The Coming of the Quantum Cats

28 August 1983

12:10 A.M. Agent Nyla Christophe

With all that was going on, no one paid much attention as Bowquist and I moved toward the pantry. If they had looked carefully at her face, they might have seen something that would make someone ask a question, until I told her to smile. Then she smiled. Next to the pantry was a bathroom, and next to the bathroom was the door to the stairs.

No one saw us go through it.

"We wait here a minute, Bowquist," I said, looking at her. She was a good-looking woman. She had ten pounds on me, ten pounds that I had sweated off with a lot of misery on the exercise machines and judo pads, but they looked good on her. She wasn't in any way fat, only rounder than I. What's more, she smelled a whole other way. I use perfume now and then. Why not? Men like it, and I like to have men like everything about me when we're headed for bed. But she wore it as a matter of course; and also there was the way her hair was done. It was a good four inches longer than the way I kept it, and turned into soft waves. "Who's Bowquist?" I asked.

"Ferdinand Bowquist is my husband," she said. She didn't act frightened, though she probably was. I would have been.

"I thought so. Seemed to me you were pretty squeezy with that senator, though."

She didn't answer that. Well, I wouldn't have, either, but for some reason I was glad to see that this pretty, respectable woman wasn't beyond fooling around a little now and then. "What are you going to do with me?" she asked.

I said, "Very little, love. I heard you say you've got a room in this hotel. We're just going to borrow it for a little while."

The door opened. I had expected it to. And through it came Moe, shepherding the two Larrys, as I had expected. The strange Larry was sunk in gloom, but my old bedmate Larry was cranky. "Nyla," he said, "are you crazy? I don't know what you're trying to do, but you can't—"

I said, "Shut up, honey. We're going for a little walk."

It wasn't little, and it wasn't a walk, exactly. It was climbing down those stairs, and it was fourteen stories—twenty-eight flights—while even in that interior well of the hotel we began to hear the sounds of firing in the streets, and now and then in the actual halls outside the fire doors.

It was enough to make a person nervous. It even made my Larry nervous. "Nyla, for God's sake," he gasped from behind me. "What are you getting us into? These people will shoot first and ask questions later!"

I was running out of steam, too, and glad enough to stop for a minute. "Nobody does that, asshole," I said. "They'll look at us and they'll ask, and then what? Whichever side they are, none of us is on the other, are we?" Except for Nyla Bowquist, I added to myself; but who would shoot her? "Anyway, it's only three more floors."

And so it was, but what I hadn't counted on was that Washington in that time must have been a high-crime area. The stairwell doors were the kind that only opened from one side. Worse than that, they were fire doors, sheet steel with hinges that wouldn't melt away in the first blaze. I looked at Moe doubtfully. "Think you can get it open?" I asked.

He didn't answer, unless a dismal grunt was an answer. He backed up across the landing, lunged forward, and kicked the door right at the lock with all his weight, two hundred and some pounds of it— It didn't budge. The noise was loud, the results nothing. Moe hopped on one foot, rubbing the other and looking sourly at me. I shrugged. "Try again," I said, but before he could either do it or argue about it the door opened. A soldier in olive-green fatigues was standing there, pointing an automatic rifle at us, looking scared, but not as scared as I was.

"Who the hell are you people?" he asked.

How I would have handled it I don't exactly know. Maybe it was because we were in strange surroundings that made him bold, maybe it was just because he had more breath left than the rest of us; but for whatever reason Moe took over on his own. "Easy with the gun, friend," he said with a grin, putting his ankle down. "These are VIP's I'm trying to get away from the fighting. I'm FBI. I'm going to take my badge out of my pocket to show you, and I'll do it real slow—"

And he did; and the soldier was young enough, and dumb enough, to come close enough to look at it, and that was his mistake. Oof he said, as Moe sank the knife into his belly and pulled it up before I could stop him.

So we had the way clear to Bowquist's room; and we also had a weapon; but, most of all, we now had the problem of finally having committed a criminal act that someone would not take lightly in the place where we could be punished for it.

There was a note pinned to the pillow in Nyla's room:

Nyla dear,

They are making me leave the hotel I'm going to try to get to Senator Kennedy's house to wait for you. I hope you're all right!

Amy

I didn't really care much about the absent Amy. What I saw that I liked was the open closet, with hangers of dresses, slacks, and blouses; and the bathroom with the working shower. I left Moe in charge of the shaken hostages and I got under the shower.

It felt good, and the shower is a place where I do my best thinking. I needed to do that. The situation had taken a turn I hadn't planned on.

It was good that we had a weapon. I'd never seen that particular one before, but it had a safety and sights and a trigger and a banana clip of ammo, and I had no doubt I could handle it. A lot of people don't think that I can use a gun, missing thumbs as I am. Quite a few of them have lost money betting on that, and one or two have lost more than money. When you've fired everything in the FBI armory, you don't have much trouble figuring out almost anything else that is built to explode gunpowder at one end and drive a bullet out of a barrel at the other.

This is not a womanly grace, but then I haven't had much time to concentrate on being a woman.

I'm not talking about making love, because I can dig up at least a dozen men to testify that at being female I am first-rate in any league. I mean the other kind of thing. The Nyla Bowquist kind of thing. The hair just right, the tiny touch of makeup that made the eyes brighter, the way of walking on spike heels as though they weren't there at all. This is the kind of thing I think about when I'm standing under the hot shower, with my conscious mind more than half turned off, letting my head wander where it might.

This time it didn't wander far. There was too much to drag it back to reality, and a lot of reality was nasty.

It was bad that now we had a corpse to explain.

