The Coming of the Quantum Cats

18 August 1983

11:15 A.M. Nicky DeSota

A day later none of it seemed so bad. "Just mistaken identity," I assured Greta when she called to say good-bye—she was on another New York run.

"Even the fingerprints?"

"Come on, Greta," I said, looking at my boss, who was looking thoughtfully at me, and at the clock behind him, which was telling me I only had two hours before I was due in traffic court. "You know where I was that night!"

"Of course I do," she said with a sigh in a tone of voice as though she weren't really sure any more. I guessed that was what being questioned by the FBI did. I could hear her yawning. "Goodness sake," she apologized, "I hope I'm not like this on my run. It was all that noise last night."

"What noise?" I hadn't heard anything, but then once I'm asleep I seldom do.

"That kind of roaring, didn't you hear? Sort of like thunder? Only there wasn't any thunder?—'Scuse me," she added, and I could hear her saying something with her hand over the mouthpiece. Then, "Sorry, honey, but they're loading up. I've got to go. See you in a couple of days—"

"I love you," I said, but I was talking to a dead phone. What's more, Mr. Ruppert was coming toward me, so I added swiftly, to the dead microphone, "I only wish I had a dozen more clients like you! Take care, and I'll get back to you with the quotations."

I hung up, gazing blandly at him, and bent quickly to the paper on my desk. I always keep a lot of it there for floor-time days. This time, though, it was actual work, quotations I had to prepare for clients in six different municipalities. Since each municipality had its own fire and safety codes—and thus its own insurance premiums— and since every client was different anyway in terms of credit standing and down payment, I had a good two hours of work with the adding machine. I had hoped for a nice lunch on the way over to Barrington, but I was lucky to get a hot dog and a root beer along the highway. I got there two minutes before the 1:30 P.M. on my ticket, which meant I was late. Not late late. The judge hadn't even shown up yet, and probably wouldn't for at least another quarter of an hour—that was what you got to be a judge for. But everybody else had been there long enough to hand in his ticket, announce his plea, and get a number. I got a number. There were forty-two people summoned for that session. I was number forty-two.

I sat down in the back, calculating as best I could. Number forty-two. Say, at the most optimistic, an average of a minute and a half a case. That meant the judge would get to me in a little over an hour. Still, that wasn't so bad, I reassured myself, because I had a briefcase full of credit reports to check over. I could be sitting right there in the back row and catching up on my paperwork.

I opened the case, pulled out the first half-dozen folders, and glanced around, reasonably well content. It was interesting to somebody who'd never been in traffic court before. The judge's bench was in a little playpen sort of a thing, flanked by two flags. On the left was the old Stars and Stripes, the forty-eight stars bright on the blue background; on the right, the white of Illinois. Between them— Between them was a sign on the wall. It said:

NO SMOKING

NO EATING

NO DRINKING

NO READING

NO WRITING

NO SLEEPING

So the afternoon would not be as productive as I had hoped. I tested it out by opening my briefcase in my lap, but the test came out negative. A fat, elderly guy in Barrington Police Department uniform came strolling down the aisle to watch what I did. There was no rule against having reading or writing materials out on your lap, it seemed; he didn't tell me to put them away. But you could see that he was waiting to pounce—one little stroke of the pen, one word scanned out of the corner of my eye, and pow!

I gave him a patronizing smile and turned to the citizen two seats away from me. "Hot in here, isn't it?" I asked. "You'd think they'd turn the fans on."

"Fans don't work," he said. That was all he said. There wasn't any rule against talking, but he wasn't taking any chances. A voice from behind me explained:

"They work all right, it's just that this court's electric bills are getting too high." I looked around. Dapper young man grinning at me; he wore a white jacket, white pants, and next to him on a vacant chair was a white panama hat. A very flashy dresser, I thought. "It's hard to stay awake, though, isn't it?" he added. "Especially when that noise keeps you awake all night."

That noise again. Again I said that I hadn't heard a thing, and both he and the guy in my row were glad to supply details. Like from the sky, see? No, not like an airplane-with an airplane you can hear the motors going; this wasn't a motor, it was more like something roaring—although, yeah, come to think of it, it did seem to come from around the airport. Midway? No, not Midway—that little private field off to the northwest, Old Orchard, they called it, though some people wanted to change the name to O'Hare. And, boy! that noise was something. On this all parties agreed—all but me, who had little to contribute but ears—and we probably would have gone on concurring for another half hour if the court attendant hadn't called out: "His Honor Timothy P. Magrahan, all rise!"

