Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE MAD FISHMONGER AGAIN

"Gentlemen," Clem Cotex said smugly, "I believe I have identified the Mad Fishmonger."

The entire membership of the Warren Belch Society- all eight of them-were assembled in the tiny office and a gasp of astonishment went up.

"Yes," Clem said emphatically, standing at the head of the table, under the portrait of Wigner's Friend, "I believe I have a positive 'make' on the 'suspect,' as Jack Webb would say."

Anthropologist Blake Williams, he of the monumental obsession upon Schrodinger's occasionally dead cat, spoke first. "Who?" he cried, almost in the tone of one who hears that the circle has, at last, been squared.

"Let me present the evidence," Cotex said with a solemnity that fit the occasion. He doused the lights and stepped to his slide-projector machine.

On the screen at the other end of the office appeared a well-known face.

"That's General Crowley, the discoverer of the North Pole!" exclaimed Professor Percy "Prime" Time.

"Yes," said Clem Cotex with deliberation. "General Edward A. Crowley, the best-known explorer and adventurer of the early decades of our century. The model of the English nobleman. The idol of young boys everywhere. General Crowley, indeed." He paused dramatically.

"Look at those eyes." Clem's voice suddenly had the tone of Perry Mason addressing the court. "How would you describe those dark and brooding orbs, my friends?"

"Well," Dr. Williams said, "he has what I believe is called urn a piercing gaze."

"Exactly," Cotex said. "A piercing gaze."

Another picture of General Crowley came on the screen. And another. And another.

"The same piercing gaze," Clem said pointedly, "year after year. No matter where he is when a photographer pops up-Africa, Mexico, the North Pole; it doesn't matter-always the same piercing gaze."

"Well ah aren't heroes supposed to have a piercing gaze?" Old Prime Time protested, wondering if this was just another of Clem's wild-goose chases.

"In a certain class of sensational fiction," Clem said tightly, "heroes have a piercing gaze. Sometimes the villains do too-Fu Manchu for instance. But we are not living in that kind of novel," he went on, not bothering to tell them his opinion of what kind of novel they were living in. "In our reality, a piercing gaze means only one thing, and you all know what it is, gentlemen."

Another picture of General Crowley came on the screen, one in which he was much older than in the previous four photos; but he still had the same dark and deep-yes, piercing-gaze.

"These are the eyes," Clem said, "of a hopeless slave of the hashish habit. Now, as you all know, many English military men acquired a taste for the resin of the Cannabis Indica plant while in India, and were none the worse for it. Certainly, an occasional smoke of the hash is an enjoyable, even a mind-expanding, experience. I daresay most of you here have tried it, and I gladly admit that I have. But a sensible man keeps such diversions within certain bounds. Such a sane, sound man does not 'do a number' (as our younger people call it) until evening, or at least until twilight. Well, maybe late afternoon, occasionally. Perhaps in the morning once in a while. But not one stick of hash after another, day after day, year after year, for twenty, thirty, forty years! No: one who fits that description is a slave of the habit, a hashish robot, a man whose mind has lost contact with Reality (whatever that is) and wanders amid the phantasms of his own poisoned brain. A man, as the Irish say, whose mind had been taken away by the Wee People."

All gazed up at the photo of General Crowley, "the last of the Kipling heroes," as a journalist had called him, and Crowley gazed back at them, stony-eyed, impassive, enigmatic.

"Now, I have been studying all of General Crowley's wanderings," Clem went on. "He was, in fact, back in England during November of 1881. The crab and periwinkle prank would have been easy for a man of his wealth, if his mind had already acquired that strange quirk, that twist in the sensibility, which cannabis abusers refer to in their own argot as 'a spaced-out sense of humor.'

"In 1893, what do we find?" Clem continued. "General Crowley was visiting the Jersey shore, right here in Unistat, 'fishing and relaxing,' he says in his autobiography. And that very summer we see the first record of 'the Jersey Devil,' that fabulous monster that looked like a gorilla, jumped like a kangaroo, and glowed in the dark.

"I think we can discount later appearances of the Jersey Devil," Clem said argumentatively, "as the work of lesser pranksters, inspired by General Crowley's initial success. "In 1904," Clem went on, "there was the famous werewolf scare in Northumberland. General Crowley was back in England that year. In 1905 we have the first major UFO flap in Spain. General Crowley was vacationing there. In 1908 gnomes and other Little Green Men were reported in Switzerland. General Crowley was there, allegedly only to climb mountains.

"And so it goes," Clem said bluntly, flicking the lights back on. "Over fifty-six percent of all the weird data collected by the conservative Forteans, by our own more imaginative group, and by all the UFO buffs, for the years of 1860 to 1930-the years of General Crowley's life- correlate with the General's own movements. Even the Loch Ness Monster first began to appear after he bought Boleskine House, on the shore on Loch Ness.

