The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette)

by Neve Maslakovic

  “And yet despite all those issues, he did suggest a cat.”

  “Because he probably had in mind a spherical cat, not an actual one.”

  “What’s a spherical cat?” I asked. Even though I wasn’t a pet person, I knew that there was no such thing as a spherical cat.

  “An approximation of a cat, an idealization. A perfect cat,” Dr. Mooney said. “Ah, here we go,” he added as the printer finished its business. He explained for my benefit, “This is a translation of the original paper in which Dr. Schrödinger first brings up the thought experiment. ‘The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,’ published in 1935 in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften.”

  I glanced over his arm at the densely written paper.

  “It’s this paragraph here in section five,” Dr. Mooney added, tapping his copy. He read the relevant bit out loud. “‘A cat is penned up inside a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device, which must be secured against direct interference by the cat.’” He looked up at us. “See? Schrödinger knew enough about cats to realize that the creature wouldn’t hang around idly next to an experimental apparatus without disturbing it…Almost as if he owned one himself.”

  Dr. Rojas cleared his throat and read out a couple of sentences of his own. “‘Perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none…The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.’ Hmm, pretty cold-blooded if you were talking about your own household companion, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He does say ‘pardon the expression.’”

  “Exactly, as if the cat is just a figure of speech.”

  After a few more minutes of this, Dr. Rojas hurried off to a summer semester class he was teaching, taking his copy of “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” with him, and I commented, “Sounds like you two are at an impasse.”

  “As usual the only way to settle this for sure is with a run into the past,” Dr. Mooney said, taking a lab stool and offering me one. There was work waiting for me back at my office, but somehow I found myself sitting down. “The first task, of course, is deciding where to go,” the professor said, considering the matter. “Academia was just as topsy-turvy then as it is now, so between that and all the war upheavals in Europe, Schrödinger lived in a lot of places: Vienna, Stuttgart, Zurich, Berlin, Oxford, and later in Graz and Dublin. Obviously, we should start by looking in 1935, the year he published his article.” He tapped the paper in his hand. “He was at Oxford then. If we find a cat with him in Oxford, it will settle matters. If we don’t, we might have to go to one of the other places, perhaps all the way back to his childhood in Vienna.

  “I might go to the library to find a biography of Schrödinger so I can trace the evolution of his ideas. And I can pore over his correspondence with Einstein to see if he mentions owning any pets. The real problem will be getting a STEWie roster spot…Perhaps we could piggyback on a run that’s already on the roster.”

  “You need to look at his personal life,” I said.

  “Hmm…What’s that, Julia?” Perched on the lab stool, he had returned his attention to the paper.

  “You need a gossipy book, something that talks not just about his scientific accomplishments but about his home life.”

  “Good point, Julia…Yes, a gossipy book.”

  “What’s that?” I pointed to the whiteboard behind him, where a line had been drawn down the middle. One side said YES, CAT; below was a list of names, each in a different handwriting. The other side said NO CAT, with a list of about the same length.

  “Wagers,” Dr. Mooney explained without bothering to look up from the paper. “This one has everyone buzzing. Dr. Baumgartner is on my side—she is relying on her personal experience with cats—while Dr. Little thinks a cat would have been too much of a distraction to Schrödinger.”

  “Is taking money for bets on campus legal? I’m pretty sure Dean Sunder wouldn’t approve.”

  “We aren’t betting money, Julia, just bragging rights…Still, let’s try to keep Lewis away from the lab.”

  As I left him to it, he called after me, “Any news on your fridge phantom?”

  “Chief Kirkland set up a camera and is recording the lunchtime hour every day. He’ll let me know what he finds.”

  I pulled open the lab door, then stopped. I didn’t know very much about quantum physics, but I did know people. And people, geniuses or not, were simple at heart. They tended to reach for what was nearby. In this case, that meant a feline member of the household.

  I added my name under YES, CAT, then left.

  3

  That night I dreamed of cats. A large number of them, too many to count—a living wave pressing against my legs as I approached STEWie’s basket in the dimly lit lab like a thief in the night. Black ones, gray ones, white ones, spotted ones, all hissing and meowing. I climbed onto the platform, steadying myself on the steel frame, aware of the mirrors towering around it. Why had I come? I wasn’t about to go into the past; I couldn’t—I didn’t have the training, didn’t know how to operate the equipment, didn’t have funding, didn’t have a research topic or a spot on the STEWie roster, and besides, I was needed in the present to find the fridge phantom…

  I was now crouched on the platform, the lab around me lit only by the flickering of workstation lights and the reflections from the cats’ eyes. The platform base felt cool to my touch. The cats, below me, pushed against the sides of the platform, their eyes glowing with meaning, as if they wanted to make sure I went into the past to seek information on one of their own. Or was it the opposite, a warning for me not to go, that the past wasn’t a place for me? The cats pressed into the platform, a heaving mass of bodies, as if trying to either send it on its way or destroy it. The platform was now shaking under my feet, and so were the mirrors around it, oriented towards where I knew not. I tried to hold on, and then I was falling, but I couldn’t tell if I was falling onto the floor, about to smack my head against its tiles, or if I was falling into History, about to hit my head on the pavement of ages past—

  I woke up with a start, sweat pouring down the back of my neck, my head throbbing.