And we rose. His Honor came in, sweating in his dollar-ninety-eight black judicial robes, gazing out at us like an actor counting a sparse house, without much pleasure. When we were allowed to sit down again he sighed and gave us a little speech:

"Ladies and gentlemen, most of you here today have been accused of traffic offenses. Now, I don't know how you people feel, but to me this has to be taken seriously. A traffic offense isn't some little thing that doesn't matter much one way or another. Not at all. A traffic offense is an offense against driving. An offense against driving is an offense against the good people who make our driving possible—our friends from the Middle East, including Mekhtab ibn Bawzi himself. An offense against our friends from the Middle East is an offense against the principles of religious toleration and democratic friendship among peoples ..."

It was not a surprise to me when the snappy customer in the white suit whispered in my ear that Judge Magrahan was coming up for reelection that November. By the time the judge got around to telling us that an offense against the Koran was an offense against religion generally, including our own Judeo-Christian denominations, I began to see that this traffic ticket could be serious. My only hope for getting off scot-free would have been if the summonsing officer hadn't shown up in court. That wasn't happening. There was a bench along the side of the room, and among the five or six men sitting there-a couple in state police uniforms, the others from various municipalities—there was my good friend from Meacham Road. He knew I was there too. He didn't smile at me, or nod, but I could feel his eyes on me from time to time.

The first case came up for decision, scared-looking young woman with a baby in a stroller, sixty-eight miles an hour in a sixty-mile-an-hour zone. A twenty-five-dollar fine and six months' probation. The second case was worse, driving under the influence of alcohol, third offense, along with reckless endangerment and failure to observe posted stop signs. That was a man of no more than twenty, and he did not leave the courtroom under his own power. One of the officers took him away in handcuffs, to be held awaiting sentencing, and as he left I could see him looking at his thumbs wistfully, as though he didn't expect to have them much longer.

I sat up straighter and put my briefcase away. Most of the people in the courtroom were doing the same thing. It seemed that Judge Magrahan's political strategy had been set: losing votes among the people he sentenced would cost him less than those he would gain by working up a reputation as a fearless crusader for traffic safety.

There was also the consideration, I realized, that most of the persons awaiting hearing came from other municipalities, like myself, and therefore were of no interest to the judge's vote counters.

So I watched for half an hour as the justice meted out justice to his subjects, one by one. I decided that it wasn't my month. Chief Agent Nyla Chnstophe was bad enough, but at least I'd been able to clear myself with her. With this judge, I had no hope. I watched my acquaintance in the white suit wander around the courtroom like a friend of the family at a picnic, stopping to chat with this one and that. When he leaned over to whisper in the ear of the cop who'd summonsed me, I began to pay closer attention. When the cop glanced at me, shaking his head, I sat up straight. When, a couple of minutes later, the two of them walked out of the courtroom together, still talking, I almost got up to follow; but the courtroom attendant who had so faithfully monitored what I was doing with my briefcase stood at the end of my row, watching me assessingly. I stayed put. For a while. When a few minutes later curiosity overcame caution it was too late. "Men's room?" I whispered to the attendant; he nodded. I went where he pointed; neither cop nor man in white were in sight anywhere around.

And when, half an hour later, the clerk at last called my name, the judge conferred in whispers with another court attendant, then scowled at me. "Mr. DeSota," he said, "your summonsing officer has been called away on urgent police business and cannot testify against you. Therefore, under the law, I have no option but to dismiss the charges. You're a free man, Mr. DeSota, and, I may add, a very lucky one."

I did not disagree at all.

I was so pleased to be out of it that I was halfway home before I realized my beeper was beeping. I stopped at a filling station and while the high-test was running into my tank I called the message center. This time they had tuned me in exactly and the operator had every word of the message. So, this time, it was the message itself that left me bewildered. Pronounced syllable by syllable with care, it said:

"You don't need to know my name and you don't need to know why I care what happens to you or how I know who you are or anything like that. But if you want help with the thumbless lady, have a tunafish-salad sandwich at the Carson, Pine, Scott coffee shop this evening at six P.M."

