The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (43 page)

“It was a silly business, sir. Shut a cat in a box. Control whether or not he is killed by decay of an isotope with a half life of one hour. At the end of the hour, is the cat alive or dead? Schrödinger contended that, because of the statistical probabilities in what they thought of as science in those days, the cat was neither alive nor dead until somebody opened the box; it existed instead as a cloud of probabilities.” Jane Libby shrugged, producing amazing dynamic curves.

“Blert?”

“Did anyone think to ask the cat?”

“Blasphemy,” said Deety. “Richard, this is ‘Science,’ German philosopher style. You are not supposed to resort to anything so crass. Anyhow Pixel got the tag ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ hung on him because he walks through walls.”

“How does he do that?”

Jane Libby answered, “It’s impossible but he’s so young he doesn’t know it’s impossible, so he does it anyhow. So there is never any knowing where he will show up. I think he was hunting for you. Dora?”

“Need something. Jay Ell?” the ship answered.

“Did you happen to notice how this kitten came aboard?”

“I notice everything. He didn’t bother with the gangway; he came right through my skin. It tickled. Is he hungry?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll fix him something. Is he old enough for solid food?”

“Yes. But no lumps. Baby food.”

“Chop chop.”

“Ladies,” I said. “Jane Libby used the words ‘brilliantly wrong’ about these German physicists. Surely you don’t include Albert Einstein under that heading?”

“I surely do!” Deety answered emphatically.

“I’m amazed. In my world Einstein wears a halo.”

“In my world they burn him in effigy. Albert Einstein was a pacifist but not an honest one. When his own ox was gored, he forgot all about his pacifist principles and used his political influence to start the project that produced the first city-killer bomb. His theoretical work was never much and most of it has turned out to be fallacious. But he will live in infamy as the pacifist politician turned killer. I despise him!”

“Success lies in achieving the top of the food chain.”

J. HARSHAW
1906-

About then the baby food for Pixel appeared, in a saucer that rose up out of the table, I believe. But I can’t swear to it, as it simply appeared. Feeding the baby cat gave me a moment to think. The vehemence of Deety’s statement had surprised me. Those German physicists lived and worked in the first half of the twentieth century—not too long ago by my notions of history, but if what these Tertians wanted me to believe were true—unlikely!—a truly long time to them. “A double dozen centuries—” Jane Libby had said.

How could this easygoing young lady. Dr. Deety, be so emotional about long-dead German pundits? I know of only one event two thousand years or more in the past that people get emotional about…and that one never happened.

I had begun to make a list in my mind of things that did not add up—the claimed age of Lazarus—that long list of deadly diseases I was alleged to have suffered from—half a dozen weird events in Luna—Most especially Tertius itself. Was this indeed a strange planet far distant from Earth in both space and time? Or was it a Potemkin village on a South Pacific island? Or even Southern California? I had not seen the city called Boondock (one million people, more or less, so they said); I had seen maybe fifty people all told. Did the others exist only as memorized background for dialog extemporized to fit Potemkin roles?

(Watch it, Richard! You’re getting paranoid again.)

How much Lethe does it take to addle the brain?

“Deety, you seem to feel strongly about Dr. Einstein.”

“I have reason to!”

“But he lived so long ago. ‘A double dozen centuries’ Jane Libby put it.”

“That long ago to
her
. Not to me!”

Dr. Burroughs spoke up. “Colonel Campbell, I think you may be assuming that we are native Tertians. We are not. We are refugees from the twentieth century, just as you are. By ‘we’ I mean myself and Hilda and Zebadiah and my daughter—my daughter Deety, not my daughter Jane Libby. Jay Ell was born here.”

“You slid home. Pop,” Deety told him.

“But just barely,” Jane Libby added.

“But he did touch home plate. You can’t disown him for that, dear.”

“I don’t want to. As pops go, he’s tolerable.”

I did not try to sort this out; I was gathering a conviction that all Tertians were certifiably insane by Iowa standards. “Dr. Burroughs, I am not from the twentieth century. I was born in Iowa in 2133.”

“Near enough, at this distance. Different time lines, I believe—divergent universes—but you and I speak much the same accent, dialect, and vocabulary; the cusp that placed you in one world and me in another must lie not far back in our pasts. Who reached the Moon first and what year?”

