Cosmic Banditos

by Weisbecker, A. C.

  As it turned out, José and his gang had heisted the books I wanted and then, drunk with power, made off with a couple hundred or so other works (none having anything to do with physics, by the way). Then they’d decided that since I was interested in libraries, I would certainly be interested in the man who ran one.

  “Yeah, right. Of course,” I thought to myself. This line of reasoning is a perfect example of Bandito Logic, a concept that for some reason is very similar to Female Logic, although, obviously, their roots are quite disparate.

  I was then subjected to a rambling account of their exploits. Separating Bandito Fact from Bandito Exaggeration is tough, but the following is a brief, unsensationalized version of José’s story.

  Here it is: José launched his Bandito Assault early one morning from the east (Banditos like to attack with the sun at their backs). They blasted out the plate-glass windows on one side of the building and piled in (Banditos don’t trust doors).

  The library had just opened, so Señor Rodriguez was the only person there. This turned out to be a stroke of bad luck for Señor Rodriguez. When José actually saw how many books there were, he more or less panicked. He spotted Señor Rodriguez cowering under a desk and dragged him out. At this point a platoon of Colombian troops arrived on the scene and opened up on the library, figuring it had been overrun by terrorists or soccer fans.

  José had his men return fire, keeping the troops pinned down, while he forced Señor Rodriguez to collect the books on my list. Once this was accomplished, José and his men bolted to the back of the library, collecting books at random and blasting everything in sight.

  The troops countered with mortar fire and grenade launchers. Señor Rodriguez was struck unconscious by a flying volume of the Works of William Shakespeare (José caught it on the rebound from Señor Rodriguez’s forehead), so José threw him over his shoulder and led his men out of the library via a rear bathroom window. This saved Señor Rodriguez’s life, since the troops were unaware that José’s Bandito Brigade had escaped and proceeded to blow the University of Barranquilla Research Library to smithereens.

  I thanked and congratulated José and the boys, then told José that I’d like a few minutes alone with Señor Rodriguez. I led Señor Rodriguez into the shack and untied him. I had a few belts of mescal, lit a joint, then sat him down and attempted to explain why he was sitting in a shack in the wilds of the Sierra Nevadas, instead of running the University of Barranquilla Research Library.

  I started at the beginning, with José’s mugging of Tina’s family. I explained the situation with respect to Tina’s nymphomania (making brief mention of her concealed diaphragm), her betrayal of Tom and Gary, and then got to the crux of the matter : Subatomic Phenomena.

  Señor Rodriguez stared at me wide-eyed as I gave him a crash course on the Underlying Nature of Reality. I did this for the same reason I mentioned the Subatomic Realm in my notes to Tom and Gary: I wanted to put Señor Rodriguez’s situation in its proper perspective.

  I paced the small room, occasionally having a contemplative hit from my joint or a quick belt of mescal. I was about halfway through a simpleminded discourse on Quantum Mechanics and was preparing to delve into its Many Worlds Interpretation when I realized that Señor Rodriguez had slumped forward in his chair unconscious. Upon closer investigation it became evident that he had slipped into some sort of coma.

  This new development was upsetting. I had grown quite fond of Señor Rodriguez even though, in the few minutes I knew him as a sentient being, he never spoke a word to me. What really bothered me was that his comatose condition was obviously not brought on so much by the bizarre situation he found himself in as by my explanation of the reasons for it. As I transferred his limp form from the chair to the bed, I thought briefly of Tina, Tom, Gary and Tina’s father.

  I looked out the window. José was romping with High Pockets while the rest of his crew guzzled tequila and smoked joints. I yelled for José to come inside.

  Presently, he and High Pockets appeared, José with a bottle of tequila in his hand, High Pockets with a volume of the Book of Knowledge in his mouth.

  When I told José what had happened to Señor Rodriguez, he nodded sagely and said, “Ahh,” then bent over and opened one of Señor Rodriguez’s eyes. Nothing but the white was visible.