"That's it?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," said the operator, very sweet, very competent. "Would you like me to repeat the message? No? Then just let me say, sir, that it's the occasional message like yours that makes this job such a fun thing to do! Thank you, Mr. DeSota, thank you very much."

"You're welcome," I said, and sat there staring out the windshield until the gas jockey rapped on my window. "Sorry," I said, and fished out the money to pay him—sixty-nine cents a gallon! If I'd looked at the prices I never would have stopped there.

But I didn't have room in my head to think about that; I was too busy thinking about the message. And the mistaken-identity thing with the FBI. And getting off so lightly in traffic court. And all the other weirdnesses that were infesting my life and the world. Under normal circumstances I would have ignored the message. It was exactly the kind of cloak-and-dagger thing that a sensible person would stay far away from. Taking time off to go there would, as a minimum, mean taking off more time from my main business in life, namely the arranging of mortgages for needy home buyers. The boss would not be pleased. And the whole thing was fishy. Going there might easily get me in trouble I couldn't get out of.

Naturally I went.

There was a novel that Greta and I were reading once where one of the characters said something like, "She went into a department store, one of the places where women gladly go but few men are willing to follow." Greta said she thought that was sort of derogatory toward women. "Women don't like to shop," she said. "It's just that they have to. They're the ones that buy the groceries and the household furnishings and all the other things people have to buy for a family."

"They don't buy the cars," I pointed out.

"No, of course. They don't buy the major capital-expense items, naturally," she agreed. "But that sort of thing you only do once every few years. Day in, day out, there's all the consumable stuff that has to be bought. If a woman spends a lot of time buying it, that's because it's her job. To compare prices and values. It's how she conserves her family's spending money. Whether she likes it or not doesn't matter. She has to do it anyway."

"Right, honey," I said, grinning.

She didn't like the grin. "No, Nick, I'm serious! You shouldn't say women like to shop. You should just say it's their job to shop."

"Now, Greta," I said reasonably, "just think this thing through, will you? How can you say it's derogatory to somebody to say she likes to do her job? I like my job too."

"That's not at all the same thing," she said, but she didn't say it angrily, and then she changed the subject. She was good about that. Greta was not one of your suffragettes. She told me a hundred times that if she got the vote she wouldn't know what to do with it. But the thing about Greta was that she had a good job as a stewardess, and it made her a little—well—I don't want to say mannish or anything like that. Not independent, exactly. And it was all conversation, of course; if I ever popped the question I knew what she would say, and once we were married there'd be no more of those funny ideas.

I did worry about her a little now and then, though.

Right then my worries were a lot more immediate. What made me think about all this was that, looking around the Carson coffee shop, I felt that line from the novel was right on target. There were a hundred customers scattered around the big room—green porch furniture for tables and chairs, hanging plants everywhere—and ninety-five of them were women. There were no single men, or pairs of men. Here and there a couple, maybe, the man generally elderly, and always with that hangdog "Oh-my-God-I've-blundered-into-the-ladies'-toilet" look.

I guess that was why I assumed that my Mystery Caller would be female. That shows how reliable my assumptions are.

After twenty minutes, and the third time the elderly waitresses came by to inquire if I was ready to order, I was. After another twenty minutes my tuna-salad sandwich arrived.

And twenty minutes after that—after I had eaten half the sandwich and was trying to make myself leave the other half on the plate as a recognition signal—I felt someone pass rapidly behind me. When I looked up there was a man already seated across the table.

I knew him. He wasn't wearing a white suit, but he had been not too many hours earlier.

"Well, hello," I said. "I might have guessed it was you."

The waitress was hovering nearby; he glanced at her, then frowned meaningfully at me. "Hello, there," he said, tone that of two old business acquaintances, not in the least surprised to have run into each other this way. But if he knew my name, he didn't use it. It was "Long time no see," and "How are you, then?" and no nonsense about waiting for me to answer. When the waitress had taken his order and gone off with it he said in a conversational tone, "You weren't followed here. There's nobody in the restaurant watching you. We can talk."

There is just so much mystery I am willing to put up with. I picked up the other half of my sandwich and regarded him over a bite of it. Youngish fellow, two or three years younger than I. Open-faced, freckled, sandy-haired—the boy next door, the one you knew would never do anything mean or sneaky. Except that here he was being a sneak. "What are we going to talk about?" I asked, my mouth full of tuna fish and cracked-wheat toast. "And who am I talking to, then?"

