The Coming of the Quantum Cats

27 August 1983

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

You can't see much out of the windows of an Army transport jet, but as we banked steeply somewhere over the Capitol I could see the whole District spread out under us. It didn't look warlike. They had the floodlights on the White House and the Lincoln Memorial, and there were long lines of car headlights and taillights because everybody in Washington was out to celebrate T.G.I.F. night. . . . No! Right along the Potomac there were only a few lights on the roads, and they didn't look like the usual car traffic. Some were single bright spotlights. Some were the faint glow that comes from the slitted headlamps of military vehicles. I leaned across the aisle to the dozing infantry colonel and tapped his shoulder. "If those are what I think they are," I yelled, "won't the Russian satellites spot them?"

He peered past me to see what I was talking about. "Oh, yeah." He grinned. "They're practicing for the Labor Day parade. What did you think?"

"Labor Day?" I gaped at him, but he'd unfastened his seat belt to come next to me, leaning to the window.

"Could you see my battalion on the White House grounds?" he asked, disappointed because we were looking the wrong way. I shook my head. "That's crowd control for the parade," he announced, winking.

"Jesus! Labor Day's not for ten days yet. Do you think the Russians are dumb enough to buy that?"

He shrugged. "If they weren't dumb, they wouldn't be Russians," he offered, and buckled in because the steward sergeant was coming down the aisle to frown at him.

But apart from that one little patch, there was the same old District, all peaceful and busy and happy. All the other roads were the way they ought to be. Even from the air you could see dearly that these people were not worried about any invasions. .

And on the other side of the barrier, I knew, there was another Washington, where our first assault wave had gone through and taken all the Potomac bridges.

And what the people in that Washington were doing that Friday night I could not imagine.

When we got out at Boiling and showed our orders the transportation clerk offered to get the colonel a staff car, provided he'd drop me off on his way to the White House. It was a good deal for both of us. On the drive in the colonel did everything but bounce around in his seat with anticipation and joy. He had already let me know he was a West Pointer, and I'd seen the Chile and Thailand ribbons on his chest. "This will be the biggest yet," he promised. "You'll get your silver leaf out of it, Major, so cheer up! You don't get promotions for being in a secure zone when an invasion's going on!',

"Yeah," I said, gazing out at the Virginia countryside. What he said was true enough. What he didn't know was that General Ratface was not going to forget me. He couldn't court-martial me after giving me a medal two hours earlier. But he would remember. Some day, sooner or later, I would be caught hoisting a beer in the Officers' Club or spitting on some GI sidewalk, and then the general would sink his teeth into my throat for the kill.

Unless, of course, I picked up a few more medals in this operation. I'm a prudent man. But it looked to me as though the most prudent thing I could do now was to be a hero, first chance I got . . .

We crossed the bridge right under Arlington Cemetery, with the eternal light flickering on the hillside behind us. Traffic was heavy and civilian, though I knew that right here, on this very structure, our troops were holding the enemy off, just a wrinkle in time away. And ahead of us— "What the hell is that?" I asked, pointing to what looked like million-candlepower searchlights blinking into the sky.

"Must be time for the Russian satellites to come over," said the colonel. "Those strobes are on top of the White House and the Sheraton Command Center, and if the Russians can make out any details with their optics fried, they're welcome to them. Anyway," he added, grinning again, "they're just more practice for the Labor Day fireworks celebration."

He dropped me at the driveway to the Sheraton Hotel, commandeered for an operations headquarters. When I showed my orders I found out the front door was for full colonels and up only; people like me had to go around to the ballroom entrance, through the parking lots. And the lots were full. Not with the usual tourists' cars and VIP's limousines; there was at least a division's worth of tanks and personnel carriers parked in orderly ranks—and with a few not-very-orderly-at-all vehicles that had been pulled back from the first assault. Some of them had taken heavy fire. One or two were a real surprise, because I couldn't see how they'd got back at all—a turret blown off one medium-heavy, a weapons carrier that seemed to have burned, four or five other vehicles with holes in them that hadn't come from moths. They were all under tarpaulins to keep the orbiting Russian eyes away, and armed guards patrolled that part of the area.

