by Rucker, Rudy
“Feller says de Broglie’s matter waves explain the duality,” put in Burroughs, clearing his throat. He fixed himself a bourbon and joined them at the table. “Our essence lies in certain giant hereditary molecules. The gene codes. If you regard these molecules as matter waves, you have a precise meaning for your personal vibration. Your insect buzz is the quantum-mechanical frequency of your genome.”
“Flabbergasting erudition,” said Ginsberg, enjoying Bill’s words. “The wise man with his myrrh. Alert the tedious dullards at the Guggenheim Foundation. A new star gleams! Were you hitting musty, foxed stacks of science journals in a bookish Tangier detox, Bill?”
“I teeped all this from my new lover,” said Bill, looking directly at Alan for the first time since their quarrel this morning. “It’s as if Turing has built an extra room onto my head. I’m afraid I’ve been rather ungracious to him today. I was wrung out from my long night of writing.”
“If you love me, why did you kiss Ginsberg in front of me?” demanded Alan.
“I saw the opportunity,” said Bill with a shrug. “I’m taking advantage of looking young. I’ve always been greedy for sensation. You know this, Alan. And please don’t sulk. Sit next to me, dear. Have I told you that you look lovely today? Youthful and world-weary at the same time. Your Christopher Morcom look.”
“Meanwhile,” interrupted Susan, drawing out the word for jokey emphasis. “Was Bill saying that a normal person’s actual genetic molecule actually vibrates at something like thirty cycles per second?”
“I can’t be bothered to calculate that for you,” said Burroughs, insouciantly swirling his drink. “Ask Turing.”
“No need to get into the niggling minutiae, Susan,” said Alan, loath to spoil the fun. “But thirty and fifty trillion might be closer to the quantum-mechanical molecular vibration rates. Let’s suppose that one’s psychic perceptions chunk the oscillations by the trillion. So we’re both right.”
“I relish the literal specificity of thirty,” said Ginsberg. “What does thirty cycles per second sound like, Susan?”
“Well, fifty is basically speaker hum,” said Susan. “An annoying buzz. Thirty is deeper, almost granular.” She opened her mouth with her chin drawn back and let out a deep awww sound. “Thirty is mellow.” Susan took another deep breath and continued the awww.
Ginsberg chanted along like a monk, his voice smooth and deep. “One Many One Many One Many One Many One…”
Turing was distracted from all this by the clamor of his inner skug. It wanted him to make some new recruits. Now! The skug was like a vampire hungry for blood.
So Alan focused on Cassady. “Are you serious about wanting to be a skugger, Neal? I can set you up immediately.” Without Alan even willing it, his finger grew out like a vine to twirl in the air before Neal’s chest. “Do it now?” importuned Alan.
“Bring on the rush,” said Neal, leaning back his head with a reckless air. “Dial my vibrations to fifty, Doctor T.”
“Don’t do it, Neal,” rasped Bill, interposing his hand. “It’s slavery. The skugs are parasites. Like tapeworms. Imagine a ruthless street preacher who lives in your spine and uses you for kicks. Although there is the one big up side that you can change your shape.”
“Maybe worth trying,” said Ginsberg, thoughtfully combing out his full beard with his fingers. “And the skug kicks become your kicks. A karma yoga. Anyway, Bill, you’re a skugger, for good or ill—and you managed to write a substantial memoir fragment, was it last night? Would you say that it’s crafted at the same egregiously apostolic level as your Tangier routines?”
“The Apocalypse According To Willy Lee,” said Bill. “I hardly remember what I wrote.”
“Auspicious sign,” said Ginsberg. “Read it to the group after dinner?” He tugged one of the Big Bow Wow bags towards himself. “This food is communal, I trust?”
“Skug or no skug?” Alan asked Neal, still wanting to make his new convert.
“Go,” answered the handsomely profiled Neal, and Alan sent his finger forward.
Things calmed down a bit after that. Neal liked being a skugger. Appetite redoubled, he raced out to the Big Bow Wow, bringing back great staggering armfuls of food.
“Hup, hoop!” said Neal, eating his final Bow Wow Burger. “The mighty loaves and the wee fishes. “You should turn skugger too, Ginzy. Don’t falter on the shoreline. The ark of the new goof is come.”
“I find it more interesting to continue as before,” said Ginsberg equably. “I’m an ongoing thought experiment in the history of poesy.” He yawned. “Where do we sleep? There’s only the two bedrooms?”
“I suppose I could fit Neal in,” said Susan demurely. It was like she’d decided to take a break from her grief.
“Far be it from me to disturb you two or, for that matter, Turing and Burroughs, the young mutant lovers,” said Ginsberg, making himself pitiful. “I suppose it’s the sofa for old Allen. The cheese ripens alone. Slumped on a mound of rags. The match girl in the driving snow.”
“Oh come in with us,” said Bill.
“We’ll find a way,” agreed Alan. “We’re highly flexible.”
“I have some new acousmatics to play for you guys,” said Susan, yawning as well. “Nonlinear feedback. I smuggled out a tape from the lab. But I’m beat.”
“Me too,” said Burroughs. He gave Alan a smile. “Even though I’ve only been up for two hours. I might tinker on the memoir later in the night. And present it tomorrow.”
Susan stole a shy look at Neal. “Will all of you still be here tomorrow?”
“Do stay on, Bill,” put in Turing.
“I’m in no rush to split,” said Ginsberg. “It would be worthwhile to see a nuclear blast, the better to stand as witness to history. When’s the next pop coming up?”
“I think day after tomorrow,” said Turing. “They’re calling it the V-bomb. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
“They plan to set it off in a canyon near here,” added Susan. “Where the cliff dwellers lived.”
“Maaaa,” said Neal in his best Okie voice. “I wanna to see them Wild West fahrworks.”
Chapter 16: Wave Mechanics
Alan awoke to the jabber of Neal, Susan, Ginsberg and Burroughs in the kitchen, gay and lively. Neal was cooking a huge breakfast and Bill was drinking whiskey. The kitchen air was a haze of cigarette smoke. Outside the snow had let up again.
Last night Ginsberg had dropped off to sleep right away, leaving Bill and Alan to have a proper make-up session on the floor beside the mattress. Being skuggers, any surface felt relatively comfortable to them—particularly while making love. For her part, Susan showed every sign of having been intimate with Neal.
“Dig,” said Neal, turning towards Alan. He shrugged his left shoulder and popped up an extra head that wore a copy of Ginsberg’s face.
“This is in poor taste, Neal,” said the Ginsberg head.
“Teach you a lesson!” said Neal. He formed his right hand into a fat mallet and bonk struck the fake head. It squealed and sank back into his flesh.
Sitting at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal, the real Ginsberg smiled and shook his head. Evidently he’d already seen this routine several times.
As if competing to be the more bizarre, Bill Burroughs stretched out his arms at the sides of his head, and flowed into ugh the form of a ten-foot long centipede, glossy dark maroon on its back, pink underneath, and with scores of wildly twitching ochre legs. Bill’s long body bent forward and he snapped his dripping mandibles in Turing’s face. The fluid gave off a pungent smell of musk and bourbon.
“Feeling chipper, eh Bill,” said Turing, half-amused. “Let me get a spot of tea, and I’m off to save the world.”
“Can I help?” asked Susan.
“Not yet. Ulam wanted me to come alone today. Have you seen Vassar?”
“I’m hoping he’s behind the scenes,” said Susan. “Or it could be he’s jealous now, and in a sulk.”
“The Cassady curse,” said Ne
al, preening a bit.
“I’m using you as much as you’re using me,” said Susan sharply. “This girl is wise—my little pageboy.”
Neal actually looked abashed.
“I’ll be on my way now,” said Turing, shrugging on his coat. This was all too intense. He could get breakfast at the Bow Wow. “Bye, Bill.” The centipede waggled his head, Ginsberg bowed, and Neal winked.
Susan followed Alan to the door. “What about Hosty?” she asked, all merriness leaving her face. “When are you going to kill him?” She seemed almost like a nagging wife.
“The moment will come,” said Alan, expressing more confidence than he really felt. “Vassar will help me. We’ll have to disable Hosty’s radio.”
“Do it today,” urged Susan, going back inside.
Alan paused for a moment, gathering himself for the big day. For now, the sky was clear and sunny.
The two-tone Cadillac was a smooth hump beneath a drift of snow. There was an empty barn behind the cottage where one might in principal garage a car, but that wasn’t the kind of precaution that a Neal Cassady would take. No matter. The drifts were sculpted into lovely higher-degree surfaces—quartics or quintics at the very least.
Tina was on duty at the Big Bow Wow. She brought Alan tea in a pot—a rarity in the States—and a nice breakfast of coddled eggs with muffins.
“Some creep was asking about you this morning,” Tina confided to Alan when she brought the check.
“Asking about the extra guests in the Cadillac?” he said.
“Hadn’t noticed those yet,” said Tina.
“You will,” said Alan. “A poet and a rowdy.”
“I think the guy asking about you was from the LANL security staff,” resumed Tina. “He said he’d seen you eating here and he wanted to know where you live. I didn’t tell him, but be careful.”
“I appreciate this,” said Alan.
He put on his Peter Pfaff personality and hitched a ride to LANL. A security guard walked him to Ulam’s office. Ulam was at work looking very disheveled. He’d pushed aside the gadgets on his table and was standing over a trove of diagrams and calculations. Yesterday’s orderly blackboard had become a palimpsest of erasures, drawings and wiggly symbols.
“Tomorrow is the big blast,” said Ulam. “I suppose you know. Our security stinks.”
“What will the V-bomb do?” asked Alan.
“Oh, you’ve guessed by now,” said Ulam, beginning to pace around his office like a prisoner. “It kills the skugs. How? The V-bomb creates rays that attack some large proteins that are particular to skugs. These V-rays are pushing the molecules into unstable high-energy states, and the molecules collapse into junk. Pffft.”
“How strange,” said Alan, feeling a dizzy sense of unreality. “You’re talking about boosting the personal vibrations of the skugs and, I presume, their skugger hosts. My friend Susan and I were discussing something very similar last night. A convergence of thought.”
“It’s a strange time,” said Ulam, still pacing. “I myself have been glimpsing a ghost the last few days—a thing like a manta ray. We approach the world’s edge. It was like this before Hiroshima. Sit down if you like, Alan.” With that, Ulam returned to his document-laden table. “Tell more more about what this Susan says. She has the artist’s intuition. And a beautiful face.”
“Susan says that skuggers vibrate at a rate faster than normal humans.”
“Our V-bomb is no bohemian elixir,” exclaimed Ulam with a short laugh. “I think Susan and I are talking about very different things.”
“Well, yes,” said Alan, embarrassed to be caught out. “Of course I know this. But as a metaphor—” He stopped himself and began again. He should be on the attack, not defending himself. “If you kill the skugs, you kill the skuggers. Including Susan and me. You’re talking about an American genocide!”
“I am aware of this issue,” said Ulam shortly. “This is why I toss at night and see ugly ghosts. And this is the reason number one why I am glad to be confiding in you. I want you to avert the deaths of the skuggers.”
“Me!” exclaimed Alan, dismayed. “But you’re the one setting off the V-bomb!”
“I want you to compose a warning we can spread to the skuggers,” said Ulam. “We must tell them to expel their skugs by noon tomorrow. And then these people are safe. And my conscience is lily white.”
“How are we supposed to expel our skugs?” asked Alan, growing angrier. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Stan. A skug is completely integrated into a skugger’s metabolism.”
“Use your noodle,” said Ulam, falling back on one of his newly learned American idioms. “I give you twenty-four hours.” He lowered his voice. “Understand that I am acting independently here. I have no authorization from the higher authorities. But if you can find a deskugging method, I’m sure the authorities would disseminate your instructions for good press. As if offering civilians a chance to leave a targeted zone. Our military is not wanting the bad press of a domestic Hiroshima.”
Alan tried to consider the offer in a rational way. But his thoughts were muddled by the angry clamor of his inner skug. And when he tried to push the skug down, the room began to spin. His vision blurred, his knees wobbled, and he dropped to the floor.
The next thing Alan knew, Ulam was helping him to sit up, and offering him a glass of water. “You fainted, Alan. You steer between a Scylla and Charybdis. As do I. We’ll help each other through.”
“I’m afraid,” said Alan, reassembling his scattered thoughts. The moment of unconsciousness had been like a jump-cut. A literal experience of the void. “I’m terribly afraid.”
“I have a second motivation for cooperating with you and the skugs,” said Ulam, gazing at Alan in his chair. The scientist resumed pacing, as collected as if he were ticking off points on a list. “I know all to well how polarities can flip. Perhaps the V-bomb is a big flop. Perhaps the skugs win and everyone on Earth is a skugger. In this case, I am hoping you will stand up for me and, above all, for my family.”
“Of course,” said Alan readily. “We’re both mathematicians.”
Ulam nodded in agreement. “You are a brilliant man, Alan, and I’d like you to go over my calculations with me. I’m terribly worried that I’ve gotten something wrong. And what I’m telling you about the V-bomb may help you in seeking a way to expel your own skug.”
Of course this kind of talk set Alan’s inner skug to ramping up for another rebellion. “Let’s not even talk about such things,” said Alan quickly. Already he was seeing spots before his eyes.
They sat sat in silence for a minute, until Alan’s vision cleared. And now he posed a different question. “Can you explain why you think I’ll help you build the V-bomb at all?”
Ulam tapped his diagrams and gave Alan a knowing smile. “For the same reason that I corrected that fool Teller’s botched design for a hydrogen bomb. You and I like to know. We like to make things work.”
“Yes,” said Alan, nodding his head. “I do want to know the secrets of the V-bomb. What are the V-rays? How do you make them? How do you tune them to the frequency of the skugs?” His skug was cautiously in favor of this line of inquiry. Knowledge is power.
Ulam drifted over to his blackboard and began drawing lines. “V-rays are a style of radiation that’s associated with living organisms. Not an electromagnetic wave and not a particle. A purely quantum mechanical wave of contingent probability. The V stands for vitality—and for the element vanadium, which happens to potentiate the ray production. By shaping a vanadium-doped bomb’s core to certain peculiar specifications of my own design, we can produce a burst of V-rays with very specific properties.”
On the blackboard Ulam drew a kind of circle with dents in its edge. He gazed it for minute, then erased it and went to lean over his table again, poking at his diagrams and his pages of tightly written equations. “Come see.”
“How far can the V-rays travel?” asked Alan, peering over Ulam’s shoulder.
“This the beauty part,” said Ulam. “My V-rays resemble neutrinos, in that hardly any form of matter impedes their motion. They sail through concrete or lead or the body of a cow, but if they are stumbling upon a living skug—tzack! A kick in the pants.”
They pulled up chairs to be more comfortable and spent the rest of the day poring over Ulam’s work. The hours flew by. The reasoning was remarkably lucid, the formulas very clean. And by late afternoon, Alan had an idea about how to pervert the design for his skug’s purposes. But he still needed to know how one would go about physically tweaking the bomb.
Ulam went across the room to fetch them some cookies and a couple of glasses of apple juice. “My working lunch,” he said, handing Alan his share. “Or supper. So now—your verdict. No problems?”
Feeling the old lust for intellectual battle, Alan began savagely picking at the construction’s weakest point. “Shouldn’t you be using the Hermitian conjugate of this Hilbert space operator?” he said, tapping one of the sheets of formulae. “Perhaps you know better than I. But it hardly seems obvious that the V-ray operator is self-adjoint. Can you truly be sure that your detonation process will produce a discrete spectrum with a single, unique eigenvalue?”
Ulam’s lips began soundlessly to move. Repeatedly he ran his hands down the sides of his face.
Alan pressed harder. “If there were to be a multiplicity of points in the discrete measurement spectrum, then the V-bomb might annihilate quite a wide range of life forms. Even more dire: If the spectrum were in fact continuous, then your V-rays could disintegrate the planet Earth itself.”
“Already I think of that,” muttered Ulam. “Thinking about this all the time. Pipe down.” He clawed a fresh sheet of paper over to himself and went into a frenzy of calculation. “Another bump in the core shape,” the mathematician murmured after about five minutes. He was scribbling at a tiny, crooked diagram and talking to himself. “A bump at azimuth thirty-seven, elevation forty-nine, and then we’re safe, please dear God. Then we are being safe.”
