Still, that wasn't enough to make anybody really nervous. When we'd each given our drop for the morning I asked him what he was worrying about. "The future, Dom," he said indignantly. "My future. This is a fresh start I've got and I want to make something of it—only—only there doesn't seem to be much need for mortgage brokers in this Eden."
"Or for senators," I said. He wasn't listening.
"There's banking, I guess," he said, leading the way as we threaded through the stacks of furnishings in the Palm Court. "I didn't see anything like that listed, but it stands to reason—only this damn arithmetic drives me crazy." He was doing better than I was, at that; binary numbers scared me so much I hadn't even begun to try to understand them, as long as our comset was willing to translate into decimal for us uneducated ones.
I guess what I had said had slowly been percolating through his fog of concentration, because he blinked at me and said, "Oh, yeah. You too. Well, I don't know, Dom, what did you do before you were a senator?"
I laughed. "I was a lawyer."
"Aw," he said sympathetically. "They don't have much of that around here, either, do they?" He stopped and nodded to the foreman of our work detail. "Reporting in, Chuck," he said. "What have you got for us to do this morning?"
"Plenty," Chuck said tersely. He was a black man, still wearing the uniform with the lieutenant's bars on it. He had been a tank commander in the invasion army and thus my enemy, although that didn't seem to matter much any more. What made the difference for us was that he had arrived twenty-four hours before us, so he was a foreman and we were tote-and-carry labor. "There's seventy-five new ones coming in this afternoon, so the ninth floor needs to be cleaned out. Get on it, you two."
By then I wasn't surprised any more to be given orders by someone who was a Peety-Deepy, just like us. That was about all we saw. Even the woman who took the blood from our fingertips was a Cat—well, of course we were all Cats, because this planet had been empty of human beings entirely five years earlier. But there were Cats and there were Cats, and the original colonists stayed out of the quarantine hotels. Now and then we'd see one, complete with face mask and coveralls, coming in to pick up the blood samples or hand out orders. They didn't linger.
So what I knew about the original colonists was scanty, mostly from what we could glean from the comset. The original settlers didn't come from a single paratime. They were from a whole congeries of them, eighteen or twenty different worlds. The way in which they were most different from us was only in that they had learned of the existence of, and managed to establish communication with, each other nearly twenty-five years earlier.
It hadn't all been gravy for them. They'd had some terrible times with "ballistic recoil" before they learned how to minimize it, mostly by limiting their connections to communications channels, with only carefully measured and controlled portals allowing them to, for instance, start to colonize the empty worlds.
But what rewards there were! They had twenty worlds, not one, working to solve the problems of paratime. They had twenty times as many people doing research. And, besides, they had the great asset of being able to "peep" any number of other worlds.
They had, in short, a research and development complex that moved a hundred times faster than our own. They learned everything that anyone else knew. Computer technology from one world, space satellites from another, nuclear fusion from a third, genetic engineering, wizardly chemistry, marvelous medicine—you name it. They had it.
I had plenty of time to think about all that, all the time Nicky and I were swamping out the ninth floor, because Nicky wasn't talkative. He was still fretting away at his private worries, whatever they were. It was only when we'd dumped the last drawerful of rotting shirts and collars into the last cracked and disintegrating pigskin valise and dragged them to the one working elevator that he seemed to come out of it. Out of nowhere, he said, "It isn't so bad here, Dom, is it?"
"That's what we don't know yet," I said, starting down the stairs to dinner.
He followed, shaking his head. "It's tough on us," he said, "because we didn't have anything to say about it. But the original colonists came here voluntarily, and I think they had the right idea. A whole new planet, Dom! Gosh, I kind of like the idea myself. I mean, we don't even have to explore it, or anything—we know where everything is."
I paused on the landing for him to catch up. "What do you mean, we know?"
"It's the same planet as our own, don't you see? All the resources have been mapped. If your people located an oilfield in Alaska, or the Brits of my time found it in Arabia—it's still there in this world! Every resource is waiting for us. And clean lakes, clean rivers, uncut forests, clean air—gee whiz, Dom, doesn't it excite you?"
"I'm more interested in what we're going to get for dinner," I said.
"Aw, Dom! You don't mean that."
I said patiently, "I sort of mean that, because I don't want to think too hard about the future, Nicky. I don't like the idea of being trapped here forever. I wish I could go home."
He looked thoughtful, but he didn't say anything more just then—neither of us did, because we still had six flights of stairs to descend. Only when we'd reached the ground floor and were standing in the line outside the restaurant, he turned around and looked at me. "Dom?" he asked. "Did you ever hear anyone say that we positively couldn't ever get home again?"
"Well, sure," I said, annoyed. "What do you think this is all about? Once they get us all settled they're closing the portal. That's the whole point, to seal us off so we can't mess things up with ballistic recoil. So we're stuck here, right? Or do you think that sooner or later we can build our own portals?"
He shook his head. "No, that's not going to happen. They'll be peeping us all the time. They wouldn't let us do that."
"Then don't talk silly," I snapped. No excuse. I was tired and irritable.
But so was Nicky. "Who the hell are you to tell me I'm silly, DeSota?" he flared. "Maybe you're a big man when you're home, but here you're just another darned Deepy!"
Of course, he was right. Bad habits persist. I had started out thinking of this other self of mine as a wimp. If I diagnosed my feelings toward Nicky carefully enough, they would turn out to be at best tolerance, more accurately contempt.
He didn't deserve that. The contempt didn't belong to him in the first place; what I found contemptible in him was a reflection of the worse side of me. The side I didn't like to think about. The side that kept Nyla Bowquist in a sneaky, sleazy affair because I didn't have the courage to make it right—and that kept its options open, too, so that the other Nylas looked really tempting to me. Because he was me, good parts and bad. Wearing the shorts and shirts of this new Eden, identical to my own, with that cheap, flashy sports suit now no more than ashes in some incinerator, he looked more like me than ever. And what was inside was the same.
"Nicky," I said when we were seated at a table, "I'm sorry."
He flashed a smile. "No harm done, Dom."
"It's just that what we're up against scares me," I apologized. He said firmly, "What we're up against isn't a bunch of supermen, Dom. They're people exactly like ourselves. They know more, because they've swiped knowledge from all over, but they aren't smarter. It's August 1983 in this world the same as yours and mine. They aren't from the future. They're us."