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  I picked up the lab book lying on his desk. It started with a description of the apparatus and the first experiments we had conducted. Nothing new there. I flipped forward a few pages.

  There was a diagram like the one Ion had drawn for Klara. Under it was a sketch of the Lego car and a description of the two experiments, the one where the car comes out of the time-tunnel before it goes in, and my variation, where the car is stopped from going in, and therefore does not come out.

  Ion had conducted a third experiment. The car was to roll towards the tunnel while he watched both ends. His plan was to stop car (1) if car (3) appeared, and to let car (1) go if car (3) did not appear. This meant that a car would come out of the right end of the tunnel if and only if no car came out of the right end of the tunnel. Yes if and only if no.

  Think about it. Either car (3) appears or it doesn’t. Case I: Car (3) appears. So Ion stops car (1) from entering the tunnel. So car (3) doesn’t appear. Case II: Car (3) doesn’t appear. So Ion lets car (1) into the tunnel. So car (3) appears.

  Question: When Ion actually ran the experiment, did car (3) appear? Answer: Yes and no.

  I closed the lab book and looked around the room. The scattered bits of Legos…how many?

  “What happened, Ion? Did the car come out of the tunnel?”

  “Yes,” Ion said, raising his head from on top of his arms.

  “No,” Ion said, uncrossing his arms and raising up his other head from under his arms.

  The two faces looked at me, each of them a bit translucent, a bit unreal. The two necks merged into his collar, making a solid, tubular letter “Y.”

  I gagged and stepped back.

  The phone began to ring. The second of Ion’s heads…the no-head…seemed not to hear it, and continued to stare at me with those prehensile eyes. Eyes which reached deep into my mind.

  But at the same time, Ion’s head groped up the receiver and held it to the first head…the yes-head…to one of the shimmering ears. I could hear Klara’s tiny voice. She sounded angry, accusing.

  “I was working,” the yes-head said.

  “Your boyfriend is here,” the no-head said, noticing the conversation. “I’m going to show him something.”

  Ion let the phone drop and walked over to the laboratory table. The no-head, the mean one, was doing the talking. Whichever head was talking tended to be bigger. It was as if the silent head corresponded to some part of Ion which was father away…drifting towards some parallel universe.

  “I’m in a mixed state, William. I ran the paradox. It had to come out both ways.” He turned the switch to power-up the guiding-field. It was dangerous to be restarting it without a vacuum in the chamber.

  The no-head bent down, peering into the cracked phase-mirror. He was still talking to me. “I know how you think I look. But that’s just your projection. Actually it feels…marvelous. You’ll see in …”

  “Get out, William,” the yes-head cried. “Before it’s too late.”

  Klara’s voice was quacking from the dangling phone receiver. I could feel myself going mad, as surely as cloth tearing. I seized the phone to speak to her. “This is William. Ion’s had a terrible accident. He …”

  There was a crash behind me. I whirled around. The time-tunnel was billowing smoke and the phase-mirrors had smashed into pieces. For a second I couldn’t see Ion through the smoke, but then he came at me.

  A tangle of twenty or a hundred thin necks writhed out of his open collar, and on the end of each tentacle-like neck rode a tiny grimacing head, and every little head was screaming at me in a terrible tiny voice… .

  He dispersed completely after that. As different variants of Ion Stepanek split off into different universes, each corresponding head would shrink…get “farther away”…and a copy of his body would split off with it, twisting and dwindling. I don’t know how long it took; I don’t know how I could have seen it; I wish I could forget it. The horrible squid-bunch of necks, each little head screaming out something different…I hope he’s really gone.

  I live with Klara now, and I wear Ion’s clothes. I have taken over his job at the Institute…they think he’s resigned. Klara forged his signature on the letter.

  It’s a good life, except for having to cut the buds off my neck every morning. The wart-like little heads. Some look like me, and some look like him. Klara says I only imagine them, and that there’s nothing on my neck but eczema.

  I still have the specs for the time-tunnel. Maybe I’ll rebuild it, and observe a yes-and-no, and disperse. I’ll go into the mixed state and come out…who knows…maybe in heaven. But I don’t really need the machine anymore.

  Mixed states happen all the time. Say someone asks you whether or not you want to kill yourself. Before they asked, maybe you weren’t really all that much for or against suicide. That’s your original mixed state. But answering the question is like being born. You have to stick out a yes-head or a no-head to answer. And the other one has to get shaved off.

  It could be any question. Do you like milk? Who are you going to vote for? Are you happy? Do you understand what I’m talking about?

  In a way, mixed states are nice. Not naming things, and not forcing them to be this way or that, but just…letting them go. Satori. There’s a Zen question for it: “What was your original face before you were born?”

  My original face. A mixed state. I don’t need a machine, no heap of glass and wire. I’m just going to walk out on the bridge towards the castle. I’ll stop. Out there, in the wind, one needs not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.

  ============

  Note on “Schrödinger’s Cat”

  Written in Spring, 1979.

  Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, March, 1981.

  My family and I lived in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. I was there on a two-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The grant came through just as I was losing my first teaching job in Geneseo (a.k.a. Wankato, a.k.a. Bata). My formal duties in Heidelberg were zero: I was given a soundproofed office and a typewriter. As well as doing research on Georg Cantor’s theories of infinities, I spent a lot of my time writing science-fiction. At this point in my career I didn’t know that I would be able to complete and sell novels, so I put a great deal of energy into writing stories.

  “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.

  Sufferin’ Succotash

  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.”