Professor John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton found another way of dealing with the Cat; he took it literally. Every quantum indeterminacy, he proposed, creates two universes; thus, the equations are literally true and in one universe the Cat lives and in another universe the cat dies. We can only experience one universe at a time, of course, but if the math says the other universe is there, then by God it is there. Furthermore, since.5 probabilities occur continually-every time you toss a coin, for instance-there are many, many such universes, perhaps an infinite number of them. With two graduate students named Everett and Graham, Wheeler even worked up a model of where the other universes were. They were on all sides of us, in superspace.
Some were heard to suggest that old Wheeler had been reading too much science fiction.
TO CROSS AGAIN
If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he'll immediately take the pear. That's his instinct speaking.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
Mountbatten Babbit, being methodical in all things including his madness, could pinpoint exactly the date on which he had started sliding over the porous membrane separating the sane from the insane. It had been long, long ago-back in 1941, actually, in July, the twenty-third of the month, a Thursday.
Or perhaps it had actually started the night before, on the twenty-second. It was hard to say, actually, even though Babbit was a man who detested imprecision of any sort. Say it was the twenty-second, then, even though the overt symptom did not manifest until the twenty-third. We do want to be as accurate as possible when we're lost out here.
So say the twenty-second: Mountbatten was a freshman at Antioch College then and the Carter Brothers Carnival was playing in nearby Xenia. Mounty and some friends went over to have a look-see. Since Mounty personally didn't wait around for the post-midnight private exhibition of the lustful mulatto lady and the randy pony, advertised by shills in the crowd, the high point of the show for him had been the Mentalist, Cagliostro the Great.
A girl assistant, in as brief a costume as the carnival could get away with back in nearly antediluvian 1941 and barbaric Ohio, circulated through the audience, while Cagliostro, youngish and handsome for this racket, sat blindfolded on the stage.
"Now what am I holding?" she would ask when somebody handed her a watch.
"I get the image of a timepiece… yes, a wristwatch," the magician intoned.
"What do I have in my hand this time?" The answer was a locket.
"Can you tell me what this object is?"
A wallet photo.
Driving back to Yellow Springs, the students fell into a debate. One guy from the psychology department gave a long spiel on Rhine and parapsychology and scientific data for ESP, which convinced almost everyone. Babbit was the exception. He was not only a chemistry major but a leading firebrand for the Atheist Club on campus and he knew damned well that ESP was pseudo-scientific balderdash and hocus-pocus.
He spent the next day, the twenty-third, in the library, researching stage magic and, in a biography of Houdini, he found the answer. A simple substitution code. Now what = watch. What do I have = locket. Can you tell = photo. And so forth. Fraud, pure and simple, like everything that goes under the name of religion or magic.
Sirius shone very bright that night in the southern sky and Mounty Babbit was back at the carnival, loaded for bear. When the girl approached his part of the audience, he handed her a prized and illegal possession: a dragon-headed Japanese condom.
"Tell me what I have been given by this person."
That wasn't in the Houdini code but neither was a condom, with or without a dragon head.
"It's against the law in this state," Cagliostro intoned somberly, causing heads to turn. "And I would advise the young gentleman from Antioch to restrain his sense of humor in the future."
And don't marry Suzie from Red Lion
The second voice was-and-yet-wasn't Cagliostro's.
Mounty took quite a riding from the other students on their way back to Yellow Springs that night. "How did he know you were young?" "How did he know you were from Antioch-where was that in the code?" "Christ, a condom-you coulda got us all arrested." But nobody said anything about Suzie from Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Mounty finally forced the issue. "What was that business about the lion?" he asked with maximum indirection.
It was as he had feared: nobody else had heard anything about a lion, or about Suzie.
It was simple logic, then. ESP is fraud. Hearing voices in your head is insanity. Mountbatten Babbit, he told himself, you are in need of psychiatric help.
But a psychiatric record would be a handicap in the career he already had mapped out for himself.
Self-control, then, was the answer. Nobody really goes bananas, after all, except weaklings.
A man like Mountbatten Babbit simply would not go mad.
But Mountbatten Babbit never did marry Suzie from Red Lion; there was a rather nasty war concluded with the exclamation point of a rather nasty bomb and then there was a marriage to a more suitably upward-mobile partner and eventually there was a title of Chief Engineer at Weishaupt Chemicals in Chicago. It was 1967 and he was no longer a brash young atheist-scientist but a middle-aged scientist-businessman who knew enough to keep his mouth shut about controversial issues and steadily feed a growing six-figure savings account. He had it made. If Cagliostro didn't keep getting in the newspapers for one shocking incident or another, Babbit might even have been able to forget the whole episode in which he had thought he might be going mad.
Then he crossed the boundary again.
A juvenile delinquent named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, from the black ghetto on the South Side, stole Mounty's car from in front of the Babbit residence in Rogers Park at precisely a moment when Mounty was looking out the window. In his trained and methodical way Mounty memorized fifteen details about the boy as he ran out the front door only to catch the briefest glimpse of the car zooming away (at least six feet, blue sweater with turtleneck, Afro hairstyle, very black skin, nose more Caucasian than Negroid, drives well, face more narrow than norm, high forehead, no beard, slim build to judge from shoulders, ring on left hand with green stone, clenched-fist button on sweater, earring in right ear, get more, damn there he goes around the corner…).
At the trial Mounty pronounced his positive identification in the same tones he used specifying materiel orders at Weishaupt Chemicals. The jury brought in a guilty verdict in five minutes.
That was the second time Mounty went mad.
For as the boy was led away Mounty glanced at him one more time and saw a blue halo form around his head just like in Catholic art.
Two weeks later he was promoted to Vice President of Weishaupt and began to see halos around random individuals in the street.
LED, LED, LED
If every case of aging can be corrected, we might all be Methuselahs, living 1,000 years or more.
–dr. robert prehoda, 1969
A Chinese named Wing Lee Chee was Cagliostro's closest friend in those early carnival days. Wing was the world's great master of karate, kung fu, aikido, and Comprehensive Advanced Machismo, but a gentle soul when not pushed too hard. In Bad Ass, Texas, he got pushed too hard by local cops, who objected to his use of the white toilet facilities at a gas station. They told him "A chink is just a yellowed-out nigger," roughed him up, and accidentally knocked his right eye out in their enthusiasm. At that point Wing lost his temper and was subsequently apprehended and quickly tried and convicted for the murder of four police officers.