deep breath and leaned back. “I’m no soldier, but I do feel drawn in that direction. Particularly by these reports that the Grik are growing more dangerously sensible.” He scowled. “And our dear Rebecca will need Audry’s sweeter voice of restraint and compassion more than yet another angry friend of her father’s.” Suddenly he started and looked around. “Where did the cat go?”
“Cat?” Koratin was confused.
“Yes… Oh! My apologies! There was one of the small ones, a Felis catus, standing about. It’s gone now.” He frowned. “I wonder if that villainous Petey has frightened it away-or worse.” He looked thoughtful. “For all I know, the little creature might already be dead!” He looked skeptically at Koratin. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of a lecherous Austrian named Erwin Schrodinger?”
Koratin blinked.
“No, of course not. Why should you?” Courtney swallowed more brandy, then leaned forward. “My scientific specialty, beyond geology and industrial engineering, is comparative biology, but my horizons have necessarily expanded of late. I’m no physicist, let that be plain, and I paid only passing attention to the flurry of physical theories that drifted about Europe in the past decade like so much paper snow. Certainly Dr. Einstein and others made interesting observations, but their proposals seemed to require the elimination of every conceivable variable that might affect attempts to prove them. As a natural scientist, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles-which, to me, stressed the impossibility of eliminating every variable in any real-world scenario-seemed more relevant to my interests, since variations in climate and habitat are the essential parts of, and not incidental or destructive to, any biological equation.”
Courtney admonished Koratin with the brandy glass. “You’re doubtless wondering what all this has to do with our missing furry friend, but it was the sudden memory of Schrodinger’s unfortunate cat that set me thinking about paradox, you see!”
“Paara..?”
“Of course!” Courtney thumped his chest and stifled a belch, then refilled his glass. “As a mental exercise and not an actual experiment, to be fair-I wouldn’t want to slander the bugger-Schrodinger proposed that a cat had been placed in a box with a diabolical device that would execute it at some point. As an offering to Einstein, the device utilized a trigger that would activate it at a presumably predictable moment, based on its atomic degradation…” Koratin’s confused blinking distracted him, but Courtney shook his head and plowed on. “As an illustration of paradox, I can’t see the point of that, because THE… point…” He paused, blinking himself. “The ultimate point was that the cat, once in the box, was both alive and dead!”
“I… don’t see how that can be,” Koratin muttered suspiciously. Courtney’s belch finally escaped, and he drank down the rest of his glass before filling it again.
“But it can… in a sense. It seems to me that an appeal to Heisenberg’s uncertainties would add to the drama of such a test, but perhaps he was trying to create a deterministic paradox.” He shrugged. “I frankly can’t remember. But though I believe determinism, that cause and effect has its place, chance-or uncertainty, if you will- constantly fiddles about with it outside the laboratory. Subjective, perceptual paradox involving life and death happens all the time-without imprisoning cats.” Courtney rubbed his bushy brow.
“Just today, for example, when the remains of Gerald and Ruth McDonald were recovered, we learned they’d been dead since the bombing-were probably killed instantly, God willing-yet until that word came, they were still alive to us. How many times have you heard of the passing of an old friend years earlier, and realized you’d thought of them as alive and perhaps wondered what they were doing after they were dead and gone, but before you got the word? That person was dead, but alive to you. I often think of my son, even now, flying Hurricanes for the RAAF, and he’ll always be alive to me, even if somewhere on the world we came from, he’s been lost for many years. Conversely, if he lives, he knows I’m dead. If he manages to discover how I left Surabaya aboard an ancient, dilapidated destroyer, he’ll learn that USS Walker was lost somewhere in the Java Sea-along with USS Mahan, USS Pope, HMS Exeter, and HMS Encounter on that dreadful, fateful day. Hopefully, there were survivors from the other ships, but there were none, could never be, survivors from Walker and Mahan… back there. All of us who remain, the so very few of us, are dead on another world-yet we live on here.” He took another long swig of brandy and then stared at his shoes. “Or do we?” he almost whispered. He sat up straight, with some difficulty, and smiled. “ That, my dear Sergeant Koratin, is a paradox.”
