Complete Stories (8 page)

“Schrödinger’s Cat” was inspired by my studies of numerous papers on quantum mechanics and the nature of time in journals like
Philosophy of Science
. The second diagram for this story seems to suggest an interesting new result: that a time-reversing mirror would have to spatially mirror-reverse objects as well. “By rights this should have been an important scientific paper …”

Analog
editor Stanley Schmidt had some doubts about the legitimacy of the mass-energy conversion processes taking place at the surface of the phase-mirrors, but I placated him by saying the phase-mirror was made of “quarkonium.” Since quarks were then at the edge of scientific knowledge, quarkonium was a handy catch-all magic-maker akin to the “radioactivity” used by 1940s SF writers.

The seed for this story was a drawing I made for my cheerfully horrified children of a Santa Claus with a thousand heads, answering phone-calls from every boy and girl in the world at once.

She was big. Fine big legs and white feathers glued all over her head. I had to have a piece of that. She brought me another bowl of slop and I gave her a thousand credit note. “Keep the change, baby.” That made three. She dimpled and sat down across from me.

“You’re beachy.” Looking me over. Charlie and I had only been out of the Regulator for a month, but I was back up to 150 keys already. I had an exoskeleton with gold chasing and rubies at the joints.

“I’m fat and I’m rich,” I said, stating the obvious. “And you’ve got something I want.” I stared at her hungrily. Those white feathers on the bare scalp were a perfect touch.

She signaled the other waitress to cover for her. I’d set the hook. She rested her big breasts on her folded arms and leaned across the table. “Why you spoon so hard? Soliton flange?”

“I’ve always been hungry, baby. Always. I lost my mother when I was four.”

She cooed sympathetically, and I decided to whip a little more out of it. “She was a juicer. She’d lock me and the dog in and go out for the night. One night she didn’t come back. It was a week before the landlord happened to open up our apartment. There wasn’t much of Poochy left …”

“You poor slogger.” Three thousand credits and she didn’t mind if I’d eaten a live dog. But still, “Why you not dial the food-tap?”

“This was back in 2020, honey. You had to go out to get food. They had stores.”

She made an O of her bright yellow lips, flexing her juicy tongue. “But you’re still mix and match!”

“You’re as young as you feel,” I said vaguely. Right now I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get some meat. I still couldn’t believe I’d gone to so much trouble to end up in a future where there was nothing to eat but processed algae. I had half a billion credits and I couldn’t score anything but veggies.

I looked at the room around us. You could eat for free at home, but people still liked to come out. They had some noise they called music, and things to look at glued to the walls. Antiques. A car-wheel, a 2-D TV set, a formica table-top…and animals, lots of stuffed animals.

Around 2130 they’d realized that nothing but the cockroaches and us was going to hack it. Pollution had cut the gene pools that far and a domino effect was setting in. Suddenly everyone wanted a stuffed animal to remind them of our glorious heritage. The whole last generation of animals ended up on mantelpieces and barroom walls.

“You know,” I said, staring longingly at a glass-eyed chicken, “A hundred years ago this place was an Italian restaurant called Stacky’s. I used to spend a lot of time here back then. The menu they had! Jesus. Have you ever even seen meat, baby?”

She smiled and shook her head. “You’re just scripting.” She didn’t believe any of it, which was just as well. The statute of limitations had run out, but still …

“Where’s your crib?” she was asking. “I could peel you.” Her tongue was purple against the yellow lip-wax.

I didn’t answer for a few minutes. I was remembering how it had been here a hundred years ago…the night I’d first met Charlie.

I was just getting by, back then, living off computer fraud. I’d invented a do-gooder thing, the Office of Interpersonal Therapeutics, and I’d gotten the computer to believe me when I charged all my bills to the OIT. It took a couple of hours a day punching in fake case-histories, requisitions, employee data…but at least it wasn’t honest work.

It was easy…so easy I sometimes suspected the Feds had a special slot on the payroll for computer con-men. I figured I fell somewhere between wino and social worker.

Most evenings I’d get into Stacky’s early and they’d just bring me one of everything on the menu. Then I’d have a couple more rounds of whatever seemed best.

