not come with me through the portal, said worriedly, "Nyla? What kind of orders are we talking about?" She grinned and pointed an index finger up toward the sky. "Washington?" he squealed, his voice changing with sudden tension. "But, listen, Nyla, I don't know diddly-shit about any of this—"

"You do now, lover," she said fondly. "Moe? You ready to record?" -

"I am now, chief," he reported, having threaded tape from one reel to another. He flipped a switch, and inside the crisscross metal on the front of the box I could see vacuum tubes—vacuum tubes!— begin to glow.

"So what we're going to do now," said the woman who wore the coveted body I loved, "we're going to take all your statements over again. Don't go volunteering any extra information," she said darkly, directly at that Douglas. "Just answer what I ask you. The director isn't going to want to hear anything about what you were doing in Chicago, or whether you like the treatment you've been getting. Just the essentials; because I'm going to have this whole thing wrapped up before we get on the plane!"

Considering all the questions I had been asked, considering the circumstances of what all of us had to say, I could not see this particular series of interviews ending much before daybreak. I was wrong about that. Nyla Christophe knew exactly what she wanted to have on the record, and asked only what she wanted to know. Nicky DeSota was up first. On request he gave his name, his address, and something called his Civilian Registry Number. After that there were only two questions:

"Have you ever been inside Daleylab?"

''No.''

"Have you ever seen the man present here who resembles you and describes himself as Senator Dominic DeSota before today?"

''No.''

Nyla jerked her head and swept him away, and the local Larry Douglas took his place. For no more elaborate an interrogation. It was the same two questions, except that the man present who resembled him was "Dr. Lawrence Douglas." He gave the same answers, and I was on stage.

I took longer. She ordered, "Start with your being advised that someone like you had been captured in a secret military installation in New Mexico and tell us your story." And she just listened, prompting me with what-happened-next sort of questions and nothing more, except that when I got to the soi-disant major-me who had taken me prisoner, she put in, "Was this man the same as the one who allegedly disappeared while in custody? No? Or the same as the one here present? No? So then you say there are at least four of you? Yes? Then go on."

And I went through the whole thing, even my knocking out the other Nyla, except that I didn't mention the kiss, and most of all I didn't mention that she was indeed a Nyla. "Sergeant Sambok" was description enough. I wasn't asked for more. "And then we landed in deep sand, and there was nothing in sight but desert. There was nobody around. It was burning hot. We had to get out of sight as fast as we could, or anyway we thought we did. We headed southeast, as near as we could tell from the sun. We walked for hours, getting thirstier all the time. Then Douglas said he'd heard that some of the cactus had water inside them, and he tried to pull one of them out of the sand, and there was a snake under it." I hesitated, wondering how much detail the woman wanted. I'd heard the rattles before I saw Douglas jump back, with the snake dropping off his sleeve. It wasn't very big, and the fatigue fabric was tough, so not much venom got in. The funny thing was that he hadn't made a sound,just looked more astonished than any other human being I had ever seen. "By then we had come to a railroad line. We just stayed there until the train crew spotted us."

"Right," said Nyla No-Thumbs, nodding to the apeman. He clicked off the recorder and began the laborious task of changing reels. If Nyla had no thumbs, this man was all thumbs, but she was patient. She had dismissed me entirely. She was devoting all her attention to my involuntary traveling companion, who looked uneasy. I could understand why, because there was something in the gaze she bent on him that I could not quite identify. It was almost— but how could that be?—seductive; and at the same time there was an unmistakable threat. She gave him a warm, sweet smile. "You're on next, hon," she said.

If the first three of us had managed to fill only one reel, this Dr. Lawrence Douglas looked likely to fill every one of the half-dozen spares Moe had brought. Nyla's questions were sharp and to the point; from time to time she referred to a notebook to make sure she was missing nothing.

He started with a surprise. "In the first place," he said, glancing at me with considerable dislike, "the time-line I was kidnapped from is Paratime Gamma. That's not my original one, but—"

"Just a minute, hon. What's 'Gamma'?"

