The Coming of the Quantum Cats

Yr 11—110 111—111, mo 1—000, da 11—101, Hr 1—010, mn 11—110

Senator Dominic DeSota

You do not get used to jumping from one parallel time to another, even when you know it's happening.

I didn't know.

All I knew was that at one moment I was hurrying down the stairs from the President's penthouse, looking for my lady love. Then, without perceptible delay (though it must have been hours, might have been days), I was lying flat on my back, listening to a honeyed voice whisper into my ear that I had nothing to worry about. That's the kind of thing that starts me worrying. I knew a lie when I heard one, and I was worried.

That is, the reasoning part of my head was worried. My body did not seem to be worried a bit. It was lying there perfectly relaxed. I don't think I had ever been quite that relaxed before, except maybe now and then after a really good toss-and-tumble with Nyla, when we'd lie back with every knot in either body untangled entirely. I don't mean that my state was in any way sexual, just that I was wholly and completely at a condition of physical ease.

There was no reason for that. There was every reason in the world why I should have been tense and scared, and should have shown it in taut muscles and twitchy nerves. There was nothing in sight or sound that was reassuring in the least. I was lying on a hard pallet in a room that looked as much like a morgue as anything else I'd ever seen. There were a dozen other pallets, each with a body recumbent on it. It even smelled medicinal and nasty, as I thought a morgue should.

The person who was whispering sweetly in my ear wasn't reassuring, either. She didn't have any face. Or he didn't; you couldn't tell, because there was nothing but a flesh-colored blankness between hair and chin. It moved a little as the voice spoke but showed no features at all. She (or he) was saying, "You will be well treated, uh, Senator, uh, DeSota, and you will be completely at liberty." And he was looking at me (or she was), though I could see no eyes, because s/he was touching me here, touching me there, and everywhere he (she) touched there was a tingle or a pang.

Something was being done to me. I just let it happen.

And that was another thing. I let it all happen. I don't mean I wasn't shaken up—no, scared—hell, terrified! But whatever my conscious mind told my head to be, my body was relaxed and compliant. It did what it was told. It didn't even need to be told in words; touch and gesture was enough, and instantly my body held still, or turned over, or presented a part of itself for the occasion.

It occurred to me at once that I'd seen something like that before, when Nyla No-Thumbs and the others were zapped into sleepy-by before we were rescued from the New Mexican motel. But they had just been asleep. This was much, much worse. And then I had been only an observer. I had not had this present indignity of having my body roll over and elevate its rump for a final shot.

It was at that point I realized I was naked. I might not have realized it then if the voice hadn't said, "You can get up and get dressed now, and then proceed into the hover."

My obliging body pulled on a pair of shorts, a pair of tennis shoes, and a sort of T-shirt from a rack—they all fit snugly, less because they were my size than because they were a kind of fabric that didn't care what size I was. Then my body obligingly walked after the (wo)man and out of the doorless cubicle. No, there weren't any doors. No, one didn't magically appear. All that happened was that she/he walked up to the wall, and kept on walking, and so did I—along with seven or eight equally complaisant bodies belonging to people wearing the same beige one-size-fits-all beachwear.

And, as a matter of fact, we were at a beach. Or close enough. We were at a kind of an airport, curious mixture of the shiny-new and the terminally decrepit, on a hot, hot summer day, with the saltmarsh smell of seawater and dead fish strong on the breeze and waves glinting across a roadway. Behind the stump of a flagpole a cement block had letters picked out in seashells embedded in the surface. The snows of winter and summer suns had done them a lot of harm, but I could still make out what they said:

FLOYD BENNETT FIELD

Behind the squat, white building we had just come out of (there was no door in the outside wall, either), a delta-winged plane came in with a ripping sound of jets at a hundred miles an hour, dropped flaps, rotated its engines, and sat down a few yards beyond the building. It rolled a couple of feet and stopped. The building, on the other hand, began to move. It shuddered, picked itself up, and slid over to the plane; while a quarter of a mile off to one side a bloated-bellied blimp was slithering in to a landing at another new white building. I turned to the happy zombie next to me and said, "Dorothy, I don't think we're in Kansas any more."

He gave me an irritated look. Then the look changed. "Don't I know you?" he asked.

I took a harder look at him. "Dr. Gribbin?" I said. "From Sandia?"

"Bloody hell," he said. "And you're the Yank congressman. What the hell is going on, do you know?"

Well, how do you begin to answer a question like that? As I was casting around for an answer, a voice from behind me saved me the trouble. "It's parallel time," said Nicky DeSota eagerly. "Do you understand about quantum mechanics? Well, it seems that Erwin Schroedinger, or maybe it was one of the people who came after him, proposed a long time ago that every time some kinds of nuclear reactions occur, which can go either way, they go both ways. This means that—"

I turned away to keep from laughing. Here was the mortgage broker explaining Schroedinger's famous conundrum to one of the world's great experts on the subject! But Nicky had an advantage Gribbin had not: he had seen it all happen. Another man in the same shorts and blouse was wandering toward us to listen to Nicky expound. I didn't pay attention. I was looking at this strange world around me, wondering why I was there, whether I would ever get back to a sane life in the Senate—well, strike that; but at least in the Senate it was a kind of insanity I was used to-and wondering, most of all, where my love had gone. There were women in our group, but none of them were familiar. And there was another woman, this one wearing the same white overall, gloves and boots included, that the faceless person who was trying to shepherd us into the bus was wearing. The one with a face was talking to the bus driver, but when she saw us approaching she jumped and hurried away as though we were lepers.

I didn't then know how apt that thought was.

I turned back to Nicky and Gribbin. "We'd better get on that thing," I said.

Gribbin gave me a puzzled look. Then the look deepened, as he glanced from Nicky to me. "You two chaps are the same!" he cried.

Nicky grinned. "That's part of it," he agreed. "Didn't you notice? You two are the same too." And he was pointing to the other man, standing with his jaw hanging; who took one look at Gribbin, another at Nicky and me.