And just beyond the fringe of boxwood hedge were the busy streets of the District, where a million people were buzzing along without a care in the world.

Whatever was happening in the lobbies and bars and restaurants of the hotel, people like me were not likely to find out. Our part of the hotel was the meeting rooms, and they were as close to GI as they could be made. I got a badge to hang on my blouse in exchange for a copy of my orders, and was sent to the William McKinley room for disposal. On the way I passed a ballroom that was full. It was neither a wedding nor a bar mitzvah; what it was full of was troops, mostly in their underwear, changing from the uniforms of their side in which they had been captured to the uniforms of ours in which they would be discreetly transported to the stockades in the Maryland hills.

Prisoners.

I paused, rubbernecking. These weren't the Air Force guards we'd captured at Sandia. These were combat soldiers, and the wounded among them proved it with their dressings. The differences between their uniforms and ours were multiple, but not all that conspicuous at first glance. The basic color of the uniform was the same olive-drab for both. Their chevrons were smaller than ours, and silver-edged where ours were all black. Ribbons were something else—I couldn't see them clearly enough to tell much, and the MP captain in charge of their guards was beginning to give me hostile looks. Besides, my orders had been to report to the William McKinley room at once, and who knew if the door guards had phoned ahead?

If they had, it made no difference. The tech sergeant at the table by the door had never heard of me. She pawed through papers, muttered into a phone, turned the papers upside down and pored over the back of them and finally said, "Take a seat, Major. We'll get to you as soon as possible."

I didn't have any trouble translating that. "As soon as possible" meant "when we find out who you are and what you're supposed to be doing here." I resigned myself to spending the next considerable fraction of my life on one of the gilt-backed banquet chairs lined along the wall.

It wasn't quite that bad. There were anywhere from fifty to a hundred people going in and out of that room. Hardly any of them paid any attention to me. But it was no more than twenty minutes, and I'd only had my feet stepped on twice as people in a hurry crowded past, when the sergeant came back. "This way, Major," she said. "Lieutenant Kauffmann is ready for you now."

Lieutenant Kauffmann was not only ready for me, he said, first thing out of his mouth, "Where the hell have you been, Major? You're supposed to be over at the White House right now."

"The White—" I began, but he cut me off.

"Right, and you're supposed to be in civilian clothes too. It says here"—he speared a folder out of the stack on his desk—"that you closely resemble a U.S. senator on the other side-"

"Resemble him, hell. I am him."

He shrugged. "Anyway, you're going to assume his identity. After the first wave has secured the White House-"

It was my turn to cut him off. "We're invading the White House?"

"Where've you been?" He groaned again, this time with a different intonation. "They haven't responded to our messages; now we try force. You'll go in civilian clothes, as I said, and take two guards in their uniforms with you. You'll get orders from the portal master, but it looks like they want you to find the President, take her prisoner, and bring her back here."

"Holy shit," I said, and then, "Wait a minute. What if the real Senator DeSota is there?"

"He's not," he said positively. "Didn't you capture him yourself?"

"But he got—I mean, I thought he'd returned to his own time."

Shrug. Translation: Not my department. "So," he went on, "get your B-four bag and change into civvies, and we'll get you transportation to—"

"I didn't bring any baggage," I said. "I don't have any civilian clothes with me."

Thunderstruck stare. "You what? Christ, Major! How the hell am I supposed to get you fitted out with civvies? Where would I get them? Why the hell—" And then he turned to the sergeant. He had remembered how to get difficult tasks done. "Sergeant! Get this man fitted out with civvies!"

And so it came to pass that twenty minutes later the sergeant and I were getting out of a commandeered Cadillac limousine the size of a house trailer, in front of a store whose neon sign said: FORMAL CLOTHES RENTAL FOR ALL OCCASIONS. The neon was turned off, but the owner had opened up for us. And forty minutes after that we were on our way to the White House, and behind us the proprietor was grumpily closing his store again. "Good work, Sergeant," I said, stretching out in the back seat, which was roughly the size of a football field. I admired the gleam on the rented patent-leather shoes, smoothed down the rented satin cummerbund, adjusted the rented black bow tie. I was, I believed, the very picture of a U.S. senator coming from some formal dinner party for a late-night call on his President. "I guess the tux is the best idea," I observed, "because who knows what the current styles for men are in their time? And formal clothes don't change, do they?"

