"What's he saying, sir?" I asked.
"Why," said the general politely, "he's saying they have-what did he say?—incontrovertible evidence that we're planning to attack his country by means of a parallel time. He's saying that unless we discontinue our 'invasion' at once his people will treat it as though it were an attack on their own country. That's a laugh, isn't it? The Russians protecting the Americans from the Americans?"
I swallowed. "Does that mean—?"
"That they'll attack? Yes, that's what it seems to mean. So take a load off your feet. We're holding off on any further troop movements until somebody figures out what we're going to do-and, thank God, that somebody is higher up than me."
Because she was one of the very few who could understand the man's slurred speech, she was the one allowed to guide his wheelchair over the bumpy, ancient walks of the college. But she could not manage the steps. "I'll find someone to help," she said, and bent to listen to the breathy whisper. "Oh, no, "she said, "it's no trouble, Dr. Hawking!" And she meant it. Even in the sweltering heat of England's hottest August—it had to be over seventy-five degrees!—helping a world-famous scientist to navigate Cambridge's pretty paths was not an imposition. It was an honor. And a responsibility; and when she came back with a husky crew member and an eager Greats from King's College she cried out in pain. "But he couldn't have got out of the chair! "she wailed. Yet there was the empty chair, straps still buckled, footrest still set high for his shrunken legs . . . but Stephen Hawking was no longer in it.
Yr 11—110 111—111, mo 1—000, da 11—101, Hr 1—010, mn 11—110
Senator Dominic DeSota
You do not get used to jumping from one parallel time to another, even when you know it's happening.
I didn't know.
All I knew was that at one moment I was hurrying down the stairs from the President's penthouse, looking for my lady love. Then, without perceptible delay (though it must have been hours, might have been days), I was lying flat on my back, listening to a honeyed voice whisper into my ear that I had nothing to worry about. That's the kind of thing that starts me worrying. I knew a lie when I heard one, and I was worried.
That is, the reasoning part of my head was worried. My body did not seem to be worried a bit. It was lying there perfectly relaxed. I don't think I had ever been quite that relaxed before, except maybe now and then after a really good toss-and-tumble with Nyla, when we'd lie back with every knot in either body untangled entirely. I don't mean that my state was in any way sexual, just that I was wholly and completely at a condition of physical ease.
There was no reason for that. There was every reason in the world why I should have been tense and scared, and should have shown it in taut muscles and twitchy nerves. There was nothing in sight or sound that was reassuring in the least. I was lying on a hard pallet in a room that looked as much like a morgue as anything else I'd ever seen. There were a dozen other pallets, each with a body recumbent on it. It even smelled medicinal and nasty, as I thought a morgue should.
The person who was whispering sweetly in my ear wasn't reassuring, either. She didn't have any face. Or he didn't; you couldn't tell, because there was nothing but a flesh-colored blankness between hair and chin. It moved a little as the voice spoke but showed no features at all. She (or he) was saying, "You will be well treated, uh, Senator, uh, DeSota, and you will be completely at liberty." And he was looking at me (or she was), though I could see no eyes, because s/he was touching me here, touching me there, and everywhere he (she) touched there was a tingle or a pang.
Something was being done to me. I just let it happen.
And that was another thing. I let it all happen. I don't mean I wasn't shaken up—no, scared—hell, terrified! But whatever my conscious mind told my head to be, my body was relaxed and compliant. It did what it was told. It didn't even need to be told in words; touch and gesture was enough, and instantly my body held still, or turned over, or presented a part of itself for the occasion.
It occurred to me at once that I'd seen something like that before, when Nyla No-Thumbs and the others were zapped into sleepy-by before we were rescued from the New Mexican motel. But they had just been asleep. This was much, much worse. And then I had been only an observer. I had not had this present indignity of having my body roll over and elevate its rump for a final shot.
It was at that point I realized I was naked. I might not have realized it then if the voice hadn't said, "You can get up and get dressed now, and then proceed into the hover."
My obliging body pulled on a pair of shorts, a pair of tennis shoes, and a sort of T-shirt from a rack—they all fit snugly, less because they were my size than because they were a kind of fabric that didn't care what size I was. Then my body obligingly walked after the (wo)man and out of the doorless cubicle. No, there weren't any doors. No, one didn't magically appear. All that happened was that she/he walked up to the wall, and kept on walking, and so did I—along with seven or eight equally complaisant bodies belonging to people wearing the same beige one-size-fits-all beachwear.
And, as a matter of fact, we were at a beach. Or close enough. We were at a kind of an airport, curious mixture of the shiny-new and the terminally decrepit, on a hot, hot summer day, with the saltmarsh smell of seawater and dead fish strong on the breeze and waves glinting across a roadway. Behind the stump of a flagpole a cement block had letters picked out in seashells embedded in the surface. The snows of winter and summer suns had done them a lot of harm, but I could still make out what they said:
FLOYD BENNETT FIELD
Behind the squat, white building we had just come out of (there was no door in the outside wall, either), a delta-winged plane came in with a ripping sound of jets at a hundred miles an hour, dropped flaps, rotated its engines, and sat down a few yards beyond the building. It rolled a couple of feet and stopped. The building, on the other hand, began to move. It shuddered, picked itself up, and slid over to the plane; while a quarter of a mile off to one side a bloated-bellied blimp was slithering in to a landing at another new white building. I turned to the happy zombie next to me and said, "Dorothy, I don't think we're in Kansas any more."
He gave me an irritated look. Then the look changed. "Don't I know you?" he asked.
I took a harder look at him. "Dr. Gribbin?" I said. "From Sandia?"
"Bloody hell," he said. "And you're the Yank congressman. What the hell is going on, do you know?"
Well, how do you begin to answer a question like that? As I was casting around for an answer, a voice from behind me saved me the trouble. "It's parallel time," said Nicky DeSota eagerly. "Do you understand about quantum mechanics? Well, it seems that Erwin Schroedinger, or maybe it was one of the people who came after him, proposed a long time ago that every time some kinds of nuclear reactions occur, which can go either way, they go both ways. This means that—"
I turned away to keep from laughing. Here was the mortgage broker explaining Schroedinger's famous conundrum to one of the world's great experts on the subject! But Nicky had an advantage Gribbin had not: he had seen it all happen. Another man in the same shorts and blouse was wandering toward us to listen to Nicky expound. I didn't pay attention. I was looking at this strange world around me, wondering why I was there, whether I would ever get back to a sane life in the Senate—well, strike that; but at least in the Senate it was a kind of insanity I was used to-and wondering, most of all, where my love had gone. There were women in our group, but none of them were familiar. And there was another woman, this one wearing the same white overall, gloves and boots included, that the faceless person who was trying to shepherd us into the bus was wearing. The one with a face was talking to the bus driver, but when she saw us approaching she jumped and hurried away as though we were lepers.