He felt his own face as though he had never noticed it before. "Bloody hell," said the second John Gribbin. Which summed it all up perfectly.

Whatever kind of happy pills they had given us, it was apparent that they were beginning to wear off. My fellow sheep were begin-fling to talk back to the faceless shepherd, not always politely. But as the drug level in my body declined, my rational self-confidence seemed to increase. Like Nicky, I had had this experience before. It didn't make it pleasing. It did make it a little less nerve-racking.

As far as I could tell, Nicky and I were the only two so fortunate in that bunch. None of the ones who had been with us in Washington were here now. I could live with that easily enough as far as it concerned the other Dom, not to mention the two Larry Douglases and the Russians. The fact that Nyla wasn't with me was a lot harder to take. I wanted very much to ask somebody if I would ever see Nyla again, but everybody else had questions of his own, and they were a lot more scared and angry about it than I. "What's going on here?" demanded one of the Gribbins, and the faceless person said:

"You'll be briefed on the hover. Please get on now; it's waiting." And as she, or he, turned away, a man on the other side grabbed her (or his) sleeve. He had the kind of scowl that says, I don't know what I'm into, but when I find out somebody's going to pay, and he was insistent.

"I'm needed at the lab!" he protested. "There's a top-level meeting right now, and if I'm not there it's going to cost us half our grant for the next fiscal year—" He stopped indignantly, because the faceless one was laughing at him.

"The things you people worry about," he/she said indulgently. "On the hover! Now. Please."

I decided there wasn't any better alternative than to do as asked, so I boarded the thing. I took a seat up near the front, just behind the glassed-in compartment that held the driver, and Nicky slipped into the one next to me.

When the faceless person called it a hover I translated that into "ground-effect machine." So it was. I'd never been in a hovercraft, but when I felt the throbbing and bouncing underneath us, and we began to slippy-slide over cracked concrete toward the road, I knew.

I use the word road loosely. That's what it had been. It had not been maintained for a long, long time. It stretched wide and empty before us, heading straight for a distant city skyline. But I could see the purpose of the hovercraft; nothing on wheels could have handled the potholes and the curling edges of asphalt. The biggest holes had been roughly filled, the jaggedest edges bulldozed away, and someone had pushed off onto the side an occasional boxy old heap of rust that had once been an automobile. There were places where the cattail marsh had so completely reclaimed the roadbed that I could not see asphalt at all, only mown bulrushes with birds scattering out of our way as we whirred toward them. I stared at that remote skyline every time the hover turned enough to bring it into sight. Something about it looked familiar. .

Bouncing around with excitement in the seat next to me, Nicky DeSota cried, "It's New York! Gosh! I've never been in this part of New York!" He nudged me, grinning. "Did you notice? This thing's air-conditioned!"

"That's nice," I said; because all that he said was true, and interesting, but I was watching what was going on up ahead of us. The driver's compartment was closed off from our part of the van with a glass window. It had its own entrance, and the wo(man) who had led us to the bus was inside it. What I was watching was what s/he was doing. What she was doing was revealing herself to be a she. She ducked her face into her hand and pulled, and—wow!— that flesh-colored blankness slipped off. There was an actual face there. In fact, rather a pretty one. She wriggled out of the top of her jumpsuit, revealing more proof of femininity, and then she turned to look back at the fifteen or twenty of us in the hovervan.

"Good morning," she said through an intercom.

Next to me Nicky cried, "Good morning!" So did a couple of the others, like fifth-graders on a school trip-which was about the way I felt.

"By now," she said, "your tranks should be wearing off, so let me explain what has happened to you. There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that within the next ooty-poot days you will be able to move freely anywhere in the world you like, and it is rather a nice world. The bad news is that you will never leave it." She smiled sweetly. There was a moment's silence, then questions called out from all over the bus. The sweet smile did not fade. "I have not turned on your phones yet," she said, "so I can't hear you just now. Take a few minutes to talk among yourselves. Then I will give you a short talk on what has happened and why, and what you can expect, and then there will be time for questions. The trip to your hotel will take about totter-tot minutes."

She gave us a last smile and turned back to the driver.

It is hard to give a coherent and consecutive account of the trip—there was too much going on. Probably if I could remember being born it would be just as hard to describe it, because I was overwhelmed with the revolutionary newness of it all. We all were—or all but Nicky. I envied him the way he took it all in stride and exulted in the wondrous new strangeness of it.

I could not share it. More than anything else, I was wondering if I would ever see Nyla again. .

Any Nyla.

By the time the woman began her orientation talk we had left the salt water behind. We were gliding along a wide avenue between rows of fallen-down frame buildings and burned-out one-story stores. Two or three times we slowed to let another hovervan pass in the opposite direction, the drivers waving at each other. The ones going out were all empty. There were no other human beings in sight. I saw turtles as big as meat platters sunning themselves along the road, and once a coiled snake that I was nearly sure was a rattler. It did not move, though its head was raised and the beady eyes stared at us. I saw a fox chasing a rabbit, frantically zigzagging along what had once been a sidewalk, until the whoosh from our fans blew both of them over and I lost them behind us.

And I listened.

The first part of what she told us was a sentence of exile. "Uncontrolled exploitation of the paratime portal," she said reprovingly, "will lead to chaos, so we have stopped it. We have transported the principal experimenters, as well as all persons who were in displaced times, to this planet. At the same time we have rendered all paratime research centers uninhabitable by means of induced radiation. We had no choice in this matter. The alternative was destructive to everyone."

