I completely forgot to warn Darlene about Tiffany, the model-slash-actress.
“What do you mean you’re trying to avoid David?” she had asked me at least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.
“Because I want to attend the programming,” I said the third time around, “Not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”
“And David is a middle-aged man who, I might add, is absolutely charming.”
“Charm is for quarks,” I said, and hung up, feeling smug until I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change. Tiffany asked, “May I help you?” and left me standing there.
After a while I gave up and went back to the red-and-gold sofas.
“David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”
“There are no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.
“What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.
“There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.” I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.
“If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”
Dr. Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.
“Did they give you a room with a seminaked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me twelve eighty-two, but the room numbers go only up to seventy-five.”
“I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,” I said.
The most serious difficulty quantum theory faces today is not the inherent limitation of measurement capability or the EPR paradox. It is the lack of a paradigm. Quantum theory has no working model, no metaphor that properly defines it.
I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor, who couldn’t remember where he’d stored my suitcase, and unpacked. My clothes, which had been permanent press all the way from MIT, underwent a complete wave-function collapse the moment I opened my suitcase and came out looking like Schrodinger’s almost-dead cat.
By the time I had called housekeeping for an iron, taken a bath, given up on the iron, and steamed a dress in the shower, I had missed the “Mixer with Munchies” and was half an hour late for Dr. Onofrio’s opening remarks.
I opened the door to the ballroom as quietly as I could and slid inside. I had hoped they would be late getting started, but a man I didn’t recognize was already introducing the speaker. “—and an inspiration to all of us in the field.”
I dived for the nearest chair and sat down.
“Hi,” David said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”
“Not at the wax museum,” I whispered.
“You should have been,” he whispered back. “It was great. They had John Wayne, Elvis, and Tiffany the model-slash-actress with the brain of a pea-slash-amoeba.”
“Shh,” I said.
“—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”
“What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.
“Shhh,” David said.
Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”
She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.
“Before I go any further,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”
Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.
“You knew we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we got out to the lobby.
When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”
“Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.
“If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It’s shaped like a stack of records.”
“I want to go to the opening remarks.”
“The beacon on top blinks out ‘Hollywood’ in Morse code.”
I went over to the front desk.
“Can I help you?” the clerk behind the desk said. “My name is Natalie, and I’m an—”
“Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?” I said.
“They’re in the ballroom.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t have any dinner,” David said. “I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone. There’s this great place that has the ice-cream cone Ryan O’Neal bought for Tatum in Paper Moon.”
“A channeler’s in the ballroom,” I told Natalie. “I’m looking for the ICQP.”
She fiddled with the computer. “I’m sorry. I don’t show a reservation for them.”
“How about Grauman’s Chinese?” David said. “You want reality? You want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?” He grabbed my hands. “Come with me,” he said seriously.
In St. Louis I had suffered a wave-function collapse a lot like what had happened to my clothes when I opened the suitcase. I had ended up on a riverboat halfway to New Orleans that time. It happened again, and the next thing I knew, I was walking around the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese, eating an ice-cream cone and trying to fit my feet into Myrna Loy’s footprints.
She must have been a midget or had her feet bound as a child. So, apparently, had Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Lamour, and Wallace Beery. The only footprints I came close to fitting were Donald Duck’s.
“I see this as a map of the microcosm,” David said, sweeping his hand over the slightly irregular pavement of printed and signed cement squares. “See, there are all these tracks. We know something’s been here, and the prints are pretty much the same, only every once in a while you’ve got this”—he knelt down and pointed at the print of John Wayne’s clenched fist—“and over here”—he walked toward the box office and pointed to the print of Betty Grable’s leg—“and we can figure out the signatures, but what is this reference to ‘Sid’ that keeps popping up? And what does this mean?”