The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette) (4 page)

Dr. Rojas considered this. “You could say the
same about the Geiger counter—it takes measurements, so it
represents an unconscious observer.”

“Schrödinger doesn’t seem to have considered
either the Geiger counter or the cat as observers.”

“But that’s exactly what I mean—a cat owner
would never
not
think of a cat as an observer. Cats like to
keep an eye on what’s going on around them.”

“And yet he still chose that particular
animal. And what more likely reason than that one was purring by
his feet at the moment he thought of the experiment?”

I wasn’t sure I had ever seen Dr. Rojas this
animated. He pounced on the point. “But that just proves my case. A
cat is not a stationary object—it moves, meows, scratches, nuzzles.
It would not sit quietly in a box for an hour. You’d need air holes
in the box, which would invalidate the experiment. A cat owner
would know this.”

“And yet despite all those issues, he
did
suggest a cat.”

“Because he probably had in mind a spherical
cat, not an actual one.”

“What’s a spherical cat?” I asked. Even
though I wasn’t a pet person, I knew that there was no such thing
as a spherical cat.

“An approximation of a cat, an idealization.
A perfect cat,” Dr. Mooney said. “Ah, here we go,” he added as the
printer finished its business. He explained for my benefit, “This
is a translation of the original paper in which Dr. Schrödinger
first brings up the thought experiment. ‘The Present Situation in
Quantum Mechanics,’ published in 1935 in the journal
Die
Naturwissenschaften
.”

I glanced over his arm at the densely written
paper.

“It’s this paragraph here in section five,”
Dr. Mooney added, tapping his copy. He read the relevant bit out
loud. “‘A cat is penned up inside a steel chamber, along with the
following diabolical device, which must be secured against direct
interference by the cat.’” He looked up at us. “See? Schrödinger
knew enough about cats to realize that the creature wouldn’t hang
around idly next to an experimental apparatus without disturbing
it…Almost as if he owned one himself.”

Dr. Rojas cleared his throat and read out a
couple of sentences of his own. “‘Perhaps in the course of one hour
one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps
none…The psi-function of the entire system would express this by
having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression)
mixed or smeared out in equal parts.’ Hmm, pretty cold-blooded if
you were talking about your own household companion, wouldn’t you
say?”

“He does say ‘pardon the expression.’”

“Exactly, as if the cat is just a figure of
speech.”

After a few more minutes of this, Dr. Rojas
hurried off to a summer semester class he was teaching, taking his
copy of “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” with him, and
I commented, “Sounds like you two are at an impasse.”

“As usual the only way to settle this for
sure is with a run into the past,” Dr. Mooney said, taking a lab
stool and offering me one. There was work waiting for me back at my
office, but somehow I found myself sitting down. “The first task,
of course, is deciding where to go,” the professor said,
considering the matter. “Academia was just as topsy-turvy then as
it is now, so between that and all the war upheavals in Europe,
Schrödinger lived in a lot of places: Vienna, Stuttgart, Zurich,
Berlin, Oxford, and later in Graz and Dublin. Obviously, we should
start by looking in 1935, the year he published his article.” He
tapped the paper in his hand. “He was at Oxford then. If we find a
cat with him in Oxford, it will settle matters. If we don’t, we
might have to go to one of the other places, perhaps all the way
back to his childhood in Vienna.

“I might go to the library to find a
biography of Schrödinger so I can trace the evolution of his ideas.
And I can pore over his correspondence with Einstein to see if he
mentions owning any pets. The real problem will be getting a STEWie
roster spot…Perhaps we could piggyback on a run that’s already on
the roster.”

“You need to look at his personal life,” I
said.

“Hmm…What’s that, Julia?” Perched on the lab
stool, he had returned his attention to the paper.

“You need a gossipy book, something that
talks not just about his scientific accomplishments but about his
home life.”

“Good point, Julia…Yes, a gossipy book.”

“What’s that?” I pointed to the whiteboard
behind him, where a line had been drawn down the middle. One side
said
YES, CAT
; below was a list of names, each in a
different handwriting. The other side said
NO CAT
, with a
list of about the same length.

“Wagers,” Dr. Mooney explained without
bothering to look up from the paper. “This one has everyone
buzzing. Dr. Baumgartner is on my side—she is relying on her
personal experience with cats—while Dr. Little thinks a cat would
have been too much of a distraction to Schrödinger.”

“Is taking money for bets on campus legal?
I’m pretty sure Dean Sunder wouldn’t approve.”

“We aren’t betting money, Julia, just
bragging rights…Still, let’s try to keep Lewis away from the
lab.”

As I left him to it, he called after me, “Any
news on your fridge phantom?”

“Chief Kirkland set up a camera and is
recording the lunchtime hour every day. He’ll let me know what he
finds.”

I pulled open the lab door, then stopped. I
didn’t know very much about quantum physics, but I did know people.
And people, geniuses or not, were simple at heart. They tended to
reach for what was nearby. In this case, that meant a feline member
of the household.

I added my name under
YES, CAT
, then
left.

