At The Rialto Read online

  At The Rialto

  Connie Willis

  Won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 1990.

  At The Rialto

  by Connie Willis

  Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory.

  —Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address to the 1988 International Congress of Quantum Physicists Annual Meeting, Hollywood, California

  I got to Hollywood around one-thirty and started trying to check into the Rialto.

  “Sorry, we don’t have any rooms,” the girl behind the desk said. “We’re all booked up with some science thing.”

  “I’m with the science thing,” I said. “Dr. Ruth Baringer. I reserved a double.”

  “There are a bunch of Republicans here, too, and a tour group from Finland. They told me when I started work here that they got all these movie people, but the only one so far was that guy who played the friend of that other guy in that one movie. You’re not a movie person, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m with the science thing. Dr. Ruth Baringer.”

  “My name’s Tiffany,” she said. “I’m not actually a hotel clerk at all. I’m just working here to pay for my transcendental posture lessons. I’m really a model/ actress.”

  “I’m a quantum physicist,” I said, trying to get things back on track. “The name is Ruth Baringer.”

  She messed with the computer for a minute. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

  “Maybe it’s in Dr. Mendoza’s name. I’m sharing a room with her.”

  She messed with the computer some more. “I don’t show a reservation for her either. Are you sure you don’t want the Disneyland Hotel? A lot of people get the two confused.”

  “I want the Rialto,” I said, rummaging through my bag for my notebook. “I have a confirmation number. W-three-seven-f ur-two-oh. ”

  She typed it in. “Are you Dr. Gedanken?” she asked.

  “Excuse me,” an elderly man said.

  “I’ll be right with you,” Tiffany told him. “How long do you plan to stay with us, Dr. Gedanken?” she asked me.

  “Excuse me,” the man said, sounding desperate. He had bushy white hair and a dazed expression, as if he had just been through a horrific experience or had been trying to check into the Rialto.

  He wasn’t wearing any socks. I wondered if he was Dr. Gedanken. Dr. Gedanken was the main reason I’d decided to come to the meeting. I had missed his lecture on wave-particle duality last year, but I had read the text of it in the ICQP Journal, and it had actually seemed to make sense, which is more than you can say for most of quantum theory. He was giving the keynote address this year, and I was determined to hear it.

  It wasn’t Dr. Gedanken. “My name is Dr. Whedbee,” the elderly man said. “You gave me the wrong room.”

  “All our rooms are pretty much the same,” Tiffany said. “Except for how many beds they have in them and stuff.”

  “My room has a person in it!” he said. “Dr. Sleeth. From the University of Texas at Austin. She was changing her clothes.” His hair seemed to get wilder as he spoke. “She thought I was a serial killer.”

  “And your name is Dr. Whedbee?” Tiffany asked, fooling with the computer again. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

  Dr. Whedbee began to cry. Tiffany got out a paper towel, wiped off the counter, and turned back to me. “May I help you?” she said.

  Thursday, 7:30–9 P.M. Opening Ceremonies. Dr. Halvard Onofrio, University of Maryland at College Park, will speak on the topic, “Doubts Surrounding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Ballroom.

  I finally got my room at five, after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

  “What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institute Henri Poincare people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”

  “Speaking of St. Louis,” Dr. Takumi said, “have you seen David yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh, really?” she said. “Last year at the annual meeting you two were practically inseparable. Moonlight river boat rides and all.”

  “What’s on the programming tonight?” I said to Abey.

  “David was just here,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going out to look at the stars in the sidewalk.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Abey said. “Riverboat rides and movie stars. What do those things have to do with quantum theory? Racine would have been an appropriate setting for a group of physicists. Not like this… this… do you realize we’re practically across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? And Hollywood Boulevard’s where all those gangs hang out. If they catch you wearing red or blue, they’ll—”

  He stopped. “Is that Dr. Gedanken?” he asked, staring at the front desk.

  I turned and looked. A short roundish man with a mustache was trying to check in. “No,” I said. “That’s Dr. Onofrio.”

  “Oh, yes,” Abey said, consulting his program book. “He’s speaking tonight at the opening ceremonies. On the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Are you going?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, which was supposed to be a joke, but Abey didn’t laugh.

