As always, I am deeply grateful to Obi-Quiet for the beta advice. Special guest-beta gratitude goes to KDH for checking my physics.

Chapter 6: Mom

I was home.

Specifically, I was standing at the top of the kitchen stairs, as though I had just walked up from the lab. From the early morning light that was filtering in from the windows in the living room, I knew that I had been up all night. Well, it wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. Mom was standing at the kitchen counter, pouring a cup of coffee from a fresh pot.

Something startled her—my sudden, silent arrival, probably—and she splashed some of her coffee on the floor. "Oh, Danny, I wish you wouldn't sneak up on me like that! I didn't hear you come in."

"Sorry, Mom. I should have said something. What time is it, anyway?" I grabbed a couple of paper napkins from the table and mopped up the spill while Mom got another mug down from the shelf and poured some coffee for me.

"About a quarter to six. I know I'm here awfully early, but I had one of those 'Eureka!' moments in the middle of the night and I couldn't wait to get started. Did you have good hunting last night? Sam was worried about you."

"Uh. . . ." I hesitated, momentarily disoriented. I hadn't been hunting last night, had I? She handed the mug to me and as I accepted it in my gloved hands I belatedly realized that I was still in ghost form, with an empty Thermos strapped to my back. I quickly transformed and tossed the Thermos onto the table. "Uh, no. This was Val's capture, I just released them for her."

"Oh, that's nice. How's Valerie doing these days?"

I had to remind myself that this was not meant to be a loaded question. Neither Mom nor Dad had any idea of the significance of the date, even if everybody else was wallowing in it. How is Valerie doing? She's alive, that's how she's doing, and so is everybody else. The Nasty Burger is still standing; nobody died.

"Val's fine, I'll let her know you asked." You didn't die, either.

She set a bakery box full of blueberry muffins on the table. We sat and broke our fast in companionable silence for a few minutes, just enjoying the rich flavors and blessed pre-dawn quiet. But the question that had been creeping around in the back of my head finally worked its way to the surface.

"Mom?"

"Mmm?"

"Have you ever heard of a cat called Schroeder?"

She finished chewing and took a sip of her coffee. "A cat called—"

"Somebody told me I should ask you about Schroeder the Cat." Did it really sound so ridiculous?

"Schroeder. . . oh! Schroedinger's Cat!" She stifled a laugh, although I couldn't see what was so amusing. Had Clockwork put one over on me? "'Schroedinger' was the name of the scientist, Sweetie, not the name of the cat."

"Ah—I guess I misunderstood. Schroedinger, the scientist, then. What was the cat's name?"

"The cat's name? Oh, silly, the cat didn't have a name!" That sent her over the edge. She giggled like a little girl, in that way that she has that makes people forget that she can inflict serious mayhem either with weapons or her own bare hands. (Their mistake.) "Remind me: how much physics did you take in college?"

"Let me think. . ." Throwing dignity to the winds I went along with the joke, ticking off the items on my fingers. "There was. . . and then my sophomore year. . . and don't forget. . . add it all together and I guess that would be. . . none. Zero. Zip. Nada."

"Ri-i-ight. Let's see, then. Where to start?" She took another bite of her muffin while she figured out how to explain 'Schroedinger's Cat' to her science-challenged offspring. "In 1935, Erwin Schroedinger proposed a thought experiment to illustrate the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles."

". . . and he had a cat."

"Actually, I don't know whether he ever had a cat. I suppose it's entirely possible that he didn't like cats very much at all."

She was losing me, fast. "Schroedinger's Cat wasn't a cat?"

"No, 'Schroedinger's Cat' was the name of the thought experiment. He said, if you put a cat inside a sealed container with a vial of poison gas and a triggering device—"

"Whoa! Wait a minute: he killed the cat?" That was unexpected. I'm glad Sam wasn't in the room, or we might have a riot on our hands. Come to think of it, I wasn't too thrilled with it, either.

"I told you, there wasn't any cat! A thought experiment is one you don't actually do, you just think about it. No cats were harmed, I promise. Now do you want me to explain this, or not?"

"Sorry. Go ahead."

"All right, then. In Schroedinger's thought experiment, one would contemplate sealing a cat inside a container with a vial of poison gas and a triggering device. The triggering device would be operated by a small amount of radioactive material with a half-life of one hour." She paused and figured out from my expression that I wasn't keeping up with her. "That means that, at the end of one hour, there would be a fifty-fifty chance that the triggering device would have broken the vial and released the poison."

"This sounds awfully complicated."

"Well, that's pretty much all there was to it. The question is, after one hour, is the cat alive or dead? You can't find out unless you open the container, which would invalidate the experiment. So you express the cat's condition as being both alive and dead at the same time."

There was something about that odd turn of phrase that reminded me of Clockwork asking whether my unborn child was both a boy and a girl. But the bizarre, inhumane setup of the thought experiment was making my head swim. "Why would opening the container invalidate the experiment? And for that matter, why not put a window in the container, so you could see the cat?"

"There was no container. There was no cat!" She laughed again, but thinly; I think I was starting to get on her nerves. " Honey, none of this has anything to do with cats. It's just an illustration. . . like if I ask you how a case is going and you answer, 'I struck out,' you're not really talking about baseball. Don't you see?"

"It's like a. . . whatchamacallit, a metaphor."

"Exactly. Like a scientific metaphor. Schroedinger was just using the story of an imaginary cat in an imaginary container to illustrate one of the principles of quantum theory."

"Which is. . . ? Or should I just stop while I'm hopelessly lost?"

"To put it as simply as I can manage: You can't determine the quantum state of an individual particle unless you isolate the particle and look at it, and if you do that, you change its quantum state. 'The act of observing affects the observed.' Does that make sense?"

It did—though probably not in the sense old Schroedinger intended. My blood ran cold as I unwound the chain of logic and reached a far simpler answer: "If you never open the container and look inside, you'll never know whether the cat is alive or dead."

She sighed. "Yes. Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Unless you open the container, you have to assume that either answer is possible, and neither answer is certain."

Is there anything left inside there?

Nothing.

Everything.

I got up, circled the table and gave my mother a kiss on the cheek. "Thanks, Mom. It does make sense to me now. And if you'll excuse me, I'd better go make peace with Sam."