Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert A. Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

of the wombplanet but not knowing what lies beyond the gravitational vagina—the whole universe
outside”
.
    “A 4,000-mile
cunt?”
Carol was awed by the concept. Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. “That’s a
very
funny metaphor, Professor.”
    “The only difference between my publishers and the James gang,” the drunk went on, monotonous as a bass drum, “is that the James boys had horses.”
    “… which explains the various rebirth experiences reported by astronauts like Aldrin and Mitchell and the others,” Williams trumpeted (gassy old windbag). “Earth is our womb. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There’s nothing metaphoric about it.”
    “The James boys hell, my last publisher was more like Attila the Hun,” plonkty-plonked Frank Hemeroid in pianissimo.
    Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash.
    “Right Wingers?” astronomer Bertha Van Ation was trilling. “We’ve got
real
Right Wingers out in Orange County. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales….”
    But that impossible Williams person was murmuring privately now to Carol the Golden Goddess, and Case tried desperately to catch the words, dreading the thought that a sexual liaison was being formed.
    “The mnemonic,” Williams was crooning, “is quite easy. Just say, ‘Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue.’ See?”
    Mnemonic for what, in God’s name? But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now:
    “Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes. Fict! The most unkennedest carp of all. Fogt. Veiny? V.D.? Wacky? His bruttus gypper.”
    “I was walking on Lexington Avenue one morning around three A.M. ,” the drunk maundered on, “and I heard this URRRRRP, this horrible
eldritch laughter
just like in an H. P. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers.”
    “This the lewdest comedy nominator,” Moon keened high on the G-string. “This de visions of spirals fur de lewdest comedy nominator. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. Think! White harse devoted. Thank! Wit ars devoided. Dunk!”
    “I wish Moon would stop reading that drivel,” Fred “Figs” Newton was clearly heard in solo. “I’d like to ask him how much the Beast really knows.”
    “Oh,” the mournful oboe of Benny Benedict sang ominously, “the Beast knows
everything….”
    “… by Loop Shore and Dellingersgangers,” Moonkeened over them, oblivious, “where yippies yip and doves duz nothing, to the hawkfullest convention ever.”
    At this point Case had to beat a hasty retreat to the John (one martini too many) and he never did get all the conversations sorted out in his memory, but the louses in the skidrow dimehaunts were firmly lodged in the Ambiguous Imagery files of his Myth-and-Metaphor Detector, right next to the Three Stooges and Chinatown.
    And Cagliostro the Great.

TO HAVE LOCKS ON THESE DOORS
    One of the causes of cancer is the harmfulness of cooked foods.
    —F URBISH LOUSEWART V ,
Unsafe Wherever You Go
    Blake Williams had the great good fortune to suffer a bout of polio in infancy. Of course he did not realize it was good fortune at the time—nor did his parents or his doctors. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time (the early 1930s) when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members. He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in 1938. The real luck occurred twelve years later, in 1950, when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service. Thenext man drafted, in his place, had both