Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

IS VLAD A SYMBOL?

A class made up solely of intellectuals will always have a guilty conscience.

–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

"Defection?" Ubu suggested at the second conference on the Brain Drain. "Russia or China…"

"The CIA was the first agency into this," Babbit said, "and they say it's impossible. They know what color drawers every commissar wears these days with the latest surveillance techniques. One hundred thirty-two top American scientists are not working over there unknown to the CIA. Take that as axiomatic." Babbit was firm.

"Well there are only twelve people in HOME…"

"They haven't left the planet," Babbit said briefly. "People of that caliber do not travel about without somebody noticing-Intelligence, newspapers, TV, other scientists, somebody. It is as if they have crawled into a hole and dragged the ground in after them." His chair creaked screeee as he leaned forward for emphasis.

"Hell, they're not loose inside the country sir," Ubu said firmly. "Americans can't just disappear these days. Why to cash a check any kind of check you've got to write both your Social Security number and your GWB number and have them both scanned by the Beast. Sir there's never been a people better watched and protected than the American people of November 1983. And we expect to do even better sir when the new circuits are put in the Beast next month."

He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice

But the snow falls thicker, making a blanket of foam against the window of Babbit's office and piles against the door of The Upstart Crow bookstore off Dupont Circle across town, where Marvin Gardens is autographing copies of Vlad Victorious.

"I never got a real live autograph from a real live author Mr. Gardens tell me why did you write two books about a man like Vlad?"

"To make money," Marvin said in his Peter Lorre cokehead voice. He had prepared for the ordeal of the seventeenth autograph party in twenty-three days by snorting more than his usual morning quantity of the snow and was in no mood to conceal his divinity from the blind uncoked Earthlings. "I have always been possessed by a mad, passionate, almost erotic desire for a very large bank account. In fact, I love the feel of money the crisp crinkle of bills the metal solidity of coin the visual impact of a large check with seven figures,"

"Is it true John Wayne will play Vlad again in the sequel?"

"That's just in the talking stage now and frankly I don't care if they cast Raquel Welch the important thing is cash on the barrelhead my agent is asking a million for the screen rights and we won't settle for a penny less… Yes?"

"Is Vlad really a symbol?"

The twelve people in HOME-High Orbital Mini-Earth-were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as "non-ec" by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to "ec" research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.

HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.

A friend of Leary's named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote overly complicated novels, had suggested a team song for the colonists, "HOME on Lagrange." To popularize this idea, he had written letters about it to many space research groups and included it in a novel called The Trick Top Hat. Still, by 1984, the song hadn't caught on with the twelve colonists. They were not at home on Lagrange because they feared that the whole project would soon be classified as "non-ec" and they would be dragged back to the womb-planet.