Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Joe had learned how to move the walls of his neurological reality-tunnel, and even how to wander from one tunnel to another without being infected with Chaneyitis, schizophrenia, mysticism, or the other pathological forms of this sixth-circuit Relativistic consciousness.

  He was one of the pioneers of the HEAD Revolution.

  He called it a simulation of satori.

  Once, while very stoned, he had even gone so far as to call the experience “I-opening.”

  DEFECTION

  How many Zen Masters does it take to change a light bulb?

  Two: One to change it and one not to change it.

  —Private Japes of Mr. G.

  NOVEMBER 23, 1983:

  “Defection,” said Roy Ubu. “That must be it.”

  Ubu was a darkish man: his hair was brown, his skin was tan, and he had a penchant for brown suits with matching cinnamon-colored ties and socks. He looked about forty, but was actually sixty-eight. Like Joe Malik, Ubu had been using FOREVER from the day it came on the market.

  “They’re not in Russia or China,” said Sylvia Goldfarb, Scientific Advisor to the President. “You can forget all about that. We know everything about them these days.”

  “They couldn’t have gone to Hell,” Ubu ventured.

  Sylvia Goldfarb raised a sardonic eyebrow. It had been a witless suggestion.

  “They couldn’t have,” Ubu repeated, as if she had confirmed his judgment. “We can rule that out.”

  Sylvia Goldfarb waited. There was something ominous in her waiting. Ubu cleared his throat.

  “I’ll put five men on it right away,” he said.

  The chair squeaked screeee as Ms. Goldfarb leaned forward impatiently. “Five won’t do it,” she said. “This is a priority investigation. We can’t have over a hundred scientists just disappear off the face of the earth. Not when they’re as important as these women and men.”

  “The thing that I can’t figure out,” Ubu said, “is why now? There’s never been an administration so favorable to science—never so many huge grants, not just for work on the space-cities and life-extension, but in computers and transplants and cloning and all over the shop. Why would a group of scientists pick this time to jump ship?”

  Dr. Goldfarb smiled. “Well,” she said, “I’ll tell you my guess. They found something to investigate, something that really excited them, but unfortunately something too far out for the government, even in 1983. That’s what I suspect, and that’s what I hope you’ll find. But until we know for sure, we have to assume that something dangerous may be afoot. Just find one of them, Mr. Ubu, and prove that she or he is doing something harmless, and you will begin to take a great load off my mind.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ubu said, looking sharp.

  He was thinking: This is going to be a pisscutter.

  One of President Hubbard’s first acts on assuming office had been to abolish the FBI—thereby throwing Roy Ubu out of work.

  “The American people survived one hundred fifty years without secret police opening their mail and tapping their phones,” Hubbard said. “They can survive without it again.”

  Most of Ubu’s colleagues fled Washington, seeking employment in police departments and private detective agencies. Roy had stuck around, shrewdly convinced that he understood government better than Hubbard. Within a month he was hired by the newly formed National Bureau of Information.

  The ostensible purpose of the NBI was to collect data for the Beast—GWB-666, the computer that had virtually become a fourth branch of government, since its memory was searched before any important decision was made.

  Actually, since bureaucracies have learned, like other gene pools, to survive over aeons, the NBI replaced many of the functions of the FBI. This was so intricately concealed in the budget figures that neither Hubbard nor any of her close advisors ever found it. (Bureaucracies do not die when terminated; they change names: Gilhooley’s First Fundamental Finding.)

  Still, there was an important difference. Since Hubbard had abolished prisons, the only citizens who had anything to fear from government were those increasingly rare, bizarrely imprinted biots who committed violence against others, and they were only sent to Hell.

  M.O.Q.

  Rhesus monkeys, like other higher primates, are intensely affected by their social environments—an isolated monkey will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than the sight of another monkey.

  —EDWARD WILSON, Sociobiology

  DECEMBER 23, 1983:

  Dr. Dashwood had been rather pensive and preoccupied at lunch that day, back at Orgasm Research in San Francisco.

  “So we take a guy like that—a meathead with no more knowledge of psychology or anthropology or sociology or medicine or history or ethics or logic than he has of nuclear physics—and we give him a gun and a club and a can of mace and turn him loose, my God, to ‘police’ the rest of us. Insanity. Total insanity.”

  That was Dr. Mounty Babbit, the wiggiest member of Orgasm Research’s staff, and, like all too many scientists these days, a bit of a radical. Dr. Dashwood hunched over his steak to avoid getting drawn into the discussion.

  “You want to disarm the police, like in England?” old Dr. Heyman asked. Heyman was still cashing in on the fact that he had once worked with Kinsey and otherwise had nothing to recommend him to any employer. “Would never work here. Americans don’t have the respect for Law and Order that Britons do.”

  “Well, then,” Babbit said calmly, “arm the public. Make sure everybody has a gun and knows how to use it. Even up the odds some way or other.”

  “Rubbish!” Heyman cried. “That would lead to sheer anarchy.”

  Dr. Dashwood painfully concentrated on his watery mashed potatoes.

