The Man Who Turned Into Himself (10 page)

'How d'you know she wasn't doing it just to impress them at the other end?' he said flatly. 'Secretly she was probably overjoyed. She probably thought she'd got rid of * me for good.'

'You don't know that,' I said, 'and as long as you don't know it you mustn't say it.' But I wished I felt as sure of myself as I was trying to sound.

'Thanks for the effort, Rick,' he said, 'but I know how you really feel. I know you're wondering if you knew
your
Anne any better than I knew mine. I want to say something about that. I think your Anne was all right. I feel it. I get that feeling from you. I can tell that your relationship was better than ours. You shared more. There was no pretence. Yours was the world where that relationship worked. Maybe the only one. Maybe there's only one where every relationship really works — or at least where it worked as well as yours did.'

I was so moved by this unselfish effort to reassure me in the depths of his own despair that I couldn't say anything for a while.

'Don't worry,' he said, 'you don't have to — say anything, I mean.'

How wrong I'd been about this man. The injustice of my first opinion of him was almost unbearable.

'No, you weren't wrong,' he went on softly. 'Everything you thought about me was perfectly justified. You got your life right, I got mine wrong. I had cheap dreams. That's all I shared with her — cheap dreams. Making money, being somebody. Well, you get back what you put in. I guess that's a rule everywhere, including where you come from.' He gave a little dry laugh.

'I'll tell you something else,' he went on, needing to talk now, so I let him. 'About Harold. Your Harold was a real friend. I know that because that's what you looked for in him. Me? I thought, hey, that's neat, this kid I grew up with has turned into a smart lawyer, that's going to be useful to me. You see the difference? He was your friend first and somebody who was useful second. With me it was the other way around. It's like a reverse image in a mirror — one of those old ghost stories. I'm the nightmare version of your life.'

'You're too hard on yourself,' I said. 'I know you don't think so now, but you'll get over this. One thing I am sure of — I don't know why, but I am — is that nothing's written in stone. You can change things. You can change yourself.'

'You sound like one of those moronic Californian self-help cults,' he said, not accusingly. I didn't take offence.

'At least one good thing's happened,' I said. 'You seem to have started to really believe in me.'

'I'm trying to,' he said, 'and I want to. What was the name you mentioned before, that guy at the university? Stickerbottle?'

'Tickelbakker. Dr Michael J. Tickelbakker.'

'But what do I say to him? What questions do I ask?'

'Don't worry — I'll feed you the right questions.'

'And what do I tell him about why I want to talk to him in the first place?'

'I don't know.' I hadn't thought about this, and should 
have. 'Tell him you're doing research for a book you're writing,' I suggested lamely.

'Are you kidding? I'm in real estate.'

'So? People in real estate can write a book if they want to.'

'You think? Most of them are so illiterate they think "Moby Dick" is a sexually transmitted disease.'

I smiled to myself. 'Tell that to Tickelbakker, if you find him. He'll enjoy it.'

***

In the event it proved unnecessary to offer any reason for meeting up with Tickelbakker aside from inviting him to lunch at Chez Arnaud, the best restaurant for miles around in Richard's universe as well as my own. The fact that Anne was on a committee to finance some new endowment at the university was sufficient of an introduction, and I remembered only too well how much Tickelbakker enjoyed good food and fine wine.

He was, for me, a joy to behold, even at second hand through Richard's eyes. He entered the restaurant wearing, as far as I could make out, the same crumpled tweed jacket he had worn on the last occasion I had seen him. He moved and waved his arms in the same gangling, uncoordinated way, and, despite being six feet tall and in his mid-thirties, he looked as always about twelve. His hair was baby-blond and thinning, except for an egregiously preserved lock that curled over his forehead. Clear-rimmed glasses rested on an upturned nose that you somehow imagined was freckled even though it wasn't. His eyes were round and bright with eagerness and, even though he was not in fact smiling broadly all the time, you somehow got the impression, as with his nonexistent freckles, that he was.