The night I met Charlie I was just sitting there looking at the beautiful golden skin of a roast chicken. Suddenly my table flipped over and the dishes went flying. Lying on the floor in front of me was the fattest…hell, he was obese.

“You do that often?” I asked.

He was slowly getting up with the aid of his exoskeleton, and didn’t seem to hear me. It was hard, really, to even tell where his head was. There was just metal tubes and little motors and yards of bouncing cloth. But then a precise little voice answered, “More than once a year, less than once a month.” An arm and then a head appeared. “You’re Eddie Myers,” the fat man stated. “And I’m Charles Laxman.”

He had fifty keys on me easy. You could tell from the way he had a deep crease circling his wrist. I only had those at my ankles. The servos at Charlie’s shoulder and elbow whirred, and the alloy tubes strapped to his right arm swiveled and hinged so as to move his right hand towards me. My servos followed suit and we shook.

In a sense all really fat men look alike. But there are differences if you know how to look for them. I could tell that Charles Laxman was rich, educated and a little flaky. He was the kind of guy who might drool when he’s thinking hard…but he’s likely to be thinking about something incredible. I liked him already for being fatter than me, and it was clear from his clothes that he was rich.

“So what’s on your mind, Charlie?” I asked, punching two drink orders into the bar board. As usual I charged it to the OIT.

“Eddie,” he said, nodding towards the bar board, “You’re a fat, small-time criminal. Am I correct?”

I was a little insulted. Was he drunk? “You out slumming?”

But he didn’t seem to hear me. “Money, Eddie. Money,” he said, smiling and puddling forward on the table. His eyes were blank.

“Money …” I said, encouragingly.

He held up five fingers. “Megadollars, Eddie. Fifty million in gold.” And then I knew what he was talking about as if I’d read his mind. He wanted me to help him break the Bin.

I figured he was crazy, but talk is just talk. And he looked lonely. “Let’s go outside,” I suggested, tossing off my drink.

Our exoskeletons walked us a few blocks together. It was a pleasant night, and I had to admit I enjoyed Charlie’s company. The whir and clank of the servos in the night air was relaxing. I lit a cigar and heard him out.

Charlie wasn’t like any of the other fat men I’ve known. Any news-paper column psychologist could tell you why I eat so much…after all, mamma is the Latin word for tit. But Charlie hadn’t gotten fat as an accidental side-effect of a desperate seeking after this or that. No, he had gotten fat on purpose. That was the first thing he told me…that for two years he had been eating “like a mindless animal.”

Without telling me why he’d wanted to be so fat, Charlie then went into some convoluted spiel about space and time. Apparently he had made his fortune by inventing a gravitational condenser. Fill it with garbage, flick a switch…and you had a tiny black hole which would boil off in radiation before long. Every big city dump had one.

But being rich wasn’t enough for Charlie…or maybe he just wasn’t rich enough. In any case, he wanted to pull off the crime of the century. He wanted to rob the Bin, the Earth-Moon gold transport.

The Moon colony had seceded from Earth shortly after they discovered the helium caves in 2025. They called us Mudders and we called them Loonies, but we couldn’t live without them. By 2050 every power plant on Earth had a super-cooled, quantum-effect liquid helium core, and most freight was being shipped in helium-filled zeppelins.

The Loonies didn’t trust us, and insisted on being paid twice a year for their helium. Paid in gold. Obligingly we Mudders had built them a robot-operated gold transport armed with missiles and lasers. The Loonies’ Bin we called it.

Everyone who’d ever tried to rob the Bin was dead, but my new friend Charlie Laxman had a plan. His gimmick was that he’d found a way to speed up.

He called his gizmo a Regulator. You fed energy into it and something seeped out…loosening things up in such a way that time near the Regulator had very little to do with the time in the rest of the world. You could live out a year at the time it took an egg to fry.

“But have you ever tried it on yourself?” I asked Charlie.

“I’ll try it now that you’re coming in with me,” he said quietly as we walked along in the direction of his townhouse. “I was scared to try it alone, even though I know it’s safe…if you’re fat enough.”

“What does the fat have to do with it?”

“I’ve been testing the Regulator on hamsters. I’d strap it to their backs and turn it on and then watch how they died. It always took the fat ones much longer to die.” Charlie began searching through his pockets for something.