  “I must meet Dr. Gedanken. He’s just gotten funding for a new project.”

  I wondered what Dr. Gedanken’s new project was—I would have loved to work with him.

  “I’m hoping he’ll come to my workshop on the wonderful world of quantum physics,” Abey said, still watching the desk. Amazingly enough, Dr. Onofrio seemed to have gotten a key and was heading for the elevators. “I think his project has something to do with understanding quantum theory.”

  Well, that let me out. I didn’t understand quantum theory at all. I sometimes had a sneaking suspicion nobody else did either, including Abey Fields, and that they just weren’t willing to admit it.

  I mean, an electron is a particle except it acts like a wave. In fact, a neutron acts like two waves and interferes with itself (or each other), and you can’t really measure any of this stuff properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that isn’t the worst of it. When you set up a Josephson junction to figure out what rules the electrons obey, they sneak past the barrier to the other side, and they don’t seem to care much about the limits of the speed of light either, and Schrodinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead till you open the box, and it all makes about as much sense as Tiffany’s calling me Dr. Gedanken.

  Which reminded me, I had promised to call Darlene and give her our room number. I didn’t have a room number, but if I waited much longer, she’d have left. She was flying to Denver to speak at CU and then coming on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the middle of his telling me how beautiful Cleveland was in the winter and went to call her.

  “I don’t have a room yet,” I said when she answered. “Should I leave a message on your answering machine or do you want to give me your number in Denver?”

  “Never mind all that,” Darlene said. “Have you seen David yet?”

  To illustrate the problems of the concept of wave function, Dr. Schrodinger imagines a cat being put into a box with a piece of uranium, a bottle of poison gas, and a Geiger counter. If a uranium nucleus disintegrates while the cat is in the box, it will release radiation, which will set off the Geiger counter and break the bottle of poison gas. It is impossible in quantum theory to predict whether a uranium nucleus will disintegrate while the cat is in the box, and only possible to calculate uranium’s probable half-life;
therefore, the cat is neither alive nor dead until we open the box.

  From “The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,” A seminar presented at the ICQP Annual Meeting by A. Fields, Ph.D., University of Nebraska at Wahoo

  I completely forgot to warn Darlene about Tiffany, the model-slash-actress.

  “What do you mean you’re trying to avoid David?” she had asked me at least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”

  Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.

  “Because I want to attend the programming,” I said the third time around, “Not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”

  “And David is a middle-aged man who, I might add, is absolutely charming.”

  “Charm is for quarks,” I said, and hung up, feeling smug until I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change. Tiffany asked, “May I help you?” and left me standing there.

  After a while I gave up and went back to the red-and-gold sofas.

  “David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”

  “There are no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.

  “What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.

  “There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.” I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.

  “If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”

  Dr. Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.

  “Did they give you a room with a seminaked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me twelve eighty-two, but the room numbers go only up to seventy-five.”

  “I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,” I said.

  The most serious difficulty quantum theory faces today is not the inherent limitation of measurement capability or the EPR paradox. It is the lack of a paradigm. Quantum theory has no working model, no metaphor that properly defines it.

  Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor, who couldn’t remember where he’d stored my suitcase, and unpacked. My clothes, which had been permanent press all the way from MIT, underwent a complete wave-function collapse the moment I opened my suitcase and came out looking like Schrodinger’s almost-dead cat.

  By the time I had called housekeeping for an iron, taken a bath, given up on the iron, and steamed a dress in the shower, I had missed the “Mixer with Munchies” and was half an hour late for Dr. Onofrio’s opening remarks.

  I opened the door to the ballroom as quietly as I could and slid inside. I had hoped they would be late getting started, but a man I didn’t recognize was already introducing the speaker. “—and an inspiration to all of us in the field.”

  I dived for the nearest chair and sat down.

  “Hi,” David said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”

  “Not at the wax museum,” I whispered.

  “You should have been,” he whispered back. “It was great. They had John Wayne, Elvis, and Tiffany the model-slash-actress with the brain of a pea-slash-amoeba.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”

  “What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.