I stretched and yawned. We were going up a slight incline, with tall, unkempt trees reaching out over us from both sides. Ahead of us was a circle with twenty-story apartment buildings, the tallest I'd seen close at hand. They had all the windows broken out, and ivy climbed their sides. "Until dye years ago," the woman was saying, "this planet was uninhabited by humans. There was a long war, they called it the World War, and somebody started using biological weapons. It wound up with everybody dead. All primates, in fact— there aren't even any gorillas left—but nearly everything else survived." She glanced at the back of her wrist as though she were consulting notes. "Oh, yes, you don't have to worry about the disease any more; that's one of the things you were inoculated against at Reception. And, of course, for all the organisms you all carried— shocking mix of bugs you people had." She dimpled a smile at us. Maybe there was some tranquilizer left. We smiled back. "Anyway, some of the paratimes began using the planet for colonization purposes—people who were displaced from their homes for one reason or another, usually drought or something of the sort. And, of course, there's always a few people who just want to pioneer. But that makes it good for you, because there's a whole infrastructure waiting for you. You won't have to go out and gather roots! This is one of the few cities that we've got working—more or less working—though, so mostly you'll want to resettle on farms. After all, food is the most important thing!"

This time nobody smiled back. Whatever any of us had been back home, it wasn't farmers.

I began to wonder just what socially useful skills a former United States senator, with a law degree and not much else, might have to offer in a new world.

We slid down a long hill toward a taller building still, a skyscraper with a clock at its top. (One face told me that it was a quarter past three, another, missing a minute hand, only said that it was somewhere between ten and eleven.) There were rusted trolley tracks under us, and just ahead an elevated train structure, also rusty. I didn't like the idea of snaking under it and through its pillars. But the driver knew what he was doing. We slowed to a crawl for a couple dozen blocks, then picked up speed again as the tracks veered off to the sides.

"Are there any questions?" the woman asked brightly.

Nicky was first off the mark. "What's a 'totter-tot'?" he called.

The woman looked puzzled. "What?"

"You said it would take totter-tot minutes. I think that's what you said."

The pretty face cleared. "Oh, I was forgetting. You're all decimal, aren't you? Let's see, that would be, um"—she glanced at her wrist again—"the whole trip will take about forty and five minutes. About, um, twenty minutes more. Any other questions?"

One of the Dr. Gribbins had his hand up. "A big one, miss," he said. "I'm a quantum-dynamicist. I don't know bugger-all about pushing a plow."

"Of course," said the woman sympathetically. "That's a real problem, here. What we really need are farmers, construction workers, and engineers. There will be retraining programs, though." She smiled brightly at fifteen people who had suddenly stopped smiling back.

There were mutterings back and forth in the van, but no clearcut questions came out of it. Probably none of us wanted to know the answers to the questions we had yet to ask. Personally I was craning my neck to see ahead, because I had caught a glimpse of a bridge. It scared me. I did not think I wanted to cross the East River on a bridge that had not had a coat of paint for half a century.

The woman was still smiling. "If any of you would like to start work at once, there are job openings in your hotel. We need cooks, cleaners, chamber-workers, and so on. You have to be self-sufficient for that sort of thing, you see, during the period of quarantine. And you will be paid for your work."

I wasn't listening. I was bracing myself as we seemed to be heading for the crumbling approach to the bridge, then relaxed as we turned away—then braced myself again as we slowed down at the water's edge. Were we going to take a ferry? Swim across? Stop here, with the promised land just visible across the water, moldering skyscrapers and all?

It was none of the above. We didn't stop. We slid down a muddy, bulldozed bank to the river; and we slid right on across the water, exactly as easily and surely as we had been gliding over the pitted old city streets. At the far end was the remnant of a pier. Nude bathers were sitting on the end of it, gazing at us incuriously. They were far more interested in one of their own, who had surfaced a few dozen yards away, pushing back his goggles and spluttering with pleasure as he waved the four-foot fish flopping on the end of his spear.

At least we were now in a part of New York where I had been before. I recognized Canal Street, though the signs were long rusted away, I didn't know any of the side streets we wound through—navigation was harder in densely built Manhattan—but I did recognize, or almost recognize, Fifth Avenue when we reached it. It was puzzling that there was no Empire State Building at what otherwise definitely looked like Thirty-fourth Street, and curious that over the next wide intersection there was the remains of a spidery traffic-control booth, elevated above the street.

We stopped there for a moment, while both the driver and the guide put their flesh masks back on. "Almost there," the woman called cheerily. "It's called the Hotel Plaza. A little moth-eaten and moldy, maybe—but, my, what a beautiful view you get of the Central Park wilderness!"

By the time we were checked into rooms in the old hotel and given a meal, a lot more had been explained to us. We had a new identity. We were "Paratemporally Displaced Persons" or PeetyDeepies for short. We were in quarantine for a week, long enough for the nasties in our circulatory systems to surface, if any had been missed by the shots and sprays we'd received while asleep. And, although we would get out of the hotel in a matter of days, we would get out of this particular paratime never.

We were there for keeps.

It took a lot of the joy out of the old Plaza Hotel. The woman hadn't lied to us. It was a nice place, basically. It had even been a nice place, I remembered, in my own A.D. 1983. A stately old dowager of a place with historic associations—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived there, and had gone to play at midnight in the fountain outside.

Of course, it had not been maintained for sixty years. There hadn't been anybody alive in this world to maintain it. That showed. There was a funny, nasty smell in the ground-floor restaurant, as though animals had denned there now and then. (They had.) A quarter of the windows were gone, though most of them had been temporarily replaced by some sort of plastic film in the process of getting the place ready for us to occupy. The water from the plumbing ran rusty now and then, and there were whole floors where it didn't run at all. And the furnishings were deplorable, especially the beds. Cotton had turned into mold, mold had turned into dust, the springs of the mattresses had turned into rust. Before we slept that night Nicky and I had to sweat and struggle new bedding up from the stacks in the lobby: bare wooden slats to stretch across the sides of the bed, still raw and sap-smelling from the sawmill, and clever air mattresses to put on the slats, compartmented and very comfortable once we had puffed ourselves scarlet to fill each of the compartments with lungpower alone. We didn't have to worry about blankets, of course. Not in New York in August, in a hotel that had never known what air-conditioning was.

Not everything in the room was a moldering antique. One thing was very new. At first I thought it was a television set, although it was a little puzzling that a sort of keyboard was attached. When Nicky experimentally pushed the "On" switch the screen lighted up, rosy background with sharp black letters that said:

HELLO.

WHAT IS YOUR P.I.D.?

