The Coming of the Quantum Cats

27 August 1983

0940 Dr. Dominic DeSota-Arbenz

As soon as the pulseur was airborne and the seatbelt sign went off I was up and running. There was a woman in a purple muumuu who slipped into the aisle just ahead of me, with a quick flick of a triumphant look over her shoulder. But that was all right; she was only heading for the W.C. I was first in line for the phone.

Actually I got there too fast. When I dialed home I got a busy signal, because we weren't at cruising height yet and the pilot hadn't relinquished his disposable radio channels. I kept dialing. I was impatient. I'd been away too long. The first time I went through to another time my wife had kept me awake all the night before with worries—she remembered all too well what had happened to Larry Douglas. But that jump was physically near, at least—Sklodowska Curie was less than six kilometers from my front door, and that first trip, going to Rho-time, I'd just popped in and popped out again, mostly to test the new suit.

I make it sound easier than it was. I was scared too. But then when we began narrowing down our searches to the times that were actually getting somewhere with paratime research, or at least theoretical quark physics, the area of exploration began to increase geographically too. Beta had a facility just south of San Francisco. Phi had one in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was pop through a portal, pop Out, jump on a pulseur, fly a few hours, pop through another portal . . . and I had a wife and a child I really would have liked to see.

The third time I dialed my number I heard the beepers putting me through, and Dorothy was home. She picked up the phone on the first ring. I was never gladder of anything than to see her sweet, calm face peering out at me from the phone.

"You're looking real good, Do," I told her. She inspected my picture at the other end. Because the camera lens on our home phone is over the screen she had a sort of unfocused look, as though she'd forgotten her glasses, but she saw sharply enough.

"I wish I could say the same for you, hon," she said. "Is it going badly?"

I couldn't tell her just how badly over an open phone, but she didn't have to be told. She could see my face. I said, "Middling awful. How's Barney?"

"Missing his daddy, otherwise all right. He cut a tooth." I'd caught her with a cup of coffee in her hand, and she took a sip, looking at me. "It's not just that there's that, uh, problem," she decided. "There's something else on your mind. What is it, Dominic?"

I said, surprised, "You're right, Do. I feel—funny. I don't know why."

She nodded. I was only confirming what she knew. When Dorothy Arbenz came to the institute as an apres-doc psychologist I saw at once that she was beautiful, quickly learned that she was very understanding. It only occurred to me later that for the rest of my life she would be reading my mind, or next thing to it, but I married her anyway. She left my subconscious to worry about what I was worrying about and changed the subject. "Are you coming home now?"

"I wish. It isn't a Sklodowska matter any more, hon."

"You're going to Washington?"

" 'Fraid so."

She took a deeper swallow of coffee. I'd begun to be able to read Dorothy's mind a little, too, so I knew what was coming next. "Are you going through again?" she asked.

I didn't answer directly. "It isn't up to me any more," I reminded her. She knew it wasn't an answer, and she knew, as well as I did, that if I went through again, it wouldn't likely be just a little prowl around to see what was going on.

So I blew her a kiss, and she blew me one back, and after I'd hung up I sat before the phone for a moment, thinking about what it was that was worrying me.

I knew what it was. I'd known it at once, I just hadn't wanted to think about it.

There were too many mes.

When I was skulking around Tau and Epsilon I'd seen other Dominic DeSotas, but it wasn't until we had three of us in the same room that the wonder—the grisly, spine-twitching astonishment and dread—really reached me. I mean, they were me. Not the one me I'd lived with all my life, but the mes that I might have been—that, in their times, I was. I could have been born into a time when science was a dirty word, and wound up a thirty-five-year-old juvenile, furtively sneaking embraces with a coeur-douce I couldn't afford to marry, terrorized by my own government, whipped into line by an oppressive social system that made me ashamed of my own nudity. I could, in fact, have been the Nicky DeSota the back of whose head I could see, a dozen rows ahead, and in some sense I was him. Or I could have given up science for politics and turned out a United States senator. Well, that wasn't awful. It was a pretty good life— wealth, power, the esteem of all who knew me-but there was a sleaziness to it too. There he was, or I was, sneaking into a hole-and-corner adulterous relationship with another woman, because I had a wife I no longer loved and could not rid myself of without terrible heartbreak and recriminations, not to speak of financial and political ruin.