"It's what we call it," he said wearily, "because you have to have some way of identifying them. My own is Alpha. This one is Tau. The senator's is Epsilon—that's the one that's being invaded—and the one I was just in, - the one that's doing the invading, that's Paratime Gamma."

"Go ahead."

"Paratime Gamma didn't invent the portal. We did in Alpha."

"Who's 'we,' hon? Did you invent it?"

"Nobody invents that kind of thing by himself, not things as complicated as the portal—it's like asking who invented the atomic bomb. I was part of the team, but I was only an aprиs-doc when I came on. The ones who made the theoretical breakthroughs were Hawkings and Gribbin in England, and in the United States Dr. DeSota. Got that part straight?"

He wasn't really being sarcastic, just trying to make sure she understood, but off in his corner Moe made a sort of warning growl in his throat. Nyla shook her head without looking at the goon. "Go on," she said, and this time there was no "hon."

He said obediently, "At first all we could do was peep. That means, we could look through the barrier. We could detect radiation, you see; and after a while we began to get real vision. Not for all the paratimes. Some are accessible, most aren't. Dr. DeSota says it's because of resonance effects—we're 'out of tune' with most of the lines. Actually, there is an infinite number of them, of course. When I—uh—when I left, there were about two hundred and fifty that had been mapped, but for most of them we could detect nothing more than a kind of smeary blur. Is this what you want to know?"

"What we want to know, sweetie," said Nyla, "is everything. If you could just peep, how come you're here?"

"No, no," he said, patiently enough, "that was just at first. That was when I joined, along about the beginning of August 1980. In October we were able to send objects through without retrieving them. And by January 1981 we sent a person through. Me." He added ruefully, "I volunteered."

"And how do you do that?" asked Nyla.

He said, still patient—barely patient, "There is not any person in this room who would have the faintest idea what I was talking about if I told you."

Nyla was keeping very good control of herself, but if I had been Douglas-Alpha I would have watched myself pretty closely. She said shortly, "Try."

Douglas must not have liked the look he saw on her face, because he swallowed and hurried on. "I don't mean you wouldn't understand because you're stupid. I mean there are only two ways to describe it. One is with the words we had to coin as we went along— the portal device generates a stream of green-dip chronons which heterodynes against the natural flux of red-flow chronons. Do you see what I mean? Gibberish, right? And the other way is mathematical and, please, you'd need to know at least basic quantum mechanics to have a hope of following it."

I saw what he meant. So did Nyla, but all she said was, "Tell us what the dates were."

He shrugged. "Dr. DeSota's doctoral dissertation was, I guess, the first rigorous proof that there were quantum effects of the kind Schroedinger proposed. That was about 1977. It's what made me go back for my doctorate. Then he and Elbert Gillespie detected the actual chronons in 1979, and developed the peeper a few months later. Then, like I said, I went through to Gamma."

He stopped, waiting. Nyla was thinking. "So you defected," she said.

"I helped them," he corrected. "I didn't have any choice, did I?"

"And you could help us," she said and smiled, all sex and sunshine again.

"Now, wait a minute!" he objected. "I—! Maybe I could try, but— Look at that wire recorder! If that's the best you can do, you don't even have solid-state technology. I need something to build on, you know!"

She said gently, "How about building on the entire resources of the United States government?" And when he frowned: "You did it for the-what do you call them? The Gamma people-"

"But they threatened to beat the hell out of me-"

He stopped short, gazing at her.

She smiled. She waited a moment to let it sink in. Then she did something I would not have expected. She got up, still smiling, walked over to him and sat on the arm of his chair, her hand on his far shoulder, her body pressed against his head. If I had suspected she wore nothing under the blouse before, now I was sure of it. She toyed with his ear. "We don't threaten," she said silkily. Another pause, while Douglas glared around the room: trapped animal being offered bait. "On the other hand," she went on, her voice softer and huskier, "we do reward. Oh, yes, hon, we reward. I would personally reward you every way I could."

I could almost smell the pheromones steaming out of her.