Since neither of us knew what a P.I.D. was we couldn't satisfy its curiosity, and it stubbornly refused to satisfy any of ours. No matter what other keys or buttons we pushed nothing happened; the only key that worked was the one marked "Off."

The day went fast. By the time the sun went down we had made our bed-sitter suite habitable-more or less habitable. That is, we'd collected towels and pillows and extra sets of clothing and soap and all the other things that insured survival. We had discovered how to open the plastic-sheet windows to let some air in—mixed blessing, because with the air came hordes of mosquitoes out of the rank vegetation in what had once been well-groomed Central Park. The lights in our room attracted them, so we turned the lights out.

We were tired. I showered and brushed my teeth, and while Nicky was doing the same I gazed out at the view of the park, as good as our guide had promised, if somewhat stranger. Just before us in the park was a busy scene, temporary buildings with people moving around and vehicles; but a quarter of a mile farther was only blackness. Bright stars shone in the sky, a sight I had never seen from New York City in my lifetime.

It was a dead city. Only the little space around the hotels was the focus of infection where life was beginning to invade it again.

And it was an empty city—for me it was a wholly empty city, because Nyla Bowquist wasn't there.

It struck me as a sad wonder that Nyla had been in that hotel, maybe in that very room, in our own time. I knew that she stayed in the Plaza when she played at Carnegie Hall, only a few blocks away. Perhaps she had stood at that very window. What she would have seen was manicured lawns, a playground, a lake, hansom cabs lined up at the entrance to the park, and a million cars, taxis, and trucks creeping along the streets that bounded it. What I saw was the bubble-shaped temporary structures, and the lights of a blimp floating down to a landing on one of the clearings. .

I became conscious of Nicky standing behind me, still damp from the shower, running a comb through his hair. "Isn't it wonderful, Dom?" he asked.

I looked at him with resentment—unjustified resentment, because it certainly was not his fault that he wasn't Nyla. "What are you talking about, Nicky? It's exile. We're stuck here forever."

He said, with audible sympathy in his voice, "I know it's tough on you, Dom, because you had a lot to lose. Me, maybe not so much. But it's not just exile. It's a whole new world. Eden! They've given us a new start in life."

"I didn't want a new start in life," I said, "and anyway, they didn't do it for our sake."

"Well, sure, Dom," he said, turning modestly to slip on a pair of pajama pants. "But you have to admit they've put a lot of effort into this. Just fixing up this part of the city for us—do you have any idea what kind of work that means? Getting the water running again when some of the pipes would have ruptured? Starting an electrical generating system?Just cleaning up the garbage-and I don't mean just rotted-out bedclothes. There must have been people in this place when they all died. Bodies. Skeletons, anyway, and somebody had carted them all off before we got here."

"They probably wanted all that for their own purposes, anyway," I objected.

"But we're getting the benefit of it," he pointed out.

"We're being exiled here, sure. That's for their own good too. They were worried about what would happen to them if this paratime stuff went on, not us."

He looked at me thoughtfully as he climbed into his bed. "They didn't have to go to all this trouble," he said. "I mean, transporting us here, feeding us, housing us, giving us clothes—"

"Sure they did! How else could they have stopped research?"

"Well," he said, settling himself under the sheet, "I can think of some people who would have taken care of it a different way. They could have just killed us, you know. Good night, Dom."

After the French-Indochinese wars there were a whole bunch of tribes that couldn't get along with the new governments. Some of them came to America. There was one colony of hill people who wound up in my own state, eighteen hundred refugees who hadn't ever seen a train, a television set, a gas stove, or a vacuum cleaner. Talk about culture shock! But it wasn't learning how to drive cars and run lawnmowers that threw them the hardest. It was the things we take for granted. How to pop open a beer can. How to use a credit card. Why the red light meant stop and the green light meant go. Why you should not urinate other than in an approved receptacle, even if you modestly went behind a tree. When I led the state's congressional delegation down to welcome those Meos, just outside of Carbondale, I was sorry for them, and a lot amused by them.

If any of them had been with me in the Plaza; they could have gotten even. I was as lost and confused as they, and this time it was harder to see the humor in it.

Nicky and I spent the whole first day just learning rudimentary survival skills in the new world. At the end of the day what I had mostly learned was that it was even harder than it looked. It helped a lot that we had that console in the room, because it was not only a television set but a phone, a computer, and an alarm clock. Once we found out what our Personal I.D.'s were-any ten-letter word or phrase we chose; I picked "Nyla my love"—we could unlock its memories and skills, and patiently it taught us most of what we needed to know. From the menus it offered us we could find the answer to almost any question, even to some we had not thought to ask. It told us, for instance, that our room and board wasn't exactly free. We had been given a credit to draw on, but sooner or later we would have to pay it back or starve. How could we pay it back? Well, there were jobs in the hotel if we wanted to get a head start: making beds, cleaning out rooms on the floors not yet finished, serving food, moving furniture. Then when we were released from quarantine there were a thousand projects that needed workers, all over the continent, even all over the world—a whole technological infrastructure needed to be completed. The volunteer colonists who had preceded us had done a lot, but there just were not enough of them to do the job.

Nor could I see where I was going to be of much help. What they needed was pipe-fitters, construction workers, motor mechanics, electricians—people with the skills to build and fix. There weren't any openings for U.S. senators. There weren't very many for quantum physicists, either, which seemed to comprise a large fraction of us Peety-Deepies. The ones that were most useful, I thought, would be the cats—the people who were out of their own time-mostly the twenty-two-year-olds of the invading army, of whom hundreds were in our hotel and thousands more scattered around the other temporary quarters in the city.

One of the things the comset in our room would do for us, once we learned how to ask, was to locate all the other Paratemporally Displaced Persons. The master list was purely alphabetical, and that was hopeless—there were nineteen Stephen Hawkings alone, not to mention nine Dominic DeSotas. (Fortunately only four of us were still in the city, the others having completed their quarantine and reassignment and gone on somewhere else.) But there was also a list reordered by time of origin. There were nearly sixty from my own time. .

