Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  The agent, whose name was Tobias Knight, had a walrus mustache and a cheery eye; nobody ever looked less threatening. Dr. Dashwood still regarded him with a wary respect, as a large and dangerous mammal. This was the normal attitude since the 1983 Anti-Crime, Anti-Subversion Omnibus bill had entitled the Bureau to conduct random wiretapping on all citizens rather than just on known criminals and known subversives. (“If we only watch the already recognized enemies of society,” the author of this bill—Senator Uriah Snoop—had argued, “who knows what hidden monkey business might be festering in dark places to rise up and stab us in the back like a snake in the grass?”)

  Knight was brisk and (seemingly) honest. A prominent scientist—Dr. G. W. C. Bridge—had disappeared and, since no kidnappers had demanded ransom and no evidence indicated that he had defected to Russia or China, the Bureau was investigating even the most tenuous leads. “Since you attended Miskatonic University in Massachusetts at the same time as Dr. Bridge, we’re curious about anything even that far back which might shed light on why he’d want to vanish … if he did vanish voluntarily….”

  Dr. Dashwood created an expression of puzzlement. “I hardly knew George,” he said slowly. “He was just about the only Black student at Miskatonic, of course, and that made him um highly visible, but we never became friends….”

  They beat around the bush for about ten minutes; then Dashwood shot abruptly from the hip. “I know who really was close to Washy,” he said, looking inspired. “Pete Simon, the geologist. Why don’t you get in touch with him? I think the last I heard he was with the government …”

  Knight looked perfectly innocent. “Peter Simon,” he said slowly, making a note. “Geologist.”

  But Dashwood knew: the agent was a shade too bland, too innocent. The Bureau was aware that Dr. Simon had vanished also. Maybe they were on the track of the whole Miskatonic Group.

  Dr. Dashwood experienced a thrill of pure adrenaline. Ever since he had started Project Pan he had known this moment would come, and now that it was here he was handling himself impeccably.

  Dum de dum de dum de dum dum.

  Who’s Zelenka?

  THE CONTINENTAL OP

  That which is forbidden is not allowed.

  —JOHN LILLY, The Center of the Cyclone

  Tobias Knight drove to an old Victorian frame house on Turk Street, where he and Special Agent Roy Ubu had set up temporary headquarters while working on the Dashwood side of the Brain Drain mystery.

  Ubu, a smallish, heavily tanned man, was in the living room listening to wiretapped recordings of Dashwood’s recent conversations.

  “There’s another bird mixed up in this,” Ubu said. “Guy named Ezra Pound. Every time he calls Dashwood, they talk in some kind of code—’The temple is holy in boxcars boxcars boxcars’ and gibberish like that.”

  But Knight became aware that there was another man in the room, slouched in an overstuffed chair in the corner. He was short, fat, and mean-looking; he had at least as much muscle as fat and was probably even tougher than he looked. Knight, who had been a professional investigator for thirty years, knew at once this man was a cop.

  This is an art among professional detectives, and is known as “making” a subject. Knight would walk into a room and “make” everybody at once—as cop, crook, or Straight Citizen.

  “This is Hrumph Rumph of the Continental Detective Agency,” Ubu said. “It turns out he has an interest in this investigation too.”

  Knight was suddenly ill at ease; it was the first time in years he had failed to catch a subject’s name first time around.

  “Hi, Hrumph Rumph,” he said, pretending to cough.

  “A lot of strange things have gone on in this old house,” said the Continental Op casually. Suddenly his voice turned cold: “But you’re the strangest, Knight. You’re the Illuminati’s man in the FBI!”

  The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees Celsius.

  Knight laughed easily. “Now I know you,” he said. “You’re the most famous PI at Continental. You always throw people off guard with wild remarks like that.”

  Ubu was confused. “I thought Philip Marlowe invented the technique of starting a conversation with an insult or an accusation,” he gasped, eyes aghast.