  Another “Ahh.” José then poured about a pint of tequila down Señor Rodriguez’s throat. No reaction. I verified that there was still a pulse. It seemed strong and steady. José then slipped off one of Señor Rodriguez’s shoes, removed his sock and proceeded to stick a match between two of his toes. He lit it and stood back. After a few seconds it had burned down to the end and gone out. Not a tremor from Señor Rodriguez. José then agreed that Señor Rodriguez was indeed in some sort of coma.

  When I asked him what we were going to do, he told me not to worry. He had a friend who knew an Indian who was familiar with these matters. Naturally it was the same guy who knew the same Indian who was on a crazed fast and wouldn’t talk about snakes or Subatomic Particles. When I told José that it was unlikely that the dude would talk about comas either, he scratched himself and sighed. He was stumped, no question about it.

  It turned out that neither José nor I felt like attending to a comatose librarian, so we decided to have a few of José’s men make a litter and carry Señor Rodriguez back to the University of Barranquilla and dump him in front of the medical center.

  José then went outside, gathered his men together and asked for volunteers. None were in the mood to transport Señor Rodriguez back to Barranquilla, a three-day trek through predator infested jungles.

  José pulled his .45, pointed it at the Bandito closest to him and asked if he was sure he wasn’t in the mood. This technique was immediately successful. A few minutes later José and I bid farewell to Señor Rodriguez, then watched him being carried off into the jungle.

  I have spent the last three days poring over the books I had requested and received via José’s kindness. (I used glue and tape to repair those volumes that had been damaged by shrapnel and small-arms fire.) My mind has been simultaneously boggled and expanded. I am aching for someone to talk to. Someone with whom I can share my insights and wonder. I have decided that only one person in my Universe fits the intellectual bill: Tina’s father.

  José is still vehemently opposed to a normal correspondence, and I suppose, for security reasons, he’s right. So I have settled on a compromise. Tina’s father is undoubtedly back in Sausalito by now, so my plan is to send him anonymous musings and ask him to respond via classified ads in the International Herald Tribune (a common method of correspondence amongst clandestine operatives). I will ask him to address his ads to “Mr. Quark,” Quarks being the most interesting and unpredictable of Subatomic Particles. I’m launching what I hope will be a productive Subatomic Dialogue.

  I will now continue the story of how High Pockets and I came to be where we are, starting where I left off, after Robert blew up the Admiral’s Inn on Antigua.

  Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly bave understood it.

  —Niels Bohr

  6

  Operation Looney Tune

  The island I had picked to be our next victim was Curaçao. We weren’t too well known there and it was close to Colombia, so José could meet us easily. Since we had lost our last yacht, we had to have a serious sitdown and plan our next move.

  We finally got through to him in Riohacha by calling all his favorite Bandito Saloons. The connection was abominable, but we managed to explain our whereabouts and situation.

  He showed up the next day at our Holiday Inn. We got very fucked up on drugs and alcohol, then began planning Operation Looney Tune.

  José had plenty of pot lying around in Colombia, but all our boats had either sunk or been confiscated by various branches of various governments.

  Jim suggested that we switch to airplanes, for variety’s sake if nothing else. Robert agreed, then suggeste
d that we look up Flash. I was completely against the idea, for reasons that will presently become evident. But the vote was three to one in favor.

  We piled into the Lear and headed north, having only vague suspicions as to Flash’s whereabouts.

  We finally located him on a remote landing strip in the southern Bahamas. Even at 20,000 feet you couldn’t miss Flash’s World War II-vintage red, white and blue B-29 bomber.

  Harry put the Lear down on the hard coral strip and taxied up to Flash’s plane, appropriately named the Looney Tune.

  He and his dog, Aileron, were passed out in the shade under the portside wing. High Pockets and Aileron had a joyous doggy reunion, but I was wary. Flash always makes me nervous, to tell you the truth.

  Flash is the most unbalanced of all my associates. He had found the B-29 in a heap at the end of a jungle landing strip in Colombia after crashing his old DC-3. He has no pilot’s license and never will, I’m sure. His flaming red hair is tied in a ponytail and matches his handlebar mustache. The B-29, which he had put back together with coat hangers and baling wire, was his airborne version of a hippie VW bus. He even fitted it with a crude kitchen and waterbed. The Looney Tune was his home.

  He is an itinerant Contrabandista who works on one-shot contracts, usually to down-and-out desperadoes like our group. You had to be desperate to even go near that dude. I’ll give you an example of Flash’s twisted Worldview. As a pilot, Flash has his own Theory of Gravitation. He feels that if he gets stoned enough during a flight, gravity will have less effect on him, and therefore on the airplane, thereby increasing lift, decreasing drag and saving fuel. A result of his theory is that Flash is unconcerned about running out of gas. It always comes as a surprise to him when the engines die at 10,000 feet. He’s dispensed with fuel gauges altogether, as a matter of fact, claiming they are a distraction. In place of navigational instruments, Flash has a Betamax mounted in the cockpit.

  Flash has a sense of humor, though. Whenever the Looney Tune coughs and dies in midair, he’ll yell back to Aileron in a perfect Porky Pig imitation, “The-ah, the-ah, that’s all folks!”

  The Looney Tune was in appalling condition, as one might suspect. It had one hell of a sound system, though. Flash likes to listen to the Doors or Jefferson Airplane while he and Aileron roar over hill and dale (at treetop level to avoid radar), the cockpit dense with marijuana smoke. Or if he’s familiar with the terrain, he’ll watch vintage cartoons on the Betamax.

  Anyway, we revived Flash, cracked open a case of bubbly and got down to some serious conspiring. I dimly recall the basic plan. High Pockets and I had a couple hundred hours in various vintage airplanes (mostly DC-3’s and -4’s) and would be, respectively, copilot and navigator (navigation not being one of Flash’s fortes). Aileron is Flash’s tailgunner, so he’d sit in the tailgunner’s bubble and keep lookout for bogies.

  With the help of the Mayor of Santa Marta, José would reopen Santa Marta International Airport at precisely midnight the following Sunday and have 5,000 pounds of gold buds waiting on the runway. After the pickup—with José, Jim and Robert flying escort in the Lear—Flash and I would fly north to Bimini, where we’d refuel, then continue on to Massachusetts, where some of Flash’s burnt-out buddies still ran a commune. We’d airdrop the bales onto them and land at a nearby county airport, where José, Jim and Robert would be waiting.

  It sounded pretty much foolproof, but unfortunately things didn’t work out exactly as we planned.

  Quantum weirdness is not only reai—it is observable.

  —John Gribbin

  7

  Schrodinger’s Bandito

  Aweek or so ago we had some excitement up here. It came in the form of a platoon of Colombian troops. José claims they were looking for me, but I suspect their visit had something to do with his pillaging of the University of Barranquilla Research Library. Maybe it was a combination of the two. Possibly Señor Rodriguez came out of his coma, identified High Pockets and me through mug shots, then remembered enough about the area to more or less pinpoint our location. At any rate, José and his crew treated them to a typical Bandito Welcome—in other words, with guns blazing.

  The battle was apparently short but spirited. (I only heard it, so this information is secondhand.) José claims he had a great time playing with his rocket launcher (the one he had used on the jaguar) and doubts that we’ll have any further problems with the army or anyone else in his right mind.

  A couple days after the shoot-out, there was another interesting development, right here at my shack. José’s buddy who knows the Indian on the crazed fast informed José that the Indian is eating and talking again. José asked me if I’d like to meet the guy to discuss snakes, Subatomic Phenomena, comas or anything else. I said sure, why not?

  So José showed up with this wizened Guajiran clad in a loincloth and festooned with feathers, bones, amulets and two Timex watches. José explained that the old geezer was a holy man of some sort, and that he’d been fasting in order to reach a higher plane or whatever.

  Luckily the old Indian spoke Spanish, so I asked José if I could spend some time alone with him. José nodded sagely, mounted his little burro and disappeared into the jungle.

  I gave the guy a banana, which he swallowed whole, peel and all, and then motioned for him to sit down. He squatted on the floor.

  I wanted to find out exactly how wise he was before delving into important issues, so first I asked him why it was that High Pockets and Legs seemed to get along fairly well except on Wednesdays.

  He nodded and explained he would have to meet them. Since it was Saturday I figured there wouldn’t be any problem with this.

  I called for High Pockets to come out from under the bed. He emerged bleary-eyed, yawned, then erupted in a short sneezing attack. I told him to sit down in front of the old Indian.

  In order to roust Legs from his nest under the shack, I picked up my M-16, rammed home a clip and fired a few bursts out the window. I then placed the rifle in front of the old Indian and High Pockets. Legs appeared on cue, snaked his way up the warm barrel and dozed off.

  The old Indian placed one hand on High Pockets’ head, lightly gripped Legs with the other and closed his eyes.

  He sat that way for about ten minutes. Neither he nor Legs nor High Pockets moved a muscle. I had never seen High Pockets sit so still. He didn’t even blink. Legs didn’t blink either, but I attributed this to the fact that snakes don’t have eyelids.

  Finally the old Indian opened his eyes and put his hands on his bony knees.

  He then explained that the phenomenon was astrological in nature. It had to do with, among other things, phases of the moon in conjunction with the birth signs of Legs and High Pockets. (Guajiran astrology involves well over 500 birth signs.)

  I smirked inwardly and reminded him that the lunar cycle is twenty-eight days and our monthly calendar (excluding February) has thirty or thirty-one. This would result in Wednesday falling on different phases of the moon each month, so what the fuck did the moon have to do with anything, for chrissakes?

  The old Indian smiled slightly, motioned for me to calm down and proceeded to impress the hell out of me with a detailed discourse on how the retrograde motions of certain planets (most notably Mars) coupled with the Coriolis effect34 caused High Pockets’ doggy consciousness to conflict arhythmically with Legs’s consciousness, which is, he added, longer and narrower than High Pockets’ consciousness, even though a dog’s spirit is located in his tail. He then explained that dogs don’t really wag their tails but that the Great Spirit is moving in such a way that when dogs wag their tails, the tails are really stationary while everything else wags.

  At this point I sensed he was starting to ramble in order to distract me from some glaring inconsistencies in his answer to the original question.

  For example: Legs was not born—he was hatched. And as impressed as I was with the old Indian’s knowledge of astronomy, and most especially of the Coriolis effect, much of his astrologica
l data still rang untrue.

  Now I was in a quandary. I wanted to get down to more serious matters, namely, Subatomic Phenomena, but I wasn’t sure that the old Indian was ready or willing to absorb the profundity of what I had to say, never mind add some insights of his own.

  I had a couple belts of mescal to clear my head.

  What the hell? I figured. I’ll give it a shot.

  I casually inquired if he would care to hear my views on the Underlying Nature of Reality. His nod was barely perceptible.

  I started at the beginning, with José’s mugging of Tina’s family. I explained how my newfound wisdom was somehow related to Tina’s nymphomania (I didn’t mention the concealed diaphragm since it is doubtful that Indians are familiar with such devices), then briefly described José’s assault on the University of Barranquilla Research Library and the abduction of Señor Rodriguez. I asked him his views on comas. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then told me he thought comas were okay. I was impressed by the almost poetic brevity of this answer, so I decided to dive headlong into the New Physics.

  I felt that the old Indian needed a bit of background information, so I first gave a very brief but insightful lecture on the history of science, physics in particular. I made mention of Copernicus, Galileo and, most importantly, Newton.

  I explained how Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation had formed the bedrock of classical physics. Laws that we take for granted. Laws that we either learned in high school or know intuitively. Laws that deal with cause and effect. Laws that say that the Universe is an orderly and predictable place. Laws that have been found to be totally untrue.

  I paused for effect. There didn’t appear to be any. The old Indian was still sitting on the floor impassively. I smiled to myself. See what I mean? I thought. A cause with no effect.