  I turned on the light and rose to get a drink of water. Quinn was on a fishing trip to which I wasn’t invited (but I wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway, truth be told—our marriage had already started falling apart by then), so he wasn’t in the house for me to disturb. The water felt refreshing, and it had the effect of refreshing my thoughts as well. Well, that was a silly dream. As if I would ever be allowed to tag along on a STEWie run.

  I took something for the headache and went back to bed resolved to pay less attention to the bets floating around the TTE lab.

  4

  I headed in to work the next morning, Wednesday, with the headache gone. I had woken up feeling slightly dissatisfied, though there wasn’t any reason for it. Everyone had things well in hand, and the questions I’d been grappling with for the past couple of days would soon be answered. I should have been quite happy to finally have some time to work on the fall course catalog, which was the main item on my to-do list.

  The day hummed along quietly.

  I stepped out midafternoon to refill my coffee at the Hypatia House kitchenette and came back to find a new message on my answering machine from a grad student who only gave his name as Andreas, Department of Paleontology. I suspected what the message would say as soon as he began to speak.

  “Hi, is this the dean’s office? My breakfast is gone—for the second time this month—and I was hoping someone could do something about it.”

  It was well past one, but breakfast was a vague term when it came to grad students; it could refer to a meal anywhere between midnight and midafternoon. The student had been polite enough, but he hadn’t left a contact number, so I had to check the Department of Paleontology website and its list of students and projects. There
he was: Andreas Ioannides, paleobotany.

  I reached him at his desk, asked what was missing—a container of spanakopita and french fries—then assured him the school was looking into things. I didn’t want to be more specific because I knew Chief Kirkland wanted to keep the fridge camera secret as long as possible.

  Next I called the security office and left a message for Chief Kirkland with one of his officers. I had asked Andreas to explain what spanakopita looked like (baked puff pastry with feta and spinach), but Chief Kirkland seemed to be familiar with world cuisine, so I figured he wouldn’t need an explanation. The message I left with the security office was simply this: “Spanakopita and french fries taken. Square glass container, blue lid.”

  About an hour later my cell phone beeped with an email. It was Chief Kirkland. He had written possibly the shortest, curtest email I’d ever received at work:

  On my way with a picture.

  N. Kirkland

  I didn’t remember giving him my email address, but it would have been easy enough to look it up in the internal campus database. I could only assume he meant he had a picture of the fridge phantom. I emailed back a short but sincere reply saying I was looking forward to seeing the picture, and yes, I was in my office and he was welcome to drop by. Then, resisting the impulse to flip through my mental catalog of the possible candidates for fridge phantom, I turned to a more pressing matter. I called Dr. Mooney and reached him at the Coffee Library.

  “Did you know that there are seventy-three breeds of cats, Julia?” he said, skipping any sort of greeting. Before I could answer, he continued: “Not relevant to the problem, of course. I followed your advice and found a gossipy biography. It turns out that Erwin Schrödinger had what you might call a complicated personal life. He had—hold on, let me make my way outside so I don’t disturb the library goers…

  “Where was I? Right, a complicated personal life. Schrödinger was married, but he carried on several affairs, and his wife, Anny, had affairs of her own. When Schrödinger received the invitation to Oxford, the year was 1933. He was living in Berlin at the time, and he was eager to leave Germany because of what was happening there. He managed to inveigle an invitation to Oxford for a colleague as well—not because of politics, but because he was interested in the colleague’s wife, Hilde. At Oxford, things developed…He and Hilde ended up having a daughter together, and he more or less seemed to consider Hilde his second wife, privately and publicly.”

  “Well, whatever floats your boat,” I said. “So did this…unusual household have a cat?”

  “The book doesn’t say. But I did find out that Erwin and Anny leased a house at 24 Northmoor Road in North Oxford for a hundred fifty British pounds per year, with Hilde and her husband living nearby. I don’t suppose anyone on the STEWie roster has research interests in Oxford in late 1934 or early 1935, Julia? Perhaps Dr. May? She oversees a lot of runs to Europe and maybe one of them might overlap in time and—”

  I interrupted him. “Not necessary. You’re in luck. An archeology department run has fallen through. Dr. Taylor has the measles.”

  “Wasn’t she vaccinated?”

  I relayed my conversation with Dr. Taylor. “Apparently, she’s in that tiny subset of people who can still get the disease. She thinks she picked it up from her toddler’s preschool rather than her travels into the past, but the end result is that Friday’s Egypt run has been put on hold.”

  Measles was always bad news, but especially if you were planning on time traveling. Bringing a disease that contagious into a pre-vaccine world would, of course, be ethically questionable, but that was a moot point. That is to say, History would not have allowed Dr. Taylor to step very far from STEWie’s basket if she traveled while contagious…and it certainly wouldn’t have allowed her to cross paths with anyone whom she might infect with the measles virus. Except for the minor detail here and there, time travelers could not change History, and a measles epidemic was definitely not a minor detail.

