Oh, boy, did I! I didn't have to answer. She knew the answer and went right on, "Let me start from the beginning. Suppose—"
She hesitated. Then she shrugged and grimly raised her right hand, the four fingers spread and the missing thumb nakedly, shockingly obvious. "Suppose I hadn't got into trouble with the law when I was seventeen. Suppose I grew up in a normal way. My life would have been a lot different, wouldn't it?" I nodded, meaning I guessed so but I was too lost to have a useful opinion; Douglas just went on looking stricken and grim. "So there might have been one life in which I grew up just the way I did—the way I am now, right? And there could have been another one in which I became, oh, I don't know. A musician. Maybe a concert violinist."
Her expression didn't really change, but I got the idea from something in her eyes that she was waiting to see if I would laugh at that idea. I didn't laugh. "See, I would have liked that at one time," she said. "And the thing is that you can't say one of those possibilities is real and the other is just imaginary. Not any more. Because they're both real. All the possibilities are real, maybe. It's just that we only live in one possibility, and we can't see the others."
I darted a glance at Douglas. He was as lost as I was, and a lot more scared—probably, I thought with a sinking feeling, because he knew more than I did about what was likely to happen to us.
"Hell with that," she said suddenly. "Come on, I'll show you. Moe!"
The door popped open, and the bigger goon filled the doorway. Nyla pushed past him, beckoning for us to follow. It was unbelievably hot outside in the sun. Her footsteps were unsteady—partly sun; partly high heels in the sand; mostly, I thought, either champagne or pure delight in her probable future. She led the way to another cabin, with a previously unobserved FBI man hulking in front of it. When Nyla Christophe nodded he threw the door open. She peered inside, then nodded to Douglas and me.
"Take a look," she invited. "Here's two good possibilities for you."
I still did not have an idea in the world what she was talking about, but I did what I was told. There were two men in the room. One was over in the corner, gently patting cream onto one of the worst cases of sunburn I'd ever seen. He had no shirt on, and he was lobster red to just above his wrists, and down to a V around his neck. With his hands over his face I couldn't get a good look at him.
The other was closer, and not moving. He lay flat on his back on one of the beds, his eyes closed. Snoring. He looked like he'd had a hard time. I don't mean just the routine hard time that you expected when you were an FBI prisoner, I mean he looked half dead. And he looked— -
"Douglas!" I yelled. "It's you!"
Douglas didn't say a word. It hit him harder than it did me. He was strangling, eyes popping. I could see he was trying to ask a question, so I asked it for him. "What's the matter with him?" I asked.
Nyla Christophe shrugged. "He'll be okay. Sunstroke and exposure, and he got himself bitten by a rattlesnake. But he's had all his shots, and the doc says he'll be good as new tomorrow. But you didn't take a good look at the other guy yet, did you?"
And so I did. And he turned and looked at me. And the face was sunburned and raw, and the expression was grim, but the face was a face I knew very well.
"My God," I said. "He's got to be the guy from Daleylab!"
"Close," said Nyla Christophe cheerfully, "but he says he's not. He says lots of things, DeSota, things you wouldn't believe; he's been talking steadily ever since the train crew picked the two of them up in the desert last night. He says all those possibilities are really real and that there's plenty more like him around—in one of those possibilities or another. But you're kind of missing the point, DeSota. What he mostly says—and what all the tests say, every one of them—is that he's you."
At this hour of the night the big underground parking garage was deserted, and the lawyer wished he hadn't worked so late as he tried to remember where he'd left his car. You never could find a policeman when you needed one! He felt he needed one now—two rapes, a murder, nobody knew how many mugg'ings in the garage in the past few months. Then he rounded a corner and saw two uniformed men patrolling, with tommy guns slung over their shoulders. "Good evening," he said, feeling better at once—until he observed that their uniforms were gray-green shoulderboarded things, with forage caps quite unlike the checkerboarded ones of the Chicago police force. Worse, when they challenged him he recognized the language. Russian! Instinctively, he turned and ran, his shoulder blades crawling. He heard a burst of shots, but no bullet struck him. And when, stuck at a dead end, he turned, sobbing, to confront them, they were gone.
26 August 1983
7:40 P.M. Senator Dominic DeSota
All that afternoon I had been staring longingly out the window at the pocket-sized swimming pool in the courtyard, sweating by the bucket and my sunburn tormenting me every minute. It wasn't just the sunburn or the heat that tormented me. Somewhere not far from here-but hopelessly walled away from me by whatever it was that separated one time-line from another—my country was being invaded, and somebody wearing my face had gone on television to give aid and comfort to the invaders. I could not remember any case in the history of the United States since the Civil War when any elected U.S. senator had done anything like that, What were my colleagues thinking of me?
What was Nyla Bowquist thinking of me?
I didn't even know what I thought of myself any more. The last forty-eight hours had been the worst of my life. It had been a terrible shock to find out that the Cathouse represented some kind of reality, and that there were infinite numbers of worlds just like my own, many of them with a Dominic DeSota, indistinguishable from me by any test. I had been taken prisoner by one of them. I had knocked out a woman who was, exactly, the woman I loved, and been held prisoner by another copy of her, not quite exact because of her mutilated hands. I had kidnapped a man. I had suffered the shock of invasion of my country by my country. And I had suffered the damnedest worst case of sunburn, trudging through the empty desert without food or water, of my life, and it hurt.
One way or another, it all hurt . . . and they wouldn't even let me get in that pool to cool off.
It wasn't forbidden, exactly. It was just something that could not be permitted by anyone but that other Nyla, and she was off on some errand of her own. The washbasin in the corner was no substitute. Every half hour or so I would splash water over my bare skin; on the quarter hour I would try gingerly to put on some of that useless sunburn cream they'd dug up for me. Those things gave me something to do. They didn't help much.
What also didn't help was the presence of my involuntary traveling companion, Dr. Lawrence Douglas. Most of that long day he lay unmoving in the bed. That I could understand. He'd gone through most of what I had: the same sunburn, the same endless hours of heat and thirst, wandering through the empty desert. And worse. Not only had he managed to get himself snake-bitten, and had the antivenom shots that were almost as bad as the bite, but he'd been shot full of pep juice of some kind so Nyla No-Thumbs could interrogate him. I hadn't been there to share it, but when they put him back in our room, by then unconscious again, he'd had bruises to add to the burn.
I didn't try to wake him.
I didn't have to wake him. When I turned unexpectedly away from the washstand I caught his eyes on me. He closed them at once, but not in time. "Oh, hell, Douglas," I said wearily, "if you want to sleep, sleep; if you want to wake up, wake up; but what's the use of faking it?"