She said shortly, "We hope." Then we were at the VIP gate, and she was showing documents to the very thorough and skeptical MP, with two other MP's right behind him, looking over his shoulder. They were all armed, but they didn't have to be. Beyond them, square in the middle of the narrow drive, was a personnel carrier with a heavy machine gun mounted in the rear, and it was pointed right at us.

It took me a moment to realize that the White House had changed considerably. The strobes! They weren't there—evidently the Russian satellite had passed and they were no longer needed. That wasn't the only thing.

Even Washington Friday-night people go to bed sometime, and the traffic had been dwindling all along. Not here, though. The traffic jam was all around us, parked on the grass, crushing the roses. The lawn of our White House would be five years recovering from the tanks and half-tracks and personnel carriers that had chewed it up—"rehearsing for the parade," of course.

I could see why they were not letting ordinary civilians in.

I was no ordinary civilian, though. We were waved through at last. The weapons carrier started up and pulled off onto the grass to let us through—another hundred dollars worth of turf down the tube—and our driver took us to a small portico I had never seen before. "Good luck," said the sergeant, hesitated, then leaned forward and gave me a kiss to show she meant it.

That was the last time for quite a while that anybody showed any affection for me.

The only other time I had been in the White House was in Stevenson's second term, and it was nothing like this. Now there weren't any uniformed pages to show me around, nor velvet ropes to keep the barbarians out of the sacred chambers. There weren't any sacred chambers. There were troops in half the rooms, and machinery or weapons in most of the others. A corporal took me swiftly down a service hall and up a broad staircase, not encouraging pauses to gawk. I wound up in a green-draped room with portraits of Presidents Madison and Taft on the wall. It was a strikingly handsome room, not counting the urn of coffee with paper cups that stood on a card table near the door. The upholstered chairs were sparsely occupied—four or five civilians, one of them a woman who looked familiar, as did two of the men, especially the black one I recognized as a former heavyweight prizefighter—and eight or nine soldiers in the dress uniform of the other side, with side arms that looked as though they meant it.

Two of the soldiers got up and came toward me, hulking, huge paratroop types, both with corporal's stripes. "Here's Major DeSota, sir," said my own corporal, saluted, and left.

It is a measure of how fast things were happening that it did not occur to me that corporals did not salute corporals. I said to the bigger of the two, "The first thing I'd like is some of that coffee, Corporal."

He raised an eyebrow as thick as a chevron, then grinned.

"Let's get the man some coffee, Captain Bagget," he said. And while corporal number two went over to pour me a cup, corporal number one said, "I'm Colonel Frankenhurst, Major. Do you know your mission?"

It took me a minute to reorient. "Sorry, sir," I apologized. "Uh—only in general terms. I mean, I understand I'm supposed to find this President Reagan, and when I do you two are supposed to take her prisoner and bring her back."

"Shit," he said dispassionately. "Well, it doesn't matter. The captain and I have been rehearsing this for the past forty-eight hours. If we're stopped, I'll do the talking; all you have to do is look like a senator. Can you handle that?" Then he grinned, to show that he had the situation well in hand. "Don't worry about it, Major. First place, we may never go through. They're having trouble with the peepers; these people on the other side move around so fast they can't keep track of them. Last I heard, they weren't going to open a portal before oh-three-hundred anyway."

"That's dumb," observed the captain-corporal, returning with my coffee. "They ought to wait till morning, that way we won't look so conspicuous." The colonel only shrugged. "Of course," said the captain with a sigh, looking me up and down, "a tuxedo won't look exactly normal at eight o'clock in the morning, either."