"I think, gentlemen, that the conclusion is inescapable. General Edward A. Crowley, the mountaineer, the adventurer, the explorer, was a man unhinged by hashish abuse. He had become a compulsive, obsessive, sometimes sadistic practical joker. After all, I think the psychology of it is easy to understand, especially to those of us who, while not enslaved by the habit as he was, have had our own little adventures with the cannabis molecule. The world was becoming increasingly materialistic, bureaucratic, and-to a man like Crowley-dull. He set out to restore the Mysterious, the Magical, even the Frightening, to us. He was the last Romantic.

"I have no doubt of it," Clem concluded. "General Crowley was the Mad Fishmonger of Worcester."

"By George," Blake Williams said, "I think you've really got it."

There were murmurs of agreement. But then Professor Fred "Fidgets" Digits spoke up suddenly: "This opens a whole new can of worms," he said. "If General Crowley was-well, what he now appears to be, a common hoaxter- well, gentlemen, can we trust his reports on the North Pole expedition?"

"I fear not," Clem Cotex said. "That question came to me as soon as I began to realize Crowley's true character. We can't believe the North Pole story at all. It may just be another of his jokes. We may have been wrong for years, gentlemen.

"The earth may not be hollow, after all."

Down the hall the Invisible Hand Society was having problems of its own.

A group of the more avant-garde members had become convinced of the existence of the Tooth Fairy and were trying to convert everybody else.

Naturally, Dr. Rauss Elysium did not like this. He felt it reduced the principles of the Invisible Hand Society to absurdity.

Dr. Rauss Elysium had summed up the entire science of economics in four propositions, to wit:

1. Find out who profits from it.

This was merely a restatement of the old Latin proverb-a favorite of Lenin's-cui bono?

2. Groups never meet together except to conspire against other groups.

This was a generalization of Adam Smith's more limited proposition "Men of the same profession never meet together except to defraud the general public." Dr. Rauss Elysium had realized that it applies not just to merchants, but to groups of all sorts, including the governmental sector.

4. Every system evolves and expands until it encroaches upon other systems.

This was just a simplification of most of the discoveries of ecology and General Systems Theory.

4. It all returns to equilibrium, eventually.

This was based on a broad Evolutionary Perspective and was the basic faith of the Invisible Hand mystique. Dr. Rauss Elysium had merely recognized that the Invisible Hand, first noted by Adam Smith, operates everywhere. The Invisible Hand, Dr. Rauss Elysium claimed, does not merely function in a free market, as Smith had thought, but continues to control everything no matter how many conspiracies, in or out of government, attempt to frustrate it. Indeed, by including Propositions 2 and 3 inside the perspective of this Proposition 4, it was obvious-at least to him-that conspiracy, government interference, monopoly, and all other attempts to frustrate the Invisible Hand were themselves part of the intricate, complex working of the Invisible Hand itself.

He was an economic Taoist.

The Invisible Hand-ers were bitterly hated by the orthodox old Libertarians. The old Libertarians claimed that the Invisible Hand-ers had carried Adam Smith to the point of self-contradiction.

The Invisible Hand people, of course, denied that.

"We're not telling you not to oppose the government," Dr. Rauss Elysium always told them. "That's your genetic and evolutionary function; just as it's the government's function to oppose you."

"But," the Libertarians would protest, "if you don't join us, the government will evolve and expand indefinitely."

"Not so," Dr. Rauss Elysium would say, with supreme Faith. "It will only evolve and expand until it creates sufficient opposition. Your coalition is that sufficient opposition at this time and place. If it were not sufficient, there would be more of you."

Some Invisible Hand-ers, of course, eventually quit and returned to orthodox Libertarianism.

They said that, no matter how hard they looked, they couldn't see the Invisible Hand.

"You're not looking hard enough," Dr. Rauss Elysium told them. "You've got to notice every little detail."

Sometimes, he would point out, ironically, that many had abandoned Libertarianism to become socialists or other kinds of Statists because they couldn't see the Invisible Hand even in the Free Market of the nineteenth century.

All they could see, he said, were the conspiracies of the big capitalists to prevent free competition and to maintain their monopolies. They, the fools, had believed government intervention would stop this.

Government intervention was, to Dr. Rauss Elysium, just like the conspiracies of the corporations, merely another aspect of the Invisible Hand.

"It all coheres wonderfully," he never tired of repeating. "Just notice all the details."

Alas, the Tooth Fairy people were using all the same arguments. They said that if you couldn't see the Tooth Fairy, you weren't looking hard enough.