That night I dreamed of cats. A large number of
them, too many to count—a living wave pressing against my legs as I
approached STEWie’s basket in the dimly lit lab like a thief in the
night. Black ones, gray ones, white ones, spotted ones, all hissing
and meowing. I climbed onto the platform, steadying myself on the
steel frame, aware of the mirrors towering around it. Why had I
come? I wasn’t about to go into the past; I
couldn’t
—I
didn’t have the training, didn’t know how to operate the equipment,
didn’t have funding, didn’t have a research topic or a spot on the
STEWie roster, and besides, I was needed in the present to find the
fridge phantom…

I was now crouched on the platform, the lab
around me lit only by the flickering of workstation lights and the
reflections from the cats’ eyes. The platform base felt cool to my
touch. The cats, below me, pushed against the sides of the
platform, their eyes glowing with meaning, as if they wanted to
make sure I went into the past to seek information on one of their
own. Or was it the opposite, a warning for me not to go, that the
past wasn’t a place for me? The cats pressed into the platform, a
heaving mass of bodies, as if trying to either send it on its way
or destroy it. The platform was now shaking under my feet, and so
were the mirrors around it, oriented towards where I knew not. I
tried to hold on, and then I was falling, but I couldn’t tell if I
was falling onto the floor, about to smack my head against its
tiles,
or if I was falling into History, about to hit my head on
the pavement of ages past
—

I woke up with a start, sweat pouring down
the back of my neck, my head throbbing.

I turned on the light and rose to get a drink
of water. Quinn was on a fishing trip to which I wasn’t invited
(but I wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway, truth be told—our
marriage had already started falling apart by then), so he wasn’t
in the house for me to disturb. The water felt refreshing, and it
had the effect of refreshing my thoughts as well. Well, that was a
silly dream. As if I would ever be allowed to tag along on a STEWie
run.

I took something for the headache and went
back to bed resolved to pay less attention to the bets floating
around the TTE lab.

I headed in to work the next morning, Wednesday,
with the headache gone. I had woken up feeling slightly
dissatisfied, though there wasn’t any reason for it. Everyone had
things well in hand, and the questions I’d been grappling with for
the past couple of days would soon be answered. I should have been
quite happy to finally have some time to work on the fall course
catalog, which was the main item on my to-do list.

The day hummed along quietly.

I stepped out midafternoon to refill my
coffee at the Hypatia House kitchenette and came back to find a new
message on my answering machine from a grad student who only gave
his name as Andreas, Department of Paleontology. I suspected what
the message would say as soon as he began to speak.

“Hi, is this the dean’s office? My breakfast
is gone—for the second time this month—and I was hoping someone
could do something about it.”

It was well past one, but breakfast was a
vague term when it came to grad students; it could refer to a meal
anywhere between midnight and midafternoon. The student had been
polite enough, but he hadn’t left a contact number, so I had to
check the Department of Paleontology website and its list of
students and projects. There he was: Andreas Ioannides,
paleobotany.

I reached him at his desk, asked what was
missing—a container of spanakopita and french fries—then assured
him the school was looking into things. I didn’t want to be more
specific because I knew Chief Kirkland wanted to keep the fridge
camera secret as long as possible.

Next I called the security office and left a
message for Chief Kirkland with one of his officers. I had asked
Andreas to explain what spanakopita looked like (baked puff pastry
with feta and spinach), but Chief Kirkland seemed to be familiar
with world cuisine, so I figured he wouldn’t need an explanation.
The message I left with the security office was simply this:
“Spanakopita and french fries taken. Square glass container, blue
lid.”

About an hour later my cell phone beeped with an
email. It was Chief Kirkland. He had written possibly the shortest,
curtest email I’d ever received at work:

On my way with a picture.

N. Kirkland

I didn’t remember giving him my email
address, but it would have been easy enough to look it up in the
internal campus database. I could only assume he meant he had a
picture of the fridge phantom. I emailed back a short but sincere
reply saying I was looking forward to seeing the picture, and yes,
I was in my office and he was welcome to drop by. Then, resisting
the impulse to flip through my mental catalog of the possible
candidates for fridge phantom, I turned to a more pressing matter.
I called Dr. Mooney and reached him at the Coffee Library.

“Did you know that there are seventy-three
breeds of cats, Julia?” he said, skipping any sort of greeting.
Before I could answer, he continued: “Not relevant to the problem,
of course. I followed your advice and found a gossipy biography. It
turns out that Erwin Schrödinger had what you might call a
complicated personal life. He had—hold on, let me make my way
outside so I don’t disturb the library goers…

“Where was I? Right, a complicated personal
life. Schrödinger was married, but he carried on several affairs,
and his wife, Anny, had affairs of her own. When Schrödinger
received the invitation to Oxford, the year was 1933. He was living
in Berlin at the time, and he was eager to leave Germany because of
what was happening there. He managed to inveigle an invitation to
Oxford for a colleague as well—not because of politics, but because
he was interested in the colleague’s wife, Hilde. At Oxford, things
developed…He and Hilde ended up having a daughter together, and he
more or less seemed to consider Hilde his second wife, privately
and publicly.”

“Well, whatever floats your boat,” I said.
“So did this…unusual household have a cat?”

“The book doesn’t say. But I did find out
that Erwin and Anny leased a house at 24 Northmoor Road in North
Oxford for a hundred fifty British pounds per year, with Hilde and
her husband living nearby. I don’t suppose anyone on the STEWie
roster has research interests in Oxford in late 1934 or early 1935,
Julia? Perhaps Dr. May? She oversees a lot of runs to Europe and
maybe one of them might overlap in time and—”

I interrupted him. “Not necessary. You’re in
luck. An archeology department run has fallen through. Dr. Taylor
has the measles.”

“Wasn’t she vaccinated?”

I relayed my conversation with Dr. Taylor.
“Apparently, she’s in that tiny subset of people who can still get
the disease. She thinks she picked it up from her toddler’s
preschool rather than her travels into the past, but the end result
is that Friday’s Egypt run has been put on hold.”