“Neil Armstrong, 1969.”

“Oh,
that
world. You’ve had your troubles. But so have we. For us the first Lunar landing was in 1952, HMAAFS
Pink Koala
, Ballox O’Malley commanding.” Dr. Burroughs looked up and around. “Yes, Lazarus? Something troubling you? Fleas? Hives?”

“If you and your daughters do not want to work, I suggest that you go chat elsewhere. Next door, perhaps; the fabulists and the historians don’t mind chasing rabbits. Colonel Campbell, I think that you will find it convenient to feed your cat elsewhere, too. I suggest the ’fresher just clockwise of my lounge.”

Deety said, “Oh, rats, Lazarus! You are a bad-tempered, grumpy old man. There is no way to disturb a mathematician who is working. Look at Lib there—You could set off a firecracker under her right now and she wouldn’t blink.” Deety stood up. “Woodie boy, you need a fresh rejuvenation; you’re getting old-age cranky. Come on. Jay Ell.”

Dr. Burroughs stood up, bowed, and said, “If you will excuse me?” and left without looking at Lazarus. There was a feeling of edgy tempers, of a need to place distance between two old bulls before they tangled.

Or three—I should be included. Chucking me out over the kitten was uncalled for; I found myself angry with Lazarus for a third time in one day. I had not brought the kitten in, and it was his own computer that had suggested feeding it there and had supplied the means.

I stood up, gathered Pixel in one hand, picked up his dish with my other hand, then found I needed to hang my cane over one arm to move. Jane Libby saw my problem, took the kitten, and cuddled it to her. I followed her, leaning on my cane and carrying the dish of baby food. I avoided looking at Lazarus.

In passing through the lounge we picked up Hazel and Hilda. Hazel waved to me, patted the seat by her; I shook my head and kept going, whereupon she got up and came with us. Hilda followed her. We did not disturb the session in the lounge. Dr. Harshaw was lecturing; we were barely noticed.

One delightful, decadent. Sybaritic aspect of life in Tertius was the quality of their refreshers—if such a mundane term can apply. Without trying to describe any of the furnishings strange to me, let me define a rich Tertian’s luxury refresher (and Lazarus was, I feel certain, the richest man there)—define it in terms of function:

Start with your favorite pub or saloon.

Add a Finnish sauna.

And how about bathing Japanese style?

Do you enjoy a hot tub? With or without an agitator?

Was the ice-cream soda fountain a part of your youth?

Do you like company when you bathe?

Let’s put a well-stocked snack bar (hot or cold) in easy reach.

Do you enjoy music? Three-dee? Feelies? Books and magazines and tapes?

Exercise? Massage? Sun lamps? Scented breezes?

Soft, warm places to curl up and nap, alone or in company?

Take all of the above, mix well, and install in a large, beautiful, well-lighted room. That list still does not describe the social refresher off Lazarus Long’s cabin, as it omits the most important feature:

Dora.

If there was any whim that ship’s computer could not satisfy, I was not there long enough to discover it.

I did not sample at once any of these luxuries; I had a duty to a cat. I sat down at a medium-size round table, the sort four friends might use for a drink, placed the kitten’s saucer thereon, reached for the kitten. Instead Jane Ell sat down and placed Pixel at the food. Burroughs joined us.

The kitten sniffed at the food he had been greedily eating minutes earlier, then gave an inspired bit of acting showing Jane Ell that he was horrified at her action in offering him something unfit for cats. Jane Ell said, “Dora, I think he’s thirsty.”

“Name it. But bear in mind that the management does not permit me to serve alcoholic beverages to minors other than for purposes of seduction.”

“Quit showing off, Dora; Colonel Campbell might believe you. Let’s offer the baby both water and whole milk, separately. And at blood temperature, which for kittens is—”

“Thirty-eight point eight degrees. Coming up pronto.”

Hilda called out from a plunge—no, a lounging tub, I guess—a few meters away, “Jay Ell! Come soak, dear. Deety has some swell gossip.”

“Uh—” The girl seemed torn. “Colonel Campbell, will you take care of Pixel now? He likes to lick it off your finger. It’s the only way to get him to drink enough.”

“I’ll do it your way.”