  “How’s Three-A?” a soft contralto asked him. It was Dr. Harriet Hopgood, aware that the boss was bored by the political discussion. Three-A was part of the code—the research subjects were never mentioned by name in any conversation—and it designated the young lady in laboratory Three, Ms. Rhoda Chief.

  “Very impressive,” Dr. Dashwood said. “She had reached twenty-three when I broke for lunch, and she was still going strong. I left Jones in charge.”

  “Twenty-three,” Dr. Babbit said. “Incredible.”

  “A most impressive woman,” Dr. Hopgood added, a tone of envy creeping into her voice. Dr. Dashwood darted a glance at her plump face and quickly looked away again; she was transparently wistful.

  Just then Dr. Dashwood’s secretary appeared at the table. “A telegram came for you,” she said. “I thought it might be important.”

  When Dr. Dashwood tore open the envelope, he was confronted with a rather curious message:

  King Kong died for your sins.

  Ezra Pound.

  Ezra Pound, thought Dr. Dashwood, now where have I heard that name before? Then it came to him: that fellow who called at an embarrassing moment this morning, from the Fernando Poop Committee (or was it the Hernando Foof Committee?). He looked again at the idiotic message. My God, he thought, some damn crank is trying to put me on.

  Ezra Pound had called when Rhoda was reaching her third thunderous orgasm, and Dr. Dashwood had been on the edge of forgetting all professional ethics and seizing her himself. It had been a weird phone call—all about the plight of Giovani Oops or some such place.

  Fortunately, Rhoda’s orgasms since then had been—comparatively—tepid. Dr. Dashwood had resumed his professional persona, although he was a little bit spacey.

  “I heard a rumor that they’ve got one hundred ninety-eight gorillas working as cops in Chicago,” Mounty Babbit went on.

  Dashwood was getting annoyed. “Freud,” he said coolly, “had an interesting theory about what motivates fear of the police.”

  That put a damper on the conversation, and Dr. Dashwood soon regretted it. Without the distraction of Babbit’s baiting of old Heyman, nothing prevented Dashwood’s mind from circling back, again and again, to the lovely Rhoda, nude, drawing the King
Kong fourteen-incher into her in seemingly interminably ecstasy. Like an arrow, like Ulysses itself, his mind plunged toward that golden-haired and juicily moist little honey-snatch, hot with twenty-three orgasms….

  Science, he reminded himself, is eternal self-discipline.

  But the old Latin joke came back to him: Penis erectus non compos mentis; a stiff prick knows no conscience.

  O Galileo and Darwin, did you have days like this?

  WASHY

  NOVEMBER 30, 1983

  The NBI had assembled a complete dossier on the missing George Washington Carver Bridge, the first scientist to disappear after leaving government employ.

  Ubu had all the facts about Dr. Bridge that had ever been recorded. He knew that Bridge had been born June 16, 1953, in Bad Ass, Texas, and weighed nine pounds, three ounces at the time. He knew that Bridge’s Social Security Number was 121-23-1723, his GWB number 345-36-5693, and his sexual penchant was for light-skinned Black or Oriental women with college degrees who would wear black lace bras while he pronged them. He knew that Bridge had a B.A. from Miskatonic University in Black Studies, an M.S. from the same source in Sociobiology, and a Ph.D. from the University of Ingolstadt in Primatology. He knew that Bridge had been baptized three times—once at the age of two weeks, by the Afro-Methodists via total submersion, again at the age of fourteen by the Roman Catholics by wetting the brow, and a third time at the age of seventeen by the Ku Klux Klan with a pail of cow piss. He knew that Dr. Bridge had left Bad Ass one month later and never returned. He knew that Dr. Bridge had studied or worked in Arkham, Massachusetts, New York City, Los Angeles, Ingolstadt, Bavaria, the Transylvanian section of Hungary, Washington, D.C., and Berkeley.

  He knew that Dr. Bridge was called “Washy” by his classmates at Miskatonic.

  He knew several thousand similar things, none of them helpful in any way toward explaining why Dr. Bridge had disappeared off the face of the earth at the head of a parade of similar disappearees which now numbered 167.

  “I knew this case would be a pisscutter,” Ubu said, contemplating his data.

  The one fact not recorded about Dr. Bridge, and the whole key to his subsequent behavior, was the fact that he had, on November 23, 1971, looked into the infamous Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, in the German translation of Von Junzt (Das Verichteraraberbuch, Ingolstadt, 1848).

  Bridge, not Dr. Bridge then, but just Washy, had been turned on to his odd volume by the Miskatonic librarian, Doris Horus, who knew he took his Black Studies seriously.

  There was one sentence in Das Verichteraraberbuch that turned everything around in Dr. Bridge’s head.

  The sentence was:

  Gestorben ist nicht, was für ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben.

  HOMES ON LEGRANGE

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  The original idea for the L5 space-cities had emerged from Professor Gerard O’Neill and a group of his students at Princeton in 1968. The motion was so radical that it took over five years to get it into print, in Physics Today, in 1973.

