Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (32 page)

“But the crowning insult to our simple-minded realism comes, of course, from our friends the physicists,” Williams explains. “If Krazy is Schrödinger’s Cat in the famous demonstration then my dear
then
we are really up the ontological creek without a paddle because when the brick is hurled she may be in any of several eigenstates, several mathematical probability matrices, in some of which the brick will certainly hit her and in some of which it will not.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Wow, indeed. To paraphrase Descartes: ‘I think; therefore, I am confused.’”

The first fame of Cagliostro began while he was touring with the U.S.O. during the war. He had entirely abandoned mentalism by then and his act depended entirely on escaping from everything the M.P.’s could devise to restrain him.

Variety
called him “the new Houdini” in 1945, just a few months before Hiroshima.

His first arrest occurred in the fall of that year, possession of marijuana, the charges dismissed without a trial. (His agent’s connections, the Crane family lawyer, the fact that the Crane fortune had not been wiped out
entirely
when ORGASMOR dropped to the bottom of the Big Board, and judicious oiling of what Show Biz and underworld people call “tin mittens”—officials on the take—contributed to this happy consummation.) He was one of the first guests on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, but was never asked to return due to a 1948 “morals” arrest: the girl was quite young and an “act against nature” was alleged. Once again, money changed hands and there was no trial.

His career was mostly “in the clubs” after that; Hollywood and TV were both in one of their chronic contractions of cowardice at the end of the decade.

A second morals arrest, followed rapidly by a second pot bust, made him a little too hot for most club owners. Still—the crowds turned out wherever he appeared. The mob decided to set immediate money against caution, and he was allowed to go on working. Until his disastrous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950.

“You’re
not
a Communist, you hardly
know
any Communists, you could have sung like a bird without hurting yourself,” his agent said afterward. “Why did you have to do it, baby?”

“Listen,” Crane said angrily. “Do you think I can get out of a fucking set of
Junior G-Man handcuffs
if I let one single jot of fear get into my head? You don’t understand. I can’t let anything scare me—especially not shit-heads like them.”

“It’s your own funeral,” the agent replied glumly. “I’ll tell you the plain and varnished facts. You’re gonna end up like Chaplin. Two sex scandals, two drug scandals, and now this. You’re gonna end up worse than Chaplin. You’re box-office poison, baby. From this day forward.”

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

Although the HEAD Revolution transformed the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance, nobody knows when it actually began. Some trace it to certain Alchemical cults of the early Dark Ages; some say it did not properly start as an organized movement until neuropharmacology began to replace old-fashioned “psychology” in the late Dark Ages
(i.e.
, just before the time of this epic novel); some try to find its origins in primitive shamanism and yoga.

What is clear is that
some
primates on Terra began to transcend genetic four-circuit limitations many centuries, or even millennia, before true neuroscience appeared among them. Whether this was due to mutation, empirical hit-or-miss experimentation with alkaloid herbs, or other factors is unknown. In Egypt and China and other places, a few primates reported fifth-circuit raptures—the dawning of neurosomatic consciousness—two thousand or even three thousand years before the Space Age began.

The picture is the same on all planets. A few biots suddenly rise above the eat-it-or-flee-it imprints of the amphibian biosurvival circuit, above the dominate-or-submit imprints of the mammalian territorial-emotional circuit, above the either/or logic of the hominid semantic circuit, above the “good” and “bad” values of the tribal sociosexual
circuit. They have transcended infantile feeding programs, childish emotional programs, adolescent philosophizing, and adult “responsibility” (pack role) all at once.

What has happened, of course, is that these biots have formed a fifth circuit in their brains. This is called the neurosomatic circuit because it allows conscious feedback between the nervous system (“mind,” in prescientific primate language) and the soma (“body”). In the larval stages of this Hedonic Revolution, every planet exhibits the same monotonous pattern:

Mysticism and monomania appear.
Many of the mutated biots become convinced that they control everything (the “I-am-God” syndrome), not realizing that they merely control their own perceptual field.

“Miracle healings” are reported.
The neurosomatic (“mind body”) feedback loop allows the mutant biots to become healthier, younger-looking, and sleeker (“handsomer”) than average. They soon believe, and are encouraged by their admirers to never doubt, that they can “cure” anything.

