Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (16 page)

“Aummmm …” came the blissful reply from the students.

Hassan led Sam and Ed to another room.

“What’s all that sixth-plane shit?” Sam whispered to Ed.

“Astral projection,” was the brief reply.

Hassan seated himself at his desk and smiled genially. “Been out celebrating the Lord’s birthday?” he asked pleasantly. “Expropriating the expropriators?”

“We got a fuckin’
truckload
downstairs,” Ed replied.

“Mmmm-mm!” Hassan said. “A merry Yuletide indeed. Class merchandise from Honkyville, or were you ripping off our brothers and sisters again?”

“Class,” Sam said emphatically.

“And a truckload.” Hassan smiled dreamily. “Why, brothers, if I’m as generous as my reputation, you likely to end up owning more horse than the Kentucky Derby!” He pressed a button and another black man entered the room. This was Robert Pearson by birth, Robert Pearson, Ph.D., according to the anthropology department at U.C.-Berkeley, El Hajj Stackerlee Mohammed during a militant period in the sixties, Clark Kent (with his Supermen) during his commercial rock music years, and now Robert Pearson again. “Accompany these cats to our warehouse and e-valuate the cash value of their merchandise,” Hassan instructed.

Another trip brought Ed and Sam, with Pearson, to a building on Canal Street bearing the legend BHAVANI IMPORTS. Here the truck was unloaded, cataloged and priced.

“A genuine Klee or I’m a brass monkey,” Pearson said once. “Your uh client has bread as well as taste.”

“Now, what’s this shit?” he said later, scrutinizing a saccharine rendition of two naked boys preparing to dive into a swimming hole, framed by a gingerbread copper-plated oval. “Oh, well, we can sell it as camp.”

His sharpest reaction came when he confronted the redwood plaque bearing the ithyphallic eidolon.

“Jesus H. Christ on a unicycle,” he breathed.

Sam and Ed exchanged glances. “We can’t figure that
one out, either,” Sam ventured. “Beats the hell out of our ass.”

“Looks like some bozos joint,” Ed suggested helpfully.

Pearson put out an exploratory hand.
“Feels
like some bozos joint,” he amended. “Sure as shit ain’t plastic.” He shook his head wearily. “What I want to know is
what kind of bozo would do this to his joint?”

Sam and Ed shrugged. “He was a white bozo,” Sam contributed finally.

“I can see that,” Pearson said. “A
crazy
white bozo,” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Lawd, Lawd,” he said in down-home accents, “the things that white folks do, it’s just too much for this simple cullud boy.”

“Skin!” cried Sam.

“Skin,” Pearson agreed. They slapped palms. And there the mystery rested until Hassan i Sabbah X arrived personally to inspect the new imports a few days later.

“Namu Amida Butsu,”
he said, peering closely. “Shee-it.”

“Where do you think we can sell it?” Pearson asked dubiously.

“That I do not know,” Hassan i Sabbah X pronounced slowly. “But when we do find a buyer, the price will make your head swim. This is a one-of-a-kind item.”

Things were coming to a head. The key was no key.

Hassan had other things on his mind that weekend; he was well aware that “Frank Sullivan” (probably, in his estimation, a double agent for both Washington and Peking) had recognized “Washy” Bridge and
that
opened a very wiggly can of worms, indeed. Ever since Washy had told him about Project Pan, in fact, Hassan had felt increasingly like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the legend. A line from an H. P. Lovecraft story came back to his consciousness over and over again: “Do
not, I beseech you, call up any that you cannot put down.”
Like many another
occultist before him, Hassan i Sabbah X now wished he had taken that warning a bit more seriously a bit sooner….

Even before he left Bhavani Imports he was startled by an incident that seemed a definite
Santaria
synchromesh. “Hey, listen, man,” an art appraiser cried, catching his sleeve, “I’ve just heard the greatest limerick. Listen, just listen: ‘A habit obscene and unsavory—’” He broke down, laughing, caught himself, and repeated urgently, “Listen.” He tried again:

He broke down again, then went on:

Hassan looked at him with paranoid suspicion. “Very funny,” he said, unsmiling, and hastened out to his limousine.