So could the local Larry Douglas. "Bitch," he whispered, so softly that I could barely hear him, though he was right next to me on the edge of the bed. "You know what she's up to? She's ambitious, old Nyla is. She's going to use this to get right out of the FBI, right up to the top. And when she gets that poor son of a bitch in bed, he'll do anything she wants—believe me, I know!"

He stopped, because Moe was glowering at us.

He hadn't stopped in time. I swallowed, and my saliva had a sudden bitter taste of rage. How crazy that was! I was jealous! I was jealous of the little rat sitting next to me, so hotly jealous I could barely keep my hands off him, and for what? Because he had bedded this other Nyla!

Crazy.

It was worse than crazy. I knew it. I didn't care. If I could have pushed a button and exterminated the bastard, I would have done it in a hot minute. Not just him. The one she was whispering to across the room too—especially him! Not just even him. I was willing to extend my detestation to all Larry Douglases, or even look-alikes, like my old acquaintance and drinking buddy, His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador, the Honorable Lavrenti Yosifovitch Djugashvili.

It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get.

I was so filled with rage and jealousy inside my own head that I hardly noticed when Nyla sat up straight, scowling. She glared at the window. "Moe," she ordered, "close the damn blinds! I don't want the whole world gaping in here!"

"Chief," he protested, "nobody's looking in—"

"Close them!" And she turned back, all smiles again, to the man who was obviously responding to whatever it was she had been whispering.

And I was on fire.

It was obsessive. I wanted to possess that woman, right then, and I was willing to kill anybody who challenged me for her. I was paying so little attention to anything else that I hardly noticed the faint thwick sound that came from nowhere, was distracted only on the surface of my mind when Moe, turning away from the window, seemed to trip and fall forward, crashing into the wire recorder. I did not fully come back to reality until Nyla herself jumped up, face suddenly full of shock and anger, opening her mouth to yell— There was another thwick.

Nyla, too, fell like a brain-shot deer. I could see a tiny feathered dart gleaming out of the thin fabric over one shoulder.

We looked at each other in amazement. And then all questions were answered for me as there was a quick puff of air pressure, like a door slamming closed on a tight, tiny room, and there, grinning at me, was me. That other me that wore the funny coveralls. "Hello, again," he said, nodding. "Here, give me a hand, let's get her out of the way."

The Douglases were quicker at following orders than I; they jumped, however bewildered, and tugged the sleeping woman out of the middle of the floor.Just in time. Another quick, silent pulse of pressure, and a tall, cylindrical metal object appeared on the floor. "Just keep quiet, please," the new Dominic ordered. He pulled open a panel on the cylinder, fussed with what was inside, and looked up, waiting.

A shimmering oval of blackness spread itself before us.

"Looks like it's working," he said, and shrugged. He was smiling. I found myself smiling back—whoever he was, whatever he represented, it was not likely to be worse than what I had here. He glanced around the room. "We'd better not hang around," he said, "but I think we ought to take these two along with us. Let's get the woman through first."

By then I was functioning well enough to help, though it was no great effort for four of us to lift Nyla's sleeping form through the black oval. It was, however, truly eerie—not just to watch her disappear, inch by inch, but to feel unseen hands on the other side catch her and pull her through.

The apeman was a lot harder. But there were four of us, not counting the help on the other side. "Now all of you," ordered the Dominic-in-charge. We obliged: the wimpy Dominic wonderingly, the ratty Douglas resentfully, the snakebitten Douglas fearfully— and me fairly fearfully, too, as I followed them.

Hot dark night, except for floodlights. I came out on a rough platform of wood, with two men in civilian clothes grabbing my arms. "Just move away, please," one of them said, eyes on the spot I'd come from.

In a moment the black cylinder appeared.

In another moment Dr. Dominic DeSota of Paratime Alpha popped into sight. "Got it all," he crowed, looking delighted with himself. "You fellows, welcome to Paratime Alpha—and you, Doug"—turning to the fearful one—"welcome home."

But Douglas-Alpha did not look in the least joyful about it.