Or I could have taken the military road, like my other avatar the Major, who prided himself on deception and brute-force conquest or I could have died early, for one reason or another, as seemed to have happened to the Dominic DeSota in Rho.

And all those mes were me.

It was scary. It threatened the stability of my life in ways I had never felt before. Everybody always knew that things could have been very different for him somehow . . . but it was a whole other thing to know that, somewhere, they had.

I gazed out at the two of them. Even from a dozen rows back I could see that Nicky was having the time of his life in the big widebody, half empty with the light Saturday traffic of the week before Labor Day. So was the senator. I admired them for taking so much joy in what was around them, in spite of the fact that they were both, as far as they knew, marooned in a time as alien to their own as Mars . . . of course, I hadn't come from where they had just come from.

The other thing I could see was that the executive type in 32-C, the one who had already begun spreading out the contents of his attache case onto his tray, the empty seat beside him, and its tray, was casting irritable glances at the phone.

I turned back and made my other call.

I didn't go through the switchboard at the Sklodowska-Curie Institute. I dialed Harry Rosenthal's private line, and, as expected, when I got him on the phone the wall behind his face was not the one in Chicago; call-forwarding had tracked him to where he was. "You're in Washington," I said.

"Damn right," he fretted. "Waiting for you. Getting calls every five minutes from the Army and the science secretary and the CIA. I wish you were here now, Dom!"

I didn't ask why.

My conversation with Dorothy hadn't been exactly joyous. Neither was this one. I started out with two big worries—the invasion of Epsilon by Gamma, and ballistic recoil. The call didn't ease either of them. It made them worse. "The events we were monitoring," Harry said tersely, "are still proceeding. And as to the other thing— have you seen the TV news?"

"How the devil would I get time to watch television, Harry?"

"You might want to make time," he said gloomily. "There are intrusions popping up all over the place—we can't get instrumentation around fast enough to check them all. But when you get a thunderstorm on three tables of a Sunday-school picnic and clear skies everywhere else, you don't need instrumentation to know what's happening." Then he added a new worry. "The secretary wants to know why you brought those Tau people back."

"But Douglas spilled his guts to them," I protested. "That's policy! You set it yourself—limit knowledge, keep the ones who don't have it from getting it."

He stared at my picture. "You were sent to bring Douglas back, and to rescue one involuntary emigre, the senator. Nobody told you to manufacture four new emigres. What are you going to do with them now?"

Since I didn't have an answer to that, I was glad to hang up and let the executive type have his turn at the phone.

I made my way back up the aisle to the midships stew coop. On the way I passed the two other Dominics, both of whom wanted to talk. I didn't. I gave a friendly wave to each and kept right on going. They would have to wait. I had to think about what Harry Rosenthal had asked me.

The stews were busily pulling bubbles of scrambled eggs out of the microwave, but when I said, "Steerage, please," they didn't argue. They knew what they had in steerage. One of them broke off long enough to put me on the little elevator, and it carried me down to the X-class passenger compartment below.

Airlines use the below-decks passenger space in the widebodies for all kinds of purposes. Some put first-class bars there. One or two filled them with seats they sold at a cut rate-there wasn't any easy way of getting out of them if there was trouble, and so they weren't exactly popular with most travelers. Trans-Continental used them for couchettes-dormir on long flights, and sometimes for special purposes on shorter ones.

We were a very special purpose.

