Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

SINCERITY IN SPELVINS

I'd rather have my mail delivered by Lockheed than ride in a plane built by the post office department.

–bartholomew gimble

Dr. Dashwood went out to dinner that night with Dr. Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two planets beyond Pluto.

Dashwood ordered a Manhattan with Southern Comfort-a combination that had never occurred to him before. He wondered how the idea got into his head-and Dr. Van Ation decided to try the same.

"Goethe said, 'Man muss entweder der Hammer oder der Amboss sein-you must be the hammer or the anvil," said a voice in the next booth.

"Mmm," Bertha Van Ation said. "This is good." She was sampling her Manhattan with Southern Comfort.

"Of course, he was just being melodramatic," the voice in the next booth said. "As an artist he must have known there are states in which you are both the hammer and the anvil-there's no either/or about it. That's the creative fire."

"So what's new in astronomy?" Dr. Dashwood asked.

"Uh?" Bertha said. "Oh, sorry, I was eavesdropping on the next booth."

"The hammer and the anvil," Dashwood said. "I heard him too. Must be a poet. They tell me we have more poets 'of anthology rank,' whatever that is, than any other city in America."

"Like the Hammerklavier sonata," said a new voice, a feminine one, in the adjoining booth. "Beethoven was both the hammer and the anvil there. Maybe he even intended the pun. He read Goethe, didn't he?"

"Read him?" asked the first voice. "They knew each other. Would have been friends, if two egomaniacs could become friends."

"This is my favorite vice," Bertha whispered. "Listening in on the conversation at the next table."

"It sure sounds as if he had that idea in mind," the feminine voice said. "Is there any other piano piece where the pianist literally has to hammer away at the keys like that?"

"This is weird," Dashwood whispered. "I got a crank letter today-we get them by the ton at Orgasm Research, as you can imagine-and it was all about the Hammerklavier."

"My, what erudite cranks you attract," Bertha whispered. "The cranks who write to us, at Griffith, are mostly illiterate farmers who have seen UFOs."

"They went walking on the street once," the man in the next booth boomed. "And everybody kept bowing to them. Goethe finally said, 'I find all this ostentatious honor a bit embarrassing.' And you know what Ludwig said? He said, 'Don't let it bother you. It is me they are honoring.

The woman's silvery laugh had golden highlights of hashish in it. "That's Beethoven for you," she said.

Suddenly the two arose; they had evidently paid their check already and had been lingering over their coffee. Dr. Dashwood and Dr. Van Ation, without being conspicuous about it, looked them over as they left. They were both Chinese.

"That's San Francisco for you," Dashwood said.

"I bought a Vivaldi record the other day," Bertha said. "It was made by a classical group in Japan, and they played his Four Seasons music on Japanese instruments. It sounded remarkably like the harpischord he wrote it for."

"M," Dashwood nodded. "And we've got all these kids playing sitars and trying to sound like Ravi Shankar."

"The arts and sciences have always been international," Bertha said. "It's only our damned politics that remain nationalistic. To our sorrow."

"Mn," Dashwood nodded again. "But, as I was asking you a while ago, what's new in astronomy?"

"Well," Bertha said intensely, leaning forward, "the universe is turning out to be a hell of a lot bigger than we thought even three or four years ago…"

At the other end of the room, seated at a table that gave a good view of Dashwood, the Continental Op was enjoying swordfish steak. He enjoyed it even more when he reminded himself that it could go on the expense account.

He owed this good fortune to the fact that Dashwood did not know his face yet.

Outside and across the street, Tobias Knight was dining on doughnuts and coffee from a deli, and bemoaning the fact that this typically warm San Francisco day had turned into a typically cold San Francisco night.

He owed this exile in the cold to the fact that Dashwood did know his face.

In Washington, Simon Moon had gone cruising at a bar called the Easter Basket. He had there picked up a young boy named Marion Murphy, who had long blond hair and girlish mannerisms, both of which were qualities Simon appreciated.

They had gone back to Simon's pad and smoked some hash. Then they rapped for a while, and Simon learned that Marion was working on a Master's in social psych, had a father who was a cop in San Francisco, and was a member of Purity of Ecology.

Simon decided not to hold the last fact against the boy.

When they went to bed Simon was the more aggressive at first, Briggsing young Marion with slurping passion. But they soon turned it into a game, and each one would Briggs the other for a while, always stopping when it seemed one of them might reach Millett. After an hour of this they were both on hair trigger, and could restrain themselves no longer. Simon began to Bryant Marion and they both started howling and panting and moaning until the bedroom began to sound like the Lion House at the zoo around mating time.

It was Simon Moon's idea of a great evening.

Dr. Dashwood was explaining the three dimensions of Briggsing to Dr. Van Ation, over coffee, at the other end of the continent.

"There just can't be any science without dimension," Dashwood said earnestly. "Fechner was the pioneer, psy-chometrics, what tastes sweeter than what and that sort of stuff. Primitive, of course, but it was the beginning of the quantification of the subjective, and my work could have followed immediately from his, except," he sighed, "you know how it is, fear and prejudice prevented the application of these methods to sex for a long time."

Dr Van Ation nodded somberly.

"Sincerity we measure in Spelvins on a scale of zero to ten," Dashwood went on, totally absorbed in his subject. "Hedonism in Lovelaces-we've been lucky there; subjects are able to distinguish sixteen graduations. Finally, there's the dimension of Tenderness-we find zero to seven covers that, so that the perfect Steinem Job, if I may use the vernacular, would consist of ten Spelvins of Sincerity, sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness."

"It certainly makes our work seem easy by comparison," Dr. Van Ation said. "Everything is so concrete and objective in astronomy."

"What does that mean?" Marion Murphy asked idly.

Simon, propping himself up on a pillow, looked where the boy was pointing. It was a sticker attached to the console of Simon's home computer, and it was in gold and black, with a dollar sign over which were imprinted the letters: