The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette)

by Neve Maslakovic

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Read Books 1-3

  About the Author

  THE FELINE AFFAIR

  An Incident Series Novelette

  Neve Maslakovic

  The characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2015 by Neve Maslakovic

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Excerpts from “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper” by John D. Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 124, pp. 323-38, 1980, quoted with permission.

  Cover design by Cynthia L. Moyer

  This is a Westmarch Publishing book.

  www.westmarchpub.com

  1

  “You want to go back in time to look for a cat, Dr. Mooney?” I repeated my question. I had stopped by the lab to drop off some paperwork and had run into Xavier Mooney, senior Time Travel Engineering professor and well-liked campus figure. I had asked in passing how his work was going.

  “Hmm, Julia? A cat, yes. Precisely.”

  He was by his workbench, rolling up a set of blueprints. Behind Dr. Mooney towered STEWie’s mirrors, the heart of St. Sunniva University’s time machine. STEWie, short for SpaceTimE Warper, warps light to send our research teams to observe History and return with photos, notes, and video. (Everyone on campus refers to the world’s past with a capital H, as if History were a living entity in its own right.) If Dr. Mooney got his wish, an upcoming run into History would yield facts about a famous feline, apparently.

  “Gabriel and I are meeting at the Faculty Club for lunch. You’re welcome to join us,” Dr. Mooney offered as he tucked the blueprints into his lab locker. He turned back to face me. “I expect that the topic of conversation will be…the cat.”

  I’m not a professor—back then I was the science dean’s assistant, with an office next to Dean Sunder’s in Hypatia House—so technically I didn’t belong at the Faculty Club. On the other hand, no one had ever invited me before and I’d heard that the food was worth trying. I checked the time on my cell phone. Dean Lewis Sunder was on the other side of campus, touring the latest exhibits at the History Museum before this evening’s fundraiser, so the paperwork I needed him to sign had to wait anyway. The new chief of campus security was going to stop by my office at one o’clock, but there was no rush for me to get back, as it was just past noon. “Thanks for the invite, Dr. Mooney. I’d love to come.”

  I followed him out the lab doors, which swung shut behind us with a creak, but I was more interested in another sound. “Is that Dr. Presnik’s team I hear in the apparel closet?”

  The excited chatter of several voices—the equivalent of a wild party by academic standards—drifted out from under the closed door across the hallway. I thought I’d recognized one of them.

  “It is. Helen and her students have just returned from Bishopsgate. They’ve gone to change out of their period wear.”

  Bishopsgate sounded like a historical church scandal of some kind. Dr. Helen Presnik was a linguistics professor, so it was quite possible she had gone into the past to study the vernacular spoken by the participants in some sordid affair or another. I didn’t remember seeing the term on STEWie’s roster, though Helen did make frequent STEWie runs. As Dr. Mooney and I exited the Time Travel Engineering (TTE) building and set a course for the Faculty Club, he explained, “It’s a place. Bishopsgate is a ward in the City of London—the City is the heart of London, its oldest part. You may have heard of one of Bishopsgate’s past inhabitants, a fellow by the name of William Shakespeare. It was another one of Helen’s attempts to prove he really wrote the plays.” We moved out of the way of a distracted student on a bicycle (it was summer, but the campus still hummed with current and visiting students) and he continued: “And she’s finally done it. She has the proof she wanted.”

  This was exactly the kind of thing for which STEWie had been created—by Dr. Xavier Mooney himself in tandem with his colleague Dr. Gabriel Rojas—with the first successful run taking place just about a year before. Like other STEWie endeavors such as cracking the ancient Greek script Linear B, Helen’s discovery was the culmination of months of effort. Besides being an excellent linguistics professor, Helen was a good friend of mine, so I was happy to hear of her success. “I’ll have to carve out some time in Dean Sunder’s schedule. We can put together a press release and maybe he can make the announcement at this evening’s fundraiser.” I sent Helen a quick text as we walked along, then mused out loud, “So it turned out to be Shakespeare after all and not Sir Francis Bacon or whoever.”

  “Yes, not Sir Francis Bacon.”

  I looked over at the professor. He sounded a tiny bit, for want of a better word, peeved about the whole thing. “Wait—did you and Dr. Rojas have a bet riding on it?”

  This would not have been unusual. Dr. Rojas and Dr. Mooney, the two senior TTE professors, liked to engage in the occasional friendly wager about whether a historical detail was likely to be true or not. Dr. Rojas, as befitting a theoretician, usually reasoned out an argument at his desk in his office down the hall from STEWie. Dr. Mooney, as befitting the more hands-on kind of scientist, would roll up his sleeves, step into STEWie’s basket, and return with evidence that settled the matter one way or another. If they did have a bet, this time Dr. Presnik had done the traveling for them.

  “Yes, and I lost…which is why I’m buying lunch today at the Faculty Club. Gabe figured the simplest, most logical assumption was that Shakespeare did write the plays. Occam’s razor. I took the opposite point of view, that it would be just like History if someone entirely unexpected turned out to be the real author.”

  History is quirky—that’s true enough—but my guess was that the professor had chosen to take the non-Helen side for other reasons. Xavier and Helen shared a past, though they usually carried on professionally enough—in fact, he had accompanied her on her first run, to attend a performance of Hamlet at the Globe. Dr. Mooney waved the matter away and nodded amiably in my direction, “Anyway, I have a new bet to propose to Gabe that may even the score.”

  “Involving the cat?”

  “Very much involving the cat.”

  “Well, I’m all ears.” As we headed up the stone steps of the Faculty Club, I remembered why I had stopped by the TTE lab in the first place. “By the way, Dean Sunder wanted me to pass on a suggestion—that you give a lab tour to Mrs. Butterworth this afternoon before the History Museum fundraiser.”

  I saw him give an inward groan, but he only nodded absentmindedly.

  “Be nice to her, she’s rich,” I reminded him. Mrs. Butterworth was one of our big donors.

  “Well, perhaps she’ll buy us a new lab generator.”

  “And for God’s sake, don’t mention Helen’s run,” I added as we went inside. “I think Mrs. Butterworth’s hopes lie on the Sir Francis Bacon side of things.”

  “Schrödinger,” I said.

  “Yes. You’ve heard of him, surely? The famous cat experiment he proposed in 1935?” Dr. Gabriel Rojas eyed me above the fancy salad the waiter had set down in front of him. I had ordered the safe choice, the day’s pizza special, and had received a small,
elegant-looking square pizza served on a matching square plate. A knife and fork seemed to be in order, so I pulled out the cutlery I’d been given with a resigned sigh. As for Schrödinger and his cat—well, who hasn’t heard of them? I said as much before trying the first forkful of the pizza.

  “In my experience,” Dr. Rojas continued between salad bites, “the best way to gauge if a student understands a topic is to ask him or her to explain it to you.”

  He stopped speaking after making that statement and went on silently eating. I realized he was applying that philosophy at that very moment and was, in fact, waiting for me to explain about Schrödinger and his cat. I took another forkful of pizza to give myself time to formulate a reply. Great. I had come to lunch for a decent bite, not a quiz on quantum physics. My college studies had consisted of a rather unfocused education, which had led to a business administrator’s degree and my job as science dean’s assistant. I wasn’t expected to have an in-depth knowledge of the sciences in the eight departments under Dean Sunder’s and my care. Still, I had found that a passing familiarity with the big topics helped me understand budget proposals and STEWie run requests. This one hadn’t come up yet.

  “Uh,” I began, having taken as long as possible to finish the mouthful of pizza, both because I was formulating my answer and because I was trying to figure out what kind of crust I was eating. It wasn’t just plain old pizza crust, that much I knew. Whole wheat? Rice? Drawing on vague memories of my one college-level physics course, I said, “There is a box with a cat in it, right?”

  “Go on,” Dr. Rojas said, still in professorial mode—not that he was ever far from it. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist when it came to chitchat or personal matters. Science was where he felt the most comfortable.

  “And something either happens to the cat or not, but it’s not clear which it is until we open the box.”

  “Why isn’t it clear?”

  “Because the box is closed. Can’t see inside a shut box.”

  Dr. Rojas shook his head. “No, that’s not it.”

  “The box isn’t closed?”

  “It is, but that isn’t why we don’t know what happened.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because we can’t know what happened.”

  “What do you mean? Why can’t we know?”

  “Because we haven’t looked.”

  If I had been having the conversation with anyone but Dr. Rojas, I would have at this point assumed they were putting me on.

  “I think I better draw a diagram.” Dr. Rojas took a Sharpie out of his shirt pocket and vaguely glanced around the table for something to write on. All the napkins in the place were cloth and too pristine to be used for sketching, so I tore a page from the notepad in my shoulder bag and handed it to him. He folded it in half and drew a large square. “Here is a steel box. Add a small amount of a radioactive substance and a Geiger counter…a hammer…and a vial of poison. Cyanide.” He sketched all of those in, then added, “And one cat,” and drew a stick figure of a cat.

  “With you so far,” I said.

  “Good. The radioactive substance is such that there’s a fifty-fifty chance that one of its atoms will decay—emit radiation—in the first hour. If it does, the Geiger counter registers this and releases the hammer, the hammer smashes the vial, and cyanide leaks into the air, with unfortunate results for the cat. If there is no decay, nothing happens to the cat.”

  The professor paused here, as if expecting me to say something at this point. I tried to rise to the occasion. “So, in summary: it’s a coin toss whether the Geiger counter, hammer, and vial will be nudged into action, which would spell bad news for the cat.”

  “So what can we conclude?” he prodded me.

  I glanced down at his sketch. “Uh…that the cat might die? Also that this is not a particularly nice experiment.”

  “According to the Copenhagen interpretation, a quantum system exists in all possible states simultaneously until observed. It’s not that we don’t know what happened until we look, it’s that the matter is settled—has an atom decayed?—only when we do look. Therefore, by extension the cat is both alive and dead—or, if you prefer, neither—until the box is opened.”

  I mulled this over. “Nothing is settled until we look.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what does that prove?” The pizza wasn’t bad, I decided. It just tasted different. I washed it down with iced tea, as the waiter had scrunched his nose at my attempt to order pop. Coke and Pepsi were not served at the Faculty Club. “I mean, the cat’s not really both alive and dead until we open the box. It can’t be. It’s like that old puzzle: if a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around, does it make a sound? Of course it does.”

  “That was Schrödinger’s point—how absurd quantum concepts are when linked to the everyday world, as represented by the cat. It’s all very well to say that the quantum world is just a cloud of probabilities…but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the reality we observe around us. Like you say, surely the tree makes a thunderous crash whether or not someone is there to hear it.”

  “And why cyanide? Why not some kind of sleep-inducing gas?”

  “Well, I suppose that would work just as well, but it’s irrelevant to the point of the—”

  “Or a tasty treat that the cat either receives or not…I have one more question now that you have, uh, explained Dr. Schrödinger’s experiment, Dr. Rojas.”

  “What is it, Julia?” asked Dr. Mooney, who had been following our exchange with some amusement.

  “Is your bet whether he used his own cat or borrowed somebody else’s? Schrödinger, I mean. Do you want to go back in time to spy on him and see where he got the cat?”

  Dr. Rojas recoiled at the suggestion, as if I had said something nasty. “Not at all. It was a Gedankenexperiment.”

  I choked a bit on the iced tea, sending it down the wrong pipe, and croaked out, “I beg your pardon?”

  Dr. Mooney gave me a hearty thump on the back, and my coughing settled down. “It means a thought experiment, a mental illustration. There was no actual box…and no cat or cyanide either.”

  “There was no actual cat…” I wasn’t a pet kind of person, but this made me feel better about the whole thing. The biology department performed controlled and heavily overseen experiments on animals, as did the School of Medicine across Sunniva Lake, so I could be forgiven for thinking the physics department might do the same.

  Dr. Mooney added above his grilled pineapple and quail, “Well, there may be a cat. That’s the bet. Did Schrödinger have a flesh and blood pet who purred by his feet as he considered knotty physics problems? Or was his inspiration purely theoretical?”

  “I see. So who’s taking which side?” I asked, looking from one professor to the other.

  “We haven’t settled that yet.” Dr. Mooney waved his fork in my direction. “Never mind the cat. What’s new in the dean’s offices, Julia?”

  “It’s happened again. The phantom struck the biology department fridge.”

  “What’s this?” Dr. Rojas asked.

  I explained that someone had been regularly pilfering food from the shared fridge at the Rosalind Franklin Biology and Genetics Complex, which stood a bit farther up the campus path from the Faculty Club. The building was on the large side and housed various labs and offices—and, apparently, one thief.

  Dr. Rojas lost interest in the topic as soon as he realized it was a social problem and there was no actual phantom requiring a scientific investigation. Dr. Mooney suggested, only half jokingly, that I bake a small dose of a laxative into a cookie or muffin and leave the treat in the biology fridge. I nixed the idea, as (a) I didn’t cook, and (b) it was too likely to put the school at risk of a lawsuit.

  “Hopefully the new campus security chief—his name is Nathaniel Kirkland—will take the matter seriously even though nothing of value is missing,” I said. As the two professors embarked on a lively discussion of whether there was likely
to have been a real cat or not, I took the opportunity to ask a passing waiter about the pizza’s mystery crust. Cauliflower. That was a new one. I finished up the last of my lunch and drained my iced tea. “Thanks for lunch, Dr. Mooney. I better take off—I’m running late for my appointment with Chief Kirkland. Good luck with the cat.”

  I grabbed my shoulder bag and headed out. Behind me, positions were being staked on academic hills.

  “I’ll have to give it some thought, but I’m leaning toward there being no cat…”

  “And I rather think there might have been…”

  “Then state your case, Xavier…”

  Campus Security Chief Kirkland was waiting in front of my closed office door. I had hoped he would be a few minutes late. He waved away my attempt to apologize for my lateness and followed me inside. “Ms. Olsen, you said on the phone that there’s some kind of problem in the biology building.”

  Not one for small talk, then. But I already knew that. I had exchanged phone calls with him a couple of times—mostly about overflow parking options for the various events I was in charge of organizing. During our first call, I had told him, as I usually do with new colleagues, “Please call me Julia. Everyone does.” His answer had been a curt, “I’d prefer not to, if you don’t mind. I try to keep things formal on all official business.”

  Well, here we were face-to-face and he was, as promised, looking all business. “Yes, there’s a problem in the biology building, an ongoing one,” I said in answer to his question. “It’s been happening for about a month now, longer if we assume it took a while for people to put two and two together and start noticing. The fridge phantom, I mean.”

  “The fridge phantom.”

  “Yes.” I remembered my manners. “Would you like a seat, maybe a refreshment?”