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sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.
    “Before I go any farther,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”
    Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to
think
about Newtonian physics
.
    —E XCERPT FROM D R . G EDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS
    “You
knew
we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we got out to the lobby.
    When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”
    “Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.
    “If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”
    “Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It’s shaped like a stack of LPs.”
    “I want to go to the opening remarks.”
    “The beacon on top blinks out ‘Hollywood’ in Morse code.”
    I went over to the front desk.
    “Can I help you?” the clerk behind the desk said. “My name is Natalie, and I’m an—”
    “Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?” I said.
    “They’re in the ballroom.”
    “I’ll bet you didn’t have any dinner,” David said. “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone. There’s this great place that has the ice cream cone Ryan O’Neal bought for Tatum in
Paper Moon
.”
    “A channeler’s in the ballroom,” I told Natalie. “I’m looking for the ICQP.”
    She fiddled with the computer. “I’m sorry. I don’t show a reservation for them.”
    “How about Grauman’s Chinese?” David said. “You want reality? You want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?”
    He grabbed my hands. “Come with me,” he said seriously.
    In St. Louis I had suffered a wave function collapse a lot like what had happened to my clothes when I opened the suitcase. I had ended up on a riverboat halfway to New Orleans that time. It happened again, and the next thing I knew I was walking around the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, eating an ice cream cone and trying to fit my feet in Myrna Loy’s footprints.
    She must have been a midget or had her feet bound as a child. So, apparently, had Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Lamour, and Wallace Beery. The only footprints I came close to fitting were Donald Duck’s.
    “I see this as a map of the microcosm,” David said, sweeping his hand over the slightly irregular pavement of printed and signed cement squares. “See, there are all these tracks. We know something’s been here, and the prints are pretty much the same, only every once in a while you’ve got this”—he knelt down and pointed at the print of John Wayne’s clenched fist—“and over here”—he walked toward the box office and pointed to the print of Betty Grable’s leg. “And we can figure out the signatures, but what is this reference to ‘Sid’ on all these squares? And what does
this
mean?”
    He pointed at Red Skelton’s square. It said, “Thanks Sid We Dood It.”
    “You keep thinking you’ve found a pattern,” David said, crossing over to the other side, “but Van Johnson’s square is kind of sandwiched in here at an angle between Esther Williams and Cantinflas, and who the hell is May Robson? And why are all these squares over here empty?”
    He had managed to maneuver me over behind the display of Academy Award winners. It was an accordionlike wrought-iron screen. I was in the fold between 1944 and 1945.
    “And as if that isn’t enough, you suddenly realize you’re standing in the courtyard. You’re not even in the theater.”
    “And that’s what you think is happening in quantum theory?” I said weakly. I was