"What we want to know, sweetie," said Nyla, "is everything. If you could just peep, how come you're here?"
"No, no," he said, patiently enough, "that was just at first. That was when I joined, along about the beginning of August 1980. In October we were able to send objects through without retrieving them. And by January 1981 we sent a person through. Me." He added ruefully, "I volunteered."
"And how do you do that?" asked Nyla.
He said, still patient—barely patient, "There is not any person in this room who would have the faintest idea what I was talking about if I told you."
Nyla was keeping very good control of herself, but if I had been Douglas-Alpha I would have watched myself pretty closely. She said shortly, "Try."
Douglas must not have liked the look he saw on her face, because he swallowed and hurried on. "I don't mean you wouldn't understand because you're stupid. I mean there are only two ways to describe it. One is with the words we had to coin as we went along— the portal device generates a stream of green-dip chronons which heterodynes against the natural flux of red-flow chronons. Do you see what I mean? Gibberish, right? And the other way is mathematical and, please, you'd need to know at least basic quantum mechanics to have a hope of following it."
I saw what he meant. So did Nyla, but all she said was, "Tell us what the dates were."
He shrugged. "Dr. DeSota's doctoral dissertation was, I guess, the first rigorous proof that there were quantum effects of the kind Schroedinger proposed. That was about 1977. It's what made me go back for my doctorate. Then he and Elbert Gillespie detected the actual chronons in 1979, and developed the peeper a few months later. Then, like I said, I went through to Gamma."
He stopped, waiting. Nyla was thinking. "So you defected," she said.
"I helped them," he corrected. "I didn't have any choice, did I?"
"And you could help us," she said and smiled, all sex and sunshine again.
"Now, wait a minute!" he objected. "I—! Maybe I could try, but— Look at that wire recorder! If that's the best you can do, you don't even have solid-state technology. I need something to build on, you know!"
She said gently, "How about building on the entire resources of the United States government?" And when he frowned: "You did it for the-what do you call them? The Gamma people-"
"But they threatened to beat the hell out of me-"
He stopped short, gazing at her.
She smiled. She waited a moment to let it sink in. Then she did something I would not have expected. She got up, still smiling, walked over to him and sat on the arm of his chair, her hand on his far shoulder, her body pressed against his head. If I had suspected she wore nothing under the blouse before, now I was sure of it. She toyed with his ear. "We don't threaten," she said silkily. Another pause, while Douglas glared around the room: trapped animal being offered bait. "On the other hand," she went on, her voice softer and huskier, "we do reward. Oh, yes, hon, we reward. I would personally reward you every way I could."
I could almost smell the pheromones steaming out of her.
So could the local Larry Douglas. "Bitch," he whispered, so softly that I could barely hear him, though he was right next to me on the edge of the bed. "You know what she's up to? She's ambitious, old Nyla is. She's going to use this to get right out of the FBI, right up to the top. And when she gets that poor son of a bitch in bed, he'll do anything she wants—believe me, I know!"
He stopped, because Moe was glowering at us.
He hadn't stopped in time. I swallowed, and my saliva had a sudden bitter taste of rage. How crazy that was! I was jealous! I was jealous of the little rat sitting next to me, so hotly jealous I could barely keep my hands off him, and for what? Because he had bedded this other Nyla!
Crazy.
It was worse than crazy. I knew it. I didn't care. If I could have pushed a button and exterminated the bastard, I would have done it in a hot minute. Not just him. The one she was whispering to across the room too—especially him! Not just even him. I was willing to extend my detestation to all Larry Douglases, or even look-alikes, like my old acquaintance and drinking buddy, His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador, the Honorable Lavrenti Yosifovitch Djugashvili.
It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get.
I was so filled with rage and jealousy inside my own head that I hardly noticed when Nyla sat up straight, scowling. She glared at the window. "Moe," she ordered, "close the damn blinds! I don't want the whole world gaping in here!"
"Chief," he protested, "nobody's looking in—"
"Close them!" And she turned back, all smiles again, to the man who was obviously responding to whatever it was she had been whispering.
And I was on fire.
It was obsessive. I wanted to possess that woman, right then, and I was willing to kill anybody who challenged me for her. I was paying so little attention to anything else that I hardly noticed the faint thwick sound that came from nowhere, was distracted only on the surface of my mind when Moe, turning away from the window, seemed to trip and fall forward, crashing into the wire recorder. I did not fully come back to reality until Nyla herself jumped up, face suddenly full of shock and anger, opening her mouth to yell— There was another thwick.
Nyla, too, fell like a brain-shot deer. I could see a tiny feathered dart gleaming out of the thin fabric over one shoulder.
We looked at each other in amazement. And then all questions were answered for me as there was a quick puff of air pressure, like a door slamming closed on a tight, tiny room, and there, grinning at me, was me. That other me that wore the funny coveralls. "Hello, again," he said, nodding. "Here, give me a hand, let's get her out of the way."
The Douglases were quicker at following orders than I; they jumped, however bewildered, and tugged the sleeping woman out of the middle of the floor.Just in time. Another quick, silent pulse of pressure, and a tall, cylindrical metal object appeared on the floor. "Just keep quiet, please," the new Dominic ordered. He pulled open a panel on the cylinder, fussed with what was inside, and looked up, waiting.
A shimmering oval of blackness spread itself before us.
"Looks like it's working," he said, and shrugged. He was smiling. I found myself smiling back—whoever he was, whatever he represented, it was not likely to be worse than what I had here. He glanced around the room. "We'd better not hang around," he said, "but I think we ought to take these two along with us. Let's get the woman through first."
By then I was functioning well enough to help, though it was no great effort for four of us to lift Nyla's sleeping form through the black oval. It was, however, truly eerie—not just to watch her disappear, inch by inch, but to feel unseen hands on the other side catch her and pull her through.
The apeman was a lot harder. But there were four of us, not counting the help on the other side. "Now all of you," ordered the Dominic-in-charge. We obliged: the wimpy Dominic wonderingly, the ratty Douglas resentfully, the snakebitten Douglas fearfully— and me fairly fearfully, too, as I followed them.
Hot dark night, except for floodlights. I came out on a rough platform of wood, with two men in civilian clothes grabbing my arms. "Just move away, please," one of them said, eyes on the spot I'd come from.
In a moment the black cylinder appeared.