As a practical matter, that might not be important—there were plenty of corpses around, with all that gunfire. I didn't like it, though. I've never been an easy killer. I don't like the people who work for me to kill except when absolutely necessary, either, and before long I would make sure that Moe regretted what he had done.

Before long. Not right away; because right away I had other things to do.

By the time I finished rinsing my hair I thought I had something pretty well worked out. I wrapped a towel around my wet hair, not bothering with the rest of me, and pushed the door open. I got three attentive male stares, ignored them, and spoke to Bowquist. "I'd like to borrow some underwear," I told her, politely enough.

"In the drawer," she said, pointing. She was a lot too well bred to say anything about my nakedness, but as I pulled the drawer open I saw her suppressing a smile. Panties, stockings, bras—they were all neatly folded; Amy must have been a treasure. I selected a matching set in white silk and dressed while I talked.

"What we're going to do," I said, "is steal a portal. Then we're going home."

That changed the look on everybody's face. Especially the men. I've noticed about men that while a naked body always interests them, there is something especially exciting about one that's all damp and rosy from the bath; they can't wait to get it sweaty and soiled again. But I took their minds off that pretty fast. Moe nodded, accepting it as a directive. The other Larry looked stunned. And my own Larry snarled, "For God's sake, Nyla, don't you know when you're well off? Stay here! Forget going back!"

I shook my head. "Maybe you can forget it, sweets," I said, "because, to tell the truth, you've got no future back home anyway. But I work for the Bureau, and they expect something from me. I'm going to deliver."

"Aw, hell, Nyla," he grumbled. "Do you want to go back to where you can go to jail for wearing shorts three inches above the knee? This isn't such a bad place! Once they get this war thing straightened out—" Then his mind caught up with his mouth, and the look on his face changed from angry to apprehensive. "What do you mean, no future?"

I said comfortably, "You couldn't figure on protection from me forever, could you? I would say you're just about used up, sweetmeat. . . . Will you hand me those slacks, Bowquist?"

"But Nyla! You and I have something going!"

"Aw, Larry, who are you kidding? You were running your own little rackets, a swindle here, a little larceny there. I don't blame you for figuring out that meeting me was your big break. Screwing an FBI bureau chief was a great way to find out if we were getting close to you. But we were, hon. I just didn't tell you."

"Nyla!" He was beginning to sweat. The other Larry, on the other hand, was beginning to look a little more cheerful: the worse things got for somebody else, the less oppressive his own problems seemed. They were two of a kind—slippery good looks, charm, meanness inside and all.

"No hard feelings," I said, zipping the slacks and admiring myself in the mirror. They weren't as tight as I would have liked them, but then I would be trying to avoid attention, not attract it. I patted his shoulder. "I got what I wanted, too, you know. I would put you definitely in the top ten of all the men I've ever known in the bed department, and besides I knew you'd fink for me. As you did." I took the towel off my head and felt the hair. Still pretty wet. "Bowquist, have you got a hair dryer I can borrow?"

"In the bathroom," she said, getting up to get it, but I stopped her.

"You get it and plug it in for me, Larry," I said, to my own Larry. Resentfully he disappeared and I heard him knocking around in the cabinets. "Now, what we're going to do is make a trade. We've got something they want. They've got something I want."

"What's that, boss?" rumbled Moe, frowning over the difficult concepts.

"What they've got is a portal. What we've got is hostages." I smiled pleasantly at the other Nyla and the other Larry. "Bowquist is the one they'll be most anxious to ransom, I guess," I said, "judging by the way her boyfriend was hugging her. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a portal. Leaves you, Dr. Douglas. I gather they want you a whole lot—"

"Oh, no, "he yelled. "Listen, don't turn me over to them! I've got a better idea."

"I'm listening," I said, still smiling.

"We'll borrow a portal, maybe—I don't know how, but we'll figure something out. We'll go back to your time. I'll teach you how to build them, just the way I did for the others! The way you wanted me to! I'll work myself to death for you, I swear I will!"

I thought it over. "Might be simpler in some ways," I conceded. "Question is, how do we get to a portal?" I turned to Bowquist. "Maybe that's where you come in," I said. "Do you think if we talked real nice to your boyfriend he could get us the use of a portal, just for a little while?"

"I have no idea," she said, very cool, very remote. These sleazy goings-on were not part of her world. I had to admire her. Part of me wished I could be more like her; part of me was bitterly complaining that I could have been, would have been; if things had gone a little differently for me, because after all I was her—"What?"

"I said," she repeated, "that something seems to have happened to your own boyfriend." She was looking at the bathroom door.

It took me a second to understand what she was talking about. Then I realized she was right. The sounds from the bathroom had stopped some time ago, but no Larry came out. I got to the door in nothing flat.

There was nowhere to hide in there, not under the sink, not even in the shower cubicle, with its curtain pulled back just the way I had left it to show no one inside.

He wasn't there. There was absolutely no way he could have got out. But he wasn't there.

For the first time in a very long time, I was really scared. I turned to Moe, over by the window, opening my mouth to tell him to look under the bed or something. Moe's expression was puzzled— Then there was no expression on his face at all. There wasn't even a face to have one on.

Like that.

I was looking at him, and then I was looking through him. He wasn't there any more. I saw the window, and the gun he'd taken away from the soldier he'd killed lying on the sill, but of the man who had stood in front of them there was no sign at all.

I felt suddenly naked as well as scared. I don't mean just skinbare, as when I came out of the shower; I mean helpless and defenseless. I jumped for that gun out of pure reflex.

I never got to it.

The room flicked away. . .

And I was gone too.