The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette) (2 page)

“And something either happens to the cat or
not, but it’s not clear which it is until we open the box.”

“Why isn’t it clear?”

“Because the box is closed. Can’t see inside
a shut box.”

Dr. Rojas shook his head. “No, that’s not
it.”

“The box isn’t closed?”

“It is, but
that
isn’t why we don’t
know what happened.”

“Why, then?”

“Because we can’t know what happened.”

“What do you mean? Why can’t we know?”

“Because we haven’t looked.”

If I had been having the conversation with
anyone but Dr. Rojas, I would have at this point assumed they were
putting me on.

“I think I better draw a diagram.” Dr. Rojas
took a Sharpie out of his shirt pocket and vaguely glanced around
the table for something to write on. All the napkins in the place
were cloth and too pristine to be used for sketching, so I tore a
page from the notepad in my shoulder bag and handed it to him. He
folded it in half and drew a large square. “Here is a steel box.
Add a small amount of a radioactive substance and a Geiger
counter…a hammer…and a vial of poison. Cyanide.” He sketched all of
those in, then added, “And one cat,” and drew a stick figure of a
cat.

“With you so far,” I said.

“Good. The radioactive substance is such that
there’s a fifty-fifty chance that one of its atoms will decay—emit
radiation—in the first hour. If it does, the Geiger counter
registers this and releases the hammer, the hammer smashes the
vial, and cyanide leaks into the air, with unfortunate results for
the cat. If there is no decay, nothing happens to the cat.”

The professor paused here, as if expecting me
to say something at this point. I tried to rise to the occasion.
“So, in summary: it’s a coin toss whether the Geiger counter,
hammer, and vial will be nudged into action, which would spell bad
news for the cat.”

“So what can we conclude?” he prodded me.

I glanced down at his sketch. “Uh…that the
cat might die? Also that this is not a particularly nice
experiment.”

“According to the Copenhagen interpretation,
a quantum system exists in all possible states simultaneously until
observed. It’s not that we don’t know what happened until we look,
it’s that the matter is settled—has an atom decayed?—only when we
do
look. Therefore, by extension the cat is both alive and
dead—or, if you prefer, neither—until the box is opened.”

I mulled this over. “Nothing is settled until
we look.”

“Exactly.”

“But what does that prove?” The pizza wasn’t
bad, I decided. It just tasted different. I washed it down with
iced tea, as the waiter had scrunched his nose at my attempt to
order pop. Coke and Pepsi were not served at the Faculty Club. “I
mean, the cat’s not
really
both alive and dead until we open
the box. It can’t be. It’s like that old puzzle: if a tree falls in
the woods and nobody’s around, does it make a sound? Of course it
does.”

“That was Schrödinger’s point—how absurd
quantum concepts are when linked to the everyday world, as
represented by the cat. It’s all very well to say that the quantum
world is just a cloud of probabilities…but that doesn’t seem to be
the case in the reality we observe around us. Like you say, surely
the tree makes a thunderous crash whether or not someone is there
to hear it.”

“And why cyanide? Why not some kind of
sleep-inducing gas?”

“Well, I suppose that would work just as
well, but it’s irrelevant to the point of the—”

“Or a tasty treat that the cat either
receives or not…I have one more question now that you have, uh,
explained Dr. Schrödinger’s experiment, Dr. Rojas.”

“What is it, Julia?” asked Dr. Mooney, who
had been following our exchange with some amusement.

“Is your bet whether he used his own cat or
borrowed somebody else’s? Schrödinger, I mean. Do you want to go
back in time to spy on him and see where he got the cat?”

Dr. Rojas recoiled at the suggestion, as if I
had said something nasty. “Not at all. It was a
Gedankenexperiment
.”

I choked a bit on the iced tea, sending it
down the wrong pipe, and croaked out, “I beg your pardon?”

Dr. Mooney gave me a hearty thump on the
back, and my coughing settled down. “It means a thought experiment,
a mental illustration. There was no actual box…and no cat or
cyanide either.”

“There was no actual cat…” I wasn’t a pet
kind of person, but this made me feel better about the whole thing.
The biology department performed controlled and heavily overseen
experiments on animals, as did the School of Medicine across
Sunniva Lake, so I could be forgiven for thinking the physics
department might do the same.

Dr. Mooney added above his grilled pineapple
and quail, “Well, there may be a cat. That’s the bet. Did
Schrödinger have a flesh and blood pet who purred by his feet as he
considered knotty physics problems? Or was his inspiration purely
theoretical?”

“I see. So who’s taking which side?” I asked,
looking from one professor to the other.

“We haven’t settled that yet.” Dr. Mooney
waved his fork in my direction. “Never mind the cat. What’s new in
the dean’s offices, Julia?”

“It’s happened again. The phantom struck the
biology department fridge.”

“What’s this?” Dr. Rojas asked.

I explained that someone had been regularly
pilfering food from the shared fridge at the Rosalind Franklin
Biology and Genetics Complex, which stood a bit farther up the
campus path from the Faculty Club. The building was on the large
side and housed various labs and offices—and, apparently, one
thief.

Dr. Rojas lost interest in the topic as soon
as he realized it was a social problem and there was no actual
phantom requiring a scientific investigation. Dr. Mooney suggested,
only half jokingly, that I bake a small dose of a laxative into a
cookie or muffin and leave the treat in the biology fridge. I nixed
the idea, as (a) I didn’t cook, and (b) it was too likely to put
the school at risk of a lawsuit.

