I thought that over. "Well, you're right," I said. "Is that what you meant before? That all we have to do is catch up, and then we can do what we please, won't have to get their permission?"
His face fell. "Not exactly," he muttered. He didn't explain what he really did mean, and I didn't press the point.
As I learned later—much later—that was a mistake.
When I first got elected to the Senate I had to learn a whole new life in no time at all. There were a lot of privileges I had to learn how to use: the senatorial bell-ring that brought an elevator to me at once, no matter how many other people were waiting on some other floor; the right to the little subway that took us from our offices to the Capitol; franking mail; the facilities of the gym and sauna reserved for senators only. I also had to learn the less agreeable things, like never appearing in public again without a fresh shave, and responding to every greeting from a passerby, because you never knew who might be a constituent. With all that, for the first couple of weeks I hardly remembered at all that I'd had a life in Chicago before.
It was the same here—almost. I had so much to learn that I almost forgot the world I had left behind. I forgot the farm bill. I forgot the war that had been raging when I was kidnapped. I forgot Marilyn, even—well, I'd had plenty of practice at forgetting my wife, for some time.
I didn't forget Nyla.
The more surely it seemed that I would never see her again, the more certain I was that I had lost something very important to me. All that Nicky said about this world was true. I could easily imagine that, once the transition period was over, I could build quite a good life for myself in this new Eden. Could do productive things, meet a handsome woman, marry her, have kids, be happy. . . . But whatever my life might be without Nyla, it would be only second best.
That feeling did not go away.
By the fourth day we were certified reasonably clean, which meant privileges. For one, both Nicky and I were reassigned to food-handling instead of shifting garbage—a big step upward. For another, we were allowed outside!
To be sure, we couldn't wander at random, and we had to take measures to avoid contaminating Eden's pure air with our still potentially disgusting breath. Nicky and I lined up for I.D. badges, coveralls, and micropore masks. He went one way. I went another.
What I had in mind was to look up some friends in one of the other hotels. The comset had told me that the Dom DeSota who was a physicist was located just cat-a-corner across the square, in another of the abandoned hotels that had become Cathouses.
It had rained hard the day before, while we were cooped up. The air was cooler and dryer, and the tall trees that stretched all up along the edge of the park were bending in the breeze. There were plenty of people in the streets, strolling or hurrying from one place to another. A few of them were faceless, like myself; the ones who were not gave us masked ones a wide berth. I didn't mind. Just being out of the hotel gave my spirits a lift. I wished that Nyla were there with me, walking hand in hand along the streets of this wondrous new place, but even without her I was cheerful. By the time I entered the lobby of the Pierre I was almost beaming, and the first face I saw was a familiar one. He was sitting on the counter of the old registration desk, talking irritably into an old two-piece telephone. "Which one are you?" I asked, peeling off my face mask. He gave me a scowl.
"I'm the one you got into this trouble in the first place, schmuck," he said bitterly. So he wasn't Lavrenti Djugashvili or the scientist; he was the con man from Time Tau.
"I'm not the one you think I am," I told him. "I'm the senator; Nicky's my roommate, in the Plaza."
"I hope he rots there," he said. Then he put down the phone and shrugged. "Hell, I guess I don't mean that. No sense hanging on to hard feelings, right? Want a cup of coffee?"
Well, he was trying to be nice. And he had coffee! There were advantages to knowing a con man, even here and now, I could see. So we sat and talked for a while. I told him what little there was to tell about Nicky and me. He told me more than I wanted to know about himself. He'd roomed the first night with Moe-the FBI man! He saw my look and shrugged. "Like I say, no use carrying a grudge any more, is there?" But Moe had found another Moe-another identical copy of himself, and the two of them had decided to room together. More than that, they'd found out there was still a third one, and they'd made plans to go off together when they left quarantine—maybe to sign up for construction on the new natural-gas pipeline that was going to go from Texas to somewhere in Southern California, maybe join an advance crew in one of the cities that hadn't been refurbished yet, maybe get into dam building down in Alabama, the place they called Muscle Shoals. There were always plenty of jobs for big guys with brawn. And did I know that Nyla was in the hotel?
Sudden rush of hope and shock. But, of course, the Nyla he was talking about wasn't my Nyla. It was the FBI woman.
I drank the rest of the coffee without tasting it, listened to the rest of Larry Douglas's gossip without hearing it. What was on my mind was a moral question, and it filled my mind. The Nyla I loved was hopelessly out of reach.
Was I willing to settle for another Nyla?
I did not even consider the question of whether that other Nyla, that hard-bitten policewoman, would settle for me. That didn't really matter. The answer I was looking for was in my head, not hers. Who was it I loved? Was it the physical, corporeal female human being with whose body my body found so much pleasure? Was it the traits and graces of the Nyla who played so beautifully on the violin and behaved so warmly, kindly in all the intercourse of the world? Would I have loved Nyla Bowquist less if she had been less able to show me the difference between Brahms and Beethoven-or less used to the glamour and excitement of the elite world we both moved in? Would I have loved her, in short, if she hadn't been famous?
Or—getting rapidly down to basics, the kind of question that never has an answer that makes sense-what did I mean by "love," anyway?
When you get into that kind of navel-gazing soul-searching it isn't too easy to keep track of what is happening in the real world. It wasn't surprising when Larry Douglas's prattle slowed down, then stopped.
I came to. He was gazing at me disagreeably. "Sorry," I said. "I was thinking."
He sniffed. "Mind telling me what it was you came here for?" he asked.
"I was looking for Dominic DeSota—the other one, the scientist."
"Oh, them. There's a bunch of them that spend their time talking about paratime and all that stuff. There's a couple of me there too. You'll find them in the bar, probably."
I did. It was as he described. There were ten or eleven people in the bar, nursing beers and talking animatedly. Two of them were Larry Douglas, four were Stephen Hawking in one state of health or another, two were John Gribbin, of whom I had met two examples at Floyd Bennett Field. They didn't even look around when I came in. They were, as the con man had said, comparing notes.
I went behind the bar and picked out a can of beer for myself, half listening to them, mostly thinking about my own problems. It wasn't hard to think, because their conversation didn't disturb me a bit. I didn't understand a word of it. "We started with oltron fission," one of them would say, and another would cut in, "Hang on a minute. What's an oltron?" And the first would say something like, "Uh, it's charged, it's light, it has a point-five variance-" and the other would say, "Variance?" And then they would start drawing particle-reaction diagrams until one of them would say, "Oh, you mean a Neumann body! Right. And it splits into an aleph-A and a gimmel, sure." And they would be off again. I let it all wash over me until the Dominic DeSota turned around to reach for his beer and saw me there.