Emma Holly (14 page)

Behind the door, Eric and his boss sat at a table as fancy as one in a fine restaurant. Lamps shed pools of light here and there, but the main illumination came from an antique candelabra burning on the serving trolley that had been rolled between the men. She couldn't doubt they'd done this kind of thing before.

Both looked relaxed—or they did until she came in.

As soon as he saw her, Eric jumped from his seat. She couldn't be sure, but she supposed this was a compliment to her clothes. Either that, or he always stood for women. Cool as ever, B.G. simply raised his brows, his gaze trailing down her body and up again.

His mouth tipped up on one side when he spied her piercing.

To her surprise, Maurice bobbed a small bow and left. His wasn't the only missing face. Despite Sylvia's promise to see her at the meal, the discipline-loving masseuse was nowhere in sight.

"Is it only us?" she asked as Eric pulled out her chair.

"Yes," B.G. said. "I thought you'd welcome the chance to get to know your keeper."

From the way Eric's eyes widened, he hadn't known this was the plan, though B.G. appeared to think he'd said nothing odd. He smoothed his white linen shirt and filled her glass with water, a politeness that showed off how lean and broad his shoulders were. "I suppose you were expecting Sylvia to join us."

"I'm sorry about that," she said, experience having taught her it was better to admit guilt as soon as you'd been caught. "She kind of took me by surprise."

"Sylvia has a way of doing that. She's being… seen to, if not as perfectly as she was by you. You seem to have a knack for bringing out your partners' most passionate responses."

"I didn't mean to," Charity said, remembering to shake her napkin into her lap. "It was more of an accident."

"An accident Eric and I enjoyed observing, even if it did show us up. I expect you've earned yourself a friend for life. But we shouldn't be letting our meal get cold. My cook is quite adept. I believe you'll find this to your taste."

"Am I going to be punished?" Charity blurted out, unable to bear the suspense.

B.G.'s smile was slow, its curve sending a slither of heat through all her secret places. "Oh, no, Charity.

You haven't earned your punishment
yet
. When the time is right, I'll let you know."

They
hadn't finished the first course before Eric decided something was seriously up with B.G. They'd dealt with candidates on their own before, but tonight felt personal. This was steak and wine and ordinary conversation, as if Charity Wills were a more traditional sort of guest. Aside from B.G.'s occasional activation of the anal toy—the effect of which Eric did his best to conceal—his boss was ignoring him.

He was talking TV with Charity, for God's sake: asking her whether she thought
The Real World
or
Survivor
painted a truer portrait of human life. Eric hadn't known his boss watched these shows. In fact, he would have sworn he did not.

It occurred to Eric, as he gritted his teeth against a burst from the vibrator, that B.G. might have done a bit of boning up precisely so he'd have something to talk about with Charity. If this was true, it was beyond any prep work he'd done in the past. Evidently, B.G. thought it important to make Charity—both the person and the plaything—feel comfortable.

"You are too funny," she said now, her hand shoving B.G.'s shoulder, her cheeks flushed with the wine and some off-the-wall witticism his boss had cracked.

B.G. inclined his head. "I'm gratified to have amused you."

"I read your book, you know," she said, slanting a glance at him as she turned her wineglass in a circle on the tablecloth. "Or part of it. I'm afraid I gave up when you got to the bit about the cat."

B.G. nodded understandingly. "Many brilliant minds have been stumped by Schrödinger's famous thought experiment."

Predictably, Charity grimaced at being lumped in with brilliant minds. "I couldn't get my head around it,"

she admitted, propping her elbows around her plate—forgetfulness, Eric was sure. Up until then, her manners had been fine.

"I'm sure you understood the premise." B.G. leaned forward to match Charity. He'd gone into teaching mode, his hair flopping in his eye, his focus on his audience. Eric hoped this meant he'd be safe from the vibrator for a while. His erection was starting to pulse in time to its rhythm even with it off.

"You could remind me," Charity said. "In case I forgot."

"Schrödinger's imaginary cat is closed in a box along with a vial of poison whose seal is linked to an unpredictable quantum event, a particle which has a 50/50 chance of decaying or not. If it decays, a Geiger counter triggers the seal on the vial to break, thus killing the imprisoned cat. If the particle doesn't decay, the cat survives."

"That's what I thought," Charity said. "But in your book you claimed that nothing happened until someone opened the box. You said that until there was an observer, the cat was neither dead nor alive. I just can't understand how that could be."

"But you've cut to the heart of the quantum paradox!" B.G. exclaimed. "According to the way people have always understood the world, a dead-alive cat is impossible. This, however, doesn't change the fact that in the quantum world—the world of the very small—contradictory states of reality have been proven, repeatedly, to coexist."

Charity sighed and wagged her head. Seeing how close she was to giving up, B.G. pressed his lips to her cheek. Though this teaching tool would have been inappropriate in a college lecture, it relaxed her enough to listen as he went on.

"Let me try to make it clearer," he said. "Take an electron, which has qualities of both waves and particles: clear, mutually exclusive states. Now say you have an electron gun." To demonstrate, he picked up a fork and held it tines-out. "This electron gun is capable of shooting a single electron at a time. In front of this gun is a wall with two tiny electron-size holes, either of which can be opened or closed on demand." To represent the barrier, he balanced a leftover slice of garlic bread on its side. "In front of this hole-y wall—Eric, if we could borrow your hand here? In front of this hole-y wall is a special electron-detecting screen, represented now by Eric's palm. When an electron hits it, it glows.

"Wanting to see what's what, you open one of the two electron holes and shoot a single electron from the gun. As a Newtonian, or large body, physicist would expect, the electron behaves like a tiny bullet, creating a discrete, particle-size blip on the electron-detecting screen. Seeing this, you conclude that an electron is a particle."

Chin on hand, Charity nodded to show she was following.

B.G. smiled in approval. "Now," he said, "just to be certain you've found the truth, you open both the holes in the wall that sits between the gun and the screen. Again, you shoot a single electron, fully expecting it to go through one hole or the other. Instead, the electron behaves like a wave, going through both holes at once and then interfering with itself on the other side, with peaks intensifying peaks or being cancelled by troughs, until what registers on the screen is not the mark of a single 'bullet' but a pattern of bright and dark bands—classic evidence of wave interference.

" 'How fascinating,' you think, and decide you must observe this waving electron going through both holes at once, just as water would do. So you place teeny tiny electron detectors on each of two electron-size holes. And what do you think happens?"

"I'm sure I have no idea," Charity said with a bemused smile. Eric smiled as well. Some people had favorite jokes. This aspect of the quantum puzzle was B.G.'s equivalent.

"What happens," B.G. said, "when you install the electron detectors on the two open holes, is that the electron reverts to behaving like a particle. Even though you just proved it is a wave, you can never record it going through both holes at once, only one or the other. It's as if the electron
knows
you are watching, and for some unfathomable reason, it's forced to commit to a single choice."

"But… how could it know?" Charity stammered.

"That," said B.G., "is a very big mystery. As in the theoretical case of the cat, human consciousness appears to hold the conundrum's key. It may be that we create our world as we observe it."

Charity slumped back in her chair, looking completely baffled but not the least self-conscious about her lack of knowledge. "You're telling me noncrazy people have proved this with real experiments. It's not physicists sitting around in armchairs saying 'Wouldn't this be neat?' "

"I've simplified the process for the sake of clarity, but, yes, perfectly rational scientists have proved this and other things equally as strange. They've proved that our concepts of time and space are human illusions. They've proved that not only do quantum particles exist, but so do their ghostly opposites.

Atoms that have appeared in a certain spot create mirages in a second where they had a probability of showing up, mirages a scanning microscope can pick up. It can be argued, in fact, that every possible choice an atom or a person can make exists in a multi-layered quantum fuzz, lacking anything we would call reality until we turn our attention to an event. Most important, scientists have found evidence to support these claims when they were striving to undermine them. To tell the truth, Charity, reality is much more peculiar than the average person is aware."

"Huh," she said. "Cool."

At this, B.G. sat back, visibly pulling his composure around him. He seemed to regret having let his enthusiasm run away. "I'm glad you think so," he said. "But I'm afraid I've monopolized the conversation.

Why don't we let Eric tell you about the time he went on tour with the Rolling Stones…"

Her
I'm-with-the-band fashion sense aside, Charity wasn't the sort of girl to be awed by name-dropping, at least not to the point of skewing her judgment. Still, it seemed polite to express interest when B.G. so obviously wanted her to.

Too, she had to admit it was uncanny that she'd been thinking just this morning how different Eric was from the guys she usually dated, the kind of man who wouldn't know Sir Mick from Sir Galahad.

"Really?" she said, turning to Eric for confirmation. "You toured with the Stones?"

Her question was simple enough, but Eric choked on his water and gripped the table edge.

"Jesus," he said when he'd caught his breath, glaring at B.G. for no reason that she could see. B.G. must have been doing something he shouldn't. He was smiling innocently. Charity wondered if Eric had earned some secret punishment.

"Yes," he said to her with an air of studiously ignoring his boss. "I traveled with the Stones on one of their tours. Nothing glamorous. I was still a suit, as you would say. I handled their PR. That was my field before I came here."

"Well, no wonder you had no trouble convincing me to come!"

"Oh, I'm persuasive," Eric said. "I've had people tell me I could sell sand to Arabia."

He didn't sound as if this pleased him, but Charity didn't get a chance to ask why. She was reaching for the last of her wine when the oddest feeling swept through her head, a sensation of pressure as if her ears had been stopped with cotton balls. An unnatural silence swallowed the room until even the ticking of the fancy mantel clock was blotted out. Then, like a broken film being restarted, the glass she'd been about to pick up jumped clearly and unmistakably at least six inches
to
the left.

She was too shocked to keep her girlish shriek inside.

Eric was on his feet before the sound faded. "What?" he said, his hands on her shoulders. "Honey, what's wrong?"

"Didn't you see it?" she gasped, craning around, her heart pattering frantically in her throat. "My glass moved all by itself."

"Surely not," Eric said.

Charity turned to B.G. "It's a trick, isn't it? You did something sneaky to make it move."

B.G. smiled and spread his hands, far too complacent for her peace of mind. "No trick," he said,

"although I regret I didn't observe the incident myself."

"It was real," she insisted. "I'm not drunk."