Chasing Schrödinger’s Cat - A Steampunk Novel (18 page)

Chapter
XXXXVIII:

Leather
and Brass – Synchronized Time

B
abbage’s
version of my
Lucidream
Goggles did not leave me
looking like the blind guy in Star Trek.
 
Brass-framed, with leather straps, they looked more like something you’d
see on Manfred von
Richthofen
.
 
It didn’t matter what they looked like so
long as they worked.
 
But that was a big
if.

“How long do you think you will
need to retrieve the new oscillator?” Babbage asked.
 
“This one is close to failure.
 
I daren’t keep it on for an extended time.”

“Hard to say.
 
The other one has a hairline crack in the
glass.
 
I’m pretty sure my friend Bill
Fowler can fix it but I don’t know how long it will take.”

“That poses a problem doesn’t
it?
 
I have no way of knowing when I
should energize the translator to bring you back.”

“Why don’t we choose a time when
I’m sure to be ready?
 
Say two weeks from
now?”

“That would be a good plan if we
could be certain time passes at the same rate in both worlds, but what if it
does not?”

“You’re saying two weeks there
might only be two hours here?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then how about this?
 
You can see into the other world with the
translator, can’t you?”

“Only certain places.”

“Can you see University Avenue
where it runs through the campus?”

“Part of it.
 
I seem to recall a very nice street clock at
the junction in front of the Students’ Union building.”

“Perfect.
 
Turn the translator on for two minutes every
hour, starting in two weeks’ time.
 
When
I’m ready to come back I will stand next to the clock from four in the
afternoon to half past.
 
That will be
your signal to bring me back at twelve P.M that night.
 
You can use the speed of the clock’s minute
hand to figure out what time that works out to here.
 
Does that sound like a plan?”

“One fraught with risk.”

“What other choice do we have?”

S
arah wanted
to stay with me while I went to fetch the new oscillator but I had to tell her
no.

“It works best if I’m alone and
quiet,” I told her.
 
“The sooner I get
there, the sooner I’ll come back.”

“Just see that you do,” she said.

Babbage’s
back room filled in for sleep center and instead of a
Medex
Envirobed
I had to make do with a stained military
cot.
 
No Tetris either, so I went
straight to my relaxation exercises and followed with my mantra.
 
I was surprisingly calm.
 
My mind seemed to be saying “what the hell,
either it works or it doesn’t.”

Chapter
XXXXIX:

Home
again – Overdue Rent – New Accommodations

I
almost
laughed when I came to and saw the dismayed faces of the robed professors
surrounding me.
 
Not exactly a
take-charge bunch.
 
You’d think they
would have at least managed to get the buffet cart off me by now.

“Don’t move Robert,” said Ross
Percival.
 
“The paramedics should be here
soon.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” I said,
pushing the cart away.
 
I got to my feet
and wiped the soggy canapés from my face.
 
“Is Bill Fowler around?”

“Over here dumpster boy,” said a
familiar voice.

“Could you meet me at the
boneyard
in twenty minutes?
 
It’s important.”

F
or once it
looked like things were going to work out.
 
All I had to do was get Bill to fix the crack in the oscillator and take
it back to Babbage.
 
But as I may have
mentioned, the gods of low comedy have it in for me.
 
My room was padlocked when I got to Mrs.
Gridestone
’s
and there was a Notice to Vacate taped to the door.

“I will let you have your
belongings when you have paid the rent you owe,” Mrs.
Gridestone
said, when I tracked her down to the laundry
room.
 
“Please be prompt.
 
I am not running a warehouse.”

“Mrs.
Gridestone
, what did you do with the
stuff that was on my night table?”

“It is of no consequence since you will not receive it without payment.”

“How much do I owe?”

“Seven hundred and forty dollars.
 
And sixty-seven cents.”

“Would you take a check?”

“The unreliability of your checks is what has caused these problems in
the first place.
 
I will accept only
cash.”

“W
hy didn’t
you just make her give it to you?” Bill said, when I told him about the snag in
my plans.
 
“She’s old, you could take
her.”

“I’ve made a vow to lead a life of
non-violence in the future.”

“And the change from the past would
be…?”

“A lot has happened lately,” I
said.
 