  Professor O’Neill had simply asked his students a rather basic question—one which occurs inevitably on every planet which evolves beyond the boom-and-bust cycle of planetside life. O’Neill asked:

  Is the surface of a planet the right place

  for an expanding technological civilization?

  Once the question had been asked, the correct answer was, of course, inescapable.

  Among the symptoms indicating that Closed System planetary industry would have to be transformed into Open System planetary-and-extraplanetary industry were the following:

  Rapid exhaustion of the fossil fuels on Terra, leading to a desperate search for new energy sources;

  The virtually limitless solar energy in space;

  Rising population and increasing longevity, leading to an inevitable new period of swarming;

  Growing pollution and ecological imbalance, caused by the attempt to provide energy from terrestrial sources for this increasing primate population;

  The Revolution of Rising Expectations—a sociological phenomenon brought on by the scientific-technological advances of the previous two centuries—which caused the majority of primates to claim they had the right to a decent standard of living;

  The failure of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations, after the smarter primates realized that lowered expectations meant starvation for the majority of the planet;

  The Hunger Project started by a circuit-five primate named Erhard, who encouraged people to believe starvation could be eliminated;

  The continuous influence of a circuit-six primate named R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller, who insisted the primate brain was designed “for total success in Universe”;

  And, finally, the debacle of terrestrial-based nuclear energy plants, which continually caused havoc in their environments, and which eventually prompted some of the primates to remember that a science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Heinlein, had foreseen all this in a 1940s story, “Blow-ups Happen,” and provided the solution—moving the nuclear plants into space.

  By 1984 over a third of Terras industrial plants had been moved, as O’Neill foresaw, into the L5 area—Legrange point 5, where the gravity fields of earth and moon are balanced. The colonists even had a theme song, invented by another science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Wilson, in a book called The Universe Next Door. The song was “HOMEs on Legrange.”

  A VISITOR FROM FAIRY LAND

  “Participation” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics; it strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind a thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. That can’t be done, quantum mechanics says.

  —WHEELER, MISNER, & THORNE, Gravitation

  MAY 1, 1934:

  “They call it liberalism and socialism, the bastards, but really it’s their own brand of highway robbery. They been after me and Henry Ford and every independent in the country for a hell of a long time. You remember all this, son; you remember what your father told you. It’s a big fortune the Crane holdings and they’re going to be trying to take it away from you, just like they’re trying to take it away from me. I earned every penny of it, when I invented ORGASMOR, and I don’t aim to let them take it away from me or from you. You just remember why all the bankers are Rosenfelt liberals, son; you remember who your real enemies are and don’t think it’s those idiot socialists and other cranks like Townsend, with his thirty dollars every Thursday. It’s those kike bankers who want the whole pie and are just using Rosenfelt as a pawn.”

  That was old Crane, Tom Crane, the man who invented ORGASMOR, talking to his son, Hugh, in Central Park, where sweet birds sang. Tom Crane was more dinosaur than primate: a tough, unsentimental reptile whose wealth was based on a swindle, pure and simple. He never explicitly claimed in any advertisement that ORGASMOR created more orgasms—just that it was “deliciously enticing” and “stimulating to all body cells and tissues” and the FDA never succeeded in proving that his agents had planted the popular mythology attributing lubricity to a product not very different in chemical content from Coca-Cola. A strict constructionist would certainly say that Crane’s customers were being defrauded.

  “It doesn’t poison anybody,” old Crane always answered such nitpickers.

  In fact, Hugh Crane—who was only ten in 1934 and would reach twelve before he discovered that the actual pronunciation of the President’s name was Roosevelt—was only partially listening to his father’s rambling diatribe. He had heard all of it before, many times, and besides, the Mysterious Tramp was much more interesting.

  The Mysterious Tramp, perhaps a visitor from fairy land, was stopping each person who passed and asking them something. They all shook their heads and walked by rapidly. This was puzzling to little Hugh: If the answer was negative, why did the Tramp keep asking the question? Didn’t he believe the people who had already answered? Was he offering a chance to
cross the boundary into magic space and were they all too timid to try?

  “You see, son, Rosenfelt and the Rhodes scholars have it all sliced up and they have to get rid of people like me….” Tom Crane was still rambling along his own paranoid yellow-brick road when they finally came abreast of the Tramp. Hugh listened eagerly to catch the Mystery Question.

  “Hey mister could you spare a dime I haven’t eaten in three days mister hey listen mister …”

  “Get a job,” said old Crane, walking faster. “You see, son, that’s the kind of good-for-nothing loafer who’s destroying this country.”

  But the boy who was to become Cagliostro the Escape Artist looked back and saw the Mysterious Tramp falling to the ground very slowly like a tree he had seen fall slowly after being chopped by the caretaker at the Crane country home out on Long Island, and just like the tree, when he finally reached the sidewalk, the Tramp didn’t move at all, not one bit, and even seemed to get stiff like the tree did, only faster.

  SPOCK? SPOCK? SPOCK?

  DECEMBER 23, 1983