"Oltion-Uncertainty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

them. Even though it was theoretically possible, the carpenter probably didn't
worry about them all landing in the same place, or inexplicably avoiding an area
shaped like, say, the face of the Madonna.

It's a lousy metaphor and Jason knows it. Yes, overall he and Ginny have a happy
marriage, but he wants her now. Now, this instant, warm and cuddly with her
auburn hair dancing in loopy curls around her ears, her smile wide and inviting
. . .

Jason gets up abruptly, pads into the bathroom, and takes a shower. He scrubs
off the day's sweat first, then closes his eyes and satisfies his other need as
best he can. It isn't enough. He opens his eyes, looking at the bright white
tiles with the beads of water forming and falling from them. Thousands of drops,
spraying randomly off his chest, yet forming an even distribution along the
wall. A Gaussian distribution, named after Karl F. Gauss, the German
mathematician who studied randomness before Schrodinger, the other doyen of
particle behavior, was even a boy. Jason knows these things. He has read up on
the subject. Yet as so many physicists have learned, knowing how a phenomenon
works doesn't mean he can control it.

Jason still needs some kind of release. He reaches forward and turns the faucet
slowly to cold, gritting his teeth until the primal whoop bursts from his lungs.
This time the whole house echoes.

The next evening she is home. Jason knows that last night has nothing to do with
tonight, that random events by definition cannot influence one another. A tossed
coin can come up tails a dozen times in a row and still have a fifty-fifty
chance on the next throw.

But tonight it's heads. For Jason. Trouble is, evidently Ginny is having a tails
sort of day, because the moment he opens the door he feels himself fading away.
He gets a glimpse of her talking on the phone, but when she turns she looks
right through him and Jason goes where virtual particles go when they
annihilate.

When awareness returns, he is sitting on a stool at the end of a polished
mahogany bar. A tall glass in front of him holds ice and a straw, and smells of
gin. Jason groans. Of all the places he could go, why does he keep coming here?
Only a cheap motel would be worse. But either way, whether he reeked of gin or
perfume, if he were to go home now his marriage would be mined. Jason knows this
with instinctive certainty. Ginny may suspect where he goes, but she must never
know.

He orders coffee from the gray-haired bartender, slurps down two cups while
watching the other patrons in the mirror. How many of them came here
voluntarily? he wonders. How many are victims of chance?

In one of those random moments when all the voices are silent but one, he hears:
"Okay, a Frenchman, a Mexican, and a Texan are in a balloon . . .