"Oh, hell," said one of the junior scientists, and shrugged to say that it was a general comment with no specific follow-up planned.
Edna Valeska fretted, "Hell and damn. My husband's going to be worried sick. He never wanted me to take night duty. I wish I could let him know I was all right."
"I wish the same thing," I said.
The colonel nodded. "In my line of work my wife's had to get used to this kind of thing—well, not this kind of thing, I mean, but not being able to call her all the time. I know it's different for civilians. I bet you're worried about your wife, Dom."
"What? Oh, sure," I agreed, and didn't add, Her too.
They fed us again before noon. It was canned spaghetti and meatballs out of the dregs of the Officers' Club kitchen supplies, but there was plenty of milk and decent coffee. "Fattening us up for the kill," said one of the junior scientists gloomily, and, on cue, our new guard came into the room with his machine-pistol at the ready, followed by Nyla. Sergeant Nyla Sambok, that was, with two more armed privates at her side.
She looked us over politely. "If you'll finish your coffee," she said, "we're about ready to take you to more comfortable quarters."
"Where's that?" asked Colonel Martineau.
"Not far, sir. If you'll come along now, please." The voice was Nyla's own. So was the "please"—a nice touch, I thought, under the circumstances. The way her troopers unshipped their weapons to cover us wasn't. Whether we had finished our coffee or not, we moved.
We didn't have far to go. Outside the air-conditioned club the desert heat hit us all between the eyes, but we weren't in it long. Out the door. Across the wide and empty base street. Into the front door of the Cathouse, and clattering down a flight of steps to a big, cluttered basement room. Once it had been a pistol range. Now it was full of people with the green invader armbands, some OD-painted things like generators, but with heavy cables snaking outside to where we could hear diesels thudding away . . . and a tall, rectangular screen of featureless jet black.
That was the first time I ever saw a portal. I didn't have to be told what it was. It was simply a blackness hanging in the air, almost big enough to fill the room from side to side; and it was scary. Colonel Martineau snapped: "Sergeant! I demand to know what your intentions are!"
"Yes, sir," she agreed. "An officer will brief you. This is for your own comfort and safety, sir."
"Bullshit, Sergeant!"
But she simply agreed, "Yes, sir," and walked away. She was no longer around to answer questions, and the armed guards obviously had all their answers in their ammo clips.
I watched her go over to the side of the room, where my good old doppelganger-Dominic was standing, with a man who looked somehow odd. Two ways odd. His face was vaguely familiar; and he seemed to be a civilian in borrowed fatigues, like me. He wore no rank insignia, like me; and like me he did not have a green armband.
He was not a prisoner, though, because he was standing before a tail console, making adjustments to some sort of instrumentation. Major Dominic was watching him closely; so was an enlisted man with a carbine. His guard? And if he needed a guard, and wasn't one of us, who was he?
Nyla-the-Sergeant was getting orders from Major-me. She nodded and came back to us. "You'll be going through in just a minute," she informed us.
"Now, hold on, Sergeant!" snapped the colonel. "I demand to be told where you're taking us!"
"Yes, sir," she said. "The officer will explain it all." Martineau subsided, fuming. I took my turn.
"You're Nyla Christophe, aren't you?" I asked sunnily.
Blink of surprise. For the first time she looked at me as though I were a human being, not just a lump of captive meat to be moved around at will. The carbine in her hands remained steady. It wasn't pointed at me, exactly, but it only needed a quarter-turn of her body to zero in on my belly. "That's my maiden name," she agreed cautiously. "Do you know me?"
"I know the one of you that's in my time," I said, and smiled. "She's my . . . friend. She's also one of the world's greatest violinists."
She looked at me curiously at hearing "friend," but I got her full attention when I said "violinist." She looked at me searchingly for a moment. She gave a quick glance toward the major, then back to me. "What are you talking about?" she asked.
I said, "Zuckerman, Ricci, Christophe. They're the top three violinists in the world today. This world. Last night Nyla played with the National Symphony before the President of the United States."
"The National Symphony?" I nodded. "My God," she said, "I've always wanted— Are you bullshitting me, Mr. DeSota?"
I shook my head. "In my time you're married to a real-estate developer in Chicago. Last night you played the Gershwin Violin Concerto, with Rostropovich conducting. Two months ago your picture was on the cover of People."
She gave me a look, partly puzzlement, partly skepticism. "Gershwin never wrote a violin concerto," she said, "and what's People?"
"It's a magazine, Nyla. You're famous."
"It's true, Sergeant," chimed in the colonel, listening intently. "I've heard you play myself."
"Yeah?" She was still skeptical, but she was also fascinated.
I nodded sincerely. "What about you, Nyla?" I asked. "Do you play the violin?"
"I teach it," she said. "I did until the call-up, anyway."
"So you see?" I exclaimed, beaming. "And—"
And that was as far as it went. "Sergeant Sambok!" called a captain, standing by the screen. "Move them out!"
That was the end of it. She was all business then, my Nyla. If she looked at me at all again, it was with the same impersonal interest that the hammer man in an abattoir might give a steer coming up the ramps "Move on, please," she said to all of us, but this time the "please" meant nothing at all.
"Now, listen, Sergeant," Colonel Martineau began, but she was having no more of it. She gestured with the carbine. The colonel looked at me and shrugged. We moved. We lined up in single file, along yellow lines that had been painted so recently on the floor that parts of them were still tacky. There was a broad yellow stripe just before the ominous blackness, like the wait-here line at a customs counter in an airport. The new captain stopped us there, one eye on us and the other on the vaguely familiar civilian.
"When I give the word," he said, "you'll just walk straight ahead through the portal, one at a time. Wait until you are called; that's important. You'll find the other side is the same level as this one, you don't have to worry about stumbling or anything. Anyway, there will be personnel on the other side to help you if necessary. Remember, only one at a time—"
"Captain!" rapped Colonel Martineau, summoning up one last effort. "I demand—"
"No you don't," the captain told him, not rudely, just as anyone with a tricky job might tell somebody else to butt out until the job was done. "You'll have a chance to make any complaints on the other side . . . sir." The "sir" was an afterthought. The tone made it clear that it wasn't to be taken seriously. The captain was a lot more interested in the civilian at the console than in anything any of us might say.
The civilian was interesting enough, actually. He was obviously making some sort of complex balancing adjustment. It appeared that he was trying to keep a red dot on one scale opposite a green one on another. When the red dot drifted away he turned knobs until he got it back. When they were together he called over his shoulder, "Move them out!"
And Dr. Edna Valeska, looking as though she were praying, cast an imploring look over her shoulder at us, shuddered, and walked into the blackness, where she simply disappeared.