Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (24 page)

By 1984 over a third of Terras industrial plants had been moved, as O’Neill foresaw, into the L5 area—Legrange point 5, where the gravity fields of earth and moon are balanced. The colonists even had a theme song, invented by another science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Wilson, in a book called
The Universe Next Door.
The song was “HOMEs on Legrange.”

MAY
1,
1934:

“They call it liberalism and socialism, the bastards, but really it’s their own brand of highway robbery. They been after me and Henry Ford and every independent in the country for a hell of a long time. You remember all this, son; you remember what your father told you. It’s a big fortune the Crane holdings and they’re going to be trying to take it away from you, just like they’re trying to take it away from me. I earned every penny of it, when I invented ORGASMOR, and I don’t aim to let them take it away from me or from you. You just remember why all the bankers are Rosenfelt liberals, son; you remember who your real enemies are and don’t think it’s those idiot socialists and other cranks like Townsend, with his thirty dollars every Thursday. It’s those kike bankers who want the whole pie and are just using Rosenfelt as a pawn.”

That was old Crane, Tom Crane, the man who invented ORGASMOR, talking to his son, Hugh, in Central Park, where sweet birds sang. Tom Crane was more dinosaur than primate: a tough, unsentimental reptile whose wealth was based on a swindle, pure and simple. He never explicitly claimed in any advertisement that ORGASMOR created more orgasms—just that it was “deliciously enticing” and “stimulating to all body cells and tissues” and the FDA never succeeded in proving that his agents had planted the popular mythology attributing lubricity to a product not very different in chemical content from Coca-Cola. A strict constructionist would certainly say that Crane’s customers were being defrauded.

“It doesn’t
poison
anybody,” old Crane always answered such nitpickers.

In fact, Hugh Crane—who was only ten in 1934 and would reach twelve before he discovered that the actual pronunciation of the President’s name was Roosevelt—was only partially listening to his father’s rambling diatribe. He had heard all of it before, many times, and besides, the Mysterious Tramp was much more interesting.

The Mysterious Tramp, perhaps a visitor from fairy land, was stopping each person who passed and asking them something. They all shook their heads and walked by rapidly. This was puzzling to little Hugh: If the answer was negative, why did the Tramp keep asking the question? Didn’t he believe the people who had already answered? Was he offering a chance to cross the boundary into magic space and were they all too timid to try?

“You see, son, Rosenfelt and the Rhodes scholars have it all sliced up and they have to get rid of people like me….” Tom Crane was still rambling along his own paranoid yellow-brick road when they finally came abreast of the Tramp. Hugh listened eagerly to catch the Mystery Question.

“Hey mister could you spare a dime I haven’t eaten in three days mister hey listen mister …”

“Get a job,” said old Crane, walking faster. “You see, son, that’s the kind of good-for-nothing loafer who’s destroying this country.”

But the boy who was to become Cagliostro the Escape Artist looked back and saw the Mysterious Tramp falling to the ground very slowly like a tree he had seen fall slowly after being chopped by the caretaker at the Crane country home out on Long Island, and just like the tree, when he finally reached the sidewalk, the Tramp didn’t move at all, not one bit, and even seemed to get stiff like the tree did, only faster.

DECEMBER 23, 1983

While Dr. Dashwood was worrying about the sinister Ezra Pound in San Francisco and Mary Margaret Wildeblood was preparing for her party in New York, a black giant named “Rosey” Stuart was struggling with a vacation memo in the
Pussycat
office in Chicago.

“This is the worst piece of idiocy I’ve ever seen,” he complained to his secretary. “It looks like it was written by a computer having a nervous breakdown. Listen to this gibberish: ‘Half a man-day shall not be equal to half a day unless the man is actually in the office for the full day, or
half of a full day, as the case may be. (This also applies to female employees.)’ What the ring-tailed rambling hell does that mean?”

“Do you want me to call Personnel and ask somebody to explain it?” asked the secretary, Marlene Murphy, a pert little redhead who could neither type nor take dictation well, but held her job because she fit the
Pussycat
image.

“Besides,” Stuart went on grumbling, “it contradicts the vacation memo we got last week.”

