I groaned. "Hellfire. I don't think I'll ever learn all this stuff."
He said cheerfully, "Sure you will, Dom. After all, as I said, you don't have any choice."
I couldn't spend all my time mooning over Nyla, or even learning. There were decisions to be made. Not just decisions; we had to go to work. We could not stay in the Plaza forever, because the quarantine quarters had to receive thousands of new cats, arriving every day. Nor could we go on halfheartedly working at chambermaid and busboy jobs, because there were no free rides in Eden. There couldn't be. Before the mass transfers there had been hardly fifty thousand venturesome pioneers on the whole planet, whether malcontents or heroes. Now nearly two hundred thousand cats had already been transported to strain the resources available, and the number would more than double before the transfers were complete. Every one of us needed food, housing, all the million little gadgets and services and conveniences that made up civilized life. Food most of all. I had never been even a backyard gardener, but my first job-hunting trip was up to the north end of the park, where crews were busy harvesting lumber, pulling stumps, plowing fields, sowing winter crops. My second was down to the Brooklyn Bridge, where there were engineers testing the strength of the cables and supports, and forty times as many people chipping rust and slapping on paint to get the old bridge ready for service again. My third and fourth and fifth were all over the city, where the jobs were repairing water mains and power lines, or checking out apartment buildings to see if any could be made livable for the winter, or collecting scrap that would (somehow) be transported to the steel mills that would (somehow) be put back in operation to create new plows, and cars, and I-beams out of the discards of the old times, pending the day when the Mesabi iron mines could (somehow) be started up again for ore. Oh, there were jobs, all right! There were more jobs than there were people. It was just that none of them seemed to be for a man whose basic skills were making speeches, running fund raisers, and conniving to trade a pilot-training program here for a slum-clearance project somewhere else.
"It'll be fine," Nicky encouraged. "Gosh! They need everything, Dom, and sooner or later they'll need government people too. You'll make out, and so will I. When Greta comes—" He clasped his hands with a seraphic smile. "A home! A wife! A family—a big house, with a half acre of ground, surrounded by tall hedges so we can go skinny-dipping any time-"
"I've got an interview," I said, and left him with his dreams. I wasn't lying. The "interview" was with the woman at the Biltmore, and she recognized me at once. "Dominic DeSota, right? Just a minute." And she huddled over her comset, studying the screen.
And then her expression clouded.
I could feel what was coming even before she found the words she was looking for. "I'm really, really sorry," she began, and didn't have to end.
I had a smile all ready, saved up for some time when I would need a smile a lot. When I put it on, wonders, it worked. "Those are the breaks of the game," I said, grinning at her. "Well, honey? You doing anything special tonight?"
The smile might have fooled her, but I could see that the tone of voice was a dead giveaway. She was a good person. She had probably already had to tell five hundred of us Peety-Deepies that their nearest and dearest couldn't really see their way clear to a new life in a new place. "A lot of people get really frightened about paratime travel," she said.
The smile was beginning to ache, but I held on to it and made an effort at conversation. "Who doesn't?" I asked, and managed a shrug. "Nyla's as brave as anybody, but this kind of thing is an awful lot to ask. I don't blame her. If the positions were reversed, I'd probably say no, thanks, too—anyway, I'd have to think it over pretty hard. . . ." I trailed off, because the woman was looking puzzled.
"What did you call her?"
"Nyla. Nyla Bowquist. Is something wrong?"
"Oh, hell, "she said, busy with her keyboard again. "You're that Dominic DeSota. I just can't keep you straight—same room number and everything; it was a woman named Greta that said no. Yours—" She frowned at the screen, tapped out a command for a double check, and then looked up at me with a smile of heavenly gold. "Your request was for Nyla Christophe Bowquist, and she accepted. She's already at Floyd Bennett for preliminary disinfection. She should be here in the hotel by tomorrow morning."
Staff Sergeant Nyla Sambok wasn't a staff sergeant any more, because nobody was. The American Army had been disbanded, along with the Soviet, by the League of Nations' peacekeeping forces. She still wore her uniform, however, dirty and wrinkled though it was. She didn't have anything else. As she waited in the Indianapolis terminal for the train home, the ex-captain on the bench next to her was listening to a little radio. It was repeating the terms of the one and only message her world had received to explain what had happened. We have removed all of your temporally displaced persons and your researchers in paratime physics, as well as inducing radioactivity to make your research centers unusable. No further research in this area is permitted. Nyla Sambok didn't need to hear it again. She only wished it had come earlier. The submarine-launched cruise missiles the Americans had not known the Soviets owned had been only marginally effective. Still, they had taken out Miami, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. The bomber-launched smart bombs the Russians had not known the Americans owned had done the same for Leningrad, Kiev, Tiflis, Odessa, and Bucharest. It was the prevailing opinion that the worst was over, since the exchanges appeared to be under the limit for a nuclear winter to follow. It would be months, though, before anyone knew.
Yr 11—110 111—111, mo 1—010, da 1—100, Hr 1—000, mn 1—111
Nicky DeSota
Mary Wodczek, the pilot of the blimp, came back to wake me up when we were somewhere over Scranton, or anyway where Scranton used to be. "Wakey-wakey," she called through the door. "New York in about an hour."
I called out thanks and crawled out of the crew bunk, shivering. They kept the living spaces in the blimp at what was supposed to be a bearable temperature, but it wasn't anything like Palm Springs. While I was getting up enough courage for a shower Mary called again, to make sure I was awake, "You know we're going to be airborne again before sundown, don't you?"
"Go fly your blimp," I advised through the door. I heard her friendly laugh, and then she was gone. Before my nerve failed me I stumbled into the little shower. It wasn't as cold as I had feared. It was warmer than the air, anyway, but all the same I was glad to get out of it and into some clothes, so I could get started on this day.
It was a holiday for the collective, which was why I was able to take the time—that, and working a weekend or two to build up some reserve. We might call it the toddy-ott of ooty-pod, but we still celebrated the twelfth of October as Columbus Day—anyway, most of us did. You couldn't expect the displaced Arab and African date growers who farmed outside our crop areas to get all mellow about the discovery of America. Columbus Day was just one more American eccentricity to them; the Ethiopian who ran our pumps had asked me when we put the tree up to decorate for the Columbus bunny.
Most of us were U.S.-born, though, and nearly all of us were cats. I mean the involuntary kind of cats. The farm community had been set up originally by the restless colonists from the twenty-era congeries, but they weren't that fond of farming. As we PeetyDeepies moved in, they moved out, to do what they considered more interesting things in this new world.
That suited me well enough. We were all equal in the Desert Agricultural Consort. That's not to say that any of them knew anything about Tau-America—my America. I hadn't found a single person who had ever heard of the Moral Might Movement. They didn't have rich Arabs buying up everything in sight—the only Arabs were part of the collective, just like me. They didn't have laws prohibiting drinking by those under thirty-five, or prohibition of abortion or contraception, and there wasn't any rule about how much of your skin you had to keep covered up. (Except the natural law, of course. No sane person wanted to expose too much skin to the California desert sun.)