Bill listened intently as I
summarized recent events, asking only the occasional question.
 
That’s one of the things I like about Bill.
 
He’s not always interrupting.

“I think I can see a trace of that
scar on your face,” he said, when I had finished.
 
“Like something you got back when you were a
kid.”

“Trust me, in the other world I
look like Boris Karloff.”

“Ok Boris.
 
Let me see if I have all this straight.
 
You need to take the new oscillator back to
the other dimension and you need me to fix it.
 
But you can’t get the oscillator until you pay your landlady seven
hundred and forty dollars.”

“And sixty-seven cents.”

“How long do you think it will take
you to come up with it?”

“Couple of weeks maybe.
 
I’ve got a TA check coming at the end of the
month.

“Well that sort of works out
because I blew one of the seals on the vacuum chamber and it’ll take a few days
to get a new one.”

“What’s that got to do with
anything?”

“Fixing the crack is no problem,”
Bill said.
 
“But if I’m right and the
oscillator is some kind of vacuum tube, I’ll have to do it in the vacuum
chamber.”

“So where do I stay in the
meantime?”

“I’ve got a cot in the back.
 
You’re welcome to use it.”

“It’s going to play hell with my
love life.”

“You wish.
 
But talking about love life, you missed a
great scene at the reception after you left.
 
Percival snuck off with Hannah Snider from Women’s Studies.
 
Didn’t even leave Hope with cab fare.
 
I’ve never seen anyone so pissed.
 
She was twitching like a
tasered
rat.”

Chapter
XXXXX:

Back
In The Saddle – Hell In A Handcart –Going Through The Garbage

I
was bored
stiff
after only a day of
hiding out in Bill’s back room so I tried to get back to my regular routine of
holding tutorials, grading undergraduate papers and putting up with Ross
Percival.
 
You never know what might
happen so why burn bridges?

Still, it was difficult to take
matters seriously when I expected to be gone soon.
 
Dealing with Percival was especially
difficult.
 
It was all I could do not to
verbalize my opinion that the man was a self-important little twerp with the
intellectual capacity of a stump, so I adopted a policy of Dilbert-like passive
aggression.
 
My work was made easier by
the fact that the man is a computer illiterate who tries to hide his ignorance.

“Bob,” he asked, during our next
session, “How are you coming along with the proofs of my article on The
Relationship between Allergic Rhinitis and Sleep Apnea?”

“I’ve been checking its paradigms
against multiplatform online sources.”

“And how is that working out?”

“I still have to collate the
firewall data.”

H
ave you
ever read your hometown newspaper during an extended trip overseas?
 
Issues you once might have considered
important now seem trivial, as though you were looking at them through the
wrong end of a telescope.
 
That’s how it
was for me during the time I was back.
 
Everything felt unreal and distorted, like something you’d see in a
Fellini retrospective.

F
The day
after I got back the Seahawks’ quarterback got a ten million dollar contract
extension, even though the team had gone two and fourteen the previous season.

F
The day
after that, the Pakistani army arrested one of their key scientists while he
was attempting to smuggle a suitcase nuke through the Swat valley.
 
The President hailed the arrest as an example
of our Pakistani ally’s commitment to maintaining peace on the Indian
subcontinent.
 
Reliable sources reported
that the scientist had failed to bribe the army colonel whose regiment had made
the arrest.

F
Osama bin
Laden denounced the arresting colonel as an apostate whose treachery would set
back only temporarily Al-Qaeda ‘s goal of establishing a world-wide Muslim
state adhering to the teachings of the first Caliphs, the last of whom died in
661 A.D.

F
And Hope
Buchan kept pestering me to “sit down and have a serious discussion about our
relationship.”

“Hope, you know what, I’m kind of
busy just now.”

“You can’t spend the rest of your
life avoiding responsibility.
 
It isn’t
fair to either of us.”

I
took her
advice about being responsible seriously in at least one respect, when I tried
to call my sister to say goodbye.
 
As
luck would have it, I got her
schnorrer
of a husband
instead.

“Hey,
Bobbo
!
 
How you doing there bro?”

“Not so bad Lenny.
 
Is Rachael around?”

“Out shopping my man.
 
You know women.
 
They spend it faster than you can make it.”