Koratin stood and gathered the decanter and the glass. “Go home, Your Excellency, back to Baalkpan. Write your book. Put these… strange thoughts to use against the Grik.”
“I believe I shall,” Courtney said distractedly. “Look there, Sergeant! The kitten has returned!” He leaned down and extended his hand. “Come here, little fellow, and I may condescend to pet you!”
CHAPTER 20
March 19, 1944
Second Fleet
120 miles west-northwest of the Enchanted Isles
“Hooked on!” shouted Sergeant Kuaar-Ran-Taak, or “Seepy,” as he completed attaching the hoisting cables to the lifting points atop the battered Nancy. “C’mon, you bunch’a dopes!” he insisted loudly to the crew on the lifting boom high above. “Take us up before we sink!”
Orrin Reddy climbed out of his flooding cockpit and joined Seepy up on the wing. The purple, cloud-shadowed sea was relatively calm beneath a mostly white sky. Patches of blue peeked through the high cloud layer here and there, dashing brilliant sunshine, like bright, photo-negative squalls, on the water. It was calmer still in Maaka-Kakja ’s massive lee that shielded the returning flight from the light wind, but Orrin and Seepy grabbed the lifting cables as the slack came off. Their plane had grown heavy with water in the five minutes or so since it touched down, and both feared it wouldn’t take the strain of the lift.
Orrin could have taken his ship into the cavernous, semisubmerged, sea-level hangar bay that could be opened in the side of the ship, but like Tikker, his counterpart in First Fleet, he considered it important that he take every opportunity to test the capabilities of his aircraft, and that included recovery procedures. Besides, this Nancy was so shot up, it would probably never fly again. If the plane collapsed during the lift, they might lose a good engine and one of the priceless. 50-caliber Browning machine guns, but other than a few other spare parts, that was all-as long as he and Seepy had a good hold on the cables.
The lift crew’s timing was a little off, and the plane jerked up out of a light trough, streaming water from a dozen holes. Orrin held his breath and grasped the cable tighter, but nothing came apart. He began to relax as the plane made its swaying, slowly spinning ascent, and watched the other four planes of his flight-none leaking, thank goodness-position themselves beneath other booms along Maaka-Kakja ’s starboard side. His mood darkened. There should have been another Nancy maneuvering below, but a flock of “Grikbirds” had jumped them out of the sun and taken one of his planes and its crew before the others could react.
He blamed himself. They’d expected Grikbirds, but he hadn’t expected them to use such a simple, time- honored tactic. He hadn’t expected them to use any real tactics at all. He should have. The damn things were aerial predators, after all, and had probably been attacking prey out of the sun, by instinct, for millions of years! They’re not as fast as a Nancy, thank God, he thought. And even if they’re smart enough to use them, I don’t see them aiming Dom muskets-or any chase weapons-with their feet. But they’re natural-born dogfighters!
Still urinating streams of seawater, the Nancy was brought level with the hangar deck, and Seepy rose with the coiled line that came down with the hooks. “See you in a minute, boss,” he said, and scampered down the bobbing, turning wing, uncoiling the line behind him. At the wingtip, just as it started dipping under his weight, he flipped the line through a pigtail and leaped across to the hangar deck with the tagline in his hand!
“Show-off!” Orrin shouted after him, but inwardly shuddered. Setting the planes down on the flight deck could be tricky in rough seas or high winds, but it was fairly straightforward. The same went for motoring in through the side of the ship. Bringing a plane inboard on the hangar deck had presented a few problems for the humans helping design the capability. A separate boom system was proposed, but the Lemurians on the project had simply asked, “Why?” They hadn’t foreseen any problems. Sometimes, despite their fur, their tails, their expressionless faces-but highly expressive body language-the human destroyermen still forgot just how different they were. No “right” way for getting planes on the hangar deck from the water had ever been established as regulation, because the ’Cats
