Complete Stories (5 page)

As he watched the stunglasses’ images, Ace High’s slack exuberance turned to
responsible concern
. Concern that he had not drawn his paycheck for two months. Concern about what he
had
been doing for two months. Concern that everyone receive their Enlightenment Rabies vaccination, particularly himself and Bodine. Concern with the fact that more and more young people were turning their backs on the real world, only to go chasing after some kind of crazy half-scientific hopped-up occultist mystagogic blue-dome swizzle, uh.

Bodine was more or less squatting on the floor with his arms between his knees. He was singing or moaning a wavering note. The Music of the Spheres is what the kids called it, and ordinarily if your best friend was singing the Music of the Spheres you left him alone for a few days. But they had to get that vaccination or they’d be swept.

“Are we crazy / are we insanéd / are we zeroes / that someone painted?” Bodine muttered when Ace shook him. Then he shifted phases, the images unlocked, and he was walking out the door with a headache.

“The old bus station, right?” Ace High said. Bodine nodded, and they started down the cold and dry sidewalk, flooded yellow with clear November sun. They were wearing their stunglasses, and each of them had about half of his attention occupied by the multiplex image the stunglasses projected into any part of the visual field not under active scrutiny.

The bus station was a ten minute walk away, but they didn’t talk much. They were absorbed in watching a dinosaur show. They couldn’t even tell that it was multiplex anymore. Their whole conscious minds were involved in the show they were watching, and the incessant messages from all the “sponsors” were being sorted out and stowed away subconsciously.

Soon Bodine and Ace High had joined the long line of waiting citizens that snaked out of the old bus station. Everyone had stunglasses on. Some people were watching sports, some were watching old movies, some were watching sex, some were watching university extension courses. Nobody was watching the November sunlight sliding across the street like nectar from the last flower of the year.

============

Written in 1977.

New Pathways
, #9, November, 1987.

When I wrote the amateurish “Enlightenment Rabies” I was exercised about the U. S. propaganda tactic of naming diseases after the government’s enemies: the Russian Flu, the Chinese Flu and the like. And, of course, I was filled with hatred for television. From the present-day vantage, the story looks cyberpunk. I sent “Enlightenment Rabies” to the short-lived magazine
Unearth
in 1978, and they were going to print it, but then they decided to serialize my novel
Spacetime Donuts
instead.
Unearth
‘s policy was to print previously unpublished authors. William Gibson and I both had our first SF publications there. I eventually cannibalized the opening paragraph of “Enlightenment Rabies” for Chapter 25 of
Software
.

“A cat is placed in a steel chamber, together with the following hellish contraption (which must be protected against direct interference by the cat): In a Geiger counter there is a tiny amount of radioactive substance, so tiny that maybe within an hour one of the atoms decays, but equally probably none of them decays. If an atom decays then the counter triggers and via a relay activates a little hammer which breaks a container of cyanide. If one has left this entire system for an hour, then one would say that the cat is still living if no atom has decayed. The first decay would have poisoned it. The wave-function of the entire system would express this by containing equal parts of the living and the dead cat.” —Erwin Schrödinger.

-----

By rights, this should have been an important scientific paper…not a thrilling wonder tale in some lurid, mass-produced edition. But I must cast my net as wide as possible. I am fishing for minds, minds with the delicacy of thought to appreciate the nature of Ion Stepanek’s fate.

Such are the facts: with my assistance, Ion Stepanek was able to build a sort of time-machine. He used this machine to produce a yes-and-no situation, which he tried to observe. As a result, he has split into an uncollapsible mixed state. Due to coupling effects, I suffer his condition, though not yet to the same degree.

It is March 21, 1980, Heidelberg, West Germany. I am sitting in the office Stepanek shared with me, staring out at a white sky. The office is in the Physics Institute. Across the river, the great castle hovers over the misted town like a thought. Such are the facts.

I did my undergraduate work at Stanford, then took my Ph.D. in particle physics at Berkeley. My thesis project helped lead to the first experimental disproof of the Bell inequality. At one time this was a fairly sensational result, although now more and more people have accepted the ultimate validity of the wave-function world-view.

Schrödinger’s though-experiment is paradoxical because, according to quantum mechanics, until the observer opens the door,
the cat is not definitely dead or definitely alive
, but is rather 50 percent dead and 50 percent alive. The cat is in what is known as a
mixed state
.

Einstein responded to Schrödinger’s paradox by asserting that this fifty-fifty business was just a measure of the observer’s lack of knowledge, rather than being a true description of the actual state of the cat. But the experimental disproof of the Bell inequality has shown that Einstein was wrong. The unobserved world evolves into truly mixed states. There are no hidden parameters which make things stay definite.

It is thanks, in part, to my own research that this result was proved. But despite this high achievement, I was unable to obtain a good research or teaching post. I make enemies easily, and it may be that one of my letters of recommendation was, in effect, a black-ball.

I postponed the inevitable with a post-doc at Harvard. But after that I had to take a poorly paying job at a state college in Wankato, Minnesota.

Cut off from any real physics laboratory, I was forced to begin thinking more deeply about the experiments I had run at Harvard and at Berkeley. What is it Schrödinger says about his paradox?

“This prevents us from accepting a ‘blurred model’ so naïvely as a picture of reality. By itself reality is not at all unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a blurred or poorly-focused photograph and a picture of clouds or fog patches.”

I had a nervous breakdown during my fourth year at Wankato. It had to do with the television weather reports. Quantum mechanics implies that
until someone makes an observation
, the weather is indeterminate, in a mixed state. There is, in principle, no reason why it should not be sunny every day. Indeed, it is logically possible to argue that it rains only because people
believe it to be raining
.

Fact: in Wankato, Minnesota, there is precipitation 227 days of the year.

Before too long I thought I had determined the reason for this. All of the citizens of Wankato…even the faculty members…watch television weather reports every evening. These reports almost always predict rain or snow. It seemed obvious to me, in my isolation, that if the weather reports could be stopped, then it would not rain so often.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to gather signatures for a petition. I went to the TV station and complained. Finally, I forced my way into the studio one evening and interrupted the weather report to state my case.

“Tomorrow it will be sunny!” I cried. “If only you will believe!”

The next day it was sunny. But I was out of a job, and in a mental institution. It was clear that I needed a rest. It had been folly to shift my fellows over so abruptly from one belief system to another. I had neglected the bridge, the mixed state.

That was in March, 1979. A year ago. They let me out after six weeks of treatment. As luck would have it, a letter from a German research foundation was waiting for me when I finally got back to my little furnished room. They had approved my application for a one-year grant, to be spent working with Ion Stepanek at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg. My project title? “Mixed States as Bridges Between Parallel Universes.”

On a typical Heidelberg day it is misty. On the Neckar River the vapor hangs in networks, concentrated at the boundaries of atmospheric pressure cells. The old town is squeezed between the river and a steep mountainside. Some hundred meters up the mountain hangs the huge, ruined castle. In the mist it looks weightless, phantasmagoric.

I got there in early September, during semester break. I found a room outside of town, and on most days, I would ride the stuffy bus from my apartment to Bismarckplatz, the little city’s center.

Strange feelings always filled me on these bus rides. I never seemed to see the same face twice, and the strangeness of it put me at a remove from reality. Never had I tasted alienation in such a pure and unalloyed form.

Half convinced that I was invisible, I would stare greedily at the German women, at their thick blonde hair and their strong features. The women stared back with bold and clinical eyes. I gave my heart a thousand times, without ever saying a word. But I could never muster the courage to approach one of those tantalizing aliens. I am, after all, soft and funny-looking.

On a normal day I would get out at Bismarckplatz and walk over the bridge. Crossing the Neckar always took me a long time. In the middle of the bridge I would stop and watch the fifty-meter-long barges speeding by beneath me. The river is like a highway, with coal and wrecked cars being lugged upstream, and great beams of steel gliding downstream. There are the locks to see, and the hazy old town, and above it all, the great hallucinatory castle.