“That one was a hoax,” Marlene explained patiently. “Some crank got in at night and ran it off on a Xerox machine as some kind of practical joke.”

“Well, Jesus on a wubber cwutch,” Stuart complained, imitating Elmer Fudd, “it made more sense than this one.”

Marlene shrugged sympathetically. “This is the one we’ve got to live with.”

Stuart shook his head wearily. “What kind of world is it where the reality is weirder than the satire?”

There was no obvious answer to that. “Do you want me to call Personnel?” Marlene repeated.

“Hell, no!” Stuart exclaimed. “Don’t agitate that pit of ding-dongs. Just put me down for the first three weeks in July, and if they tell me I can’t have it, I’ll go over their heads and talk to Sput.” Stan Sputnik was the founder of the
Pussycat
empire and still acted as both Managing Editor and Publisher, as well as embodying the
Pussycat
image in all his highly publicized acts and deeds.

Stuart crumbled the vacation memo and threw it in the wastebasket.

“What’s next?” he asked.

“Dr. Dashwood. About the interview.”

“Oh, yes,” Stuart said, turning his chair to look out the window. “Call his secretary and see if he’s in.”

While Marlene went outside to her desk to place the
call, Stuart looked out over Chicago thinking of his rapid rise in the
Pussycat
empire. Born in Chicago’s South Side ghetto—his full name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart—he had originally followed the usual predatory life-script of impoverished alpha males. But his second prison term had thrown him into contact with a most peculiar cell mate—a self-proclaimed Sufi and master of all forms of Persian magick. “Rosey” Stuart came out of prison convinced he could do anything, acquired a degree in literature from Harvard in record time, and started the Great Novel about the Black Experience in America.

About then both racism and poverty were becoming obsolete, and selling a first novel was as hard as ever. Stuart had been toiling at
Pussycat
for five years, dickering with a novel about a parallel universe where racism still existed and a malignant black magician takes over the country by demonically possessing the body of the white President.

Last year the staff of
Pussycat
had quadrupled. Sput Sputnik had grown annoyed by the ever-increasing number of imitations of his Illustrated Fantasy Book for Onanists. Every editor at every competition publication had been hired away at a juicy salary increase.

Pussycat
suddenly had six Senior Editors, twelve Associate Editors, twenty-four Assistant Editors, and thirty Junior Editors. The other publishers found themselves confronting deadlines with nobody left on their staffs. Two went bankrupt; one committed suicide; the others took a year to get back in gear again.

“Business is business,” said Sput. He liked to think of himself as a tough, hard-driving businessman, as well as the twentieth century’s leading philosopher, the superstud of every girl’s tender dreams, the hero of the free press, the foe of bigotry and intolerance everywhere, and the world’s unacknowledged Master Psychologist. If he had
known there was such a thing as pie-eating champion, he would have aimed for that title also. He considered himself a Renaissance Man.

Although Stuart had advanced from Junior Editor to Senior Editor in spite of this competition, he hardly knew Sput at all. Sput never came to the offices, preferring to work in his mansion in Manhattan, and Stuart saw him only on the rare occasions when he was called upon to fly to New York for a conference.

Those conferences tended to be a bit much. Like certain movie actors who are always “on,” even when nowhere near a soundstage, Sput was as determined to impress his editors as he was to overwhelm the whole world. For years, he had insisted on playing chess during conferences, keeping an impoverished grandmaster on hand for a stiff competition; since the grandmaster knew which side his bread was buttered on, Sput always won. He had gotten this idea from a very inaccurate historical novel about Napoleon, in which the little Corsican sociopath was portrayed as playing masterful chess while discussing military strategy with his generals and the Napoleonic legal code with his judges.

More recently Sput had read a novel about Nero. The effect was even more disconcerting than trying to talk with him while he laboriously evaded an obvious Noah’s Ark trap. He was seated behind his desk receiving a blow job when Stuart had been ushered into his presence the last time. It was unnerving.