We were even more special than what they ordinarily euphemistically meant by a "special purpose," which is to say for transporting prisoners. There weren't any prisoners here, exactly. There were the two FBI people from Tau and their Larry Douglas, who had committed no crimes anybody in our world cared much about. Then there was our own Larry Douglas. Whose status was pretty murky; whose trial, if he ever had one, would set about a million precedents—I'd already heard the lawyers argue about what "jurisdiction" meant in his case. No prisoners. The flic-de-nation who was sitting by himself, reading an in-flight magazine, wasn't a guard.Just a precaution.

I came in from the front of the compartment. There was room for thirty people in it, and our lot didn't crowd it at all. The FBI woman and her anthropoid were sitting at the far end of one row, whispering to each other. More accurately, the woman was whispering and the bruiser was listening humbly and respectfully. Neither of them looked up. Their Larry Douglas was across the aisle, wistfully trying to get invited into the conversation. They weren't interested. And our own Larry was sitting with his head down in the first row, imaging hopelessness. He didn't look up either, but I knew he had seen me come out of the elevator.

I looked at him for a moment. What a lot of hell this man had unleashed! When we found out for sure what he was doing—when the people he was working for made the quantum leap from talk to deployment—we had to decide what to do about him. I voted for going after him. It was a close decision. My first impulse was to send him some token of our esteem, like a pack of rabid wolves. Though I didn't say it, it seemed still like an attractive idea.

Though I hadn't said it, he lifted his head and whined, "I couldn't help it, Dom! They were going to torture me!"

I was surprised to hear a contralto laugh from farther back in the compartment. The FBI woman had quit conspiring to listen; it seemed she'd heard that song before. "It's true," he said desperately. "And anyway it's your fault, Dom."

That jolted me. I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but he was ahead of me. "You could have stopped it! You could have come after me. Why weren't you peeping me the whole time?"

The gall of the man! That was back in the early days of the project, long before we had had the resources to mount both portal and peeper at the same time. "We didn't because we couldn't," I snapped. He gave me a rebellious look.

The bruiser took a hand in the conversation. "What are you going to do with us?" he growled.

The woman looked on silently. It was like hearing a puppet speak when its owner is absent; I was almost surprised to find the ape was capable of articulate speech at all. "As an attorney," he boomed—bigger surprise still—"I got to tell you you're violating our civil rights like a million different ways, Charlie. You been keeping us incommunicado, which is depriving us of our habeas corpus; you ain't read us our rights or charged us with no indictable act or deed; you kept us from the right of consultation with our lawyer—"

"You just said you are a lawyer," I protested.

"Even a lawyer has a right to a lawyer," he said virtuously, "so what the hell about it, Jackson?"

I looked helplessly at the woman. "Is this goon really an attorney?"

She shrugged, grinning. "Says he is. That's how he got into the bureau. Personally I think he bought it from a diploma mill. Anyway, what about it?"

"What about what?"

"What are you going to do about us?" she asked politely. "Because, honestly, Moe's right. You must have some kind of laws around here, and I'm willing to bet you're breaking a whole bunch of them."

She was a lot too close to what I believed myself for me to be comfortable with the conversation. I tried diversion. "What would you do if you were me?" I asked.

"Why," she said, grinning, "I'd save up my money to pay off a hell of a huge damage judgment, once we get to court, and I'd probably start arranging my affairs for the next ten years in the slammer."

And that, too, did not seem at all unrealistic. I mean, given a good lawyer on their side, and a few bad breaks on mine. This sort of thing was not at all what I had been prepared to risk when I signed up for the project.

And it was all so unfair! I'd seen the bruises on Nicky DeSota's body. I'd heard him say what this pair had done to him. Civil rights? What civil rights had they given him?

And yet in their own time they weren't lawbreakers. They were the law!

I said slowly, "I don't think you really know what you're up against."

"Then tell us," she invited.

I hesitated. Then I reached back and picked up the phone. When the head stew answered, I said, "Will you ask the gentlemen in 22-A and 22-F to step down here? And, oh, yes, how about some breakfasts all around?"

It's a queasy feeling looking at yourself. I'd had it often enough before through the peepholes, looking at one Dominic DeSota or another in one time-line or another—it was even queasier when I couldn't find any Dominic DeSota at all. (Or sometimes no anybody, but I don't like to think about those time-lines.)