Cheerfully ignoring Richard's abstemious order of salad, grilled sole and mineral water, Tickelbakker, sipping a glass of champagne and taking Richard at his word when invited to order whatever he wanted, embarked upon a lunch of such indulgence that Richard silently marvelled at the robustness of his constitution, while blanching inwardly at the mounting cost coming his way. 'It's all right,' I reassured him, 'he's worth every cent — believe me.'

It was the day after our visit to the motel. The previous evening had passed off without incident between Anne and Richard. He had dined with two bankers from Chicago who were key investors in one of his developments, while Anne had said she was seeing someone for a preliminary chat about a Christmas gala they were organising for cancer research. A discreet call to Cy from the restaurant where Richard was dining had confirmed that the motel had not featured on her itinerary that evening.

There had been no sex between them overnight, and practically no conversation. In the morning she had left the apartment by seven to go to her aerobics workout while he was still in his shower. He had spent the morning on desultory paper work in his office, having given instructions that he was not to be disturbed. What he was actually doing was rehearsing with me a sufficient layman's knowledge (which was all I had to offer) of quantum physics in order to be able to present himself to Tickelbakker as a well-off dilettante in search of intellectual stimulation.

'That's very impressive,' Tickelbakker said, beaming over his escalope de foie gras a la vinaigrette and accompanying glass of Sauterne. Richard had just come to the end of his carefully prepared pitch. 'That's as good a lay description as I've come across of the basic principles.'

Richard enjoyed a little glow of pride and we exchanged secret congratulations: he on the clarity of my exposition, I on the excellence of his memory. He had started off with my favourite illustration of the scale on which we were talking. Imagine the earth stuffed with grapes, and that's how many atoms there are in a baseball. Now imagine a speck of dust in the centre of a baseball pitch, and that's the nucleus of the atom. Finally imagine another speck of dust on the boundary line, and that's an electron circling the nucleus.

'As I understand it,' he went on, 'it's on this level that 
the fun really starts. These sub-atomic entities, electrons, neutrons, whatever, behave both as particles and waves just as one sees in the two-slit experiment with light.'

'Exactly. You can do the same experiment — it's a classic — using streams of electrons or neutrons instead of your flashlight beam and you'll get the same result.'

'What I don't fully understand,' said Richard, 'is why. What's the explanation of this particle/wave duality?'

'You're not alone in that. Because effectively there is no definitive explanation.'

'Another thing I find equally fascinating and baffling,' Richard, prompted by me, prompted him, 'is the way these electrons or protons or whatever seem to know when we're observing them and adjust their behaviour accordingly.'

'Mm-hm,' Tickelbakker nodded, eyeing the bottle of La Lagune '72 that was being opened in anticipation of his aile de volaille aux poireaux et truffes. 'For instance, take a stream of electrons going through both open slits in your two-slit experiment and therefore giving you a wave pattern on the second screen. Let's suppose you want to measure the exact position of one of those electrons while it's behaving like a wave, or say you want to find out which of the two slits it goes through. We have techniques for doing that with absolute accuracy. There is no problem recording what's going on at that level. The problem is that the electron seems to know it's being observed and suddenly stops what it's doing. It lets you take a picture of it going through one slit or the other, but in that instant it stops being a wave and becomes a particle and slams into that second screen like it's a bullet — just as it would if only one slit were open.'

'Okay — so how does it know it's being watched?'

'That's where we get into some really fancy theories.'

'Such as,' I lobbed the words with careful precision into Richard's mind, 'the Many Worlds theory developed by Hugh Everett at Princeton in 1957. Go ahead, say it!'

'Such as,' Richard ventured tentatively, 'the Many Worlds theory developed by Hugh Everett at Princeton in 1957.'

'Yes, indeed!' said Tickelbakker. 'My word, Mr Hamilton, you really do know something about this subject, don't you!'

'Not really,' Richard replied modestly. 'I'm not a mathematician, so I have to take it on trust that the equations work. But I understand that the implications of this theory are staggering.' Each word had been dictated by me a split second before he spoke it. We were becoming quite a double act. More importantly, he was now convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that the information pouring out of him had its origins elsewhere than in his own unconscious. My credentials were finally becoming unimpeachably established with him.

