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

testicles bloodily blown off in Korea.
    Williams, of course, never knew about this patriotic gelding, but he was well aware that various boys his age were having various portions of their anatomy blown off in Korea; being somewhat philosophical, he often reflected on the paradox that the polio (which had been, when it occurred, a physical agony to him and a psychological agony to his parents) had preserved him from such mutilations. Considering that the only continuing effect of the polio was the slight limp, he had to admit that Nature or God or something-or-other had sneakily done him great good while appearing to do him great evil. This was a decided encouragement toward an optimistic attitude toward the seemingly evil and made him wonder if the universe were not benevolent after all. The guy who lost his balls in Williams’s place, on the other hand, became a pronounced pessimist and cynic.
    Between Korea and Vietnam, while Blake was acquiring first an M.S. and then a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology, another great good fortune, in the form of another seeming evil, came before his eyes. He was walking in lower Manhattan; he had started from Washington Square, where he and his current girl friend—they were both NYU students—had just had a particularly nasty quarrel right after a biology class. He had wandered far to the west in a mood of suicidal gloom, such as young male primates often think they should experience after losing a sexual partner. Somehow, he wandered onto Vandivoort Street and found himself at the Vandivoort Street incinerator. There he saw a most peculiar sight: a rather stout man, looking like he was about to cry, was watching while two younger, thinner men were pouring books out of a truck into the incinerator.
    “What the hell?” Blake Williams asked nobody in particular.It was like an old movie of Nazi Germany. Nobody had told him that bookburning was now an American institution.
    He approached the stout man, who was the only one of the three who seemed unhappy, and repeated his question. “What the hell?” he asked. “I mean, are you people burning
books
?”
    “
They
are,” the stout man said. He went on to explain that he was an executive of something called the Orgone Institute Press and that a court had ordered all their books destroyed. Williams was curious and looked at some of the titles:
Character Analysis
and
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
and
The Cancer Biopathy
and
Contact with Space.
    “I didn’t know that book burning was legal in this country,” he said.
    “Neither did I,” the stout man said bitterly.
    Blake Williams walked on, dazed. He couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d seen Storm Troopers rounding up Jews. He wondered if he’d fallen into a time warp.
    Later, of course, he learned that the Orgone Institute, headed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, had been investigating human sexuality and had come to some highly unorthodox conclusions. Dr. Reich himself died in prison, Dr. Silvert (Reich’s co-investigator) committed suicide, the books were burned, and the heresy was buried. But Williams had an entirely new attitude toward the country in which he lived, the scientific community which had looked on and made not a single gesture to support Dr. Reich and Dr. Silvert, and the omnipresent rhetoric which insisted that the Dark Ages had ended many centuries ago.
    He remembered that Sister Kenny, at the time he and thousands of others were cured by her polio therapy, had been denounced as a quack by the same entrenched medical bureaucrats who imprisoned the Orgone researchers. How convenient, he thought, aghast, to assume that allthe injustices happen in other countries and other ages: that Dreyfus may have been innocent, but the Rosenbergs never; that Pasteur may have been right, but not the researcher ostracized from the American Association for the Advancement of Science—not the professor denied tenure at
our
university, not the man in
our
prison. Blake Williams came to the