“Back uptown?” the chauffeur asked.

“Broad Street,” Hassan said, giving an address. He was in mild first-circuit anxiety all the way to his destination.

He remembered his first conversation with Washy Bridge. “How many?” he had asked, not in shock or in outrage but in simple unbelief, inability to believe.
They are our creation: we are their creation.

“Fifty-seven of us.” The scientist was perspiring with anxiety, now that the secret was finally out, the reason he had fled Project Pan.

“Fifty-seven,” Hassan said hollowly.
Heinz 57 Varieties
, he remembered absently from the advertisements. “And
all of them with Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and more diplomas than a dog has fleas …”

“You’ve got to realize it works,” Washy said then. “You just can’t understand if you don’t keep that in mind. It works.”

“And two hundred to three hundred years in jail for each of you if it ever gets out,” Hassan added harshly. “You just better keep that in mind too.”

“That’s why I’m here,” the scientist said.

Hassan had paced the room briefly. “Wheels within wheels,” he said once. “Wheels within wheels
within
wheels.” Once he grinned. “At least I know why the Cincinnati cocaine market is thriving,” he said with a lewd chuckle. “Cincinnati,” he repeated, shaking his head. “What do they call it again?”

“Knights of Christianity United in Faith.”

A
habit obscene and unsavory
, Hassan remembered suddenly, jostled back into present time. He had arrived at his destination.

The man to whom he spoke then was a stockbroker according to public knowledge but pursued certain other careers in a private and clandestine manner.

“‘Frank Sullivan,’” Hassan said. “I want to know
everything
about him. Everything.”

The part-time stockbroker turned ashy-white. He got up, glared suspiciously at a window washer outside his office, and walked over to check that the window was closed all the way.

“Impossible,” he said then, in a near whisper. “If I told you the one most amusing and interesting fact about him, I’d be dead tomorrow.”

“That hot?” Hassan asked.

The man leaned back in his chair and gazed absently toward the ceiling. He recited some names, beginning with Jack Ruby of Dallas and ending with a senator whose
private plane had crashed just the week before, on Christmas Eve. “Those are just a few,” he ended, “who happened to find out too much about Frank Sullivan.”

Hassan spoke only once during the drive back to Harlem.

“Secrecy!”
he said with a profound grimace.

The chauffeur looked back nervously. He had never heard so much obscene emphasis in a single word.

Within three days the storm had become a blizzard in most of the Northeast and Roy Ubu was feeling snowed under in every sense of the phrase, driving with extreme caution, thinking that the new Head of Programming for the Beast, whatzisname, Moon, really seemed to take some kind of fiendish pleasure in producing reams and reams of records to prove that the records were all defective….

The snow whipped Ubu again as he parked and skittered into GWB to find Moon once again cheerfully perusing printouts that demonstrated, for the thirty-third time, that every single one of the missing scientists had simply stopped leaving ink or magnetic tape traces sometime between summer ‘81 and spring ’82. Which was impossible
in the age of bureaucracy: It was like an animal not leaving footprints on a wet beach.

“But the Beast is
supposed
to know,” Ubu had protested once.

“GWB-666 knows
everything
that has been recorded,” Moon said patiently. “It does not know what has never been recorded. You can’t see behind your head; GWB-666 can’t scan what was never recorded anywhere.”

“But dammit nobody can do anything in this country dammit without making a record.”

“Nobody but these 132 very elusive men and women,” Moon replied placidly. “If you’ll notice, I marked the bios where it deals with experience in programming. Seventy-eight out of the 132 have such experience. They obviously learned a great deal about Erase and Cancel codes….”

Roy Ubu made a despairing gesture. “How many bits can this thing access?” he asked wearily.

“Over one hundred twenty billion bytes,” Simon said. “Nearly a trillion bits. There’s never been an information system like this in all history,” he added with some pride.

“But it has amnesia where these scientists are concerned,” Ubu said bitterly.

   The robot whose passport said “Frank Sullivan” was in Washington that weekend and reported to a high official in Naval Intelligence, who suspected him of being a double agent infiltrating them for Air Force Intelligence.

After the usual sordid business was disposed of, “Sullivan” asked casually if N.I. had any interest in Hassan i Sabbah X.

“Good Lord and Aunt Agnes, no!” said the official emphatically. “Congress will have our ass if we get into anything domestic.” Then he asked, elaborately disinterested, “What did you happen to pick up?”

“Well, if there’s no real interest …” Pseudo-Sullivan gazed off into space absently.

There was a short silence.

“If it’s something big …” the official said finally.

“Sullivan” held out his hand. Another commercial transaction took place.

“It’s about a government scientist named George Washington Bridge …” pseudo-Sullivan began….

   “Miska-what?” Roy Ubu demanded.

“Miskatonic,” Special Agent Tobias Knight repeated. “Here’s their catalog.” He held up a booklet blazoned with a Gothic sketch of book, candle, inverse pentagram, and the motto:

“Where the hell is that?” Ubu asked.

“New England, somewhere in Massachusetts … ah, here it is, Arkham, Massachusetts.”

“And how many of the 132 were students there?” Ubu was hot on the scent.

“Sixty-seven of them,” Knight said triumphantly. “All in the classes of ’66 through ’69….”

“By God, it’s a
live
one,” Ubu cried. “Two or three might be happenstance, even ten might be coincidence, but Jumpin’ Jesus sixtyfuckin
seven
means something. Let’s look into this Miskatonic U. and find out what was going on back there in ’66 to ’69, besides dope.”

Mounty Babbit took a walk in Lincoln Park one day in 1969, trying to relax and calm his mind. Every tree spoke to him; the lions looked at him as a brother; the nervous armadillo pacing its cage stopped to stare at him, and he received clearly the message, “How did we get trapped in these ridiculous bodies?”

“We need bodies,” Ped Xing replied, “just as we need minds, to function in this three-dimensional continuum. Surely you remember that we are actually n-dimensional?”

“Oh, yes,” the armadillo signaled, “how could I have forgotten?”

Socrates had his
daemon
, Mounty thought in despair; Jesus had the Father in Heaven; Elwood P. Dowd had his giant white rabbit, Harvey; but why do I have to have a crazy Vietnamese Buddhist?

“You make the napalm,” Ped Xing told him.

Thoroughly agitated, Babbit wandered into the primate house, not noticing the sign which said “CLOSED TODAY.” There he saw two grim-faced men, in green uniforms, and a gorilla, in a blue uniform, going through a most remarkable pantomime. One of the men would raise a sign saying “WE DEMAND JUSTICE” and the gorilla would then spray him with a can of shaving cream; the other man would then feed the gorilla.

Operant conditioning. But what the hell …

Even Ped Xing was confused by that one.

The night watchman at Bhavani Imports, a Puerto Rican poet and
Santaria
initiate named Hugo de Naranja, was reading a novel called
Illuminatus!
when the mysterious incident occurred. Hugo was so absorbed in the book, which he considered the greatest novel since
Don Quixote
, that he didn’t notice the strange sound at first. Gradually the sound’s persistence invaded his consciousness, dragged him out of the most aesthetically exquisite blow job in all modern fiction, jerked him into an alert awareness that out there in the darkness there was something odd going on.

Rats, he thought.

No, the quick trot of rat paws was different.

A thief with soft slippers, or in his stockings …

Not that, either.

Hugo put down his book and picked up flashlight in left hand groping right-handedly and then finding pistol in holster. Something was going on in the vast darkness of the warehouse and he had to go and look for it and do something about it. He wished he hadn’t read so many Women’s Lib diatribes against
machismo
and Papa Hemingway. He wished he could still believe in the
macho
values. He wished he had more
cojones
or another job.

Then he walked out of his cubbyhole office, flashing the light ahead of him, and quoted to himself from his favorite
philosopher. “The ordinary man has problems. The warrior only has challenges.” Then he saw the intruder.

A
cat.
It was only a cat, held for one moment in his lightbeam, then skittering away into deeper darkness as the light raced after it. Then it was caught again, higher up, standing for Christ’s sake on the ghastly amputated penis plaque, its golden eyes glittering half-whitely in the flashed lightray. A cat standing on a penis, something right out of Surrealism or Dada.