  I continued: “If you can be ready by Friday morning, I’ll save the spot for you, Dr. Mooney…assuming you can procure Dean Sunder’s approval in time.”

  “Oh, he’ll be on board. I can wander around Oxford and get footage not only of Schrödinger but of other famous historical figures—J. R. R. Tolkien lived just down the street, at 20 Northmoor Road. I’ll see which of my grad students wants to go.”

  “It’s this person here.” Chief Kirkland tapped the laptop screen. “Do you know who that is?”

  I did. The bearded, unruly-haired figure in the picture was Dr. Cook, a visiting research fellow from one of the East Coast universities. He was a big name in his field, experimental genetics, so everyone had been pleased to learn that he would be bestowing his presence on one of our science departments for the summer semester. The paused video showed him midstep, walking away from the biology fridge. He was carrying a glass container with a blue lid in one hand and a napkin in the other.

  “That, I believe, is the spanakopita and fries,” Chief Kirkland said. “Odd lunch combo.”

  “It’s a grad student’s breakfast. And that’s not a grad student. That’s Dr. Lloyd Cook.” I should have seen it before—the mustached and goateed smiley face he’d left on my note had been a self-sketch.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Visiting research fellow in genetics.”

  Chief Kirkland jotted the name down. “Lloyd Cook. How long has he been at St. Sunniva?”

  “Since early June.”

  “And his office is where exactly?”

  “Let me check.” I opened the online campus directory. “He should be listed, even if he’s here only for the semester…Here we go. Second floor, Room 204C.”

  “Two-oh-four-cee. Got it.” In a few efficient movements, Chief Kirkland flipped his notepad and the laptop closed and got to his feet.

  “That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you wanted?”

  “I needed an identification, and Dr. Oshiro wasn’t available.”

  I pointed out that it would have been faster to email me the photo, but he shook his head. “I didn’t want to have to spend time emailing follow-up questions back and forth.”

  I had to admit that made some sense. Fighting off a yawn brought on by my poor night’s sleep, I said, “If you don’t mind me asking, do you have a pet? A cat, a dog, a fish…?”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “A matter that’s come up in the Time Travel Engineering lab has been on my mind.”

  “In that case, I admit to owning a dog.”

  “Would you construct an experiment, even a theoretical one, that might result in your dog being—theoretically, like I said—poisoned with cyanide?”

  This got his attention. “Good Lord, what kinds of things are they up to in the TTE lab? No, I wouldn’t.”

  “What if the dog didn’t belong to you but someone else?”

  “Like who?”

  “A colleague, say. Or, er, a mistress.” I was thinking of what Dr. Mooney had said about Schrödinger’s private life. I had no idea what his own marital status was. “Also, it’s actually not a dog but a cat.”

  “Then it would depend on whether I liked the person or not. Or their cat.”

  I chuckled at that and explained as best as I could about Dr. Schrödinger’s experiment. He listened without interrupting my no doubt jumbled explanation. I added, “So that’s the bet. I’ve put down my name on the YES, CAT side, but I keep changing my mind and wondering if I should walk over to the TTE lab and switch my vote.” The new information I’d received from Dr. Mooney about Schrödinger’s living arrangements had made the famous physicist seem more human, though perhaps less likely to have owned a cat. From what Dr. Mooney had relayed, he didn’t sound like a homebody. “It was quite a cruel notion for him to have developed if he did have a feline companion. On the other hand, if your job is to consider the mysteries of the universe—the gears and springs and weights that make the whole thing tick and shuffle along—maybe every
thing is fair game.”

  “I’d go with your first instinct…though those can be wrong on occasion.” He suddenly pulled back, as if remembering that he didn’t like me very much, and said, “I better get going. I need to have a chat with our Dr. Cook.”

  “You might want to wait until Dr. Oshiro is available,” I suggested. “There is no set protocol here, but it could ease matters.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  With that he left.

  5

  “I thought it would be best if you spoke to him alone,” Dr. Oshiro said to Chief Kirkland. “I still think that was the right course of action, but I have to admit that I find his response to you a little…surprising.”

  “Why? What did Dr. Cook say?” I asked, having arrived midconversation. Dean Sunder was at a late-afternoon off-campus event. He had asked me to attend Dr. Oshiro’s meeting with the chief in his place and report back, leaving any decisions that had to be made with her. Chief Kirkland had his laptop open on a small table in one corner of Dr. Oshiro’s office, where it was streaming the incriminating footage. I took the third chair.

  Chief Kirkland explained, “Dr. Cook claims that according to his life philosophy there is no such thing as private property. Not where life-sustaining resources like food, heat, and water are concerned.”

  “He what?” I said, not quite believing my ears.

  “He freely admits to taking other people’s food. He says he places his own food in the shared fridge several times a week and would be perfectly happy if someone else ate it. In his opinion, it’s not his fault that no one has taken the opportunity. Apparently, he also keeps his house unlocked so it’s available to those who need a place to stay. I don’t know if anyone has taken him up on that opportunity either.”