Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

DEMATERIALIZING GORILLAS

Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.

–william F. buckley, jr.,

The Wit and Wisdom of Vlad the Impaler

The Warren Belch Society held its annual meeting on January 2, 1984, while POE was busy mining downtown Washington with homemade atom bombs. The Society knew nothing of this and was more concerned with disappearing gorillas in Chicago.

Their tiny office was dominated by a huge oil painting of Schrodinger's Cat, executed in weird orgone-blue hues by their founder and presiding officer, the eccentric millionaire, W. Clement Cotex. All active members of the Society-eight of them, to be exact-were present.

The Warren Belch Society had been founded after Cotex had been kicked out of the Fortean Society for having bizarre notions. The purpose of "the Belchers" (as Cotex jovially called them) was to investigate those aspects of scientific theory and those alleged occult events which were regarded as "too far out" by the unimaginative Forteans, who are willing to investigate UFOs, rains of crabs and fish, girls who might have turned into swans, and similar matters, but, like their founder, the late Charles Fort, drew the line at the dogs that said "Good morning" and then vanished in a puff of green smoke.

Cotex, admittedly, was an intellectual surrealist. The name of the Society, for instance, was deliberately taken from the most obscure of all the lawmen of the Old West, Marshall Warren Belch of Dodge City, who had unfortunately been shot to death when his pistol jammed during his very first gunfight. It was Clem Cotex's claim that the Everett-Wheeler-Graham-DeWitt interpretation of the Schrodinger's Cat paradox was literally true. Everything that could happen did happen. There were infinitely many universes, each one the result of a collapse of the state vector in a possible way. Thus, somewhere in superspace, there must be a universe in which Marshall Belch's pistol didn't jam and he lived on to become famous. There were probably TV shows and movies about him by now, over there in that universe. Or so Cotex argued.

In general, as good empiricists, the Belch Society was more interested in odd facts than in odd theories. A UFO Contactee who could jam zippers by looking at them. A man found dead in St. Louis with his throat torn as though by the fangs of an enormous beast, with no animal missing from the local zoos (the famous Stimson Case of 1968). Documented instances of a fat bearded man with jolly eyes seen near chimneys on Christmas Eve, with a bag of toys over his shoulder. Bleeding Catholic statues. Flying Hindus. Dematerializing Buddhists. Kahuna fire-walkers. Why the signs always say WALK when the streetlight is on red and DON'T WALK when it is on green. Books in which the permutations of the phrase "heaven and hell" appeared at random intervals, forming a Markoff Chain.

"Take anybody in the world-anybody in this novel," Cotex once explained his theory to a group of skeptical fellow characters. "Like you, Dr. Williams," he added, picking out the most erudite and wiggy in the crowd, Blake Williams. "In one of the parallel universes, you're probably not an anthropologist, but maybe a chemist or something. In another universe, you might even be a female musician instead of a male scientist. And so on. In another universe," Cotex concluded, '7 might be a small businessman from Little Rock who believes the universe is five-cornered."

The disappearing gorillas, they were all convinced, were: (a) a major breakthrough to another universe; (b) not yet known to those stuffy old Forteans; and (c) really hot stuff.

"If gorillas can teleport," Professor Fred "Fidgets" Digits was saying, "that may be the whole key to the Mad Fishmonger."

"We needn't assume that the gorillas actually teleport," Dr. Horace Naismith objected. "It may be that there is a Schwartzchild Radius in Lincoln Park Zoo and they sort of fall into it and pass the Event Horizon."

This led to some lively debate on whether teleportation was or was not more likely than a Black Hole in the Lincoln Park Zoo, but Blake Williams suddenly derailed the conversation with a thoughtful and uncompleted "I wonder if this goes all the way back to the Democratic Convention of 1968…"

"Say," Cortex cried, eyes wide. "What was all that fighting and fussing about, anyway? The way I remember it, the radicals wanted to sleep in the park and the police beat the shit out of them and chased them out of the park. That seems an awfully silly issue to lead to a whole week of rioting and tear-gassing. And why were so many journalists-and especially cameramen-attacked by the cops… ?"

"You think maybe the city authorities knew about it, even back then… ?" Naismith asked eagerly.

"People may resist new ideas, as we all know to our sorrow," Williams said, "but a fact this size-over two hundred gorillas purchased by the zoo over a ten-year period and only two accounted for-must have been noticed by somebody on the finance committee at least. You can bet your sweet ass the city authorities know about it. And, of course, they're imposing a cover-up, just like the air force with the UFOs. The same old government reflex. Pavlov's Dog meets Schrodinger's Cat again."

"This is a time for action, not theory," said Cotex. "Gentlemen, I am flying to Chicago tonight to begin a personal investigation. A case like this is a surrealist's heaven and a logician's hell," he added with a chuckle. He was totally nonlinear.