The worst part was wondering where I had gone wrong. Or sometimes where I had gone right—but always different. I couldn't say that Senator Dom had gone wrong. Even in the ill-fitting and dirty fatigues, munching his not very good hash browns, he looked like somebody who had made something of his life.

But what about the other one?

He surely did not look like any kind of success. Rumpled business suit—and long pants at that! Imagine long pants in August! He didn't sound that way, either. He talked like somebody whose world wasn't much to begin with, and lately had gone definitely sour.

Still, I could see him livening up before my eyes. When the pulseur took off he was really shaken—closed his eyes, pressed his whole body back against the seat as though he were trying to disappear inside it. I made sure I had an airsick bag ready as we stood on our tail at eight hundred kilometers an hour. I couldn't blame him.

He'd never been in a pulseur before, and not too often in even the clumsy old piston-engine walruses of his time.

I did not know if I would have done any bitter in his place. No, wrong. I knew I would not.

I wasn't sure I would have done as well as the senator, either, though the fact that he had was encouraging. He was next to Nicky, helping him get the plastic off his scrambled eggs, watching me to see what I was going to say. When I didn't say anything for a moment, trying to figure out how to begin, he did. "Dom," he said, "I appreciate being rescued, but I've got responsibilities in my own time. Can you get me back there?"

"I hope so, Dom," I said.

He looked at me appraisingly. "You could have saved a lot of trouble if you'd told me what was happening the first time we met," he offered.

"I do what I'm told to do, Dom," I said. "There's a lot at stake here." The woman snickered; she'd had a lot of practice listening to people talk generalities when the specifics were embarrassing. I flushed. "I'll tell you anything you want to know," I said, "because you all have a right to that much, but let me start with the basics. Accord? You all know by now that there are parallel times. An infinity of them. We can't reach them all, not even by peeping—well, that's what 'infinity' means, after all. The only times we've been able to reach so far have diverged sometime within the last ninety or ninety-five years. Only a few hundred of those, actually, but there are some interesting ones. In some of them the Communists took over the whole of Europe by 1933, with that supreme military genius Trotsky running the country. Then there's a whole set where Franklin D. Roosevelt escaped assassination and lived to become President. So the country was spared the military takeover and the interregnum, when it turned out there was nothing in the Constitution to say who became President when a President-elect died before assuming office, and so Garner and Hoover both claimed the office—until the Army stepped in and imposed martial law. Then there were—"

"Dom," said the senator patiently, "I guess we've got nothing better to do as long as we're on this airplane, but I don't know if history is the thing we're most interested in."

"I was only giving some illustrations."

"Sure. But we understand about parallel times—well, no, that's a lie. I don't understand. But enough to go on: every time some, I don't know, goofatron in the whatsicle splits there's a whole new universe created, right? Something like that? Well, why don't you first come to the nearest one instead of some world that's really a lot different, in a lot of ways?"

"Ah," I said, nodding, "that's a good question." I felt solid ground beneath my feet; I'd been through this with Senate committees and budget planners often enough. "First I'll give you the technical answer: it's because of what Steve Hawking calls 'permeable-fixed n-space contiguity,' if that's any help." I knew it wasn't. Snort from Moe, the anthropoid, varying expressions of polite detachment from the other men. Nyla Christophe was the only one who showed friendly concern, curiously enough. She gave me an encouraging nod as she dexterously scooped up her scrambled eggs. She didn't look at what she was doing, didn't drop a crumb, thumbless or not. And she didn't miss a word. "I'll give you an analogy. Think of the relationship between the time domains as a coiled spring, with each time strung on it, one after another, like a bead. If you number every bead, of course number five is right before bead number six, and right after bead number four—they're neighbors. But the spring is coiled. So time five may actually be touching time number six hundred and fifty-two, and on the other side of that one is maybe time number fifteen hundred and something, depending on what the radius of curvature is. Are you following me so far?"

