2.
I was able to finish most of a chapter while she slept. She envied me for being able to get along on five or six hours’ sleep; I envied her for being able to stay down for ten. She was always more rested than me, but then I theoretically had more time to work. An extra forty-hour week every ten days. If only I could get paid for reading trash fiction and watching TV, I’d be a wealthy man.
But this particular morning, I did write, and was pretty happy with it.
So was Kit. She read through it while we had motel-room instant in paper cups.
“Would they really have to shoot him in the eye, or the ear? I mean in the real world.”
“They say people who kill people for a living don’t like .38s. The army stopped using them in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine part. The enraged Moro natives would absorb several shots and just keep coming.”
“Pretty tough customers.”
“Well, they tied leather thongs around their balls before they went into combat. The leather got wet and constricted, and the pain drove them mad.”
“That’s got to be bullshit,” she said. “Racist bullshit. They couldn’t walk.”
“Hey. I read it in a book. That’s why the army changed from the .38 to the .45. The .45 bullet was big enough to knock them down.”
“But they don’t use the .45 anymore. You said you had a 9-mm in the desert. That’s got to be smaller.” She rubbed her chin. “Forty-five hundredths of an inch is like twelve millimeters. Way smaller.”
“Yeah, I guess. But it knocks them down better.”
“Goodness. Smaller is better. Where will it all end?”
“A tiny little bullet, obviously, that moves at the speed of light. A photon.”
“Have to be a heavy photon.”
“I’m sure they’re working on it.” I should’ve paid attention in physics. How could a photon weigh anything, if it always moved at the speed of light? If it didn’t move at the speed of light, it wouldn’t be a photon.
“So is the monster really from another planet?”
“He thinks he is.”
“Yeah, but you know. Don’t you?”
“Right now he’s Schrödinger’s Cat. And I haven’t opened the box.”
“Ah.” She took a sip of coffee. “So you don’t know yet.”
I wagged a pedantic finger at her. “That’s not what I said.”
She squinted at me while wheels turned—she was the one who first told me about the paradox: Mr. S’s cat is in a box, presumably soundproof, with a gun pointed at its helpless little head. The gun will go off if the trigger is struck by an alpha particle from an alpha-particle generator that the cat’s sadistic owner purchased at the local quantum hardware store. Schrödinger’s point was that because of the quantum nature of elementary particles, there was only a probability, not a certainty, that the alpha particle had done its job. You couldn’t tell whether the cat was alive or dead without opening the box—which takes the problem out of the quantum universe and into the real world.
Of course in the real world, there would or would not be a smoking hole in the box and cat brains all over the place. But that’s not what scientists mean by “real.”
“That’s cute, Jack. You mean it literally?”
I shrugged.
“So right now—in your mind—the monster is both a human and an alien.”
I almost didn’t say anything. I trickled a little bit of rum into my coffee. “Until I open the box,” I said.
I had a WeatherCard but hadn’t charged it, and of course didn’t bring the adaptor, but the morning sky was seamless blue and the weekend forecast had been good when we left home. So we filled our water bottles and pedaled off into deepest darkest Iowa, which is to say sunny rolling hills with wildflowers anthropomorphically nodding approval as we cruised by on our modest quest. Then the smallest grey cloud peeked over the western horizon, and then it loomed, and then all hell broke loose, lightning and thunder and a screaming gale pelting us with fast fat drops.
Lightning blasted a copse of trees not a hundred yards in front of us, while I was looking at it and trying to decide whether to stop there for shelter. Then Kit’s bike slipped on gravel and she went down hard. Gloves protected her hands, but her left knee was torn and the shoulder hurt.
The bike was all right but she couldn’t ride it, left leg stiffening. She couldn’t even push it, really.
Neither of our cell phones got a signal. “Let’s just lock it and leave it here,” I shouted over the wind. “If somebody steals it, they steal it.”
She nodded, her face screwed tight. “You go on for help. Or back to the motel?”
“No! I’m not leaving you.”
We compromised by hiding the bike behind a sign and piling all her stuff on the back of mine, which I then trundled back toward the Tidy Inn while she limped alongside.
I wasn’t much of a companion, pushing the double load through pelting rain and grit. I sort of wasn’t there, going into a kind of zen state familiar from the desert: you can get through anything, one minute at a time. When the minute’s up, do another minute. Go blank, stay blank.
So she startled me when she cried out “There! There it is!” A dim red VACANCY sign flickering in the gathering gloom. Only two hours and twenty minutes of trudge.
The cruddy place did look a thousand percent more comfortable than it had the evening before. The old crone got all maternal and taped up Kit’s leg. She let us have the same room for ten dollars off, since it hadn’t been made up yet. I could’ve collapsed into a pile of dirty laundry and slept for a week.
Kit filled the tub while I worked over the bike a little with paper towels and WD-40. Slipping into the water was pure heaven. Almost literally, like dying quietly and drifting off to a somnolent reward. We both fell asleep and woke up in cooling soup. While the tub drained we scrubbed each other with the hand shower attachment, more giggles than hygiene.
We carried lightweight emergency meals, dehydrated ramen or rice with mystery meat—just add hot water and pray—but decided to have regular food whenever it was available. So when we checked in we’d made a call to one of the Amana Colony restaurants, the Wheel, that did home dinner deliveries. I got dressed enough to open the door at eight, and a teenaged boy brought in armloads of Styrofoam boxes—the minimum order, a family dinner for four. Famished, we tore into the mountain of roast pork and sausage, mashed potatoes, green beans, beets, yams, and all. We didn’t open the container of pickled ham, the place’s specialty, saving it for tomorrow, wrapped up along with a loaf of fresh bread and some butter.
The motel TV only had network, so we lay in bed and watched mind-rot for a while. I fell asleep in the middle of the first sitcom, and when I woke up the room was dark except for the luminous clock, 4:44, a lucky-looking number. Kit snored quietly while I set up the laptop on the desk, angled so the light wouldn’t bother her. I made some instant with hot water from the tap and sweetened it with rum, and let the screen take me into Hunter’s world.
CHAPTER SIX
Hunter kept his police-band radio going all night while he sat on the steps of the dark trailer and peered out into the night with infrared goggles. He saw a fight between an owl and a weasel, but no human activity. If anybody was missing Lane Jared, PhD, they hadn’t told the police.
You should know as much as possible about the things you eat. From his flat sharkskin wallet, Hunter could tell that Dr. Jared was thirty-two, single, and perhaps did not drive; he had a “non-driver’s license,” a state ID, issued in Atlanta, and his leg muscles were so tough and stringy that if he owned a car he had probably only pushed it around for exercise.