Alternities by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

startling how little difference there was, like the Northside city councilman who was arrested in both worlds for taking bribes. Sometimes the twists were startling enough to make Endicott laugh out loud, such as when the woman he had known as a call-girl madam turned up as the owner of a chain of upscale bedroom boutiques.
    He came by his curiosity honestly. He had spent most of his first three months in this strange twisted reflection of the world studying his own counterpart, at once repelled and fascinated.
    In this world, as in his own, he had done well for himself—perhaps even a bit more so here. His alternate was married, as he had been, but to a different woman—curiously, to a woman with whom Endicott had enjoyed a quiet affair half a dozen years back. When he finally gained entrance to his alternate’s elegant Gates Mills house, he found a hundred familiar objects and a thousand more that were unfamiliar but pleasing to his tastes and sensibilities.
    The truth was that Endicott had not planned at first to kill his alternate and replace him. But here was a power base ready for the taking. And as he thought on it, he saw that it would be easy, an invisible crime. If it even qualified as a crime. He was Walter Endicott. These possessions, this life, belonged to Walter Endicott. To him , if he was bold enough to assert the claim.
    It was that conviction, as much as need or opportunity, which finally moved him. With each passing day, the existence of his alternate distressed him more. Something which came from deep inside him, from the place where the self fights for recognition, came to find the sight of the other to be intolerable.
    He did it by his own hand, at a time of his own choosing. And when it was done, when he had faced himself without flinching and seen himself die without disintegrating, Endicott knew for certain that there were no rules, no cosmic plan, no God. Life truly was a game, and there was nothing to fear in this life but unfriendly Chance and the selfish drives of those more ruthless than himself.
    And understanding that, he intended to see that he was not victimized by either.
Washington, D.C., The Home Alternity
    Peter Robinson finished scanning the two-page summary of that morning’s submarine contact and pushed it back across the nineteenth-century mahogany table toward the Secretary of Defense.
    “This will do for the FNS, but it’s not enough for me,” he said. “A simple answer, please, Gregory. Did we know that sub was sitting in New York harbor? And don’t bother to tell me that it wasn’t actually in the harbor. You know that’s how it’s going to read in the damned Times tomorrow.”
    Gregory O’Neill looked pained. He had already endured a minor dressing-down in the Cabinet Room, before a hastily convened meeting of the National Security Council senior membership. Now they were alone in the President’s private meeting room, and it could only get worse.
    “We knew it was in the area,” O’Neill said. “There’d been contacts off and on for the last two days. But no, we weren’t on it right at the moment she surfaced.”
    “And after?”
    “We tracked it for twenty-six minutes. She picked up the liner Kestrel and ran with her for a while, right under her keel a hundred feet down. Then she turned south and went deep and we lost her.”
    Robinson leaned back in his chair and toyed with a pencil. “I’ve given the Navy fifteen billion dollars for Cyclops on the promise that I’d know when a Russian sub had its nose up our ass. What’s going on here, Gregory?”
    “That’s about the busiest waterway we have, sir. I think the boys with the headphones did a good job to stay with it as well as they did.”
    “Are you telling me that this is the best I can hope for?”
    Conscious of past history, O’Neill hesitated. He had survived longer than either of Robinson’s previous Secretaries of Defense, but the common element in their departures had been an attempt to