"Maybe," called Christophe, speaking for all of them.

"Right. Then—I hate to do this—but, you see, the spring isn't curved in normal three-dimensional space. It's in n dimensions, and I don't know what n is. So proximity makes a difference—that's why we haven't been able to reach times where the split occurred more than ninety or ninety-five years ago, except in occasional fugitive glimpses. But the 'nearest' isn't the 'easiest' to reach, or anyway not always. Have I lost you?"

"Just about," said Nicky, smiling for the first time. "But it's fun to keep trying to understand!"

I said helpfully, "If you get a chance, there's an Asimov called The Intelligent Man's Guide to Quantum Mechanics."

"No, thanks," said Nicky. "But keep on, please."

"Well, that's about enough for theory. Some of you knew that already, of course." I glanced neutrally at our renegade Larry Douglas, who scowled and went back to his orange juice and roll. "So we developed the peeper, and then the portal. I don't want to go into the technology of that stuff. For one thing I can't—"

"But you're the fellow who invented it," balled Christophe.

I shrugged. "If it's credit you're giving—well, no. Certainly not single-handed. We had Gribbin and Hawking from England, Sverdlich from Smolensk—and, of course, we had all the French emigre scientists after Bartholomew Two, so we had a solid base of mathematicians and nuclear physicists available. But if you're blaming me— Well, I'll take that." I took a deep breath. "Because what we hadn't counted on was ballistic recoil."

I don't know what sort of reaction I had expected. I got three different ones—four, if you count the flic, who looked worried. Larry looked despondent. The other Larry and the two FBI people looked opaque: the poker face was a Tau trait, I had discovered, probably because it was not a time when you wanted other people to know what you were thinking very often. And the two Dominics looked interested. I took a swallow of my cooling coffee-I hadn't even touched the solid food yet—and tried to explain:

"There's a tension between the worlds. Call it a skin. Once it's punctured anywhere, it is weakened everywhere: It's a little like that heat-sealed plastic wrapping that the meat comes in in supermarkets, you know?" They didn't. "Like the stuff your eggs were wrapped in," I said. "It's in a state of tension. When we puncture it anywhere it takes a lot of power, but then the skin is weaker— thinner—in other places. It's hard to predict just where the other places will be, because the geometry is fractal—well, never mind that; it's just hard. But it thins. At first radiation is all that gets through; then gases. Then—more than gases." I looked at our own Larry. "Since you, uh, left," I told him, "we've come across some bad ones. Large areas open, causing violent storms. And—well, there was one that killed a lot of people. Time Eta had built apartments over an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Two diesels and four or five flatcars came through at eighty kilometers an hour, right into the lobby of a building, before it closed again."

Nicky put his hand up. "Doc? There were some stories about loud noises around a little airfield—could they have been that? From a time where they had rocketships, like this one?"

I started to tell him that a pulseur wasn't a rocketship but a jet, but caught myself in time. "I'd say probably yes," I agreed. "And we don't seem to be able to prevent it. At first we thought it was because of leakage of energy from our portal generators, and if we could control them better we could eliminate the ballistic recoil. But now we think it's really recoil, and there's a conservation law involved. If x amount of energy or matter goes from my time to yours, then x amount has to come back out of it again. Not necessarily back to mine. It may go to a third time entirely. It may go in fractions to several different ones.

"And we can't stop it."

"Jesus," said Nyla Christophe contemptuously. "You guys are playing with dynamite. Talk about irresponsible!"

Senator Dom cut in. His tone was less accusing, but a long way from really friendly. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to stop all this until you learn how to control it?" he asked.

"A damn good idea," I said fervently. "Only it got out of our hands when Larry got captured in Gamma. We could stop. But we couldn't both stop and keep an eye on them—not to mention the other times that were getting close, like yours, or that looked as though they'd be dangerous if they ever did get anywhere, like Ms. Christophe's."