But none of them was Nyla Christophe Bowquist.

When we went down for our morning bloodletting on the third day Nicky was nervous. It was an occasion for some nervousness, in a way, because it was important to us to be healthy. Heaven knows, we seemed healthy. We had arrived from our various paratimes positively reeking of germs and viruses and nastinesses of every kind, but our hosts did not tolerate disease. Smallpox, tuberculosis, cancer, and the common cold no longer existed in their worlds, nor did flu or venereal disease or even the caries of tooth decay. They didn't want them brought in. So they had given us any number of shots while we were still unconscious, and they checked the results with a drop of our blood twice a day. What was important about it was that clean blood meant privileges. If we were still clean today, we could switch from the backbreaking labor of shifting furniture to the more refined tasks of serving food. If we stayed clean through the morrow, we would even be permitted to go out into the Street! At least as far as the other hotels on the street, so that we could look for lost friends from our own time, if not actually to cross over and breathe the same air as the natives at their goings-on in the park.

Still, that wasn't enough to make anybody really nervous. When we'd each given our drop for the morning I asked him what he was worrying about. "The future, Dom," he said indignantly. "My future. This is a fresh start I've got and I want to make something of it—only—only there doesn't seem to be much need for mortgage brokers in this Eden."

"Or for senators," I said. He wasn't listening.

"There's banking, I guess," he said, leading the way as we threaded through the stacks of furnishings in the Palm Court. "I didn't see anything like that listed, but it stands to reason—only this damn arithmetic drives me crazy." He was doing better than I was, at that; binary numbers scared me so much I hadn't even begun to try to understand them, as long as our comset was willing to translate into decimal for us uneducated ones.

I guess what I had said had slowly been percolating through his fog of concentration, because he blinked at me and said, "Oh, yeah. You too. Well, I don't know, Dom, what did you do before you were a senator?"

I laughed. "I was a lawyer."

"Aw," he said sympathetically. "They don't have much of that around here, either, do they?" He stopped and nodded to the foreman of our work detail. "Reporting in, Chuck," he said. "What have you got for us to do this morning?"

"Plenty," Chuck said tersely. He was a black man, still wearing the uniform with the lieutenant's bars on it. He had been a tank commander in the invasion army and thus my enemy, although that didn't seem to matter much any more. What made the difference for us was that he had arrived twenty-four hours before us, so he was a foreman and we were tote-and-carry labor. "There's seventy-five new ones coming in this afternoon, so the ninth floor needs to be cleaned out. Get on it, you two."

By then I wasn't surprised any more to be given orders by someone who was a Peety-Deepy, just like us. That was about all we saw. Even the woman who took the blood from our fingertips was a Cat—well, of course we were all Cats, because this planet had been empty of human beings entirely five years earlier. But there were Cats and there were Cats, and the original colonists stayed out of the quarantine hotels. Now and then we'd see one, complete with face mask and coveralls, coming in to pick up the blood samples or hand out orders. They didn't linger.

So what I knew about the original colonists was scanty, mostly from what we could glean from the comset. The original settlers didn't come from a single paratime. They were from a whole congeries of them, eighteen or twenty different worlds. The way in which they were most different from us was only in that they had learned of the existence of, and managed to establish communication with, each other nearly twenty-five years earlier.

It hadn't all been gravy for them. They'd had some terrible times with "ballistic recoil" before they learned how to minimize it, mostly by limiting their connections to communications channels, with only carefully measured and controlled portals allowing them to, for instance, start to colonize the empty worlds.

But what rewards there were! They had twenty worlds, not one, working to solve the problems of paratime. They had twenty times as many people doing research. And, besides, they had the great asset of being able to "peep" any number of other worlds.

They had, in short, a research and development complex that moved a hundred times faster than our own. They learned everything that anyone else knew. Computer technology from one world, space satellites from another, nuclear fusion from a third, genetic engineering, wizardly chemistry, marvelous medicine—you name it. They had it.

I had plenty of time to think about all that, all the time Nicky and I were swamping out the ninth floor, because Nicky wasn't talkative. He was still fretting away at his private worries, whatever they were. It was only when we'd dumped the last drawerful of rotting shirts and collars into the last cracked and disintegrating pigskin valise and dragged them to the one working elevator that he seemed to come out of it. Out of nowhere, he said, "It isn't so bad here, Dom, is it?"

"That's what we don't know yet," I said, starting down the stairs to dinner.

He followed, shaking his head. "It's tough on us," he said, "because we didn't have anything to say about it. But the original colonists came here voluntarily, and I think they had the right idea. A whole new planet, Dom! Gosh, I kind of like the idea myself. I mean, we don't even have to explore it, or anything—we know where everything is."

I paused on the landing for him to catch up. "What do you mean, we know?"

"It's the same planet as our own, don't you see? All the resources have been mapped. If your people located an oilfield in Alaska, or the Brits of my time found it in Arabia—it's still there in this world! Every resource is waiting for us. And clean lakes, clean rivers, uncut forests, clean air—gee whiz, Dom, doesn't it excite you?"

"I'm more interested in what we're going to get for dinner," I said.

"Aw, Dom! You don't mean that."

I said patiently, "I sort of mean that, because I don't want to think too hard about the future, Nicky. I don't like the idea of being trapped here forever. I wish I could go home."

He looked thoughtful, but he didn't say anything more just then—neither of us did, because we still had six flights of stairs to descend. Only when we'd reached the ground floor and were standing in the line outside the restaurant, he turned around and looked at me. "Dom?" he asked. "Did you ever hear anyone say that we positively couldn't ever get home again?"

"Well, sure," I said, annoyed. "What do you think this is all about? Once they get us all settled they're closing the portal. That's the whole point, to seal us off so we can't mess things up with ballistic recoil. So we're stuck here, right? Or do you think that sooner or later we can build our own portals?"

He shook his head. "No, that's not going to happen. They'll be peeping us all the time. They wouldn't let us do that."

"Then don't talk silly," I snapped. No excuse. I was tired and irritable.