He made an impatient gesture. "Call me Jimmy. Names don't matter. What matters is, what were you trying to do at Daleylab?"

"Ah, Jimmy," I said sadly, and put down the rest of my sandwich. "This is stupid," I said. "You go back and tell Chief Agent Christophe that the trick didn't work."

He frowned at me for silence while the waitress brought his ham and cheese sandwich. Then, "There's no trick," he said.

"There's nothing but a trick, Jimmy. I was never anywhere near Daleylab, and you and Christophe better know it."

"Don't jerk me around," he said. "They've got your picture."

"It's a fake."

"Fingerprints? They fakes too?"

I said steadily, "Anything at all they've got that says I was trying to break into Daleylab last Saturday night is a fake, because I wasn't."

He chewed on his ham and cheese, studying me suspiciously. I studied him back. Not only was he younger than I, he was taller and a lot better looking. A whole lot better dressed. The white suit he'd worn that afternoon was flashy. This one wasn't flashy, but it was cut nicely out of real English fabric—seventy-five dollars at least, and matching shoes that hadn't come from any Thom McAn I ever saw. He said suddenly, "Nyla thinks your alibi witnesses are lying."

I'd started to pick up the rest of my sandwich. I put it down again. "How do you know what Nyla Christophe thinks if you're not FBI?"

"We're friends," he explained. "I've got a lot of cop friends— not just in the FBI. You ought to know that."

"I know what you did," I said. "I don't know why you did it."

"Why shouldn't I do a favor if! want to?" he demanded. "Get back to your witnesses. Are they lying?"

"No! If they were, would I tell you? But they're not."

He chewed the rest of his ham and cheese in silence, keeping his eyes on me as though some change in expression might resolve the problem for him. I let him keep his quiet. I finished my own sandwich, drank the last of my coffee, waved the waitress over for a refill. He tapped his cup for the same, and when she had gone away again he said, "I didn't think they were, actually."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"Oh, don't come with that supercilious crap with me, Dominic. You're in trouble up to your ass, you know that?"

I hadn't known that. "Christophe told me I could go home!" I objected.

"Why shouldn't she? You couldn't get out of town if you tried. She's not through with you."

"Why not, damn it?"

"Because," he explained, "photos and fingerprints don't lie."

"But I wasn't there!"

He said slowly, "I swear, I think you mean it. I think your witnesses mean it, too, and that's pretty hard to swallow. I think you people might even pass a lie-detector test."

"Why not? We aren't lying."

"Oh, hell, Dominic!" he exploded. "Don't you know you need help?"

"Are you going to help me?" I asked.

"Me? No," he said. "But I know somebody who might. Pay the check, Dominic, and let's go for a ride."

Around this time in August the sun doesn't go down till eight or so, but it was already full dark before we got to where we were going. There wasn't much traffic, once we got out of the Chicago suburbs heading south. We went past cornfields by the mile and small towns by the dozen, and every time I asked this Jimmy person where we were going he only shook his head. "The less you know," he said, "the less trouble you can get anybody in."

"When are we going to get there, then? I'm not a night owl, Jimmy, and I've got a job, and they expect me to be working in the morning—"

"What you've got," he said patiently, as he slowed for a light, "is trouble with the FBI. If you don't get that straightened out, no other trouble is going to matter."

"Yes, sure, Jimmy, but—"

"But quit your bellyaching," he ordered. "We're just about there. It's right outside this town."

"This town," according to the sign on the road, was called Dixon, Illinois, population 2250, Rotary and Lions Club met every Thursday and Friday in the Holiday Inn. We turned off the main street at a square with a World War II 75-millimeter cannon in a little green patch, drove a few blocks, and then Jimmy took a tire-whining left into a private road.

Who the road belonged to it did not declare. There was no cute little "Welcome to Hiddenwell Acres" sign, no name, nothing to identify it and certainly nothing to make us feel at all welcome. On the contrary. What distinguished this road from any other around was the swinging-gate barrier that blocked us at the first turn. There was a little wooden guardhouse next to the gate, and out of it leaned a large, nonwooden guard. "I.D.," he ordered. Jimmy passed him something. What it was I knew not, but it satisfied him. Well, it almost satisfied him. He pored over it for a while, licking his lips. Then he picked up a phone and discussed it with someone on the other end. Then he cranked the barrier up and waved us through.