The senator said temperately, "I'm in no position to blame you for anything, Dom. If we'd moved a little faster, my time might've been the first to break through, and I don't have any reason to believe we'd have done better. But—it scares me, Dom. I wish we'd thought a little more about the consequences before we got started. Those are big risks to take, just for the sake of developing a new weapon."

I lost my temper. Not at him. At myself, mostly, because of course he was saying nothing I hadn't said to myself a good many times over the past months. "You can't stop scientific research because there might be some danger somewhere!" I snapped. "Anyway, who said anything about a weapon?"

He looked surprised. "I only thought that it was obvious—"

"Maybe to savages the military application was obvious! Do you have any idea at all of what paratime means to research in general? Especially in the sciences that can't perform experiments?"

"I don't know exactly what you mean." He frowned.

"Think about it! Sociology, for instance. You can't isolate societies and perform experiments on them. But here we have an infinite number of societies, as like to our own or as different as we could want: we can develop a science of comparative sociology! Or economics, or poli-sci, or any of the social sciences at all. And not just the soft sciences! We had a meteorologist who came in as a research fellow. He went out of his mind when he discovered that your paratime, Nicky, hasn't had an Atlantic hurricane sweep up the coast in thirty years. We've been having them one or two a year and the damage is terrible. Now they think it has something to do with industrialization and urban sprawl; if we know that, maybe we can do something to stop it. And—trade."

The Tau Larry Douglas pricked up his ears. "I don't get what you're saying, DeSota," he said. "What kind of trade between two sets of the same people?"

"Two sets with slightly different histories. Slightly different fads, for one thing—there's a twenty-million-dollar business in hula hoops that came out of our peeping a year ago."

For once there was unanimity among my guests. All looked blank at once. "What's a hula hoop?" asked Larry Tau.

"A kind of a toy, that's all. But I'm not just talking about toys, I'm talking about a lot more valuable things. Think of it this way. If each paratime spends, oh, call it a billion dollars a year, on research and development—and if you can skim the cream of the R and D for fifty different paratimes—then, even with all the duplication, you're bound to find you still multiply your R and D results by a bunch!"

Silence for a moment while they digested that. Then Nicky said slowly, "I guess I can see what you're saying, Dom. You can't find out things unless you try them, so there's a risk in any kind of science; all right. And I guess getting other people's research to add to your own would be a big help, all right. But still—honestly, Dom, I don't really see how you expected this thing to do much for the ordinary slob in the street. Like me."

"It could save millions of lives, for one thing," I said.

"Come on! You mean by defeating an enemy before he defeats you, something like that?"

"No, not that. Maybe that would be true sometimes, but it's not what I'm talking about. Do you know what nuclear winter is? The death of everything because nuclear war throws so much dust into the air that it hides the sun, long enough to kill off nearly all the vegetation and most of the large animals—including human beings?"

They hadn't; but they understood it quickly enough. "Is that what you mean by a benefit?" Christophe said with a sneer. "Killing everybody?"

"Of course I don't. But there are times where it has happened. There are times we have reached where there are no mammals larger than a rat still alive—because the war did happen, five, ten, or more years ago, and the human race simply exterminated itself."

"Lovely!"

I kept a grip on my temper. Not easily. The woman got under my skin—was having the same effect, or some even more penetrating effect, on the senator, because he was looking at her with an expression I can only describe as fascinated. "No," I said tightly, "it isn't lovely at all. It's just a fact. Some time-lines have a virgin planet. The land is there, even the cities are sometimes there, though they're damaged. But there aren't any people to live in them.

"And then there are other times, our own included, where there are people dying and starving for lack of homes and land. Our Africa has been in a drought condition for most of the last decade. Parts of Asia are almost as bad. In other times Latin America has its own famines.

"Suppose we took those starving people without land, and let them emigrate to the empty planets without people?"

Nicky DeSota shouted, "That's wonderful, Dom! You've given new life to millions of people! How do they get along in their new world?"