But so was Nicky. "Who the hell are you to tell me I'm silly, DeSota?" he flared. "Maybe you're a big man when you're home, but here you're just another darned Deepy!"

Of course, he was right. Bad habits persist. I had started out thinking of this other self of mine as a wimp. If I diagnosed my feelings toward Nicky carefully enough, they would turn out to be at best tolerance, more accurately contempt.

He didn't deserve that. The contempt didn't belong to him in the first place; what I found contemptible in him was a reflection of the worse side of me. The side I didn't like to think about. The side that kept Nyla Bowquist in a sneaky, sleazy affair because I didn't have the courage to make it right—and that kept its options open, too, so that the other Nylas looked really tempting to me. Because he was me, good parts and bad. Wearing the shorts and shirts of this new Eden, identical to my own, with that cheap, flashy sports suit now no more than ashes in some incinerator, he looked more like me than ever. And what was inside was the same.

"Nicky," I said when we were seated at a table, "I'm sorry."

He flashed a smile. "No harm done, Dom."

"It's just that what we're up against scares me," I apologized. He said firmly, "What we're up against isn't a bunch of supermen, Dom. They're people exactly like ourselves. They know more, because they've swiped knowledge from all over, but they aren't smarter. It's August 1983 in this world the same as yours and mine. They aren't from the future. They're us."

I thought that over. "Well, you're right," I said. "Is that what you meant before? That all we have to do is catch up, and then we can do what we please, won't have to get their permission?"

His face fell. "Not exactly," he muttered. He didn't explain what he really did mean, and I didn't press the point.

As I learned later—much later—that was a mistake.

When I first got elected to the Senate I had to learn a whole new life in no time at all. There were a lot of privileges I had to learn how to use: the senatorial bell-ring that brought an elevator to me at once, no matter how many other people were waiting on some other floor; the right to the little subway that took us from our offices to the Capitol; franking mail; the facilities of the gym and sauna reserved for senators only. I also had to learn the less agreeable things, like never appearing in public again without a fresh shave, and responding to every greeting from a passerby, because you never knew who might be a constituent. With all that, for the first couple of weeks I hardly remembered at all that I'd had a life in Chicago before.

It was the same here—almost. I had so much to learn that I almost forgot the world I had left behind. I forgot the farm bill. I forgot the war that had been raging when I was kidnapped. I forgot Marilyn, even—well, I'd had plenty of practice at forgetting my wife, for some time.

I didn't forget Nyla.

The more surely it seemed that I would never see her again, the more certain I was that I had lost something very important to me. All that Nicky said about this world was true. I could easily imagine that, once the transition period was over, I could build quite a good life for myself in this new Eden. Could do productive things, meet a handsome woman, marry her, have kids, be happy. . . . But whatever my life might be without Nyla, it would be only second best.

That feeling did not go away.

By the fourth day we were certified reasonably clean, which meant privileges. For one, both Nicky and I were reassigned to food-handling instead of shifting garbage—a big step upward. For another, we were allowed outside!

To be sure, we couldn't wander at random, and we had to take measures to avoid contaminating Eden's pure air with our still potentially disgusting breath. Nicky and I lined up for I.D. badges, coveralls, and micropore masks. He went one way. I went another.

What I had in mind was to look up some friends in one of the other hotels. The comset had told me that the Dom DeSota who was a physicist was located just cat-a-corner across the square, in another of the abandoned hotels that had become Cathouses.

It had rained hard the day before, while we were cooped up. The air was cooler and dryer, and the tall trees that stretched all up along the edge of the park were bending in the breeze. There were plenty of people in the streets, strolling or hurrying from one place to another. A few of them were faceless, like myself; the ones who were not gave us masked ones a wide berth. I didn't mind. Just being out of the hotel gave my spirits a lift. I wished that Nyla were there with me, walking hand in hand along the streets of this wondrous new place, but even without her I was cheerful. By the time I entered the lobby of the Pierre I was almost beaming, and the first face I saw was a familiar one. He was sitting on the counter of the old registration desk, talking irritably into an old two-piece telephone. "Which one are you?" I asked, peeling off my face mask. He gave me a scowl.

"I'm the one you got into this trouble in the first place, schmuck," he said bitterly. So he wasn't Lavrenti Djugashvili or the scientist; he was the con man from Time Tau.

"I'm not the one you think I am," I told him. "I'm the senator; Nicky's my roommate, in the Plaza."

"I hope he rots there," he said. Then he put down the phone and shrugged. "Hell, I guess I don't mean that. No sense hanging on to hard feelings, right? Want a cup of coffee?"

Well, he was trying to be nice. And he had coffee! There were advantages to knowing a con man, even here and now, I could see. So we sat and talked for a while. I told him what little there was to tell about Nicky and me. He told me more than I wanted to know about himself. He'd roomed the first night with Moe-the FBI man! He saw my look and shrugged. "Like I say, no use carrying a grudge any more, is there?" But Moe had found another Moe-another identical copy of himself, and the two of them had decided to room together. More than that, they'd found out there was still a third one, and they'd made plans to go off together when they left quarantine—maybe to sign up for construction on the new natural-gas pipeline that was going to go from Texas to somewhere in Southern California, maybe join an advance crew in one of the cities that hadn't been refurbished yet, maybe get into dam building down in Alabama, the place they called Muscle Shoals. There were always plenty of jobs for big guys with brawn. And did I know that Nyla was in the hotel?

Sudden rush of hope and shock. But, of course, the Nyla he was talking about wasn't my Nyla. It was the FBI woman.

I drank the rest of the coffee without tasting it, listened to the rest of Larry Douglas's gossip without hearing it. What was on my mind was a moral question, and it filled my mind. The Nyla I loved was hopelessly out of reach.

Was I willing to settle for another Nyla?