“Hopefully the new campus security chief—his
name is Nathaniel Kirkland—will take the matter seriously even
though nothing of value is missing,” I said. As the two professors
embarked on a lively discussion of whether there was likely to have
been a real cat or not, I took the opportunity to ask a passing
waiter about the pizza’s mystery crust. Cauliflower. That was a new
one. I finished up the last of my lunch and drained my iced tea.
“Thanks for lunch, Dr. Mooney. I better take off—I’m running late
for my appointment with Chief Kirkland. Good luck with the
cat.”

I grabbed my shoulder bag and headed out.
Behind me, positions were being staked on academic hills.

“I’ll have to give it some thought, but I’m
leaning toward there being no cat…”

“And I rather think there might have
been…”

“Then state your case, Xavier…”

Campus Security Chief Kirkland was waiting in front
of my closed office door. I had hoped he would be a few minutes
late. He waved away my attempt to apologize for my lateness and
followed me inside. “Ms. Olsen, you said on the phone that there’s
some kind of problem in the biology building.”

Not one for small talk, then. But I already
knew that. I had exchanged phone calls with him a couple of
times—mostly about overflow parking options for the various events
I was in charge of organizing. During our first call, I had told
him, as I usually do with new colleagues, “Please call me Julia.
Everyone does.” His answer had been a curt, “I’d prefer not to, if
you don’t mind. I try to keep things formal on all official
business.”

Well, here we were face-to-face and he was,
as promised, looking all business. “Yes, there’s a problem in the
biology building, an ongoing one,” I said in answer to his
question. “It’s been happening for about a month now, longer if we
assume it took a while for people to put two and two together and
start noticing. The fridge phantom, I mean.”

“The fridge phantom.”

“Yes.” I remembered my manners. “Would you
like a seat, maybe a refreshment?”

He shook his head briefly. “No, thanks.”

Well, that was a bit rude. Our previous
campus chief, Dan Anderson, had been a sweetheart, always ready to
lend a hand or just a sympathetic ear. I wondered if I should have
called Dan for help instead. It would have given him a nice break
from gardening. Remaining standing myself, I launched into the
details of the story. “Someone has been pilfering people’s
lunches.” People’s personal food no less, I went on to explain,
which seemed especially egregious for some reason. Stuff cooked at
home and brought in plastic containers to be warmed up in the
microwave. I added, “Obviously, it’s more of an annoyance than a
real crime, but it’s upsetting to our researchers and graduate
students. The best that can be said of the phantom is that he or
she returns the empty containers to the fridge, so the only thing
anyone has lost is the actual food they’ve prepared.”

“Petty theft
is
a crime.” He rubbed a
hand across his square jaw. “The, er, phantom may not be returning
the containers to be nice, like you assume, Ms. Olsen.”

“No?”

“What else is the phantom going to do with
the containers? Stuff them in a backpack and take them home? Throw
them in the office trash bin, where everyone would see them? I’d
put them back in the fridge too.”

I gave myself a mental kick. Yeah, that made
sense. Something occurred to me. “It probably isn’t one of the
graduate students—they all have shared offices and tend to eat at
their desks. If one of them was helping himself or herself freely
to the others’ food, it would be noticed.”

Chief Kirkland took a chair and flipped open
a notepad. As it would have felt silly to continue standing under
the circumstances, I slid into my desk chair across from him.

“Are the graduate students two to an office?”
he asked without looking up from his notepad.

“More like four to five. The rooms tend to be
on the large side—or, rather, we tend to pack in the desks.”

“Yes, that wouldn’t allow for much
privacy.”

I was happy that we had ruled out the grad
students, who had enough problems to deal with without us knocking
on their doors and inquiring about their lunch habits.
“Unfortunately that means it has to be someone who doesn’t share an
office,” I added as an afterthought.

“Yes, but why is that unfortunate?”

I thought about offering him a cookie from
the jar that sat between us on my desk, but he’d already rejected a
refreshment, so he’d probably find it an annoyance. I resisted
taking a cookie for myself. “Because it means it has to be one of
our professors—a senior, junior, or visiting professor. Or a
postdoctoral researcher. Hmm…I’m not sure what would happen if it
does turn out to be a tenured professor.”

“Tenure means they can’t be fired,
right?”

“The bar for sending a tenured professor on
their way is pretty high, and Dean Sunder wants to keep it that
way. I don’t know that petty theft would be enough.”

“In that case, if your preferred solution is
to merely discourage the person, can’t you just put up a sign
saying please don’t take food belonging to others?”

“I did, last week.”

“And?”

“Whoever it was drew a smiley face on the
sign with a mustache and goatee and added a note of their own. It
said, ‘What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours.’”

It had been a very exasperating response.
Almost as if the person was toying with us.

“Do you still have it? The sign?”

I pulled the paper out of my desk drawer and
handed it to him. “Are you going to test it for fingerprints or
something?”

“We don’t have that kind of ability.” Chief
Kirkland studied the sign I had made, with its cheeky response, for
a moment. “Well, we can go about this two ways. I can make the
rounds and talk to everyone in the building, office by office and
desk by—”

“I don’t know about that. I’d rather we
didn’t disturb our researchers at work if there’s no need. I
wouldn’t call them a sensitive lot exactly…Well, maybe I
would.”

“Then we set up a camera and catch whoever it
is that way.”

Our new security chief sounded like he would
prefer the second method anyway, as it wouldn’t involve much
conversation.

“Camera it is,” I said. “I’ll let Dean Sunder
know, and also Dr. Oshiro—she’s the departmental chair in
biology.”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t mention it to
anyone in the biology building for now.”

“Just Dean Sunder, then. When do you want to
set the camera up? I can meet you in front of the biology building
after tonight’s fundraiser. Or early tomorrow morning if you’d
prefer, before most of the building’s students and staff arrive for
the day.”