Chasing Schrödinger’s Cat - A Steampunk Novel (19 page)

Chapter
XXXXXII:

More
Activism - Back At The
Boneyard
– Strange Bedfellows

I
felt ridiculously
exposed standing on the folding chair next to the clock.
 
The last thing I wanted was to get sent
packing by campus security.
 
True, they
had their hands full coping with the demonstrators whose slogan-chanting voices
could still be heard receding in the distance but who knew how long that would
last?

I decided the best thing to do
would be to make like a demonstrator myself and hope the first amendment would
protect me so I tried coming up with some chants of my own.
 
My first effort got me nothing but funny
looks.

Truth

Justice

The
American Way

All
means All

Let’s
start today!

I decided the problem was the
slogan was too generic.
 
I needed
something students care about.
 
Learning?
 
The Asians maybe, but
they never demonstrate.
 
I finally
settled on money.

(One,
two, three, four)

Higher
fees will make us poor

(Five,
six, seven, eight)

Budget
cuts are what we hate

That one struck a nerve.
 
A crowd began to gather and murmured its
agreement.
 
Encouraged, I segued into my
next effort.

Board
of regents rich and rude!

We
don’t like your attitude!

Fee
increases are a crime

Board
of regents must resign!

A red-haired man who looked just
like Willie Fitzgerald stepped out of the crowd holding a megaphone.
 
At first I thought maybe he was Willie
Fitzgerald but when he spoke, his accent was pure Puget Sound.

“Use this brother,” he said,
holding out the megaphone.
 
“Your message
needs to be heard.”

My half-hour was almost up so I
refused.
 
“Why don’t you take over?” I
said.
 
I’ll even contribute my folding
chair.”

The Willie clone needed no
encouragement and stepped onto the chair the moment I was on the ground.
 
I could hear a new chant starting as I walked
back to the
Boneyard
.

No
more lies and no more pain,

They’re
just fooling us again

T
he first
thing I saw when I got back to Bill’s place was a trail of clothing starting at
the door and leading toward the back room.
 
Bill’s Converse high tops were followed by a pair of dainty combat boots
which in turn led to a pair of jeans followed by black coveralls and a pile of
underclothing.
 
The end of the path was
marked by the now-familiar Hermes scarf.

I could see a pair of bare feet
showing below the open door of Bill’s beer fridge and I knew they weren’t Bill’s
because his toes are hairier than a Hobbit’s.

“Hey Mary Lou,” I called.
 
“How’s the ankle?”

The refrigerator door closed slowly
and Mary Lou Bernstein emerged from her hiding place wearing Bill’s Seattle
Seahawks jersey.

“Much better thank you.
 
It was just a sprain” she said, as she began
to retrieve her clothes from the floor.
 
“Please don’t tell anyone about this.
 
It’ll probably never happen again.”

“Why not?”

“I never have any luck with men.”

“Well you might have luck with this
one.
 
He really likes you.”

“Really?
 
How do you know?”

“Aside from the fact he’s told me
so, he’s letting you wear his Seahawks jersey.”

“This old thing?” she said, looking
down at the garment.
 
“What’s so special
about it?”

“Trust me.
 
It’s his most cherished possession.”

“Oh.
 
Well then.”
 
She fingered the jersey with a pleased look on her face and dropped her
clothes back onto the floor.
 
I guess she
decided the jersey was warm enough after all.

“Is Bill around?”

“He’s in the clean room fussing
over a vacuum something or other.”

Chapter
XXXXXIII:

Fixing
The Oscillator – Bill Stays Put

B
ill
was making final adjustments to the new vacuum seal when I
got to the clean room.

“Everything go Ok at the clock?” he
asked.

“No way to tell.
 
I’ll find out at midnight.”

“Hand me that UV curing wand would
you?” Bill said.
 
“I’m almost
ready.”
 
He sealed the wand, along with
the oscillator and a syringe of UV adhesive inside the chamber.

“Hold up for a second before you
get going,” I said.
 
“I wanted to throw
an idea at you.”

“Throw away.”

“Have you ever thought about coming
with me?
 
Not at the same time but you
could use my goggles after I’m gone.
 
I
could videotape my routine so you’d know how to do it.”

“Thanks, but my place is here.
 
Who knows, maybe I’ll be the first researcher
to perfect cold fusion.
 
Anyhow, I want
to see where things go with Mary Lou.
 
I
mean would you go back if it wasn’t for Sarah?”

“I sure would.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel alive there.
 
Here I’m just sleep walking, going through the
motions.
 
Anyhow, I think this world is a
dead end.
 
Terrorist nukes, energy
shortages, climate change.
 
If one of
them doesn’t get us, another one will.
 
In the other world, they still have a chance.
 
Maybe I can help them avoid some of the
mistakes we’ve made here.”

“You might be right, but even if I
wanted to follow you, I doubt if I could.
 
