The Coming of the Quantum Cats by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

of the way—there weren’t too many of them, because the FBI goons weren’t hard to recognize, and most people turned the other way fast. Into a car, me and Moe on the jump seats, the other prisoner and his guard behind us. A city police car pulled out ahead of us, and we went blasting away, God knows how fast, through city streets and out onto a two-lane highway that snaked away up into the hills.

We drove for nearly an hour. We wound up at a crossroads, two empty highways stretching to the compass points, and a filling station with a motel behind it. The sign over the office said “La Cucaracha Travelers Rest,” which was not a name I would have given to a motel.

I also wouldn’t have put armed guards in the driveway.

The guards were, however, a little decorative touch that I had begun to get used to. So there were good signs and there were bad signs. The bad sign was that I was still under arrest. The good sign was that I wasn’t being taken to Leavenworth or one of the camps, where I would disappear from sight until they got good and ready to let me out—if ever. This was a permanent island in the FBI archipelago. They could not mean to keep me here for very long. They might even let me go.

Alternatively, what part of me might come out of the Cucaracha Motel might be only enough to send home to bury.

I wasn’t given enough time to worry. My silent colleague and I were hustled into one of the cabins and ordered to sit on the edge of the bed and keep quiet, while Moe stood inside the door, glaring a us, and the other one stood right outside. We didn’t have long to wait, though. The door opened from outside. Moe moved out of the way without looking to see who it was.

Nyla Christophe strode in, her hands clasped behind her.

She was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. I could not see her expression, but I could tell that she was gazing at us thoughtfully—I could feel the burning, like acid, where her eyes raked across my face. But her voice was only normally unpleasant when she said, “All right, you guys, you can take those dumb veils off now.”

I was glad enough to do that, because I was stifling inside that thing in the desert heat. The other fellow moved more slowly and unwillingly; and when the veil was off his expression was scared, resentful, unhappy—all the things I would have expected; but what I hadn’t expected was that the face that wore the expressions belonged to Larry Douglas.

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