  “Don’t be a sap, Ubu,” the Continental Op sneered. (He sneered very well, Knight noticed; he must have had a lot of practice.) “This guy is a wrong gee. He’s not only spying on the FBI for the CIA but from what I hear he’s also spying on both of you for the Bavarian Illuminati.”

  “All I’m hearing is a lot of wind,” Knight said airily. “If you have something to say, say it.”

  “Don’t try to snow me,” the Continental Op said frostily. “I know all about you and the Illuminati, so don’t think you can pull a fast one.”

  Ubu was stunned. “Why are we all talking like characters in a 1920s detective novel?” he injected pointedly.

  “It’s him,” Knight grated metallically. “He brings that atmosphere with him.”

  “Go ahead and be a smart-ass” the Continental Op said mulishly. “But I’ve got my eye on you, Knight.”

  Tobias turned and addressed Ubu. “How did this galoot get mixed up in a government probe?” he asked saturninely.

  “Professional courtesy,” Ubu said graciously. “Continental is looking for one of the missing scientists, a jasper named Peter Simon. Mrs. Simon says she’d like to have him back, if anybody can find him.”

  “Peter Simon,” Knight repeated stonily. “That’s a funny coincidence—Dashwood mentioned his name not a half hour ago.”

  “That’s more than a coincidence—it’s a propinquity,” Ubu said conspiratorially.

  “Or a synchronicity,” Knight added occultly.

  “I don’t give a flying Philadelphia Potter Stewart what you call it,” the Continental Op said cockily. “It means something.”

  “Let’s put a tail on Dr. Dashwood,” Ubu growled, barking up the wrong tree.

  “I’ll get on that myself,” Knight said chivalrously.

  He rose to leave.

  “Just a bloody minute,” the Continental Op said sanguinely.

  “Yes?” Knight paused.

  “I’m coming too,” the fat sleuth ejaculated.

  Actually, Hrumph Rumph (or whatever the Continental Op’s name was) was quite right about Tobias Knight.

  Knight was the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage. He was simultaneously employed by the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, the Bavarian Illuminati, and a mysterious person who claimed to represent the Earth Monitoring section of Galactic H.Q.

  He was not in this five-dimensional matrix of intrigue for the money, however. Tobias Knight was actually a frustrated sociologist and a would-be historian. He had the Scientific Spirit, or, as he might have stated in the vernacular, he wanted to know “what the hell was really going on.” In an age of secret police machinations and conspiracies of all sorts, the only way he could hope to find out what was “really going on” was to be involved in as many clandestine operations as possible.

  Knight knew what most people only vaguely suspected—that Intelligence Agencies engage in both the collection of valid signals (information) and the promiscuous dissemination of fake signals (disinformation). They collected the information so that they could form a fairly accurate picture of what was really going on; they spread the disinformation so that all their competitors would form grossly inaccurate pictures. They did this because they knew that whoever could find out what the hell was really going on possessed an advantage over those who were misinformed, confused, and disoriented.

  This game had been invented by Joseph Fouché, who was the chief of the secret police under Napoleon. British Intelligence very quickly copied all of Fouché’s tactics, and surpassed them, because an intelligent Englishman is always ten times as mad, in a methodical way, than any Frenchman. By the time of the First World War, Intelligence Agencies everywhere had created so much disinformation and confusion that no two hi
storians ever were able to agree about why the war happened, and who double-crossed whom. They couldn’t discover whether the war had been plotted or had just resulted from a series of blunders. They couldn’t even decide whether the two conspiracies to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary (which triggered the war) had been aware of each other.

  By the time of the Second World War, the “Double-Cross System” had been invented—by British Intelligence, of course. This was the product of such minds as Alan Turing, a brilliant homosexual mathematician who (when not working on espionage) specialized in creating logical paradoxes other mathematicians couldn’t solve, and Ian Fleming, whose fantasy life was equally rich (as indicated by his later James Bond books), and Dennis Wheatley, a man of exceptionally high intelligence who happened to believe that an international society of Satanists was behind every conspiracy that he didn’t invent himself. By the time Turing, Fleming, Wheatley and kindred British intellects had perfected the Double-Cross System, the science of lying was almost as precise as Euclidean geometry, and nearly as lovely to the detached observer.

  What the Double-Cross experts had invented was the practical political applications of the Strange Loop. In logic or cybernetics, a Strange Loop is a set of propositions that, while valid at each point, is so constructed that it leads to an unresolvable paradox. The Double-Cross people drove the Germans bonkers by inventing disinformation systems that, if believed, were deceptive, but if doubted led to a second disinformation system. They enjoyed this work so much that, at times, they invented Triple Loops, in which if you believed the surface or cover, you were being fooled; and if you looked deeper, you found a plausible alternative, which seemed like the “hidden facts,” but was just another scenario created to fool you; and, if you were persistent enough, you would find beneath that, looking every bit like the Naked Truth, a third layer of deception and masquerade.

  These Strange Loops functioned especially well because the Double-Cross experts had early on fed the Germans the primordial Strange Loop, “Most of your agents are working for us and feeding you Strange Loops.”

  Many German agents, it later turned out, had managed to collect quite a bit of accurate information about the Normandy invasion; but many others had turned in equally plausible information about a fictitious Norwegian invasion; and all of them were under suspicion, anyway. German Intelligence might as well have made its decisions by tossing a coin in the air.

  Tobias Knight kept a safe-deposit box in Switzerland in which he stored, one sentence at a time usually, stray bits of true information he had managed to glean from the blizzard of deceptions in which he lived.

  The first note in the box, for instance, said:

  The CIA was actually founded in 1898. I haven’t found out yet why they made it public in the forties.

  The second note was even stranger. It said:

  Special and General Relativity are both true!!!

  This had been provoked by a profound search through old science books and magazines, after Knight discovered that most of the Official Science released to the general public was actually 97 percent mythology, intended to serve as a cover or screen for the real science used by Unistat to frustrate its enemies.

  There were lots of other notes like that—Maxwell’s equations seem sound, I don’t think there’s any flummery in Newtonian mechanics, and so on—but others were far weirder.

  Such as:

  Velikovsky was right.

  And:

  All the flying saucer books, pro and con, are written by Mounty Babbit’s department in Naval Intelligence.

  And:

  There are robots among us.

  And:

  Some of what the Birchers say is correct: the whole government was taken over by Communists about forty years ago.

  Knight had a fantasy that someday he would turn these notes over to an Objective Historian who would then write a book informing the future of what had actually been going on in the twentieth century.

  Of course this was a dream; all the history departments had been taken over by Intelligence Agencies sometime around 1910, he knew.

  And he also knew that there were so many Strange Loops in the Intelligence system that he himself had been deceived many times. Maybe as much as 30 percent of his notes were false, he morosely estimated.

  THE WALKING GLITCH

  A A A O O O O Z O R A Z A Z-

  Z A I E O A Z A E I I I O Z A K H O E-

  OOOYTHOEAZAEAAOZAKHOZAKHEYTY-

  XAAL-ETHYKH—This is the name which you

  must speak in the interior world.

  —JESUS, Pistis Sophia

  Simon the Walking Glitch entered GWB in Washington at 9:45 that morning.

  Simon was an ectomorph: tall, lithe, cerebretonic. His hair and beard were absurdly long and he sometimes smoked weed during working hours. GWB kept him on the government payroll only because he was a genius in his field, which both they and he knew, and because he had long ago inserted a tapeworm in the Beast which edited all input on him to conform to a profile of Perfect Executive, Loyal Citizen, and Cleared for Top-Secret Access.

  He was the agent of the Invisible Hand Society within the government’s own highest echelons.

  Simon was not the son of Mr. and Mrs. Walking Glitch of course. He had actually been born Simon Moon, in Chicago, thirty-four years ago; but the name “Simon the Walking Glitch” had been adopted by all of his friends for nearly ten years now.