I think there’s something special in your personal circuitry that makes
dimensional travel possible for you and nobody else.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Me too.”
 
There was an awkward silence and Bill turned
back to the vacuum chamber.
 
“You
mentioned that Nikola Tesla had a hand in developing the dimensional
translator,” he said, as he started the vacuum pump.
 
“That’s interesting.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“I’m a physicist.
 
That’s like asking the Pope if he’s heard of
St. Peter.”

“Tesla was a physicist?”

“He was everything.
  
Physicist, engineer, inventor, Nobel Prize
nominee, you name it.
 
He was as famous
as Edison in his day.”

“So why have I never heard of him?”

“Aside from the fact you are an
ignoramus?
 
Tesla became seriously
unglued in his later years.
 
Kept making
outrageous claims he couldn’t back up.
 
The scientific community was embarrassed and tried to forget he ever
existed.”

“What kind of claims?”

“Said he could transmit electricity
without wires, claimed to have invented a device for contacting other
planets.
 
When he died he was trying to
sell The Defense Department on some kind of a death ray called a Particle Beam
Generator but he could never raise the money to get the thing built.”

“You know what?” I said.
 
“I think he might have.”
 
But Bill didn’t hear me.
 
His attention had turned to the vacuum
chamber where a buzzer had just gone off.

“Ok,” Bill said.
 
“Let’s do this.”
 
He began manipulating the external controls
of a pair of robot arms inside the chamber.
 
First he laid a bead of adhesive along the crack in the glass.
 
Then he got me to shut off the room lights
and turned on the UV curing wand.
 
For a
few moments the only thing I could see was Bill’s face haloed by the ghostly
blue light emanating from the vacuum chamber viewport as he ran the curing wand
back and forth over the surface of the repair.
 
For a big, sloppy guy, Bill can be awfully delicate when he wants to
be.
 
“I think that’s got it,” he said
finally.

Chapter
XXXXXIV:

A
Farewell - An Offer I Could Refuse – Back At The Sleep Lab

“H
andle this
with gloves from now on,” Bill said.
 
“The adhesive is sensitive to skin oils.”
 
There was a painful silence as he sealed the
oscillator into a Ziploc baggie and gave it to me.
 
“Am I ever going to see you again?” he asked.

“Probably not,” I said.

We did the man hug with three
backslaps instead of two.
 
Tough guys.

I
still had
some time to kill before midnight so I went over to the graduate students’ lounge
and watched another episode of
My Too
Perfect Sons
.
 
In this one
Dae-pung
was trying to break up with his girlfriend by
telling her he’s married with three kids.
 
Not to be deterred, the girlfriend vowed to challenge his wife to a
duel.
 
It had been a long day and the
combination of stuffy air and a comfortable sofa made me fall asleep.
 
When I woke up it was almost half past
eleven.
 
I rushed out the door and started
jogging toward the sleep center.
 
I was
relieved to see the lights still on when I got there.
 
Sometimes George locks up early.

My cardiac efficiency sucks so I
had to stop outside to catch my breath.
 
I was just about to go in when a short figure emerged from the shadows
of a Hemlock tree by the walkway.
 
It was
Hope Buchan, wearing the same black cocktail dress she had worn at the
Chancellor’s reception.

“I have been waiting for you
Robert,” she said.
 
The night was chilly
and her bare arms were covered in goose bumps.

“Hope, I’m kind of in a rush.
 
Besides, you should get home before you catch
cold.”

She moved into a pool of light
beneath an overhead street lamp.
 
I
couldn’t help feeling she was intentionally trying to add dramatic emphasis to
her next statement.
 
“I have come to a
decision Robert,” she said.

“Could you tell me some other time?
 
I really am in a hurry.”

“I have decided to give myself to
you.”

“Say what?”

“I will let you have your way with
me.”

I knew she expected me to ask about
her change of heart, but I kept silent.
   
The last thing I needed was to get involved in a relationship discussion
on the sidewalk.
 
Besides, I felt sorry
for her.
 
Her offer of sexual surrender
sounded like it had been cribbed from a Victorian melodrama.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no
candidate for sainthood.
 
My main emotion
was not one of sympathy, but relief.
 
The
future was not Hope’s friend, but that was her problem, not mine.

“Hope, I’m really flattered, but
I’m going to pass,” I said.
 
“Now, if
you’ll excuse me.”
 
I turned toward the
sleep center where I could see George getting ready to lock the door.

“How dare you turn your back on
me?” Hope screeched behind me.
 
“I will
not be ignored.”

“I
didn’t
have you down for tonight,” George said, when he opened the door to let me in.

“New secretary in the department,”
I said.
 
“She must have forgotten.”

“Who’s that out on the
sidewalk?
 
She with you?”

Hope was now stabbing at the
buttons of her cell phone with a rigid forefinger.
  