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other," said the colonel. "Well, DeSota, would you like to meet the other doubles? This is Nancy Davis—of course you've seen her on the TV." Of course I had; she was the star of the I Remember Mama remake, and how they'd got her away from her studios and her well-advertised activities raising funds for everything from Animal Welfare to the Right to Life I couldn't guess. "She's the President." Colonel Frankenhurst grinned. "John here is a Washington police captain on special White House duty—in the real world he's an airline pilot from Ohio. And the champ is a senator like you." He watched me shake hands. "Pretty good work getting you all together," he said complacently. "We missed a few, of course. We found the President's personal maid, but she was eight months pregnant—they didn't think anybody would be fooled. And we lucked onto General Porteco, her personal military aide. Unfortunately our guy was just coming out of the DT's and they couldn't trust him to remember his lines."

The other civilian came forward. "I'm not anybody's double," he apologized. "I'm Professor Greenberg—political science. They called me in to try to get a line on what the structure of this other society is like, so I've been interviewing you doubles to see if I can figure out where the differences began. But before I get to you, Major—you've been through once already, haven't you? What's it like?"

So for the next half hour I did the talking. I didn't have that much to tell, after all—what did I know about the other side except for about a quarter of a square mile in the New Mexico desert? But it was more than anyone else present knew, and they all had questions. Professor Greenberg wanted to know how much a Coke cost out of their machines. "Senator" Clay wanted to know how many of their troops were black. "President" Nancy Davis wanted to know what the hit TV shows were, and whether I knew if abortion was legal. Colonel-corporal Frankenhurst wanted, very badly, to know how well those other guys had done in hand-to-hand combat, if any had occurred when we took over their Sandia base.

I did my best. But while I was still trying to remember who the hosts on those other guys' Today show were for Nancy Davis, there was noise in the corridor, and the door flung open and in came President Brown and entourage. He didn't look happy.

I hadn't expected him to, because I'd already heard how pissed he was at the disruption of his home life with troops and equipment, not to mention the disruption of his schedule because he had had to cancel every appointment with every person who wasn't cleared to know what was going on . . . which was almost everybody. "There you are," he snapped to sweet-faced, bland-smiling Nancy Davis. "I've got to talk to you, right now!"

She wasn't fazed in the least. Affably, she said, "Certainly, Mr. President. What can I do for you?"

"You can tell me what the hell kind of person you are," he snarled. "You don't respond to my public messages at all! What does it take to get you to act?"

"I guess you mean that other me, Mr. President," she said, smiling. She really had a dimple when she wanted it—a triumph, I was sure, of the cosmetic surgeon's art. "I don't know if I can tell you that. After all, I'm not really the President—here."

"Make believe you are, for God's sake!" he roared. "Do you have any idea what's resting on this? I'm not talking about this cockamamie other world, I'm talking about here. The Russians are getting really nasty about the 'parade preparations' and the 'archaeological study site' in New Mexico, and there are too many people involved. It's only a question of time till the word gets out, and what are they going to do then?" As she opened her mouth he said, "No, that's not what I'm asking you—what the hell would you know about that? I'm asking you about you. The other you. Would it help, do you think, if I canceled this operation and tried to get you, the other you, on the phone? President-to-President? A one-on-one talk?"

"Why, I think that would depend on what you said, Mr. President," she said thoughtfully.

"I'd say the truth!" he barked. "Might be an interesting change, at that."

"Well," she said slowly, "I rather think, Mr. President, that I'd remember my oath of office. I suppose it's the same one you took. To defend the United States against all enemies, domestic or external—even if they're both domestic and external, so to speak. What I would not do, I think, is allow my country to be invaded by anybody at all without fighting back with everything I had—even if the invaders were my own country."

He glared at her, baffled. Then he glared around the room, particularly at the uniformed men. I think that was the only time in my life when I was glad I was a lowly field-grade officer, with no responsibility for high-level planning. I would not have liked to be on the Combined Chiefs of Staff right at that moment.

Then he sank slowly into a chair, gazing into space. One of his flunkies whispered urgently in his ear, but the President shook him off. "So we've got a war on our hands after all," he said.

No one responded to that.

There was a lot of silence in the room. The anxious flunky glanced at his wristwatch, then at Jerry Brown. Without looking at him, the President said, "I know. It's probably academic by now. Take a look out the window and see if it's started."

The aide was a youngish man, no more than thirty-five, but he looked more like a hundred as he moved stiffly toward the long green drapes.

