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.
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.”