I did not even consider the question of whether that other Nyla, that hard-bitten policewoman, would settle for me. That didn't really matter. The answer I was looking for was in my head, not hers. Who was it I loved? Was it the physical, corporeal female human being with whose body my body found so much pleasure? Was it the traits and graces of the Nyla who played so beautifully on the violin and behaved so warmly, kindly in all the intercourse of the world? Would I have loved Nyla Bowquist less if she had been less able to show me the difference between Brahms and Beethoven-or less used to the glamour and excitement of the elite world we both moved in? Would I have loved her, in short, if she hadn't been famous?

Or—getting rapidly down to basics, the kind of question that never has an answer that makes sense-what did I mean by "love," anyway?

When you get into that kind of navel-gazing soul-searching it isn't too easy to keep track of what is happening in the real world. It wasn't surprising when Larry Douglas's prattle slowed down, then stopped.

I came to. He was gazing at me disagreeably. "Sorry," I said. "I was thinking."

He sniffed. "Mind telling me what it was you came here for?" he asked.

"I was looking for Dominic DeSota—the other one, the scientist."

"Oh, them. There's a bunch of them that spend their time talking about paratime and all that stuff. There's a couple of me there too. You'll find them in the bar, probably."

I did. It was as he described. There were ten or eleven people in the bar, nursing beers and talking animatedly. Two of them were Larry Douglas, four were Stephen Hawking in one state of health or another, two were John Gribbin, of whom I had met two examples at Floyd Bennett Field. They didn't even look around when I came in. They were, as the con man had said, comparing notes.

I went behind the bar and picked out a can of beer for myself, half listening to them, mostly thinking about my own problems. It wasn't hard to think, because their conversation didn't disturb me a bit. I didn't understand a word of it. "We started with oltron fission," one of them would say, and another would cut in, "Hang on a minute. What's an oltron?" And the first would say something like, "Uh, it's charged, it's light, it has a point-five variance-" and the other would say, "Variance?" And then they would start drawing particle-reaction diagrams until one of them would say, "Oh, you mean a Neumann body! Right. And it splits into an aleph-A and a gimmel, sure." And they would be off again. I let it all wash over me until the Dominic DeSota turned around to reach for his beer and saw me there.

"Oh, hi, Dom," he said. "Back already? Listen, Gribbin here says they used vanadium targets in the accelerator and got nearly twice the brilliance. What do you think of that?"

I grinned at him. "Not much," I confessed. "I'm the one who's a senator when he's back home, Dom. The one you were with in Washington when we got snatched."

"Oh, that one," he said, amused. "Well, I'm not that Dom either. He's off checking up on his wife."

I winced. "Well, tell him I was looking for him," I said, turning away, wishing I'd been as lucky as he. If only they'd caught my Nyla up in the sweep, instead of the No-Thumbs woman . . . and then . .

I stopped, swallowing hard.

"Hey," I said. "They didn't snatch his wife, did they? She was in her own time, and she wasn't working on paratime!"

"No, of course not," said the other Dom. He gave me a puzzled look. "He applied for her to join him, that's all. He just went to see when she's coming in."

"Applied . . . to join. . . . You mean . . . "

And he did mean just what I thought he meant. That was policy. The kidnappers weren't inhuman. They were willing to let us bring our families over, provided our families were willing to come.

All I had to do was apply.

Forty minutes later I was in the Biltmore Hotel, waiting my turn to—to, I guess the word is propose. I wasn't alone. There were fifty men in line with me on the same errand. We didn't talk much, because each one of us was busy rehearsing the speech we were about to make. When I felt a tap on my shoulder I flinched.

But it was only Nicky. "You, too, Dom?" he said, grinning. "I've just finished. Now if Greta will only say yes

Suddenly we were the center of attention, as the men before and behind me in the line turned to hear what the man who had already done it had to say. "She didn't answer?" I asked.

"Answer? No! You don't talk to her directly," he explained. "They don't have enough channels for that, I guess. What you do, you go into a room and they sort of film you—I don't suppose it's really film—anyway, you say what you have to say. Then they locate your wife, or whatever, and transmit it to her. What did you call those things? Holograms? It will be a sort of hologram image of you, and you can talk for one minute. Then it's up to her—"

Then it would be up to her.

What do you say to a woman to make her give up a world that loves her for the sake of chancy adventures in exile? All the time I was inching ahead in the line, all the time I was giving information about Nyla Bowquist to the attendant who would have to locate her, I invented reasons. Not reasons. Bribes. Airy-fairy promises of what our life would be like. . . . As if I knew any of that!

And when at last I was in front of the lens, with the bright lights glaring into my eyes, I abandoned the reasons and the bribes. All I could find to say was, "Nyla, my darling, I love you. Please come here and marry me."

By Saturday we were wholly germ-free and ready to start our new lives. By Saturday the woman at the Baltmore desk was already tired of seeing both Nicky and me. There were only a limited number of channels to other times, she explained, and very heavy demands on all of them. No, she didn't know whether Nyla had even received my message yet. Yes, Nyla would be told everything she needed to know about what this world was like and how to get here. No, she couldn't even guess how long it would take. Sometimes it was less than a day, but some people hadn't had a response even three weeks later. .

I didn't want to wait three weeks. I didn't want to be lonely that long ... especially when it might happen that all I would get at the end of the three weeks was the knowledge that I would be lonely forever.

Meanwhile I had to fill my time one way or another. Nicky had the same problem, but he didn't seem to have the same trouble doing it. When he wasn't working he was exploring; when he wasn't exploring he has hunched over the data-machine terminal in our room, trying to learn as much as he could. About the third time I came to him to ask how many ooties went into a oddy-poot he said, "Really, Dom, how are you going to get along here if you can't even make change?"

"It's so confusing, Nicky. All those ones and zeroes."

"It's binary arithmetic," he corrected me. "One equals one. One-oh equals two. One-one equals three—" And he drew me a column of figures:

1 1

10 2

11 3

100 4

101 5

"Sure, Nicky, sure," I groused, "but what do you do when you get up to those ten or twelve digit numbers? How do you even say the suckers?"

He said seriously, "What you do, Dom, is learn the pronouncing codes."