'What Everett said, as I understand it,' he continued, lifting the words directly from me like a newscaster reading from his autocue, 'is that instead of a wave becoming a particle when we look at it, what actually happens is that the person doing the looking splits into two identical selves, the only difference between them being that one of them is looking at a wave, and the other is looking at a particle.'

'Exactly! Plus they're doing it in two totally separate universes!'

'So every time a scientist in a laboratory looks at an electron or whatever, the universe splits into two?' I had deliberately fed him a misleading question here in order to impress on him even further the enormity of what I wanted him to understand.

'No, no,' Tickelbakker corrected him, as I knew he would, 'it's quite independent of scientists or anybody else. It's called quantum transition, and it's going on incessantly in every star, every galaxy, every corner of the universe. Remember
— everything
is made out of this same stuff!'

'So every time one of these "transitions" occurs, the whole universe splits into two versions of itself — in one of which there is a wave inside one part of one atom, and in the other there's a particle instead. And that will be the only difference between those two universes?'

'That's about the size of it.'

'But it's utterly insane!' The protest came spontaneously from Richard with no prompting from me. It was a healthy reaction and I was curious to see how Tickelbakker countered it.

He laughed. 'Niels Bohr, who pioneered this work back in the twenties, said that if you weren't shocked by quantum theory, then you had failed to understand it.'

'But that means there must be an infinite number of universes.'

'Not quite infinite. It's limited mathematically. But for practical purposes — yes, infinite.'

'So in other words,' Richard went on, reading once more from his internal autocue, 'while you and I are sitting here in this restaurant, a virtually identical you and I are also sitting in a virtually identical restaurant in a virtually identical universe — and so on ad infinitum.'

'In some of those universes you and I, I'm sorry to say, are not having lunch.' Tickelbakker poked appreciatively at a ripe-looking brie and said he would have some of that along with a piece of fine English stilton, and maybe a glass of the Warre '45 to go with them. 'In some of them,' he continued with a note of genuine regret, 'we haven't even met. In some of them we haven't even been born. In some of them, however, we probably know each other much better.'

'For instance,' I interrupted, seizing on the opportunity to drive home my point with Richard, 'in one of them I might be a magazine publisher instead of a real estate developer, and you might be editing a magazine for me called
Particle/Wave.'

Tickelbakker laughed. 'Why not? Sounds like a fine idea. As a matter of fact I've often thought of trying to put some kind of magazine together for the slightly better than layman reader. I think there's a gap in the market. But I haven't found a publisher.'

'But where exactly are all these parallel universes?' I asked, moving on quickly before getting side-tracked into a venture that I knew was close to Tickelbakker's heart.

'That, I have to admit, is a little hard to describe without actually using mathematics. When we use a description like parallel universe we tend to think in everyday commonsense terms of something like a railroad track branching off into two, then three, then four tracks, and so on, but all going forward through the same four-dimensional (three of space, one of time) framework.' He looked up at the hovering waiter and, to Richard's astonishment, declined dessert.

'In actual fact,' he continued, 'when we talk of parallel universes we don't literally mean parallel at all. First of all we have to think in terms of many more dimensions than the four we are familiar with. This, I'm afraid, is where the language of mathematics comes in. Because that's what it is — a language of considerably more sophistication and precision than mere words. The nearest I can get to describing it in words would be to say that these other universes split off at right angles to our own — a virtually infinite number of right angles, which in turn could only exist in superspace and supertime, which are mathematical concepts.'

There seemed little more to be said. Richard and I were both silent for a moment as Tickelbakker savoured the 12-year-old Macallan malt that he had chosen in preference to a Cognac with his coffee.

Then Richard, taking me by surprise and seizing the initiative, leaned forward and fixed Tickelbakker with his best down-to-earth, man-to-man gaze.

'Now look,' he began, 'just between the two of us, do you believe all this stuff? Or is it just so much hot air?'

Tickelbakker gave an amiably patient grin, fully comprehending (well, not
quite
fully) the enormity of what Richard was attempting to grasp.

'Belief doesn't really come into it,' he replied thoughtfully. 'When you confront a theory of any kind, whether it's relativity, quantum physics, or just the proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, you ask yourself whether it's compatible with the known facts. If it is, you work with it.'