He was ecstatic. I knew exactly how he felt. I'd felt the same thing—once. I said carefully, "Of course, they need support. It's not just the people. They need their animals, sometimes they need machinery, almost always they need doctors and teachers to show them how to farm new kinds of land . . . or, at least, they would. We haven't done it yet."

Crash went Nicky's exuberance. Up went Nyla Christophe's smug contempt. "Do-gooders," she said, shaking her head.

"Why not?" begged Nicky.

"Three reasons," I said. "First, we came across the ballistic-recoil problem. If we can't prevent that, or at least control it, we can't risk any large-scale transfers. We may have to stop using portals at all. And, second—" I looked at my old friend Larry Douglas. "There's the Gamma situation."

He moved sulkily, but didn't speak. He had already told us that he couldn't help giving them the portal. He had nothing to add.

The senator frowned. "You mean the people who took over Sandia."

I said, "It's not just Sandia any more, Dom. There's a shooting war now. It isn't big. It's only in Washington. But the Gammas have occupied all the Potomac bridges, the White House itself, and the National Airport—what you call Hoover Field. And there have been some nasty firefights. We think there are at least five hundred casualties. The first thing we have to do, since that's our responsibility in a way, is put that fire out . . . if we can."

I had the senator's full attention now. "Oh, my God," he said.

I tried to reassure him. "The fighting has died down now," I said. "As of half an hour ago, there wasn't anything more than sniping—of course, a few civilians are still getting killed—"

It did not seem to reassure him at all. "Civilians!" he cried. "But why don't they— I mean, at least they could— Aren't they evacuating the noncombatants, for God's sake?"

"I believe there is some of that, yes," I said, puzzling over his reaction: he had already told me that his family was a thousand miles away, in his Chicago home.

"I've got to get back," he said strongly.

"We're going to do that, Dom," I said. "I think. You understand that it isn't up to me. But that's what I've recommended. In fact, I've recommended that we all go through to Washington, D.C., Epsilon—that's your time, Senator—to show them what is happening, and offer whatever help we can. Almost all, I mean," I added, glancing at our own Larry Douglas, who shrugged, unsurprised.

There was an interruption from the other Larry Douglas. "I don't want to go back anywhere," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I claim sanctuary!" he said forcefully. "I don't want to go back to my own time, because of, uh, political persecution, and I don't want to go skylarking around to get involved in whatever damn wars are being fought anywhere. You got me into this mess. You owe me something. I want to stay here."

The big goon rose threateningly in his seat. So, immediately, did the flic-de-nation, reaching for the holstered dartgun at his side. Christophe put her hand on Moe's shoulders, and the big man subsided at once, though the look he gave Douglas-Tau was murderous.

"We can talk about that later," said Christophe pleasantly. "Let's deal with one thing at a time. You said there were three problems. You've only told us two of them."

"Ah, yes," I said somberly. "The other new element in the equation. We're being peeped ourselves. We don't know who, or for what purpose. But it's happening."

Christophe chortled. "Welcome to the club!"

Our Larry said pettishly—brave with the flic between him and her—"Oh, shut up, you. Dom? Is this something new since I, uh, left?"

I nodded. "We don't know the source. We can't trace it back— there's indications that they're using technology a lot better than anything we've got. But we get instrument readings from at least fifty places. Somebody's watching us, and they've been doing it, now, for about three months."

"So you're in the same spot we were a few days ago," said the senator neutrally.

"I'm afraid so," I said.

He pursed his lips, thinking it through. "And what are you going to do now, Dom?" he asked. "Are you going to send me back to my own time?"

"I think that's what they've got in mind for you, Dom," I said. "In fact, I think we're all going. You because you live there. Me and Larry because we can tell them things they need to know to defend themselves. And the others because—well, because they're living proof of the existence of other worlds." And because they're a nuisance, I thought but did not say out loud: a couple of FBI people and a mortgage broker, who needed them in our time?

I took a forkful of my scrambled eggs at last. They were cold and awful, but I didn't have much appetite anyway.