"Why should I? No, no, I know," I said, to head him off, "the reason I should learn is that I'm stuck here, and when in Rome you learn to use Roman numbers, right? Only it's dumb! Maybe there's some little saving in time or something; but it must have cost them millions to switch over from decimal to binary."

He laughed. "You know what it cost them? Bear in mind, they've put all their data into electronic storage. So they pushed a button somewhere and the machines did a global search-and-replace. All at once. All over the world. All over all the worlds that were involved; and from then on it was standard."

I gazed at him. "That's computer talk," I said. "You've learned a lot since you got out of your own time."

"I didn't have the choice, Dom," he said, "and sooner or later you're going to realize that neither do you. Here. I'll get you started." And he punched out some commands on the machine and got up. "Start by learning how to count," he ordered, and left me to it.

Of course, he was right.

So I got serious. I took my mind off me and my problems, I even took it off Nyla, and I tried to concentrate. What Nicky had called up for me was an old document called On Binary Digits and Human Habits, and it told me all I wanted to know about binary arithmetic and the way to write it and say it.

The writing conventions were easy enough. The custom was to write numbers in binary in groups of six digits, with a hyphen in the middle, 000-000. When there were more than six digits they used commas, just as we used to for thousands and millions: 000-000,000-000. I laboriously converted the present year into binary, and 1983 came out as:

1-111,011-111

It looked pretty dumb to me.

Then, reading on, I discovered that they pronounced each group of six according to some cockamamy rule that looked ridiculous at first, but got easy after I'd studied the table for a while. You pronounced each three-digit group slightly differently, according to whether it was before or after the hyphen, but that was only to make saying the words easier:

Binary Pronunciation Pronunciation alone

quantity in first group or in second group

000 ohly pohl

001 ooty poot

010 ahtah pahtah

011 oddy pod

100 too too

101 totter tot

110 dye dye

111 teeter tee

So numbers like "ten"—i.e., 1-010—became "ooty-pahtah" and "fifty," or 110-010, became "dye-pahtah," and when Nicky came back into the room I was able to tell him, "Four months or so from now, on New Year's Eve, I am going to wish you a Happy New Ooty-tee, oddy-tee."

"Well done, Dom," he grinned, "but that's this year. Next year will be 1984, and that's ooty-tee, too-pohl."

I groaned. "Hellfire. I don't think I'll ever learn all this stuff."

He said cheerfully, "Sure you will, Dom. After all, as I said, you don't have any choice."

I couldn't spend all my time mooning over Nyla, or even learning. There were decisions to be made. Not just decisions; we had to go to work. We could not stay in the Plaza forever, because the quarantine quarters had to receive thousands of new cats, arriving every day. Nor could we go on halfheartedly working at chambermaid and busboy jobs, because there were no free rides in Eden. There couldn't be. Before the mass transfers there had been hardly fifty thousand venturesome pioneers on the whole planet, whether malcontents or heroes. Now nearly two hundred thousand cats had already been transported to strain the resources available, and the number would more than double before the transfers were complete. Every one of us needed food, housing, all the million little gadgets and services and conveniences that made up civilized life. Food most of all. I had never been even a backyard gardener, but my first job-hunting trip was up to the north end of the park, where crews were busy harvesting lumber, pulling stumps, plowing fields, sowing winter crops. My second was down to the Brooklyn Bridge, where there were engineers testing the strength of the cables and supports, and forty times as many people chipping rust and slapping on paint to get the old bridge ready for service again. My third and fourth and fifth were all over the city, where the jobs were repairing water mains and power lines, or checking out apartment buildings to see if any could be made livable for the winter, or collecting scrap that would (somehow) be transported to the steel mills that would (somehow) be put back in operation to create new plows, and cars, and I-beams out of the discards of the old times, pending the day when the Mesabi iron mines could (somehow) be started up again for ore. Oh, there were jobs, all right! There were more jobs than there were people. It was just that none of them seemed to be for a man whose basic skills were making speeches, running fund raisers, and conniving to trade a pilot-training program here for a slum-clearance project somewhere else.

"It'll be fine," Nicky encouraged. "Gosh! They need everything, Dom, and sooner or later they'll need government people too. You'll make out, and so will I. When Greta comes—" He clasped his hands with a seraphic smile. "A home! A wife! A family—a big house, with a half acre of ground, surrounded by tall hedges so we can go skinny-dipping any time-"

"I've got an interview," I said, and left him with his dreams. I wasn't lying. The "interview" was with the woman at the Biltmore, and she recognized me at once. "Dominic DeSota, right? Just a minute." And she huddled over her comset, studying the screen.

And then her expression clouded.

I could feel what was coming even before she found the words she was looking for. "I'm really, really sorry," she began, and didn't have to end.

I had a smile all ready, saved up for some time when I would need a smile a lot. When I put it on, wonders, it worked. "Those are the breaks of the game," I said, grinning at her. "Well, honey? You doing anything special tonight?"

The smile might have fooled her, but I could see that the tone of voice was a dead giveaway. She was a good person. She had probably already had to tell five hundred of us Peety-Deepies that their nearest and dearest couldn't really see their way clear to a new life in a new place. "A lot of people get really frightened about paratime travel," she said.

The smile was beginning to ache, but I held on to it and made an effort at conversation. "Who doesn't?" I asked, and managed a shrug. "Nyla's as brave as anybody, but this kind of thing is an awful lot to ask. I don't blame her. If the positions were reversed, I'd probably say no, thanks, too—anyway, I'd have to think it over pretty hard. . . ." I trailed off, because the woman was looking puzzled.

"What did you call her?"

"Nyla. Nyla Bowquist. Is something wrong?"

"Oh, hell, "she said, busy with her keyboard again. "You're that Dominic DeSota. I just can't keep you straight—same room number and everything; it was a woman named Greta that said no. Yours—" She frowned at the screen, tapped out a command for a double check, and then looked up at me with a smile of heavenly gold. "Your request was for Nyla Christophe Bowquist, and she accepted. She's already at Floyd Bennett for preliminary disinfection. She should be here in the hotel by tomorrow morning."