Other darker thoughts detained me on the bridge as well. Surely you have seen Edvard Munch’s painting,
The Cry
? Why do you think Munch chose to place this most anguished figure in modern art…on a bridge? On a bridge one is neither here nor there; one is rootless…and anything can happen. Did you know that in the 1800s the most commonly attempted method of suicide was none other than…jumping off a bridge? Out there, in the wind, one need not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.

During my first two months in Heidelberg, the Institute was deserted. The sole secretary present showed me my desk in Ion Stepanek’s large office. As I later learned, Stepanek was spending the semester break visiting relatives in Budapest. Both he and his wife, Klara, were Hungarian refugees.

The first time I met Stepanek, he caught me by surprise. I had spent those first lonely months at the Institute by going over various treatments of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. My slow understanding of the solution was expressed in a large, three-dimensional figure, a sort of solid letter “Y,” which I was amusing myself with by drawing on the office blackboard.

“William,” a voice cried suddenly. “What a pleasure to find you here, hard at work!” I turned a bit too abruptly—he had startled me—and we shook hands.

Ion Stepanek was a short, wiry man, given to wearing suede vests and jackets. His hair was thinning, and rather greasy. He had a large nose and a wide, amused mouth. His eyes were very quick, and he had a disconcerting habit of staring me in the eye when he sensed I might be holding something back.

Although he was ten years my senior and, nominally, my supervisor, Ion began by treating me as an equal. He had read my experimental work and my recent, unpublishable theorizings. In return I had read everything he had written, even including a stack of freshly typed pages I had found on his desk.

His sharp eyes took in my diagram of the EPR paradox, and then he turned to gesture at the window. “So, William? Do you like the fog? The indeterminacy?”

I shrugged. “I can live with it. Did you enjoy your vacation?”

“Must it be yes or no?” I didn’t know quite what to answer. Stepanek savored the moment, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Have you read my latest?”

“You mean this?” I pointed to the pages on his desk. “Yes, I took the liberty. But …” I stopped, not wanting to offend him.

He plucked the thought out of my eyes and answered it. “You are wondering why I would waste my energy on a chimera like time-travel.”

I nodded. “Surely you are aware of the paradoxes. One can so easily produce a yes-and-no situation with a time-machine.”

Ion smiled widely, mirthlessly. “Do you not understand your own work? This is just what you want.”

We dropped the matter for then, and went on to discuss the bus routes, my apartment, the restaurants…the minutiae of life in a foreign country.

Ion insisted on taking me home with him for the midday meal. His house was only a few hundred meters from the Institute. His wife, Klara, greeted me like a long-lost cousin.

“Ion has been so looking forward to your visit, William. It is wonderful that you are here!” She had soft eyes and dark, sensual lips. A perfect wife, a perfect mother. How comfortable she made me feel!

I accepted a glass of kirsch before lunch. The clear, dry alcohol went straight to my head, but Ion assured me that Klara’s after-dinner coffee would remedy that. Then the two children, twin ten-year-old girls, came crashing in.

The German school-day ends before one o’clock, and it is not unusual for the whole family to have their big meal together at midday.

“Do you fix such a big supper as well?” I asked Klara as we sat down to our cauliflower soup.

“This is not big,” she said, looking down the loaded table. “This is nothing.”

Besides the soup, there was a roast stuffed with hot sausage, a platter of fried potatoes, creamed spinach, cucumber salad, smoked cheese, two kinds of salami, dishes of pickled peppers, and a large carafe of excellent white wine.

“I have never seen such a magnificent meal in my life!” I exclaimed.

The twins giggled, and Ion laughed appreciatively. “You see, Klara? William is already learning the art of Hungarian exaggeration.”

In the course of many happy hours spent at the Stepaneks’ over the next three months, I was to become very familiar with this sort of conversation. A Hungarian is never happy without being ecstatic, never sad without being suicidal, never your friend without being ready to give you everything he owns, never displeased without being ready to kill. But there was, for all that, a consciously playful element to their exaggerations which somehow kept them from ever being oppressive.