The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (94 page)

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?”

“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?”

He pointed at Red
Skelton’s square. It said, “Thanks Sid We Dood It.”

“You keep thinking you’ve found a pattern,” David said, crossing over to the
other side, “but Van Johnson’s square is kind of sandwiched in here at an angle between Esther Williams and Cantinflas, and who the hell is May Robson? And why are all these squares over here empty?”

He had managed to maneuver me over behind the display of Academy Award winners. It was an accordionlike wrought-iron screen. I was in the fold between 1944 and 1945.

“And as if that isn’t enough,
you suddenly realize you’re standing in the courtyard. You’re not even in the theater.”

“And that’s what you think is happening in quantum theory?” I said weakly. I was backed up into Bing Crosby, who had won for Best Actor in
Going My Way
. “You think we’re not in the theater yet?”

“I think we know as much about quantum theory as we can figure out about May Robson from her footprints,” he said,
putting his hand up to Ingrid Bergman’s cheek (Best Actress,
Gaslight)
and blocking my escape. “I don’t think we understand anything
about
quantum theory, not tunneling, not complementarity.” He leaned toward me. “Not passion.”

The best movie of 1945 was
Lost Weekend.
“Dr. Gedanken understands it,” I said, disentangling myself from the Academy Award winners and David. “Did you know he’s putting
together a new research team for a big project on understanding quantum theory?”

“Yes,” David said. “Want to see a movie?”

“There’s a seminar on chaos at nine,” I said, stepping over the Marx Brothers. “I have to get back.”

“If it’s chaos you want, you should stay right here,” he said, stopping to look at Irene Dunne’s handprints. “We could see the movie and then go have dinner. There’s this
place near Hollywood and Vine that has the mashed potatoes Richard Dreyfuss made into Devil’s Tower in
Close Encounters
.”

“I want to meet Dr. Gedanken,” I said, making it safely to the sidewalk. I looked back at David. He had gone back to the other side of the courtyard and was looking at Roy Rogers’s signature.

“Are you kidding? He doesn’t understand it any better than we do.”

“Well, at least
he’s trying.”

“So am I. The problem is, how can one neutron interfere with itself, and why are there only two of Trigger’s hoofprints here?”

“It’s eight fifty-five,” I said. “I am going to the chaos
seminar.”

“If you can find it,” he said, getting down on one knee to look at the signature.

“I’ll find it,” I said grimly. He stood up and grinned at me, his hands in his pockets. “It’s a great
movie,” he said.

It was happening again. I turned and practically ran across the street.

“
Benji IX
is showing,” he shouted after me. “He accidentally exchanges bodies with a Siamese cat.”

I couldn’t find the chaos seminar. The Clara Bow Room, where it was supposed to be, was empty. A meeting of vegetarians was next door in the Fatty Arbuckle Room, and all the other conference rooms were locked. The channeler was still in the ballroom. “Come!” she commanded when I opened the door. “Understanding awaits!” I went upstairs to bed.

I had forgotten
to call Darlene. She would have left for Denver already, but I called her answering machine and told it the room number in case she picked up her messages. In the morning I would have to tell the front desk to give her a key. I went to bed.

I didn’t sleep well. The air conditioner went off during the night, which meant I didn’t have to steam my suit when I got up the next morning. I got dressed
and went downstairs. The programming started at nine with Abey Fields’s Wonderful World workshop in the Mary Pick-ford Room, a breakfast buffet in the ballroom, and a slide presentation on “Delayed Choice Experiments” in Cecil B. DeMille A on the mezzanine level.

The breakfast buffet sounded wonderful, even though it always turns out to be urn coffee and donuts. I hadn’t had anything but an ice-cream
cone since noon the day before, but if David was around, he would be somewhere close to the food, and I wanted to steer clear of him. Last night it had been Grauman’s Chinese. Today I was likely to end up at Knotts’ Berry Farm. I wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he was charming.

It was pitch-dark inside Cecil B. DeMille A. Even the slide on the screen up front appeared to be black. “As
you can see,” Dr. Lvov said, “the laser pulse is already in motion before the experimenter sets up the wave or particle detector.” He clicked to the next slide, which was dark gray. “We used a Mach-Zender interferometer with two mirrors and a particle detector. For the first series of tries we allowed the experimenter to decide which apparatus he would use by whatever method he wished. For the second
series we used that most primitive of randomizers—”

He clicked again, to a white slide with black polka dots that gave off enough light for me to be able to spot an empty chair on the aisle ten rows up. I hurried to get to it before the slide changed, and sat down.

“—a pair of dice. Alley’s experiments had shown us that when the particle detector was in place, the light was detected as a particle,
and when the wave detector was in place, the light showed wavelike behavior, no matter when the choice of apparatus was made.”

“Hi,” David said. “You’ve missed five black slides, two
gray ones, and a white with black polka dots.”

“Shh,” I said.

“In our two series, we hoped to ascertain whether the consciousness of the decision affected the outcome.” Dr. Lvov clicked to another black slide.
“As you can see, the graph shows no effective difference between the tries in which the experimenter chose the detection apparatus and those in which the apparatus was randomly chosen.”

“You want to go get some breakfast?” David whispered.

“I already ate,” I whispered back, and waited for my stomach to growl and give me away. It did.

“There’s a great place down near Hollywood and Vine that
has the waffles Katharine Hepburn made for Spencer Tracy in
Woman of the Year
”

“Shh,” I said.

“And after breakfast we could go to Frederick’s of Hollywood and see the bra museum.”

“Will you please be quiet? I can’t hear.”

“Or see,” he said, but he subsided more or less for the remaining ninety-two black, gray, and polka-dotted slides.

Dr. Lvov turned on the lights and blinked smilingly at
the audience. “Consciousness had no discernible effect on the results of the experiment. As one of my lab assistants put it, ‘The little devil knows what you’re going to do before you know it yourself.’”

This was apparently supposed
to be a joke, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I opened my program and tried to find something to go to that David wouldn’t be caught dead at.

“Are you two
going to breakfast?” Dr. Thibodeaux asked.

“Yes,” David said.

“No,” I said.

“Dr. Hotard and I wished to eat somewhere that is
vraiment
Hollywood.”

“David knows just the place,” I said. “He’s been telling me about this great place where they have the grapefruit James Cagney shoved in Mae Clark’s face in
Public Enemy
.”

Dr. Hotard hurried up, carrying a camera and four guidebooks. “And then
perhaps you would show us Grauman’s Chinese Theatre,” he asked David.

“Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

“And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a
chapeau
.”

They dragged
him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.

“He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a paper plate in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other.

“Did you get that at the breakfast brunch?” I asked.

“Yes. It was the last one. And they
ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t in Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.

“No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.

“You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut into
her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”

Dr. Whedbee eventually came
in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.

“Here,” Dr.
Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal-basin boundaries adjusted.” She whacked the side of the projector.

There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit it again. The light came on. “I learned that in the chaos seminar last
night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”