A quarter of a mile farther along the road split, to loop around a lawn with a fountain. We circled and stopped in front of a veranda with huge white pillars. I'd seen it before—in, I think, the movie Gone With the Wind. And the servants came out of the same film. A cheerful young black man came at us from one direction to bob his head and take Jimmy's car to an invisible parking lot behind a grove of apple trees in fruit. A plump, middle-aged black woman came from another direction to admit us to the house. She didn't greet Jimmy by name, and didn't pay any attention to me at all. She didn't ask questions. She didn't volunteer any answers. The list of things she didn't do was, in fact, very long. What she did do was lead us silently through a huge three-story foyer with a carpeted stairway curving down to the entrance, through a passage, through a little sort of living room, with a fireplace and comfortable couch and armchairs, all unoccupied, through a glass door into, finally, a sort of combination hothouse and gymnasium. It had been hot enough outside. It was twice as hot within. The place was full of tropical plants stretching up to the glass roof, with vines clinging to the trees and a sort of general jungly smell of decaying plants and humid soil.

In the middle of it all was a swimming pool, long and narrow. And in the pool was an elderly man; and on the elderly man was nothing at all. He was skinny-dipping. It did not seem to concern him. He was doing laps. He splashed to our end of the pool, gasped, "Ninety-eight," swam a sort of sloppy Australian crawl to the far end—"Ninety-nine"—did the last stretch back to us at top speed, arms slipping gracefully into the water ahead of his white topknot, feet frothing up the water behind in a vigorous eight-beat kick. "One hundred," he said, panting, and clung to the edge of the pool. Another young black man, this one grave rather than cheerful, handed him a towel, and he dabbed at his face and grinned up at me. "Evening, gentlemen," he said.

I made a noise at him. It wasn't exactly a "Good evening," but it was polite. Jimmy did better. He crouched down beside the pool, took one of the old swimmer's wet and slippery hands, and pumped it enthusiastically.

"Ron," he said, from the heart—anyway it sounded as though it came from the heart—"I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for seeing us tonight."

"Not at all," said the man courteously. "After all, Larry, you said it was a significant civil liberties issue."

"Yes, I think it is," said "Jimmy" gamely, carefully not looking to see if I'd picked up on the name. "It's about Dominic here. He has an unusual problem with the FBI. They claim he was detected breaking into a secret government research installation. They have pictures and fingerprints to prove it. But he has unimpeachable witnesses to prove he was a thousand miles away at the time."

Ron had pulled himself out of the pool and was toweling himself dry. He had to be in his seventies, anyway, but when I looked at his tapering torso and absolute lack of any spare tire around the waist, I only wished I could live to be that kind of seventy. He not only looked good, he looked sort of familiar. Then he finished drying himself, dropped the towel on the tiling, and let the black man help him into a white terry-cloth robe. "I don't do private-eye movies any more, Larry," he said, grinning, and I realized why he looked familiar. He was an actor. Had been an actor, anyway. In the movies. Never a big star, but one of those faces you kept seeing until your subconscious remembered it even if the rest of you didn't. Until there was some kind of scandal. Scandal? Trouble, anyway. I couldn't remember the details, but he had been fired. Not just from the job; from the industry. It had been something political, maybe. .

Whatever it was, it had happened a long time ago. Right after World War II, right about when I was getting ready to get born; and now old Ron was easily in his seventies and maybe a little more than that. A nice-looking old man, even not counting the slim waist and square shoulders, with an engaging grin and a lock of white hair that kept falling down over his eyes.

So he looked.

Old Ron didn't linger by the pool. He led the way to the room with the couch and chairs. In the five minutes since we had passed through it last someone had lighted a fire in the fireplace and put out glasses and bottles on a sideboard. A third young black man, perhaps the fire-layer and drink-setter-outer, materialized to take our drink orders, while Ron sat in the armchair nearest the fire, raising his bare feet to the warmth of it by resting them on a hassock. You remember it was August? I could understand that his little tootsies might be cold, but surely there was some better way of warming them than by heating up the whole damn room.

When we all had our drinks, he raised his in a toast, swallowed half of it briskly, and then gave "Jimmy" and me that engaging grin again. "Well, Larry," he said, "what kind of a hopeless incompetent have you brought me this time?"