The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette) Read Online Free Page A

continued. “How many
full-time professors, visiting professors, and postdocs are in the
building?”
    “I’ll have to get back to you with an exact
list. Biology has all of the first floor. Counting the genetics
department upstairs and paleontology in the basement, probably
about thirty or so. What happens now?”
    “Now? I watch and wait. That part does not
happen quickly.”
    “Oh.”
    “Not to mention that if the thief makes off
with something other than my quinoa salad, we won’t know it until
the victim reports their food missing.”
    “Oh,” I said again.
    “Solving crime is not a fast process,” he
pointed out.
    “I guess not.”
    “In any case, I’ll let you know what I
discover,” he said, as if dismissing me. Well, that was a bit rude,
especially after I had gone out of my way to help him. He must have
picked up on my reaction because he added, “I assume you have
better things to do, Ms. Olsen, than sit here with me keeping an
eye on things. Besides, this looks like it might take several days.
I plan on having one of my officers take over. Then I can
fast-forward through the footage at the end of the week.”
    “All right, keep me—that is, the dean’s
office—updated.”
    “Will do.”

    Later that afternoon I checked on Drs. Mooney and
Rojas on my way back from helping set up for a Tuesday afternoon
chemistry department seminar. The two were still carrying out their
debate, now in the TTE lab. For every argument one raised, the
other, as befitting an academic, had a counterargument.
    “I believe he did have a cat,” Dr.
Mooney had just said. “Of all the imaginary animals you could put
in an imaginary box in a thought experiment, a cat is not the first
one that comes to mind. A fish in a small tank would be simpler,
and it wouldn’t require the vial of poison, just a hammer to smash
its tank. The fact that Schrödinger chose a cat indicates that he
had a cat.”
    Dr. Rojas disagreed. “A person fond of cats
wouldn’t place a cat in danger—even in a theoretical sense. I would
know. Lane and I have three in our house. We’ve had to put screens
on all our windows and doors. One already spends too much time
worrying about them.”
    “Maybe he didn’t like his cat,” I said.
    “Ah, hello, Julia. I didn’t hear you come
in,” Dr. Mooney said. The two professors were on their feet by one
of the lab’s printers, which was busy spitting out two copies of an
article of some kind. “Yes, maybe he didn’t like his cat. Like I
said, Schrödinger could have suggested a simpler setup, perhaps one
not involving an animal at all. A bottle of wine, say, that the
hammer could break. It might have even made more sense, as one
could argue the cat itself counts as an observer of the events
inside the box.”
    Dr. Rojas considered this. “You could say the
same about the Geiger counter—it takes measurements, so it
represents an unconscious observer.”
    “Schrödinger doesn’t seem to have considered
either the Geiger counter or the cat as observers.”
    “But that’s exactly what I mean—a cat owner
would never not think of a cat as an observer. Cats like to
keep an eye on what’s going on around them.”
    “And yet he still chose that particular
animal. And what more likely reason than that one was purring by
his feet at the moment he thought of the experiment?”
    I wasn’t sure I had ever seen Dr. Rojas this
animated. He pounced on the point. “But that just proves my case. A
cat is not a stationary object—it moves, meows, scratches, nuzzles.
It would not sit quietly in a box for an hour. You’d need air holes
in the box, which would invalidate the experiment. A cat owner
would know this.”
    “And yet despite all those issues, he did suggest a cat.”
    “Because he probably had in mind a spherical
cat, not an actual one.”
    “What’s a spherical cat?” I asked. Even
though I wasn’t a pet person, I knew that there was no such thing
as a spherical cat.
    “An