“You wanted to discuss the interview subjects for the next six months?” Stuart asked, taking his seat and noting that the erotic technician kneeling before the Great Man was a recent Pussyette from the mag’s foldout. In fact, she was the first to appear, not in an ordinary crotch shot (they were now becoming commonplace, not only in
Pussycat
, but in its imitators), but in a randy low-angle
crotch shot in which her vulva lips could clearly be seen
pouting
beneath the pubic hair. Stuart had been curious as to how that effect was obtained and asked the chief photographer, “Were you rubbing her off just before you snapped that?”

“Nali,” was the laconic answer. “We tried that, but the lips still weren’t visible enough. We ended up stuffing her snatch full of my hashish stash.”

“Lawd!” Stuart was astonished, and dropped back to his mother tongue.

“That’s why she had that far-gone look in her eyes. Stoned out of her head by the time we got it all out of her again. Bet you didn’t know it was possible to get high that way.”

“Wonder what it would be like to navigate her geography right after the hash came out,” Stuart said thoughtfully.

“Wouldn’t know,” the photographer sighed. “Sput put an exclusive on her soon as he saw the test shots.”

Now she kneeled, nude and covered with some kind of oil that Sput had read about in the Nero book, and carefully licked his wingwang up and down while he, imitating supercool, went over the interview list.

“Don’t want President Hubbard,” he said. “She’s too controversial.”

“But dammit, Sput, our interviews are
supposed
to be controversial!” Stuart seemed to recall saying that at each of these conferences.

“Not
that
controversial,” Sput said. “The intellectuals all hate her because she’s a scientist.
*
Now, here, Jane
Fonda and Timothy Leary, they’re good. But, Jesus H. Christ, Robert Anson Wilson, for Chrissake—he’s a fucking
science-fiction writer!”

“We interviewed Vonnegut,” Stuart said, watching the lady’s head bobbing up and down at Sput’s crotch.

“Yeah, but his books are serious. That’s different,” Sput said, breathing a bit heavily by now. “Besides, everybody says
The Universe Next Door
drives people wiggy and makes them become nudists or Buddhists or something. That kind of trouble we don’t need. And one science-fiction writer in five years is enough, already. (Gently, doll, gently!) I see you don’t have the Attorney General on the list yet.”

“It’s the same as ever,” Stuart explained, noting that the girl’s hand was sneaking down her belly into her crotch. “She just won’t give us an interview. She still says we’re a dirty magazine.”

“Dammit, we never go beyond contemporary community standards,” Sput protested, hurt. “That old bitch is a
bigot.”

“Well, bigot or not, she won’t give us an interview.”

“Fascist reactionary old bat,” Sput fumed. “Someday I’ll—” Then he brightened. “Listen, doll,” he said to the girl at his feet. “You’re the Attorney General—now really go to it,
like a fucking vacuum cleaner!”
The girl’s head began bobbing faster, and Sput slouched back a bit, smiling contentedly.

“Reactionary WASP bitch,” he muttered. “That’s right, take it, take it all, you foe of the First Amendment!”

“Er—Dr. Francis Dashwood,” Stuart prompted.

“Very good,
very
good.” Sput was whispering, as if toking a marijuana cigarette. “You Gestapo pig,” he added to the girl at his feet.

“How about Jackie Kennedy Onassis?”

“Yeah, yeah, class,” Sput said vaguely. He was beginning
to tremble a bit. “Who else you got?” he whispered, trembling more. “Dr. Spock.”

“Spock?” Sput asked. Then he repeated, shrilly, “Spock? Spock! SPOCK!???!” He was coming, Stuart realized with an embarrassed twinge. “Swallow it,” Sput was roaring. “Swallow it, you
wire tapper!”

It was a distracting conference all around, Stuart thought, remembering.

His secretary was at his door. “I finally located Dr. Dashwood,” she said, “at this home. He’s on the phone.”

Stuart picked up his phone, saying, “Ah, good afternoon, Dr. Dashwood. It’s a great pleasure to speak to you.”

“Is this on the level?” came a tense voice. “You’re not involved with that Poop or Foof place, are you?”

Stuart was dumbfounded. Could the head of the best-known sex research organization in America be a paranoid nut? “I
am
speaking to Dr. Francis Dashwood?” he asked carefully.