Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page B

inside, bottles of drinks racked in ice-cold water. He pulled out a twelve-ounce Coke in a heavy returnable bottle, also a time trip. There was a bottle opener at the cash register, which clanged and made satisfying greased-metal sounds. He got a quarter change for his dollar, and a finger-touch of warm flesh. “You need somethin’, just holler.” He watched the .38 swivel back to the stockroom.
    A good place to begin an adventure. Sex and guns and Mother Nature outside playing the noir witch. Forget Arlene and the evaporating check and weepy Mom and dear old Dad.
    Just you and me, monster. I’m coming to get you.

2.
    I was able to finish most of a chapter while she slept. She envied me for being able to get along on five or six hours’ sleep; I envied her for being able to stay down for ten. She was always more rested than me, but then I theoretically had more time to work. An extra forty-hour week every ten days. If only I could get paid for reading trash fiction and watching TV, I’d be a wealthy man.
    But this particular morning, I did write, and was pretty happy with it.
    So was Kit. She read through it while we had motel-room instant in paper cups.
    â€œWould they really have to shoot him in the eye, or the ear? I mean in the real world.”
    â€œThey say people who kill people for a living don’t like .38s. The army stopped using them in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine part. The enraged Moro natives would absorb several shots and just keep coming.”
    â€œPretty tough customers.”
    â€œWell, they tied leather thongs around their balls before they went into combat. The leather got wet and constricted, and the pain drove them mad.”
    â€œThat’s got to be bullshit,” she said. “Racist bullshit. They couldn’t walk.”
    â€œHey. I read it in a book. That’s why the army changed from the .38 to the .45. The .45 bullet was big enough to knock them down.”
    â€œBut they don’t use the .45 anymore. You said you had a 9-mm in the desert. That’s got to be smaller.” She rubbed her chin. “Forty-five hundredths of an inch is like twelve millimeters. Way smaller.”
    â€œYeah, I guess. But it knocks them down better.”
    â€œGoodness. Smaller is better. Where will it all end?”
    â€œA tiny little bullet, obviously, that moves at the speed of light. A photon.”
    â€œHave to be a heavy photon.”
    â€œI’m sure they’re working on it.” I should’ve paid attention in physics. How could a photon weigh anything, if it always moved at the speed of light? If it didn’t move at the speed of light, it wouldn’t be a photon.
    â€œSo is the monster really from another planet?”
    â€œHe thinks he is.”
    â€œYeah, but
you
know. Don’t you?”
    â€œRight now he’s Schrödinger’s Cat. And I haven’t opened the box.”
    â€œAh.” She took a sip of coffee. “So you don’t know yet.”
    I wagged a pedantic finger at her. “That’s not what I said.”
    She squinted at me while wheels turned—she was the one who first told me about the paradox: Mr. S’s cat is in a box, presumably soundproof, with a gun pointed at its helpless little head. The gun will go off if the trigger is struck by an alpha particle from an alpha-particle generator that the cat’s sadistic owner purchased at the local quantum hardware store. Schrödinger’s point was that because of the quantum nature of elementary particles, there was only a probability, not a certainty, that the alpha particle had done its job. You couldn’t tell whether the cat was alive or dead without opening the box—which takes the problem out of the quantum universe and into the real world.
    Of course in the real world, there would or would not be a smoking hole in the box and cat brains all over the place. But that’s not what scientists mean by