Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE HIDDEN VARIABLE

Markoff Chancy was a prime candidate for POE but, due to quantum wave probabilities, his orbit never intersected theirs.

Chancy detested the majority of primates because they called him Shorty or even more insulting names.

Mr. Chancy, you see, was a midget, but he was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood. People did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind those big oversized clods of cinema's two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks. By the time the midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin, or anybody in POE. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge.

It was in college (U.C.-Berkeley, 1962) that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden joke in his name. It was in a math class and, since this was Berkeley, the two students directly behind the midget were ignoring the professor and discussing their own intellectual interests- which were, of course, five years ahead of intellectual fads elsewhere.

"So we keep the same instincts as our primate and pre-primate ancestors," one student was saying. (He was from Chicago, his name was Mounty Babbit, and he was crazy even for Berkeley.) "But we superimpose culture and law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say"-Babbit's voice betrayed pride in the aphorism he was about to unleash-"mankind is the statutory ape."

".. and," the professor, Percy "Prime" Time, said at just that moment, "when such a related series appeared in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney won't be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the semester, even if the related series of his appearances in class does seem part of a notably random process." The class roared; another tone of bile was entered on the midget's shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.

In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room. Pussycat centerfold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women all built like Pussyettes, all throwing themselves passionately upon him. Today, however, Pussycat would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, he hurried across Bancroft Way and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him.

Damn "Prime" Time and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the measurable world that pronounced him subnormal. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul, he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability. He would be the random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the midget versus the digits.

He took out his pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let's have a Markoff Chain orgasm, just to start with, he thought savagely.

His first overt act-his Fort Sumter, as it were-began in San Francisco the following Saturday. He was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified five-and-dime store, when he saw the sign: