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Friday 9/20 I see Harry in Buick. Harry dreams he sees me.
Saturday 9/21 We shop Stars 'n' Bars. Godzilla.
Sunday 9/22 Go to church. Harry blunzed. Trip to Looking-Glass World.
Monday 9/23 Gary-brains invade. Start trip with Nancy. **************
Monday 9/30 End trip with Nancy. Slugs in New Brunswick.
Tuesday 10/1 Fly to Iowa. Nancy arrested. I get blunzed. Manhattan.
Wednesday 10/2 Today.
Thursday 10/3 Tomorrow.
I stared at the list for a while, and then erased it. I'd get those yellow gluons from Bitter today. Since I was Harry's sister and Nancy was Fletcher's wife, the police would let us into Harry's shop to look around. We'd say we wanted to inventory the valuables. And then I'd get blunzed. But if yellow gluons were as scarce as Harry said, I wouldn't have much time to maneuver. I'd need to pack everything into one fast wish. I groped for the best way to put it.
Make everything be just like it was on the morning of Friday, September 20.
No, that wouldn't work. That would just throw us all into a horrible time loop. If everything was just like that Friday, then it would be that Friday again, and the whole crazy string of events would happen over again, ending with me wishing us back to that Friday again — no, thanks. Try again.
Undo all the wishes that Harry and I have made up till now.
That would be stupid! Just for openers, I'd lose my money. Not to mention the fact that Antie — and maybe Harry too — would be dead. And I wouldn't get to do my part to start the universe. No, no. I had to get more specific.
Make my body be like it used to, and have the governor pardon Harry, Sondra and me. That seemed fine. I made a hard copy and folded it into my purse. I fell into a light doze and dreamed about Harry and the bumblebee. I was the bee.
"Ma'am?"
I sat up and looked around. We were off the turnpike and nearing Princeton. The robot driver was talking to me.
"Do you need instructions?"
"N
"Of Alwin Bitter?"
"Yesss."
"Well, what do you want, then? I was sleeping."
"I'm bored. Do you k
I glanced at the meter. A hundred and sixty-seven dollars now. Two hundred bucks and I was supposed to entertain the driver as well?
"No, I don't know any logic puzzles." The robot made such a disappointed sound that I relented.
"Well, maybe I do. What about this one. A genie promises a man that he can have exactly one wish come true. Now, what if the man's one wish is that he gets all the wishes he wants?"
"He willl get all the wishes he wa
"But remember! An initial condition is that he is allowed to have only one wish."
"I ssseee. So he willl get
"But he was supposed to get one wish."
"Butt perhaps the ma
"But then he doesn't."
"I ssee. Tha
25. Levels of Uncertainty
"Would you like some iced tea… Mr. Fletcher?"
"Thank you, Mrs. Bitter. I would."
The four of us were sitting in their living room. Five of us, counting Serena. She was sitting on my lap, though she didn't understand who I was supposed to be. I took her little arms and clapped her hands together. She laughed gaily; at least I could still make my daughter laugh.
"So the wishes haven't worked out well?" Bitter asked me.
"Not entirely. I'm stuck in a woman's body, and we're all in trouble with the police."
"Nancy was telling me a little about the machine that you and Harry Gerber built. How did you two come to invent it?"
"Well… that's a little complicated." I paused, trying to think how to say it. "The plans for the blunzer came to Harry in a dream. He dreamed he saw someone who told him how to build it. So he went ahead and built it, and later I got blunzed. I didn't understand the machine, but after I got blunzed I was able to figure out the plans by looking at the machine and reading Harry's mind. So then I went back in time and put the plans in Harry's mind while he was dreaming. I was the person he saw in his dream to begin with. It's a circle. The universe made it happen, is what Harry says. He says the universe was using us to excite itself."
"Like a writer reading his own dirty books," sniggered Nancy. She didn't take me seriously anymore.
"More like a fountain that recycles its water." I frowned. "Or a battery that runs its own recharger."
"The self-generative Absolute," said Bitter non-committally. His wife, Sybil, came back from the kitchen with four glasses of iced tea on a tray. She was a slender lady whose tall body shaped a graceful S-curve. She kept giving me curious looks — as if I were some kind of carnival freak.
"I've come to ask for your help," I told Bitter. "Harry says that with your co
"Dr. Bitter's the one to ask?" Nancy exclaimed.
"I hadn't realized. What a wonderful coincidence! Will you help us, Alwin?"
"I don't know if I should. Things aren't perfect for you now — but they could, after all, be much worse."
"I'll do the wishing," proposed Nancy. "I won't ask for anything stupid like Harry and Joe did."
"What would you ask for?" I demanded angrily. Serena left my lap for safer territory.
"Just leave it to me, Susan."
"No way! I've thought this through, Nancy, and I know just what —"
"I will try to get you the gluons," interrupted Bitter. "On the condition that Nancy be the one to make the wish. I like Nancy."
Nancy and the white-haired old man exchanged a smile. Sitting here in my tailored tweed earth-tone suit I felt like a fool. I needed help and these people were playing games with me.
"I don't think you understand what kind of forces we're dealing with, Dr. Bitter." I rapped out his name like a curse.
"Call me Alwin. Let's all be friends here. What kinds of forces are we dealing with, Joe? How do you and Harry think the blunzer functions?"
"Why do you ask? If you're so enlightened, you already know all about it. You just want to laugh at me, don't you?"
"No, please!" Bitter made a placating gesture with both hands. "I'm simply asking for information. It is obvious that your machine works. I'm curious about the method. Tell it to me as best you can."
"A person gets blunzed by having the value of Planck's constant change in his brain tissue," I began.
"Her brain," interrupted Nancy.
"The person's brain," I snarled. "Can you shut up and let me explain it just one time? The idea is to treat the gluons so they become an utterly featureless fluid known as Planck juice. This fluid is in what might be termed a second-order quantum state. It is doubly indeterminate. Not only is there the usual indeterminacy at the scale of Planck's constant, there is a second-order indeterminacy: an indeterminacy in the actual value of Planck's constant." Harry and the blunzer had taught me well.
"So this Planck juice is, so to speak, unsure of the value of Planck's constant?" asked Bitter.
"Correct. It is fed into a one-meter-long subether wave guide leading to the subject's brain. In the wave guide, the field symmetry breaks, and the Planck juice becomes the carrier of a new value of Planck's constant 'seeing' the wave guide's one-meter length, the fluid chooses that for the new Planck length."
"One meter," said Bitter, measuring the length out with his hands. Instead of ten-to-the-minus-thirty-third centimeters. "That's a very large amplification."