The kitten did like to drink that way…although it seemed possible that I would die of old age before I got as much as ten milliliters down him. But the kitten was in no hurry. Hazel got out of the lounging tub and joined us, dripping. I kissed her cautiously and said, “You’re getting that chair soaking wet.”

“Won’t hurt the chair. What’s this about Lazarus acting up again?”

“That mother!”

“In his case that’s merely descriptive. What happened?”

“Uh—Maybe I reacted too strongly. Better ask Dr. Burroughs.”

“Jacob?”

“No, Richard did not overreact. Lazarus went out of his way to be offensively difficult with all four of us. In the first place, Lazarus has no business trying to supervise the mathematics section; he is not a mathematician in any professional sense and is not qualified to supervise. In the second place each of us in the section knows the quirks of the others; we never interfere with each other’s work. But Lazarus kicked me out, and Deety, and Jane Libby, for daring to talk a few moments about something not on his agenda…totally unaware, or at least uncaring, that I and both my daughters use a two-level mode of meditation. Hazel, I kept my temper. Truly I did, dear. You would have been proud of me.”

“I’m always proud of you, Jacob. I would not have kept my temper. In dealing with Lazarus you should take a tip from Sir Winston Churchill and step on his toes until he apologizes. Lazarus doesn’t appreciate good manners. But what did he do to Richard?”

“Told him not to feed his cat at the conference table. Ridiculous! As if it could possibly harm his fancy table if this kitten happened to pee on it.”

Hazel shook her head and looked grim, which doesn’t fit her face. “Lazarus has always been a rough cob but, ever since this campaign—Overlord, I mean—started, he has been growing increasingly difficult. Jacob, has your section been handing him gloomy predictions?”

“Some. But the real difficulty is that our long-range projections are so vague. That can be maddening, I know, because when a city is destroyed, the tragedy is
not
vague; it’s sharp and sickening. If we change history, we aren’t truly undestroying that city, we are simply starting a new time line. We need projections that will let us change history
before
that city is destroyed.” He looked at me. “That’s why rescuing Adam Selene is so important.”

I looked stupid—my best role. “To make Lazarus better tempered?”

“Indirectly, yes. We need a supervising computer that can direct and program and monitor other large computers in creating multi verse projections. The biggest supervising computer we know of is the one on this planet, Athene or Teena, and her twin on Secundus. But this sort of projection is a much bigger job. Public functions on Tertius are mostly automated fail-safe and Teena steps in only as a trouble-shooter. But the Holmes IV—Adam Selene or Mike—through a set of odd circumstances, grew and grew and grew with apparently no one trying to keep his size down to optimum…then his self-programming increased enormously through a unique challenge: running the Lunar Revolution. Colonel, I don’t think any human brain or brains could possibly have written the programs that Holmes IV self-programmed to let him handle all the details of that revolution. My older daughter, Deety, is a top specialist in programming; she says a human brain could not do it and that, in her opinion, an artificial intelligence could swing it only the way Holmes IV did it—by being faced with the necessity, a case of ‘Root, Hog, or Die.’ So we need Adam Selene—or his essence, those programs he wrote in creating himself. Because
we
don’t know how to do it.”

Hazel glanced at the pool. “I’ll bet Deety could do it. If she had to.”

“Thank you, dear, on behalf of my daughter. But she is not given to false modesty. If Deety could do it, or thought she had even a slim chance, she would be hacking away at it now. As it is, she’s doing what she can; she is working hard at tying together the computer bank we have.”

“Jacob, I hate to say this—” Hazel hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Then don’t.”

“I need to get it off my chest. Papa Mannie isn’t optimistic over the results even if we are totally successful in retrieving all the memory banks and programs that constitute the essential Adam Selene—or ‘Mike’ as Papa Mannie calls him. He thinks his old friend was hurt so badly in the last attack—I remember it to this day; it was dreadful—Mike was hurt so badly that he withdrew into a computer catatonia and will never wake up. For years Papa tried to wake him, after the Revolution when Papa had free access to the Warden’s Complex. He doesn’t see how bringing those memories and programs here will do it. Oh, he wants to try, he’s eager to, he loves Mike. But he’s not hopeful.”

“When you see Manuel, tell him to cheer up; Deety has thought of an answer.”

“Really? Oh, I hope so!”