“They’ve been saying that about quantum mechanics for years,” Jerry said.
“Anyway, this might, if you looked at it right.”
Wiz picked through the basket and selected a jelly doughnut as the best of
the remaining batch. Then he turned back to his friends. “I’ll bite. What
does quantum mechanics have to do with these bad guys?”
“Okay, you know that in quantum mechanics you deal with the position of a
particle in terms of probabilities? There’s a probability wave and the
particle is most likely to be found at the wave’s greatest magnitude and
less likely to be found at lower magnitudes. But the point is, you don’t
know exactly where it is.”
Danny rummaged through the box. “So? Are there any more chocolate ones?”
“I think you ate them all, but as I was saying, we already know that
something like quantum effects occur here on a macroscopic scale. Remember
when we tried to play cards? The shuffled deck was in something like a
quantum indeterminate state. We had to create a demon to collapse the
state vector by looking at the cards before we could play. Otherwise the
deck would respond to everyone’s mental desires and you’d end up with
everyone holding four aces or the like.”
Jerry took another swig of tea from his mug. “It’s as if the line between
reality and unreality is drawn at a higher level here. Some things don’t
become real here until someone becomes aware of them.”
Wiz took a bite of his doughnut and chewed thoughtfully, dribbling
powdered sugar down his chin.
“How does that tie in with these-things-that want to destroy the World?”
“Well, there’s an alternate interpretation of quantum mechanics from a guy
named Everett which says that what we’re really seeing is multiple worlds,
all equally real. What collapsing the state vector really means is that
we’ve chosen among them. One of them becomes ‘real’ because we’ve taken
that branch of the skein of parallel universes and that makes the others
unreal.”
Wiz put his doughnut down on the console behind him and rubbed his chin
thoughtfully, leaving white streaks on his cheek.
“That would explain a lot about this place. For instance, why there are
some operations that seem to be basic that we can’t use in our magic
language because they’re unstable.”
“Yes,” Jerry said slowly. “We’ve been beating our brains out because we
thought they have to be composed of several simpler operations. Maybe
there’s some kind of uncertainty principle at work and those are
primitives, they’re just one thing one day and another thing the next.”
“Well, the appearance of demons is sure influenced by the operator’s
mental state, unless you specify what they look like in the spell.” Wiz
wiped at the sugar on his cheek thoughtfully, smearing it out more evenly.
“And so these things that Duke Aelric’s worried about come from one of
these parallel universes?”
“I suppose you could say that they represent a universe with a
low-probability wave function that overlaps ours,” Jerry said. Then he
brightened. “Hey! If I work out the mathematics on this, will that make me
the Neils Bohr of this universe?”
“You know . . .” Wiz began and reached behind him for the doughnut. When
he couldn’t find it he turned to look.
A mouse-sized gremlin was halfway down the desk with the doughnut clasped
in front of him. The prize was nearly as big as it was and the gremlin was
bent backwards under the load as it staggered away.
“Hey!” Wiz yelled.
The gremlin looked over its shoulder at Wiz, grinned, and broke into a
wobbly run. Right to the edge of the desk and several steps beyond into
empty air.
Suddenly the grin faded. The little creature looked down and saw it was
standing on nothing. Its face fell and its bat ears drooped to its
shoulders.
“Uh oh,” it squeaked. Then gremlin and doughnut plummeted to the floor.
As the gremlin scuttled away, Wiz walked over, picked up the doughnut,
brushed it off and took a second bite.
“I don’t know if that makes you Neils Bohr,” he began again, “but if
you’re right I think Chuck Jones is the Erwin Schr”dinger of this