Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

" 'Midst hootings and howls
He deflowers young owls,
Which he keeps in an underground aviary!"

Hassan looked at him with paranoid suspicion. "Very funny," he said, unsmiling, and hastened out to his limousine.

"Back uptown?" the chauffeur asked.

"Broad Street," Hassan said, giving an address. He was in mild first-circuit anxiety all the way to his destination.

He remembered his first conversation with Washy Bridge. "How many?" he had asked, not in shock or in; outrage but in simple unbelief, inability to believe. They are our creation: we are their creation.

"Fifty-seven of us." The scientist was perspiring with anxiety, now that the secret was finally out, the reason he had fled Project Pan.

"Fifty-seven," Hassan said hollowly. Heinz 57 Varieties, he remembered absently from the advertisements. "And all of them with Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s and more diplomas than a dog has fleas…"

"You've got to realize it works," Washy said then. "You just can't understand if you don't keep that in mind. It works."

"And two hundred to three hundred years in jail for each of you if it ever gets out," Hassan added harshly. "You just better keep that in mind too."

"That's why I'm here," the scientist said.

Hassan had paced the room briefly. "Wheels within wheels," he said once. "Wheels within wheels within wheels." Once he grinned. "At least I know why the Cincinnati cocaine market is thriving," he said with a lewd chuckle. "Cincinnati," he repeated, shaking his head. "What do they call it again?"

"Knights of Christianity United in Faith."

A habit obscene and unsavory, Hassan remembered suddenly, jostled back into present time. He had arrived at his destination.

The man to whom he spoke then was a stockbroker according to public knowledge but pursued certain other careers in a private and clandestine manner.

'Frank Sullivan,' " Hassan said. "I want to know everything about him. Everything."

The part-time stockbroker turned ashy-white. He got up, glared suspiciously at a window washer outside his office, and walked over to check that the window was closed all the way.

"Impossible," he said then, in a near whisper. "If I told you the one most amusing and interesting fact about him, I'd be dead tomorrow."

"That hot?" Hassan asked.

The man leaned back in his chair and gazed absently toward the ceiling. He recited some names, beginning with Jack Ruby of Dallas and ending with a senator whose private plane had crashed just the week before, on Christmas Eve. "Those are just a few," he ended, "who happened to find out too much about Frank Sullivan."

Hassan spoke only once during the drive back to Harlem.

"Secrecy!" he said with a profound grimace.

The chauffeur looked back nervously. He had never heard so much obscene emphasis in a single word.