We were tired. I showered and brushed my teeth, and while Nicky was doing the same I gazed out at the view of the park, as good as our guide had promised, if somewhat stranger. Just before us in the park was a busy scene, temporary buildings with people moving around and vehicles; but a quarter of a mile farther was only blackness. Bright stars shone in the sky, a sight I had never seen from New York City in my lifetime.
It was a dead city. Only the little space around the hotels was the focus of infection where life was beginning to invade it again.
And it was an empty city—for me it was a wholly empty city, because Nyla Bowquist wasn't there.
It struck me as a sad wonder that Nyla had been in that hotel, maybe in that very room, in our own time. I knew that she stayed in the Plaza when she played at Carnegie Hall, only a few blocks away. Perhaps she had stood at that very window. What she would have seen was manicured lawns, a playground, a lake, hansom cabs lined up at the entrance to the park, and a million cars, taxis, and trucks creeping along the streets that bounded it. What I saw was the bubble-shaped temporary structures, and the lights of a blimp floating down to a landing on one of the clearings. .
I became conscious of Nicky standing behind me, still damp from the shower, running a comb through his hair. "Isn't it wonderful, Dom?" he asked.
I looked at him with resentment—unjustified resentment, because it certainly was not his fault that he wasn't Nyla. "What are you talking about, Nicky? It's exile. We're stuck here forever."
He said, with audible sympathy in his voice, "I know it's tough on you, Dom, because you had a lot to lose. Me, maybe not so much. But it's not just exile. It's a whole new world. Eden! They've given us a new start in life."
"I didn't want a new start in life," I said, "and anyway, they didn't do it for our sake."
"Well, sure, Dom," he said, turning modestly to slip on a pair of pajama pants. "But you have to admit they've put a lot of effort into this. Just fixing up this part of the city for us—do you have any idea what kind of work that means? Getting the water running again when some of the pipes would have ruptured? Starting an electrical generating system?Just cleaning up the garbage-and I don't mean just rotted-out bedclothes. There must have been people in this place when they all died. Bodies. Skeletons, anyway, and somebody had carted them all off before we got here."
"They probably wanted all that for their own purposes, anyway," I objected.
"But we're getting the benefit of it," he pointed out.
"We're being exiled here, sure. That's for their own good too. They were worried about what would happen to them if this paratime stuff went on, not us."
He looked at me thoughtfully as he climbed into his bed. "They didn't have to go to all this trouble," he said. "I mean, transporting us here, feeding us, housing us, giving us clothes—"
"Sure they did! How else could they have stopped research?"
"Well," he said, settling himself under the sheet, "I can think of some people who would have taken care of it a different way. They could have just killed us, you know. Good night, Dom."
After the French-Indochinese wars there were a whole bunch of tribes that couldn't get along with the new governments. Some of them came to America. There was one colony of hill people who wound up in my own state, eighteen hundred refugees who hadn't ever seen a train, a television set, a gas stove, or a vacuum cleaner. Talk about culture shock! But it wasn't learning how to drive cars and run lawnmowers that threw them the hardest. It was the things we take for granted. How to pop open a beer can. How to use a credit card. Why the red light meant stop and the green light meant go. Why you should not urinate other than in an approved receptacle, even if you modestly went behind a tree. When I led the state's congressional delegation down to welcome those Meos, just outside of Carbondale, I was sorry for them, and a lot amused by them.
If any of them had been with me in the Plaza; they could have gotten even. I was as lost and confused as they, and this time it was harder to see the humor in it.
Nicky and I spent the whole first day just learning rudimentary survival skills in the new world. At the end of the day what I had mostly learned was that it was even harder than it looked. It helped a lot that we had that console in the room, because it was not only a television set but a phone, a computer, and an alarm clock. Once we found out what our Personal I.D.'s were-any ten-letter word or phrase we chose; I picked "Nyla my love"—we could unlock its memories and skills, and patiently it taught us most of what we needed to know. From the menus it offered us we could find the answer to almost any question, even to some we had not thought to ask. It told us, for instance, that our room and board wasn't exactly free. We had been given a credit to draw on, but sooner or later we would have to pay it back or starve. How could we pay it back? Well, there were jobs in the hotel if we wanted to get a head start: making beds, cleaning out rooms on the floors not yet finished, serving food, moving furniture. Then when we were released from quarantine there were a thousand projects that needed workers, all over the continent, even all over the world—a whole technological infrastructure needed to be completed. The volunteer colonists who had preceded us had done a lot, but there just were not enough of them to do the job.
Nor could I see where I was going to be of much help. What they needed was pipe-fitters, construction workers, motor mechanics, electricians—people with the skills to build and fix. There weren't any openings for U.S. senators. There weren't very many for quantum physicists, either, which seemed to comprise a large fraction of us Peety-Deepies. The ones that were most useful, I thought, would be the cats—the people who were out of their own time-mostly the twenty-two-year-olds of the invading army, of whom hundreds were in our hotel and thousands more scattered around the other temporary quarters in the city.
One of the things the comset in our room would do for us, once we learned how to ask, was to locate all the other Paratemporally Displaced Persons. The master list was purely alphabetical, and that was hopeless—there were nineteen Stephen Hawkings alone, not to mention nine Dominic DeSotas. (Fortunately only four of us were still in the city, the others having completed their quarantine and reassignment and gone on somewhere else.) But there was also a list reordered by time of origin. There were nearly sixty from my own time. .
But none of them was Nyla Christophe Bowquist.
When we went down for our morning bloodletting on the third day Nicky was nervous. It was an occasion for some nervousness, in a way, because it was important to us to be healthy. Heaven knows, we seemed healthy. We had arrived from our various paratimes positively reeking of germs and viruses and nastinesses of every kind, but our hosts did not tolerate disease. Smallpox, tuberculosis, cancer, and the common cold no longer existed in their worlds, nor did flu or venereal disease or even the caries of tooth decay. They didn't want them brought in. So they had given us any number of shots while we were still unconscious, and they checked the results with a drop of our blood twice a day. What was important about it was that clean blood meant privileges. If we were still clean today, we could switch from the backbreaking labor of shifting furniture to the more refined tasks of serving food. If we stayed clean through the morrow, we would even be permitted to go out into the Street! At least as far as the other hotels on the street, so that we could look for lost friends from our own time, if not actually to cross over and breathe the same air as the natives at their goings-on in the park.