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least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
    Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.
    “Because I want to attend the programming,” I said the third time around, “not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”
    “And David is a middle-aged man, who, I might add, is absolutely charming. In fact, he may be the last charming man left in the universe.”
    “Charm is for quarks,” I said and hung up, feeling smug until I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change.
    Tiffany asked, “May I help you?” and left me standing there.
    After a while I gave up and went back to the red and gold sofas. “David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”
    “There
are
no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.
    “What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.
    “There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.”
    I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.
    “If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”
    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 semi-naked 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 1282, but the room numbers only go 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
.
    —E XCERPT FROM D R . G EDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS
    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 Schrödinger’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.”
    “Shh,” I said.
    “—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”
    “What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.
    “Shh,” David said.
    Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached, and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”
    She