“I don’t get it. If this Regulator kills every hamster you tried it on…I mean, that’s not real encouraging?” The fifty million in gold seemed a little further away than it had a minute ago.

Charlie didn’t seem to hear me. He was still rummaging in his clothes. Finally he gave up the search and looked at me, blinking. “Encouraging,” he said, obviously replaying my question to himself, “Encouraging. Well, it was just starvation they died of. And you and I could live very comfortably for a week on nothing but water.”

I was beginning to get it. We’d flash down on the Bin, take a day or two to clear it out and be gone before it could react. “But what about when we slow back down?” I asked, “They’ll be able to trace the gold.”

“We’ll just lie low,” Charlie said calmly. “For about a hundred years. My Regulator works the other way too. We’ll take a nap and it’ll be 2150.”

A big loose grin spread over my face.

-----

The girl across the table from me was grinning back. She held an atomizer out towards me. “You step out? Alterations?”

“Let’s go,” I said. “Physically.” She went over to whisper something to the other waitress, and then we left together. I whistled and my car pulled up. There was room for her in back with me, and I instructed the robot to take us out to my house.

“I’m Zoozie,” she said, trying to put her arms around me.

“Fast Eddie,” I answered. “But I’m too big.” Her face was near mine, and I managed to lean forward enough to lick it. Nice. I reached down to feel one of those big legs.

“Let’s bounce,” she suggested.

“If you can find it.” I told the robot not to hurry and lay back in my seat. I could see lights flickering past like starts. In my mind I was back on Charlie’s spaceship.

The Bin was just a point of light against the blackness of space, but we had come close enough to attract its attention. A light began flashing on the control panel of our ship, and a pleasantly feminine computer voice addressed us. “Red warning. You have violated the security zone of a Class Q Transport. Please change your course to a three-one-niner reading to avoid interception. You have thirty seconds of grace. This warning will not be repeated.”

I gunned our ship straight for the Bin, and looked over at Charlie with a hard grin. He looked a little pale. I think he might have backed out if I hadn’t been there.

We were both wearing scuba diving gear…yellow rubber suits and a couple of tanks of compressed oxygen apiece. He said that even though it would feel like we were out there for hours, we wouldn’t need pressure suits. A suit’s joints would have heated up too much anyway. As it was, Charlie had had to design us special beefed-up and frictionless exo-skeletons. It had taken a while to get used to them. If you weren’t careful, you could brain yourself going to scratch your ear.

Each of us had one of Charlie’s Regulators set into the rubber suit right over the navel, and now we dialed them on. I felt like I could smell the extra time, a tingling high in my sinuses. My nose seemed to expand and I felt like a horse, a horse I’d seen in a zoo when I was four. I remembered the scrape I’d gotten on my knee that day, and Mommy tucking me in. I seemed to taste blood in my mouth and I could hear Poochy screaming. My eyes snapped open.

Nothing looked different, except the clock on the control panel seemed to have stopped. The next fifteen hours of my life would last about a tenth of a second, normal time.

Charlie was already undogging the hatch and I walked over to help him. As I walked, the air felt like a thick jelly, and rubbing against it heated me up unpleasantly. Finally the hatch cracked open and the jelly wafted us and our equipment into outer space. This was the part I’d had my doubts about, but the hard vacuum just felt like a crisp fall day. The raw solar radiation warmed my cheeks pleasantly.

Charlie ripped the hatch door loose from the ship, tore it in half, and handed me the larger piece. What with the souped-up exoskeleton and my speeded-up reflexes, the thick metal felt like balsa wood.

The Bin was about two k’s off, and I could see a missile come easing out of a hole in the side. It came floating towards us like a big lazy fish. Aiming carefully, I threw a chunk of metal at it when it was a thousand meters off. The recoil of my throw sent me spinning, and it took a minute of pitching out small pieces of the hatch to stop myself. The Rocket was exploding in slow motion. It looked like a flower blooming.

Charlie waved his fist at me happily, and by throwing some more pieces of the hatch we got ourselves moving towards the Bin at a good clip. Two more missiles swam out, but they were just after our ship and we let them go. I began to doubt that the Bin’s robot brain could see us at all.