“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 re-charger.”
“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 connections here you might be able to get me some yellow gluons. Each color of gluon just works once, and we’ve already used the red kind and the blue kind. I need the yellow gluons so I can activate the blunzer one last time and—”
“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.”
“One hundred decillion fold,” I confirmed. “When the fluid is injected into the subject’s brain, the entire brain becomes arbitrarily indeterminate, for the brain’s size is now less than the one-meter Planck length. The personality associated with the brain becomes able to do anything whatsoever.”
“A third-order uncertainty,” mused Bitter. “An ingenious device. And you say that you invented it?”
“No one invented it, I tell you. I got it from Harry and Harry got it from me. It made us build it.”
“Yet it only wants to work three times,” said Bitter, sitting back in his chair. “What do you think of all this, Sybil?”
“I think you’re right to let Nancy have the third wish,” said Bitter’s wife. She had lighted a cigarette and was holding her head tilted back to keep the smoke out of her eyes. “It’s like a fairy tale. Do you remember the story of the magic fish that we read, Serena?”
“Yus.”
“How does it go?” asked Nancy.
“Like this,” said old Sybil. “A poor fisherman catches a magic fish. The fish says, ‘Put me back in the water and you can have anything you want.’ So the fisherman throws the magic fish back in the water. When he gets home to his little hut, he tells his wife. The wife says she wants to live in a mansion. So the fisherman goes back to the ocean and asks the fish for a mansion. Fine. When the fisherman gets home, there’s a mansion, but his wife isn’t satisfied for long. ‘This isn’t enough,’ she says. ‘I want to be a queen in a castle.’ So the fisherman goes back to the ocean and calls to the fish again. When he gets home, his wife is a queen in a castle, but she still isn’t happy. ‘I want to be empress of the sun and the moon,’ she says. Well, the fisherman goes back to yell for the magic fish again, but this time the fish gets mad and takes everything away.”
“It was the wife’s fault!” I exclaimed. “It was the wife’s fault that they ended up with nothing.”
“It wasn’t the wife who kept going back to bother the magic fish,” said Sybil, looking at me through a haze of smoke. “The fisherman should have thought for himself. I know another three-wish fairy tale, too.”
“I’ve heard it,” I interrupted. “‘The Peasant and the Sausage.’”
“Yes,” said Sybil. “And I suppose you blame the wife in that one too, don’t you, Joe?” She was just backing up Nancy because they were both women.
“Of course it was the wife’s fault. If she hadn’t asked for that stupid sausage—”
“And what if the husband hadn’t been so mean? They would have had two good wishes left. A husband should think for himself and keep his temper.”
I was going to yell something back, but Bitter interrupted me. “Don’t try to argue with Sybil. It’s hopeless. I’ll try and get you the yellow gluons, Joe, but Nancy will have to be the one to get blunzed.”
“All right,” I sighed. “But what are you going to wish for, Nancy? Make sure you get me back my right body, and get Harry and Sondra and me out of trouble with the law.”
“I’ll wish what I like,” said Nancy tartly. That Sybil was a bad example, a real troublemaker.
“I made a big wish once,” said Alwin suddenly. “It was a long time ago. I was involved with a dangerous experiment—an experiment even more dangerous than yours, Joe. It gave me endless power, but the world was being destroyed. I had to use my power to renormalize reality. I had to use my power to get rid of my power.”
“Do all the wish stories have to end that way?” protested Nancy. “With everyone back where they started?”
“One could argue that the world is perfect just as it is,” said Bitter. “The world is the sum of all our wishes about it. And all of us are aspects of the One.”
“I understand,” said Nancy softly. “I understand, Alwin.”
“Well, I sure don’t,” I said, rising to my feet. My skirt was rucked up awkwardly around my waist. I patted at my big hips, trying to smooth the fabric down. “Come on, Dr. Bitter, less talk and more action. Let’s go get those gluons.”
“All right. I’ll make a phone call first.”
Nancy and I said goodbye to Serena while Bitter made his call. Sybil kept staring at me in curiosity. She seemed fascinated by the idea of a man trying to move a woman’s body around.
“Don’t you like being a woman?” she asked me finally.
“No, it’s too hard. There’s a fairy tale about that too, isn’t there?”
“That’s right,” said Sybil. “‘The Farmer Who Would Keep House.’” Her soft eyes were dancing and her broad mouth was amused. It was hard to stay mad at this woman.
“Can you watch Serena just a little longer?” asked Nancy.
“I have to go meet a friend,” said Sybil. “But my daughter Ida will be home from school soon. She’ll keep an eye on Serena. Make a good wish, Nancy!”
“It’s all set,” said Bitter, coming back into the room. “Tri Lu has some yellow gluons you can have for one million dollars.”
“Let’s go.”
Alwin and Nancy and I set out on foot. Lu’s office wasn’t far.