Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  After three years the question still came to him when he had too much booze aboard: Why me?

  Which was selfish and maudlin. The real question should be: Why my mother?

  Or, more to the point: Why anybody?

  The world must be mad, that we go on living like this, and tolerate it. The primordial jungles were probably less dangerous than the streets of any city in Unistat. Was this the resultant of the long struggle upward from the caves—a world more frightening, more full of hatred and violence, more bloody than the days of the saber-tooth?

  Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It’s almost as if they’re afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing.

  With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that.

  So much for booze as a tranquilizer.

  He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum …

  “Nice night.” An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony.

  “You don’t feel the smog up here,” Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him.

  The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. “The stars,” he said, “don’t they get to you?”

  Benny looked up. “I used to think I’d live to see people go there,” he confessed, suddenly sure he had met this man somewhere before, a long time ago. “Not likely with Lousewart leading us back to the Stone Age.”

  “You’re non-ec,” the man said, in mock accusation.

  “Guilty,” Benny replied, realizing that this man was remarkably easy to talk to. “I think that if we used more of our brains, we’d be able to create a world where people would have a right to High Expectations.”

  “Hopelessly reactionary,” the man said, grinning. “You probably still read science fiction.”

  “Guilty again,” Benny said.

  “Suppose I were an extraterrestrial,” the man said quietly. “Suppose I were several million years ahead of this planet. What one question would you ask me?”

  “Why is there so much violence and hatred among us?” Benny asked at once.

  “It’s always that way on primitive planets,” the man said. “The early stages of evolution are never pretty.”

  “Do planets grow up?” Benny asked.

  “Some of them,” the man said simply.

  “How?”

  “Through suffering enough, they learn wisdom.” Benny turned and looked at his odd companion. He is an actor, he thought. “Through suffering,” he repeated. “There’s no other way?”

  “Not in the primitive stages,” the man said. “Primitives are too self-centered to ask the important questions, until suffering forces them to ask.”

  Benny felt the grief pass through him again, and leave. He grinned. “You play this game very well.”

  “Anybody can do it,” the man said. “It’s a gimmick, to get outside your usual mind-set. You can do it too. Just try for a minute—you be the advanced intelligence, and I’ll be the primitive Terran. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Benny said, enjoying this.

  “Why me?” The stranger’s tone was intense. “Why have I been singled out for so much injustice and pain?”

  “There is no known answer to that,” Benny said at once. “Some say it’s just chance—hazard—statistics. Some say there is a Plan, and that you were chosen to learn an important lesson. Nobody knows, really. The important thing is to ask the next question.”

  “And what is the next question?”

  Benny felt as if this was easy. “The next question is, What do I do about it? How ever many minutes or hours or years or decades I have left, what do I do to make sense out of it all?”

  “Hey, that’s good,” the stranger said. “You play Higher Intelligence very well.”

  “It’s just a gimmick,” Benny said, feeling as if a great weight had been taken off him.

  They laughed.

  “Where did you ever learn that?” Benny asked.

  “From a book on Cabala,” the man said. “It’s a way of contacting the Holy Guardian Angel. But people don’t relate to that metaphor these days, so I changed it to an extraterrestrial from an advanced civilization.”

  “Who are you? I keep feeling I’ve seen your face….”

  The man laughed. “I’m a stage magician,” he said. “Cagliostro the Great.”

  “Are you sure you’re not a real magician?” Benny asked.

  SCHRÖDINGER THE MAN

  Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

  —NEILS BOHR, QUOTED BY BEYNAM, Future Science

  Erwin Schrödinger did a lot more than just make up mathematical riddles about fictitious cats. His equations describing subatomic wave mechanics, which earned him a Nobel Prize, were among the most important contributions to particle theory in our century. Later, he turned his attention to biophysics and in a small book called What Is Life? he offered the first mathematical definition of the difference between living and dead systems, throwing off as a side reflection the idea that life is negative entropy. This insight was to trigger quite a few new ideas in many of his readers, including Norbert Wiener of MIT and Claud Shannon of Bell Labs, who got so deep into negative entropy, due to Schrödinger, that they created mathematical information theory and laid the foundations of the science of cybernetics, resulting ultimately in the Beast.

  Schrödinger didn’t even believe in his own Cat riddle; he had propounded it only to show that there must be something wrong with quantum theory if it leads to conclusions like that. Schrödinger didn’t like quantum theory because it pictures an anarchist universe and he was a determinist, like his good friend Albert Einstein. Thus, even though he had helped to create quantum theory and used it every day, Schrödinger kept hoping to find something seriously wrong with it.

  The Cat problem presupposes a Cat, a device of lethal nature, such as a gun or a poison-gas pellet, and a quantum process which will, eventually, trigger the weapon and kill the Cat. Very simple. An experimenter, if he wanted to find out when the device had fired and killed the Cat, would look into the laboratory where all this was transpiring and note what actually happened. But—Schrödinger points out with some glee—modern physics, if it’s all it’s cracked up to be, should allow us to find out what is happening without our actually going into the laboratory to look. All we have to do is write down the equations of the quantum process and calculate when the phase change leading to detonation will occur. The trouble is that the equations yield, at minimum, two solutions. At any given time—say one half hour—the equations give us two quantum eigenvalues, one of which means that the Cat is now definitely dead, kaput, spurlos versenkt, finished, and the other which tells us that the Cat is still alive as you and me.

  I never died, said he;

  I never die, said he.

  Most physicists preferred to ignore Schrödinger’s damned Cat; quantum mechanics worked, after all, and why make a big thing about something a little funny in the mathematics?

  Einstein loved Schrödinger’s Cat because it mathematically demonstrated his own conviction that subatomic events couldn’t be as anarchistic as wave mechanics seemed to imply. Einstein was a Hidden Variable man. He claimed there must be a Hidden Variable—an Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith might have said—controlling the seemingly indeterminate quantum anarchy. Einstein was sure that the Hidden Variable was something quite deterministic and mechanical, which would
be discovered eventually. “God does not play dice with the world,” he liked to say.

  Decade followed decade and the Hidden Variable remained elusive.

  In the 1970s, Dr. Evan Harris Walker solved the Cat paradox (to his own satisfaction) and defined the Hidden Variable (to his own satisfaction). The Hidden Variable, he said, was consciousness. There was muttering in some quarters that Walker was smuggling pantheism into physics disguised as quantum psychology, but many younger physicistas—especially the acid-heads—accepted the Walker solution.

  Professor John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton found another way of dealing with the Cat; he took it literally. Every quantum indeterminacy, he proposed, creates two universes; thus, the equations are literally true and in one universe the Cat lives and in another universe the cat dies. We can only experience one universe at a time, of course, but if the math says the other universe is there, then by God it is there. Furthermore, since .5 probabilities occur continually—every time you toss a coin, for instance—there are many, many such universes, perhaps an infinite number of them. With two graduate students named Everett and Graham, Wheeler even worked up a model of where the other universes were. They were on all sides of us, in superspace.

  Some were heard to suggest that old Wheeler had been reading too much science fiction.

  TO CROSS AGAIN

  If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he’ll immediately take the pear. That’s his instinct speaking.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  Mountbatten Babbit, being methodical in all things including his madness, could pinpoint exactly the date on which he had started sliding over the porous membrane separating the sane from the insane. It had been long, long ago—back in 1941, actually, in July, the twenty-third of the month, a Thursday.

  Or perhaps it had actually started the night before, on the twenty-second. It was hard to say, actually, even though Babbit was a man who detested imprecision of any sort. Say it was the twenty-second, then, even though the overt symptom did not manifest until the twenty-third. We do want to be as accurate as possible when we’re lost out here.

  So say the twenty-second: Mountbatten was a freshman at Antioch College then and the Carter Brothers Carnival was playing in nearby Xenia. Mounty and some friends went over to have a look-see. Since Mounty personally didn’t wait around for the post-midnight private exhibition of the lustful mulatto lady and the randy pony, advertised by shills in the crowd, the high point of the show for him had been the Mentalist, Cagliostro the Great.

  A girl assistant, in as brief a costume as the carnival could get away with back in nearly antediluvian 1941 and barbaric Ohio, circulated through the audience, while Cagliostro, youngish and handsome for this racket, sat blindfolded on the stage.

  “Now what am I holding?” she would ask when somebody handed her a watch.

  “I get the image of a timepiece … yes, a wristwatch,” the magician intoned.

  “What do I have in my hand this time?” The answer was a locket.

  “Can you tell me what this object is?”

  A wallet photo.

  Driving back to Yellow Springs, the students fell into a debate. One guy from the psychology department gave a long spiel on Rhine and parapsychology and scientific data for ESP, which convinced almost everyone. Babbit was the exception. He was not only a chemistry major but a leading firebrand for the Atheist Club on campus and he knew damned well that ESP was pseudo-scientific balderdash and hocus-pocus.

  He spent the next day, the twenty-third, in the library, researching stage magic and, in a biography of Houdini, he found the answer. A simple substitution code. Now what = watch. What do I have = locket. Can you tell = photo. And so forth. Fraud, pure and simple, like everything that goes under the name of religion or magic.

  Sirius shone very bright that night in the southern sky and Mounty Babbit was back at the carnival, loaded for bear. When the girl approached his part of the audience, he handed her a prized and illegal possession: a dragon-headed Japanese condom.

  “Tell me what I have been given by this person.”

  That wasn’t in the Houdini code but neither was a condom, with or without a dragon head.

  “It’s against the law in this state,” Cagliostro intoned somberly, causing heads to turn. “And I would advise the young gentleman from Antioch to restrain his sense of humor in the future.”

  And don’t marry Suzie from Red Lion

  The second voice was-and-yet-wasn’t Cagliostro’s.

  Mounty took quite a riding from the other students on their way back to Yellow Springs that night. “How did he know you were young?” “How did he know you were from Antioch—where was that in the code?” “Christ, a condom—you coulda got us all arrested.” But nobody said anything about Suzie from Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Mounty finally forced the issue. “What was that business about the lion?” he asked with maximum indirection.

  It was as he had feared: nobody else had heard anything about a lion, or about Suzie.

  It was simple logic, then. ESP is fraud. Hearing voices in your head is insanity. Mountbatten Babbit, he told himself, you are in need of psychiatric help.

  But a psychiatric record would be a handicap in the career he already had mapped out for himself.

  Self-control, then, was the answer. Nobody really goes bananas, after all, except weaklings.

  A man like Mountbatten Babbit simply would not go mad.

  But Mountbatten Babbit never did marry Suzie from Red Lion; there was a rather nasty war concluded with the exclamation point of a rather nasty bomb and then there was a marriage to a more suitably upward-mobile partner and eventually there was a title of Chief Engineer at Weishaupt Chemicals in Chicago. It was 1967 and he was no longer a brash young atheist-scientist but a middle-aged scientist-businessman who knew enough to keep his mouth shut about controversial issues and steadily feed a growing six-figure savings account. He had it made. If Cagliostro didn’t keep getting in the newspapers for one shocking incident or another, Babbit might even have been able to forget the whole episode in which he had thought he might be going mad.

  Then he crossed the boundary again.

  A juvenile delinquent named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, from the black ghetto on the South Side, stole Mounty’s car from in front of the Babbit residence in Rogers Park at precisely a moment when Mounty was looking out the window. In his trained and methodical way Mounty memorized fifteen details about the boy as he ran out the front door only to catch the briefest glimpse of the car zooming away (at least six feet, blue sweater with turtleneck, Afro hairstyle, very black skin, nose more Caucasian than Negroid, drives well, face more narrow than norm, high forehead, no beard, slim build to judge from shoulders, ring on left hand with green stone, clenched-fist button on sweater, earring in right ear, get more, damn there he goes around the corner …).

  At the trial Mounty pronounced his positive identification in the same tones he used specifying materiel orders at Weishaupt Chemicals. The jury brought in a guilty verdict in five minutes.

  That was the second time Mounty went mad.

  For as the boy was led away Mounty glanced at him one more time and saw a blue halo form around his head just like in Catholic art.

  Two weeks later he was promoted to Vice President of Weishaupt and began to see halos around random individuals in the street.

  LED, LED, LED

  If every case of aging can be corrected, we might all be Methuselahs, living 1,000 years or more.

  —DR. ROBERT PREHODA, 1969

  A Chinese named Wing Lee Chee was Cagliostro’s closest friend in those early carnival days. Wing was the world’s great master of karate, kung fu, aikido, and Comprehensive Advanced Machismo, but a gentle soul when not pushed too hard. In Bad Ass, Texas, he got pushed too hard by local cops, who objected to his use of the white toilet facilities at a gas station. They told him “A chink is just a yellowed-out nigger,” roughed him up, and accid
entally knocked his right eye out in their enthusiasm. At that point Wing lost his temper and was subsequently apprehended and quickly tried and convicted for the murder of four police officers.

  Judge Draconic V. Wasp pronounced sentence in this wise: “Young feller, you’ve been tried and convicted and every man in this courtroom knows your guilt is as black as hell. I have no regret in passing sentence in such a case. Soon, you little bastard, it will be spring and the robin will sing again, the flowers will bud, little children will laugh on their way to school—and you will hear and know nothing of that, for you will be dead, dead, dead. You chink bastard. Sheriff, take the yellow son-of-a-bitch out and hang him.”

  Wing Lee Chee received this with no show of emotion, but then he arose and addressed the court in a steady and terrible voice. “As I rook upon the whiskey-fogged faces of judge and July in the tlavesty of a civirized coult,” he said, “I know furr werr that I was foorish to ever expect justice from such degenelates. You, Judge Wasp, speak of the sweet singing of lobins in the spling and the brooming of the prants, but what can you know of the gleat Tao that moves arr of us, you four-mouthed, cunt-ricking, donkey-fucking led-neck? You desclibe the gentre voices of chirden, you glafting, thieving, monkey-faced, frat-nosed idiot offspring of a feebre-minded goat by pulple-plicked baboon! What do you know of the innocence of rittle chirden? What do you know of anything but colluption and highway lobbery, you syph-spocked, clap-lidden, amoeba-blained white lacist? You say that Wing Lee Chee sharr be hanged by the neck until he is dead, dead, dead, but Wing Lee Chee says”—he paused dramatically, swept the courtroom with a withering glance and concluded—“you can kiss my ass until it is led, led, led!”

  It is said that nineteen peace officers were torn limb from limb in the course of the hanging of Wing Lee Chee.