Neurosomatic intolerance appears.
The mutated biots grow annoyed, and become extremely critical about, the robot mechanisms of first-circuit approach-avoidance, second-circuit domination-submission, third-circuit either or-logic, and static fourth-circuit sex roles. They call on everybody to float free like themselves, or like the wind.

The other biots usually declare these five-circuit mutants to be divine, or else they kill them. Sometimes they do both.

The condition was just becoming understood on Terra at the time of this Quantum Comedy, as neuropharmacologists slowly traced the links between neurochemistry and the creation of perceived reality-tunnels.

Anyone with I’s in their hood could see it was a tight cityation there on bonger howl, one nation under guard, as Case tosses in the midst of the nightmare, all of them whooping it oop with their tommyhawk fans and their moody decks and their scolded litters, one nation in a dirigible.

Forty of them with town feathers, raising coin as much as they were able, insidious rapacious seditious, with their stars bangled bangers and the ramrods we welshed, through the nox with the lox from a bulb, till the girl with colitis goes by, and Case really saddling hard into it and glowing coolish along with it and hooverin deeper and dotter into doubt about it, pushing a head with their desotos and pontiacs there. “Buy all Chimatong highdeals,” they sang.

It was the Guylum Bardot or the Bardot Theodial or if not it was the vector moaning there, all singing O atum bomb O adum bum vee green send unum blather. The very muddle of a model motel tea party: Immolaton, Resurrection, Sewandsow.

And Justin Case awoke.

Just a nightmare, just a nightmare … Indians auditing his income tax and all that, fading now, only a trauma house, or a drama, yes, fadern.

Justin sat up and turned on the light.

His first thought was that he was only dreaming that he had awakened.

For, at the foot of his bed, there stood a little green man in a miniature NASA spacesuit.

“I am Apollon of Mars,” he said. “Come with me at once.”

Hugh Crane served his contempt-of-Congress sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, the “gentleman’s club” as the Maf calls it, where the government incarcerates those ritzy felons who are not likely to shiv a guard or climb a wall.

He worked in the library with Alger Hiss. They both watched the famous “Checkers” speech on the TV in the rec room. This was a masterpiece of primate oratory in which a vice presidential candidate named Richard Nixon argued that huge sums of money given to him by various businessmen were not intended as bribes and were not expected to result in reciprocal favors on his part.

“As an old carny man,” Mr. Hiss asked Mr. Crane, “what do you think of
that
performance?”

“The dog
shtik
was very good,” Crane said professionally. “But he left out Mother.”

Another distinguished guest at Lewisburg that year was the aging Idaho poet and folk singer Ezra Pound, who was also in for Un-American Activities. He and Crane never
got along well, because Pound, who had seldom been outside Idaho, distrusted all easterners.

Crane performed yoga exercises every day in his cell. The Illuminati, of course, subsequently scanned the notes he kept on these neurophysiological experiments. The most interesting items were the following:

These notes were not published when Hugh came out of prison. Instead, he brought forth a book cheerfully titled
There is No Governor Anywhere
, which explained some—not all—of his magic escapes, and set this in the context of a philosophy which declared every individual a creator of his own universe. The polemics against government and organized religion were tactless, to say the least, for a performer depending upon public goodwill; Crane did not hesitate to identify his outlook bluntly as atheism and anarchism.

To everybody’s surprise, including Crane’s, the book became a best-seller, and he became the most controversial man in the United States. Even in the fearful fifties—even with American Legion and John Birch chapters constantly reminding everyone of his drug arrests, his sex arrests, and the documented fact that prison authorities had delayed his parole because of his homosexual seduction of a younger inmate—Hugh Crane acquired a new following. TV gingerly tested him on the egghead ghetto of Sunday afternoon, then promoted him to the late-late talk shows.

He managed to end every appearance with the words “There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free.”

And around then—to the vocal dismay of press and clergy—a club owner decided he was a “freak” act (“They’ll hate him but they’ll come”) and Crane was able to work as a magician again. The crowd overflowed into the street and many were turned away. Cagliostro introduced a new escape, from a lead box that had been welded closed in view of the audience. “There is no restraint that cannot be escaped,” he told them in an intense tone. “We are all absolutely free.”

A pudgy Broadway columnist named Benny Benedict, who was just starting to get a following, interviewed him the next day. “How the hell did you manage that welded-box escape?” Benedict asked bluntly.

“I used real magic,” the Great Cagliostro pronounced.

“Come off it,” Benedict said. But Cagliostro merely grinned at him impudently.