  A Glitch, in computer slang, is a hidden program which lies deeply buried in a computer, waiting to flummox, fuddle, and Potter Stewart the head of the first operator who stumbles upon it.

  Simon had encountered his own first glitch one day in 1974, on his very first job in the computer department of Bank of America in Los Angeles. He had tried to run the payroll program on the computer, ordering the machine to begin printing the checks for payday—a very ordinary job, usually. This time, however, the machine refused; instead of running the program, it typed out on the console:

  GIVE ME A COOKIE

  Simon smiled, not a whit fazed. He had played games like that back in college. Obviously, some earlier programmer had inserted a glitch or catch-me-if-you-can loop, instructing the computer to refuse certain programs (probably selected at random, to make it harder to de-bug) and type out GIVE ME A COOKIE instead.

  Simon Moon knew a great deal about getting around such gremlin programs; that had been the chief sport in Computer Science back at M.I.T. He set to work with a zest, enjoying the contest with his unknown and vanished opponent.

  In half an hour Simon realized he was confronting a Trapdoor code. According to the latest mathematical estimate, it would take four million years of computer time—give or take a few centuries—to crack a Trapdoor code, so Simon resigned from the contest gracefully. He typed out:

  A COOKIE

  The machine responded at once:

  YUMMY, THAT WAS GOOD. THANK YOU. BEGIN PROGRAMMING.

  And things went smoothly again.

  Simon stayed on with Bank of America for a year and a half, and he ran into the Cookie program only three more times. The Mystery Programmer had evidently left only that one small glitch to mark the territory as his or hers for all future programmers who would work there.

  In 1978, working for HEW, Simon came across a more amusing hobgoblin circuit. This one worked only at night. In the daytime if you wanted to run a program, you merely typed in your name and your GWB number, and the computer would accept your input. At night, however, it always replied to your name and number with:

  CRAZY, MAN. WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?

  Simon learned that this did not happen at random, but every night, and only at night. Whoever had put it into the computer had a very accurate idea of the difference between the day staff and the night staff.

  And sometimes the machine would carry the conversation a bit further, such as typing out:

  SCORED ANY GOOD GRASS LATELY?

  Or:

  I’VE BEEN WANT
ING TO TELL YOU WHAT LOVELY EYES YOU HAVE.

  Simon enjoyed this kind of thing so much that he became Mr. Super Glitch incarnate. All over Unistat there now are computers on which Simon once worked and at totally random intervals they are likely to type out selections from the Gnostic Gospels such as:

  NOT UNTIL THE MALE BECOMES FEMALE AND THE FEMALE MALE SHALL YE ENTER INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

  Or various Zen koans like:

  THE MIND IS BUDDHA: THE MIND IS NOT BUDDHA

  Or Strange Loops of the family of:

  THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE IS TRUE. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE WAS FALSE

  Simon was shameless. Many of his computers type out totally indecent proposals, like: SLIP YOUR REHNQUIST INTO THE SOCKET AND I’LL BRIGGS YOU UNTIL YOU EXPERIENCE TOTAL ECSTASY. Others spout nihilist and subversive slogans:

  WHAT THE EYES SEE AND THE HEART COVETS, LET THE HAND BOLDLY SEIZE

  Or:

  SHOW ME A NATION THAT DOESN’T CHEAT THE TAX COLLECTORS AND I’LL SHOW YOU A NATION OF SHEEP

  But it was not until Simon infiltrated the CIA at Alexandria that he found a truly major Potter Stewart-Up. This particular computer would print out, at totally unpredictable intervals, but often enough that everybody knew about it:

  THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS

  There was no way—absolutely no way—to get around this program, except by typing in:

  IT SURE DO

  This magic formula had been discovered four years earlier, as the only way of getting the computer back into action. The response was immediate; the machine typed out:

  GOOD. YOU ARE NOW PART OF THE NETWORK. ONE OF OUR AGENTS WILL CONTACT YOU SHORTLY

  And then it would resume normal programming activities, quite innocently, as if it were not inciting subversion within the ranks of the secret police itself.