  “Shhh,” David said.

  Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”

  She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.

  “Before I go any further,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”

  Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.

  Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  “You knew we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we got out to the lobby.

  When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”

  “Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.

  “If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It’s shaped like a stack of records.”

  “I want to go to the opening remarks.”

  “The beacon on top blinks out ‘Hollywood’ in Morse code.”

  I went over to the front desk.

  “Can I help you?” the clerk behind the desk said. “My name is Natalie, and I’m an—”

  “Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?” I said.

  “They’re in the ballroom.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t have any dinner,” David said. “I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone. There’s this great place that has the ice-cream cone Ryan O’Neal bought for Tatum in Paper Moon.”

  “A channeler’s in the ballroom,” I told Natalie. “I’m looking for the ICQP.”

  She fiddled with the computer. “I’m sorry. I don’t show a reservation for them.”

  “How about Grauman’s Chinese?” David said. “You want reality? You want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?” He grabbed my hands. “Come with me,” he said seriously.

  In St. Louis I had suffered a wave-function collapse a lot like what had happened to my clothes when I opened the suitcase. I had ended up on a riverboat halfway to New Orleans that time. It happened again, and the next thing I knew, I was walking around the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese, eating an ice-cream cone and trying to fit my feet into Myrna Loy’s footprints.

  She must have been a midget or had her feet bound as a child. So, apparently, had Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Lamour, and Wallace Beery. The only footprints I came close to fitting were Donald Duck’s.

  “I see this as a map of the microcosm,” David said, sweeping his hand over the slightly irregular pavement of printed and signed cement squares. “See, there are all these tracks. We know something’s been here, and the prints are pretty much the same, only every once in a while you’ve got this”—he knelt down and pointed at the print of John Wayne’s clenched fist—“and over here”—he walked toward the box office and pointed to the print of Betty Grable’s leg—“and we can figure out the signatures, but what is this reference to ‘Sid’ that keeps popping up? And what does this mean?”

  He pointed at Red Skelton’s square. It said, “Thanks Sid We Dood It.”

  “You keep thinking you’ve found a pattern,” David said, crossing over to the other side, “but Van Johnson’s square is kind of sandwiched in here at an angle between Esther Williams and Cantinflas, and who the hell is May Robson? And why are all these squares over here empty?”

  He had managed to maneuver me over behind the display of Academy Award winners. It w
as an accordionlike wrought-iron screen. I was in the fold between 1944 and 1945.

  “And as if that isn’t enough, you suddenly realize you’re standing in the courtyard. You’re not even in the theater.”

  “And that’s what you think is happening in quantum theory?” I said weakly. I was backed up into Bing Crosby, who had won for Best Actor in Going My Way. “You think we’re not in the theater yet?”

  “I think we know as much about quantum theory as we can figure out about May Robson from her footprints,” he said, putting his hand up to Ingrid Bergman’s cheek (Best Actress, Gaslight) and blocking my escape. “I don’t think we understand anything about quantum theory, not tunneling, not complementarity.” He leaned toward me. “Not passion.”

  The best movie of 1945 was Lost Weekend. “Dr. Gedanken understands it,” I said, disentangling myself from the Academy Award winners and David. “Did you know he’s putting together a new research team for a big project on understanding quantum theory?”

  “Yes,” David said. “Want to see a movie?”

  “There’s a seminar on chaos at nine,” I said, stepping over the Marx Brothers. “I have to get back.”

  “If it’s chaos you want, you should stay right here,” he said, stopping to look at Irene Dunne’s handprints. “We could see the movie and then go have dinner. There’s this place near Hollywood and Vine that has the mashed potatoes Richard Dreyfuss made into Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters.”

  “I want to meet Dr. Gedanken,” I said, making it safely to the sidewalk. I looked back at David. He had gone back to the other side of the courtyard and was looking at Roy Rogers’s signature.

  “Are you kidding? He doesn’t understand it any better than we do.”

  “Well, at least he’s trying.”

  “So am I. The problem is, how can one neutron interfere with itself, and why are there only two of Trigger’s hoofprints here?”