The left side of her hair had come undone
and was blowing wildly in the wind.

“Should I ask her in?” George
asked.
 
“It looks like rain soon.”
 
His offer lacked enthusiasm.
 
I wasn’t surprised.
 
In the harsh light, Hope’s jerky movements
and disheveled appearance made her look like one of the furies.

“Oh geez no.
 
Don’t do that.”

“Whatever,” George said with
relief.
 
“She’s your friend.”

Chapter
XXXXXV:

Better
Living Through Chemistry – The Traveller’s Return – New Political Developments

A
couple of
months earlier I had spent an excruciating ninety minutes with a pharmaceutical
representative who would not listen
when I told him one of
the fundamental principles of my research is that sleep has to be natural.
 
Just to shut him up I let him leave me with
samples of his company’s products.
 
Now I
was grateful to him.
 
I had only a few
minutes left of Babbage’s promised two hours and I couldn’t fool around.

I swallowed twenty milligrams of
something called
Zaleplon
as soon as George had
finished hooking me up.
 
Where do they
come up with these drug names?
 
It’s like
you grabbed a random handful of Scrabble tiles and threw them down on the
board.

The drug lived up to its billing,
funny name or not.
 
My eyes closed in
minutes and I had the distant sensation of someone stroking my hand.

I
was just coming
back to consciousness when I felt a strong electrical pulse throw my body into
momentary convulsions.

“Blast and damnation,” I heard
Babbage say.

“Oh my God, you’ve killed him,” Sarah
cried.

“No, I think I’m Ok,” I tried to
say, but my tongue was so thick I couldn’t get the words out.
 
I opened my eyes to see Sarah clutching my
hand and Babbage standing over the dimensional translator whose oscillator was
emitting sparks through newly-formed cracks in its glass casing.

Sarah threw herself onto me with
both arms around my neck.
 
“Please don’t
die,” she said.

“I’m not dying,” I managed to croak.
 
“I think I’ll be alright.”

“You are not alright,” Sarah
said.
 
“Listen to your breathing.
 
It sounds awful.”

“That is because you are choking
me.”

“Oh yes, I suppose I am.
 
Is that better?”

I
spent the
next few minutes drinking tea and telling Babbage and Sarah what had happened
while I was away.
 
I held off showing the
repaired oscillator until the end of my tale on the principal of saving the
best for last.
 
My ‘Ta
Daa
’ moment did not get the response I expected.

“Yes that looks to be in order,” Babbage
said, peering at the oscillator through the Ziploc baggy.
 
“Clever chap, your Bill Fowler.
 
But what material is this translucent,
flexible pouch made from?”

“You mean the baggie?
 
It’s plastic.”

“
Plass
-tick,”
Babbage said, turning the word over in his mouth.
 
“What will you do with it?”

“Throw it out?”

“Certainly not,” Babbage said in
horror, as though I had just proposed chucking the crown jewels into the
Thames.
 
“May I keep it?”

“Be my guest.”

Sarah had different concerns.
 
“This Hope Buchan woman,” she said.
 
“How long have you known her?”

I wasn’t the only one with
news.
 
Babbage showed me a front page
story in
The Times
describing recent
events in London.
 
The number of black
dirigibles patrolling the airspace over London had grown exponentially since
the newsreel Sarah and I had seen in
Totnes
.
 
A wide-angle photograph taken from the roof
of the Senate House showed a menacing cigar shape hovering over ever major
intersection in the city.

“What’s the point of all this?” I
asked.

“Osgood Wellesley is demanding the
government invoke martial law to cope with civil unrest,” Babbage said.

“So he just gets to blanket London
with gunships?
 
Who put him in charge?”

“The belief is that he is nothing
but a proxy for conservative forces looking for an excuse to keep the lower
classes in check.
 
They chose Wellesley
as their spokesperson because his status as Minister of Defense gives him
control of the armed forces.”

“So what’s the holdup?
 
Why hasn’t he already gotten his way?”

“He wants Her Majesty’s seal of
approval on the new order.
 
He plans to use
her Silver Jubilee speech Houses of Parliament as the occasion for the formal
announcement.”

“When’s her speech?”

“Thursday afternoon.”

“But that’s the day after
tomorrow,” Sarah said.
 
“Whatever shall
we do?”

"Extremis
malis
,
extrema
remedia
. Desperate
times call for desperate measures.
 
Now
that you have the translator, you need to connect it to Tesla’s machine on the
roof of the British Museum.”

“How are we going to do that?” I
asked.
 
“They already sent Bennie Sherman
looking for us.
 
They have our
descriptions and they know what the van looks like.”

“I always feel that the simplest
solutions are best.
 
Why don’t you travel
by rail?”

“Not on your life.
 
The train stations are the first place
they’ll be looking for us.”

“It should not be a problem if you
travel in disguise.
 
I think I may have
the solution.”