I almost choked on that one.
 
Clinton was president the last time Lenny
brought home a paycheck.

“Could you tell her I called?”

“Sure thing, but before you go, let
me tell you about this great deal I can get you on a new water softener…”

M
y teaching
assistant check finally showed up at Mrs.
Gridestone’s
but it was all I could do to pry it loose from her.
 
Talk about dim witted.
 
How did the woman think I was going to pay
her if she held on to my check?

I finally convinced her that
withholding mail is a federal crime and came back an hour later with her money.

“Here you are Mrs. G.
 
Seven hundred and forty dollars.”

“And sixty-seven cents.”

“Now can I have the stuff that was
on my night table?”

She came back a few moments later
holding a green garbage bag.
 
“All of
your miscellaneous articles are in here,” she said.
 
“Please collect your large items as soon as
possible.”

“Give them to the Salvation Army,”
I said.
 
I was out on the street heading
for Bill’s basement two minutes later.

“I
love your
luggage,” Bill said, when I dropped the garbage bag in front of him.
 
“Louis Vuitton?”

“Just give me a beer and help me
sort through it,” I said.

“What are we looking for?”

“The oscillator.”

We spent the next few minutes
sorting through the debris of what I now thought of as my ‘old’ life.
 
I finally spotted the oscillator poking out
from beneath a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges.
 
“Here,” I said, handing it to Bill.

Bill examined the small glass
object beneath the fluorescent glow of a magnifying lamp.
 
“Not as bad as I remembered,” he said
finally.

“How soon can you fix it?”

“The new seal is supposed to be
here tomorrow afternoon.
 
How about
tomorrow night?”

“That works out perfectly.”

“How so?”

“I’ll have been back here two weeks
tomorrow.
 
Babbage is going to be
watching for my signal tomorrow afternoon at four.”

Chapter
XXXXXI:

Student
Outrage – Bill To The Rescue

S
o
everything was all set right?
 
Fix the
oscillator, go the sleep center, get back to Sarah.
 
Wrong.

It turned out that a former British
Member of Parliament named George McGillivray had been booked to speak at the
Students’ Union on the afternoon of the next day.
 
McGillivray was best known for his contention
that “Hezbollah are a legitimate part of the Lebanese national resistance to
the illegal Israeli occupation of their land.”

The results were predictable.
 
Opposing crowds of demonstrators began gathering
in front of the Students’ Union the day before.
 
Cries of "Viva, viva,
Palestina
!"
elicited louder chants of, "Go away, McGillivray!"
 
Fearing a full-scale battle, the local
authorities called for reinforcements from the Seattle Police Department whose
riot squad are always glad of a chance to don their Kevlar® body armor and
Lexan
^TM
face shields.

The air was reeking of pepper spray
and tear gas by the time I got to the street clock whose glass had been cracked
by a rubber bullet.
 
Fortunately the clock
was still running but I was faced with the problem of how to make myself seen
among the milling demonstrators.
 
Help
came in the form of Bill Fowler who somehow materialized beside me holding a
metal folding chair.

“I thought you might need to
something to lift yourself over the crowd,” he said.

“It’s not exactly a staircase to
heaven, but I guess it will do.”

We had just put the chair by the
clock when a five-man snatch squad rushed out from police lines.
 
A wave of panic surged through the crowd and
the ensuing crush almost knocked me over.
 
Bill pulled me to the clock and we sheltered behind it as a river of
fleeing humanity passed around us.
 
A
masked demonstrator fell heavily against me saying “Oh Jesus,” in a panicky
female voice.
 
I instinctively held on to
the neck of
 
her black coveralls to keep
her from being swept away and it was only when the commotion had died down that
I realized I had rescued Mary Lou Bernstein.

“Oh my God, I think my ankle is
broken,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to straighten up.

Why was nothing ever easy?
 
Mary Lou needed medical attention but it was
five minutes to four and I needed to stay at the clock.
 
Then I noticed the expression of concern on
Bill’s face and the solution was obvious.

“Mary Lou, I have some things to
look after but I Bill here would be happy to take you to the first aid
station.”

Bill looked at me with gratitude,
picked her up like a small child and carried her off down the street with her
arm around his neck and her head resting against his shoulder.