At the Rialto

“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.”