"But biological weapons are—" He stopped, thinking. He'd been going to say that they were against international law or something.
I explained, "After Salt II we had to do something. We pretty much gave up nukes. So we worked on other things."
"What's 'Salt II'?" he asked; then, immediately, "No, the hell with that, I don't want history lessons from you. All I want from you is for all of you to go the hell back where you came from and leave us alone, and I doubt you'll do that. If it interests you, you make me want to puke."
What a feisty little devil he was! He made me almost proud but also mad. "Bullshit, Dom!" I yelled. "You would have done the same thing! You were getting ready to, one way or another—otherwise why were you working on this Cathouse project?"
"Because—" he began, and stopped. His expression was a good enough answer. He changed the subject. "Have you got a cigarette?" he asked.
"Gave it up," I said with satisfaction.
He nodded, thinking. "I really didn't believe it would work," he said slowly.
"But you were in there trying, boy, weren't you? So what's the difference? We're not doing anything you wouldn't have done if you'd finished your research ahead of us."
"That's—that's doubtful," he said. Honest of him. He hadn't said, "That's untrue."
"So will you help talk your President into it?" I pushed.
No hesitation this time. "No."
"Not even to save a lot of lives, maybe?"
He said, "Not even for that. No surrender, Dom And I'm not sure I would want to buy a few American lives with a few million Russians, either."
I looked at him in amazement. Was it possible that I—in any incarnation---could be such a softheaded fool? But he wasn't looking softheaded. He leaned back in his chair, studying me, and suddenly he seemed taller and more sure of himself. "So what's the thing that scares you, Dominic?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" I sparred.
He said, reasoning it out, "Sounds to me like you've got a worry you're not telling me about. Maybe I can't guess what that is. On the other hand, maybe I can. The reason I came down here was because there was another one of us snooping around. He seemed to know what you were going to do. If I were you, I think I'd be real worried about him. Why? Who is he? What's going on?"
I should have known that it was hard to keep secrets from myself. I was never a dummy, not even in this senator incarnation. He'd twigged to the thing that was most on my mind—or one of them.
I said slowly, "He's from another parallel time, Dom."
"I guessed that much," he said impatiently. "Did he visit you before?"
"No. Not exactly. Not him." I didn't want to tell him any more
about the visitor we had had—the one we had managed to catch and detain, who was now sitting in his tent under guard on the other side of the portal, sweating with fear that his people would find him and do something bad to him for helping us develop the portal. "But we did have a visitor. Maybe more than one."
"Keep talking."
I said, "Have you ever heard of 'rebound'?"
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning 'bouncing back.' When you go through the skin, or whatever it is, that separates one time from another, there's some kind of conservation effect. Things begin going in the other direction."
He frowned. "You mean other people being thrown back and forth?"
"Not just people. It's complicated. It depends on how badly the skin is torn. Sometimes it's just energy—light, or sound. Sometimes it's gases drifting back and forth, or small things—birds flying, maybe. Sometimes it's a lot more."
"And that's happening here?"
I said unwillingly, "Seems to be, Dom. And Snot just here."
He stood up and went over to the window. I let him think it out. Over his shoulder he said, "It sounds like you people are really screwing the bird, Dom." I didn't answer that. He turned around, looking at me. "I wish you'd get me a cigarette," he said testily. "This stuff is hard to take calmly."
I debated for a moment whether to hardnose him on that, decided not to. "Why not? They're your lungs." I poked at the intercom on the desk until I figured out which button connected with the orderly room and told Sergeant Sambok to bring up some smokes. "So," I said, "we want to get this thing squared away. Are you going to help us?"
He said simply, "No."
"Not even when it's as risky as I'm telling you? Not even when your country is defenseless against us anyway?"
"You got into it, Dominic. You get out of it by yourself," he said definitely, and turned toward the door as Nyla Sambok appeared with a carton of tax-free PX cigarettes.
And all of a sudden my friendly other self changed from the self-assured name/rank/serial-number-only prisoner to something brand-new.
What the hell had happened to him? He was staring after the sergeant as if he'd seen a ghost. I never saw such an expression of astonishment, and rage, and worry on any human face—least of all on my own!
A man named Dominic DeSota sat before a screen, his fingers busy on a keyboard, analyzing and recording. Without lifting his fingers he spoke into a tiny microphone that curved around his cheek, "Boss? This one's the farthest of yet. There don't seem to be any vertebrates in it at all."
24 August 1983
9:20 A.M, Senator Dominic DeSota
When I got back to my home away from home, the stockade in the J-3 parking lot, I found out I had missed breakfast. I was also missing six of my fellow prisoners. There were a dozen or so of the base's permanent party soldiers still there, including a couple shamefacedly wearing "PW" stencils on their shirt backs and picking up leftover cafeteria trays from where the others had left them. A different soldier, with a green armband, was watching them with an automatic pistol held loosely before him. One of Major DeSota's, no doubt.
But of the few civilians who had shared the canvas cots in the parking lot with me the night before, there were none. This upset the corporal who had brought me back. He motioned me inside the fence while he muttered worriedly to the other guard. It didn't worry me. I had other things on my mind.
I had one other thing: Nyla Bowquist!
I don't know how to say how shattering it was to see my dear lover in an Army uniform, with traces of blackout makeup still on her face, a gun over her shoulder, looking at me with no recognition at all.
Now that I had time to think I realized that it was likely enough that there would be another Nyla in their time, just as there was another Dominic DeSota—and, no doubt, another Marilyn (but who would she be married to there?) and another Ferdie Bowquist and a whole other cast of characters. The other Dom DeSota wasn't at all the same as me. There was no reason the other Nyla should be. This one was no famous concert violinist. She wore her hair shorter and her eyes less made up. And her clothes—well, it was an army uniform, after all. My Nyla dressed beautifully, but this one hadn't had the freedom of choice.
But so heartbreakingly similar! And she hadn't known me at all! Or—that was not exactly true—she had known me as a copy of that other Dominic, whom she had known, all right (but not, I thought, in the biblical sense). I wondered if I would see her again.
And wondered instantly if I would ever see my own Nyla again. And wondered at myself! Here I was in the middle of huge, fantastic, and frightening events, and the thing that filled my mind was the woman I was having an--affair with—