He didn't have to, actually, because by then we could all hear the racket of truck motors and tank diesels starting up.

Then everybody was at the windows. There were three of them, and instinctively we left the one in the middle for the President's solitary use. He made his way slowly over and stood gazing thoughtfully and silently at the hot August night outside, while all the rest of us crowded around the other two.

What we were looking at was the South Lawn, usually reserved for photo opportunities with visiting heads of state or Easter egg hunts for the Washington children. Someone had built a huge, flimsy tarpaulin structure to shield something from eyes in the street or overhead, but from our window we could see what it contained: the huge black rectangle of a portal, like a movie screen before the picture has started to show, only black. Even though I'd done it before, it was unnerving to look at that thing and imagine plunging into it.

It was even more unnerving when the first squadron of six whippet tanks roared through and disappeared, churning up the already battered grass . . . after them a dozen personnel carriers with combat-ready machine-gunners and Rangers . . . after them a company of paratroops in camouflage suits on foot .

The President sighed and turned away. He walked out of the room, his ducklings waddling after, into the corridors that were also beginning to get noisy with the inside part of the operation. And the ones of us still left in the room looked at each other.

Because we knew that we were likely to be next.

It all went pretty briskly after that—as you might expect, because it was all downhill. People were rushing around, flinging orders in all directions; the sparks flew. I felt the tingle. I worked myself up to a fair-to-middling case of jitters, mostly over the question of how I was going to find something so heroic to do that it would placate even old General Ratface Magruder. Then they hustled us out of the Green Room, up a stair, down a hall, past guards with rapid-fire weapons at the ready . . . and there we were. In the Oval Office itself. Occupying the very seat of majesty.

It didn't look the way any seat of majesty was supposed to look. It looked like moving day, with a little bit of a mad-scientist laboratory for dessert. The big presidential desk had been shoved against a wall. Thousand-dollar armchairs and five-thousand-dollar couches had been stacked against another. And in the center of the room a rectangle of copper tubing surrounded nothing, like an empty picture frame. It filled the center of the room floor-to-ceiling, with the squat boxes of the portal field generator on one side of it and the control panels on the other.

The field was down.

Nothing was happening but yelling and confusion, because that scarey, velvety black nothing did not fill the rectangle. You could see right through it, and what I saw was a full bird colonel whimpering with rage and frustration, while his technicians ripped the panels apart, trying to find the blown fuse that had crashed the portal. Three-quarters of a platoon of assault troops stood glowering before the panel, while their captain helped things along by yelling at the back of the colonel's head, A captain should not talk to a colonel like that. The colonel was too deep in misery to hear it.

It was not a peaceful scene.

The portal master came toward us. She was a major. She wasn't yelling at anyone. Her face showed no expression at all but terminal weariness. She told my corporals, "You're on hold. We only got eight men through before it crashed, and you might be scrubbed. Stay out of the way."

Colonel-corporal Frankenhurst gave us a jerk of the head, meaning do it, but tarried to ask, "How's it going on the other side?"

We tarried to hear. Needlessly. It was a dumb question. The portal master didn't try to answer it. She just turned and plodded away; because, of course, she didn't know. She couldn't. Once the troops were through that portal they were gone. They could not be seen or heard. They could not come back to report. They could not even get a message through until a portal generator was through and operational on the other side. If we had had a peeper working but in this rig the peeper field was tied to the portal itself, and neither was working. We didn't know a thing. .

And then we did, and it was bad. The operation was a tactical surprise, a complete success in every way but one. We hadn't done what it was set up for. Madame President had been hustled away through an exit no one had mapped.

Within ten minutes two-way traffic was established on all floors, but by then it didn't matter any more. We took prisoners by the score. We had flushed guards and Secret Servicemen out of every butler's pantry and clothes closet. I saw President Reagan's own military attache, a brigadier general in full-dress uniform, wearing an expression of fury and resentment—"why was it me?" We even had the First Gentleman, caught going back for the videocassettes of his old films, but we didn't have the one we wanted.

Madame President had got clean away.

In the first hot dawn light I hitched a ride back to the Sheraton in a White House van, incongruous among the prisoners and guards in my rented tux.

We were going to have to fight for it.