"You! Prisoner DeSota!" growled the corporal, and I realized he'd been waving at me. "Come on, your people have been moved. I have to take you to the assembly point."
I looked at the other prisoners, who only looked back at me in the opaque, I-only-work-here expression of enlisted men in a situation not covered by orders. "Where's that?" I asked. But the only answer I got was a nasty twitch of the machine-pistol.
It wasn't far. It was right back the way we had come, to the Officers' Club just across from the Cathouse.
I'd been in it before. Many times. It was a sort of lounge where the people working could sit for a cup of coffee and a short conversation away from their desks, or take their latest load of information memos to read over in peace. It looked as it always had, except that there were nine people in it who clearly didn't want to be there. Two of the civilian scientists were pacing back and forth, glaring out the windows. Colonel Martineau was sitting talking to one of the women, whom I recognized as a mathematician brought down from ITT, and therefore one of my constituents. "Edna," I said, nodding. "Colonel."Just as though I had happened to drop in for a Coke and nothing strange was going on at all.
"We wondered where you were," said the colonel.
"I was being questioned by that nasty other Dominic DeSota. Made me miss breakfast."
"If you have any quarters," he said, "there's a vending machine right out in the hail, and the guard'll let you use it." I didn't, but Dr. Edna Valeska did—just like our own, except that the face was Herbert Hoover's. A soft drink and a couple of Twinkies didn't make a meal, but at least they informed my stomach my intentions were good. Out of habit, Colonel Martineau made a round of the room while I was getting them, checking windows (shake of the head; armed guards outside), checking the other doer (locked), listening to the telephone (dead). Then he sat down and watched me eat. "We've all been questioned," he said. "What interested them most seemed to be you, Dom—anyway, that first man who looked like you. The one that disappeared."
"They asked me the same thing," I said, mouth full of lardy sugar. "I didn't see any harm in telling them what I knew—which wasn't much, of course. Should I have stuck to name, rank, and serial number, which I don't have?"
He looked at me in surprise. I was surprised too; I hadn't realized how edgy I was. "I think we have to play this one by ear, Senator," he said, placating me. I grinned to show I was sorry, and Edna Valeska perched on the couch next to me to get into the discussion.
"The good news," she said gloomily, "is that we have proof now that the Cathouse Project works. The bad news is they got it before us, and they're using it; and the even worse news is that there seems to be more than one other time-line involved. There's no other explanation that saves the facts."
"That's the way it looks to me," I agreed, "but who are these other ones?" Shakes of the head. "Christ. I'm not used to this kind of stuff."
Flash of a grin from Edna. "Who is?"
"Well, but it's your project!" I protested. "If you don't know what's going on, who does?"
"I said I wasn't used to it, Senator. I didn't say I didn't understand it—part of it, anyway." She saw my eyes on her cigarettes and plucked one out for me. "For instance," she said, lighting us both up, "we know quite a lot about the time-line of our visitors—the invading ones, that is; the one where you're a major in the army."
"We do?"
"To be sure. They're invading because they want to get at an enemy in their time through the back door—the same as we were preparing to do."
"Dr. Valeska," I said, "we weren't preparing. The mission of the Cathouse was to study feasibility. There were no operational plans."
She shrugged, dismissing the distinction as without enough difference to matter. "There's one other solid deduction, and one other fact. The deduction is that, although they've got pretty far along with time-crossing, there is at least one other time-line that's got farther. The one that produced the first Dominic DeSota."
I noticed that not only had the others in the room begun to cluster around to listen, but even the guard in the doorway was flapping his ears in our direction. Well, why not? Maybe I could read something from his expression. "How do you know that?" I asked, watching the guard out of the corner of my eye.
"Because these other people-we'll call them Population One—can slip one person through at a time and pull him back from the other side. I don't think Population Two—the invaders—can do that." The frown on the face of the guard made that seem plausible, I thought. Edna Valeska was noticing it, too, I could tell. "So," she said, "there's another player in this game."
"So we might have an ally," I said hopefully. "The Population One people might be as vulnerable as we are, only to Population Two."
The guard was goggling at us now, and the look of worry on his face was comforting. We were talking about things that he didn't want to think about. I turned to smile at him. Mistake. He glowered at me and backed away, his weapon stiffly at port arms, no expression at all on his face any more. But that was a kind of confirmation too.
"On the other hand," said Edna Valeska, "if the Population One people were going to do anything for us they had every chance to warn us. They didn't do that."
That was true enough, and I began to feel as discomfited as the guard. "So what's the other fact we know about the Population Two people-the invaders?" I ask.
"The Soviet Union is their principal enemy."
I said, "Yes, so it seems. But that's hard to believe! After the nuke war, when the Chinese did the decapitation bit in 1960, bombing Moscow and Leningrad—"
"Right, Dom," Colonel Martineau put in, "but, you see, in their time that didn't happen. We've pieced that all together, from the things we found out when we were questioned. The Soviets had only one big outside war. Around 1940, I think. They got into a war with Finland, and the Germans got involved—"
"The Germans!"
Martineau nodded. "The Germans didn't have their revolution. A man named Hitler took power, and the war was pretty bad. The Russians won, and after the war they occupied most of Eastern Europe, under their leader, Josef Stalin."
That was toughest of all to swallow. "Now, wait a minute! I know who Stalin was! He ran the country for a while until his assassination. His grandson's a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. He's the Russian ambassador to the U.S. We play bridge. He's a good friend of—some friends of mine," I finished, not wanting to mention Nyla Bowquist. I caught a glimpse of the guard, more cautious this time, but once again definitely listening. "Old Joe," I lectured, "was killed by some kind of Georgian separatist underground. And the English had had their general strike that turned into a revolution. They went socialist, the way they still are, and the Russian Litvinov got to be boss of the U.S.S.R. because he had good English connections. Had an English wife, as a matter of fact. And then, after 1960, the Germans had their counterrevolution and the kaiserin came back, and now they and Japan are the big competitors . . . " I trailed off. I wasn't scaring the guard any more. I was just boring him. Not to mention what I was doing to Edna and Colonel Martineau.
The colonel shook his head. "None of that happened in their time," he said. "For the last thirty-odd years they've only had two real superpowers, the Russians and the Americans. And they want to knock out the competition."
The guard wasn't only bored. He wasn't even listening any more. There was a faint stir from the front of the O's Club, and he was watching whatever was happening there. By then all of us in the room had been casting sidelong glances at our living litmus paper to see when what we said produced a reaction, and when it stopped reacting the conversation died.