The Probability Broach

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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Table of Contents
 
 
When I began writing my first novel,
The Probability Broach,
35 years ago in 1977, the medium you’re reading these words on didn’t exist (although I predicted something a bit like it in my second novel).
Just to give you an idea how long ago that was, the Commodore PET, the world’s first personal computer, was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Later that year, it was released to the market.
The Apple corporation was founded in 1977, and Tandy began selling its first computers. Although the novel itself is full of computers and computeroid devices, it was written on a licensed Sperry-Remington copy of the famous IBM Selectric II typewriter, as were my next five books. Optical fibers first carried telephone traffic in 1977, and an electrical blackout in New York City left folks in the dark for twenty-five hours. Also the TCP/IC protocol was established, making the Internet possible.
Someday.
Elvis and Groucho died; Orlando Bloom, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Liv Tyler were born. Jimmy Carter succeeded Gerald Ford as President of the United States. (Ol’ Jerry’s looking pretty good in retrospect.) Fleetwood Mac’s Grammy-winning
Rumours
was released, as was the Clash’s first album,
The Clash
; the Supremes performed for the first time.
Star Wars
came to the big screen.
In 1977, the medium you’re reading didn’t exist; few even saw it coming. Telephones in 1977 were wired to the wall, their numbers associated with residences rather than individuals. This morning I used my tiny, pocket telephone to text a friend, asking him if he wants to Skype--real, live, futuristic videophone--later this afternoon.
This medium, the e-book, may prove historically significant in another way, as well. During the Great Depression, there was another literary revolution. Small, inexpensive books without hard covers made it possible for anyone to purchase any book and carry it anywhere, on a train, a bus, or a hike. Paperbacks made economic hard times a bitmore endurable and established fortunes for those who recognized the trend.
I read yesterday that the average American family’s net worth has diminished 40 percent in the past three years (something that might easily have been avoided if more people had read
The Probability Broach
). If this isn’t another Great Depression, then I don’t know what qualifies. And the paperback book of this Depression is the e-book.
The e-book is the paperback of the New Depression.
Long afterward, paperback books shaped my childhood and my young adulthood. They made my teenage years bearable and gave me a better education than any school or schoolteacher ever did. Thanks largely to Jim Frenkel and Tor Books, who believed in this book when nobody else did. I enjoy thinking that I may be doing the same for someone else today.

L. Neil Smith

Fort Collins, Colorado
June, 2010
 
ABOUT L. NEIL SMITH’S
THE PROBABILITY BROACH
BY ANDREA MILLEN RICH
 
 
You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not of sight nor of sound but of
ideas
and, yes, imagination.
Imagine a world—like our own, only more so—in which the American Revolution was never quite consummated, in which the bright promise of freedom gradually faded, gradually died. Imagine an America swamped by rules and regulations and taxes, an America marred by blighted hopes and ravaged lives. Imagine rationing: The dole (and Dole). And gun control. Imagine, if you will, a kind of universal slavery accepted and imposed by an almost-unanimous consent.
Now project a different world, built on a different principle: a world in which President George Washington was slain as a traitor to his country for trying to impose new taxes … in which the so-called Whiskey Rebellion was a
success
… the Constitution was scuttled as too Draconian … and, because the Declaration of Independence has a single extra word in it, the State has virtually withered away.
All of which makes possible a much richer, much more
liberated
kind of place—the society and world of the Confederacy—where, for starters, everybody’s got a gun (including the talking chimps).
You’ll learn how it all happened when you follow Detective Win Bear on his journey through the Probability Broach, a journey propelled by murder and mayhem and which, in the end, is destined to jostle more than one hard-lost misconception.
All of which is to say that L. Neil Smith’s first novel, now happily back in print, is one helluva read. It’s a hard-boiled, chatty, slam-bang philosophical adventure that looks and feels like a fusion of Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, and Ayn Rand (that’s
President
Ayn Rand, this side of the Broach). But Smith’s voice is fresh, no mere expression of influences. The rambunctiousness that makes this transdimensional trek so charming and fun is his alone.
Are there some heavy ideas here? Yes. Do they wend their way into the dialogue? Sure. Do they clog and burden the narrative?
Nope.
Unlike some libertarian bards, Smith knows how to make his plot
depend
on ideological conflict, and he keeps the pace chugging and the reader’s interest engaged. A pivotal scene—you’ll know it when you get there—concerns the psychological and moral issues surrounding the right to bear arms. But it’s no dry ideological exchange. Not by a long shot.
A lot has happened since December of 1979, when
The
Probability Broach
first saw print. The Reagan Revolution has come, and gone, and come back. The microchip has helped pump life into a creaky economy. The Soviet Union has cracked up, along with certain other ideological constructs; what will replace them is unclear. Hope alternates with despair on the seesaw that is the evening news. Rush Limbaugh alternates with Howard Stern on the radio. In
this
world, the battle of the “Jeffersonians” against the “Hamiltonians” is still far from won—but maybe, just maybe, the Jeffersonians are gaining an edge.
In the world beyond the Broach, the battle
has
been won. How a small, bitter, power-lusting remnant of Hamiltonianism threatens to blow that victory to smithereens is the tale that awaits you.
Whatever your own views, listen to what Smith’s heroes and heroines have to say. Admire them for their independence, their pluck, their frontier spirit, their feckless cornball humor. And, what the heck, you may as well appreciate the plight of small-time losers like Tricky Dick Milhous and the adenoidal Buckley F. Williams, Jr., while you’re at it. Above all, have fun.
Now … fasten your seat belt …
 
It’s going to be a
bumpy
ride.
 
ANDREA MILLEN RICH,
President of Laissez Faire Books
My movement to the Chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a criminal who is going to the place of his execution.
—George Washington
February 4, 1789
 
 
… would cease operations early next month. In a joint press release, executives of the other networks regretted the passing of America’s oldest broadcasting corporation and pledged to use the assets awarded to them by the federal bankruptcy court to continue its tradition of operation “in the public interest.”
In a related story, TV schedules will be cut back by an additional two hours in eighty cities next week. Heads of the FCC and Department of Energy, officially unavailable for comment, unofficially denied rumors that broadcast cutbacks were related to recent media criticism of the President’s economic and energy policies.
—KOE Channel 4
Eyewitness News
Denver, July 6, 1987
 
 
Another sweltering Denver summer. A faded poster was stapled crookedly to the plywood door of an abandoned fast-food joint at the corner of Colfax and York:
CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
The Secretary of Energy Has Determined That This Unit
Represents An Unjustifiable Expenditure of Our Nation’s
Precious And Dwindling Energy Reserves. DOE 568-90-3041
 
Through its soot-grimy windows, I could see them stirring sluggishly—panhandlers keeping out of the sun. Me, I was roasting in the parking lot, my battered department-issue Plymouth settling slowly to its hubcaps in the hot asphalt. Pushing a flavorless brown-bag lunch into my face, I wished vainly for a cigar and rehearsed my vast repertoire of excuses.
Things had started out rotten, breakfast interrupted by a call to a dilapidated Emerson Street garage. Somebody had strung up a corpse from the rafters, gutted and skinned it like a deer. The carcass had bled into a galvanized bucket on the floor and the skin was folded neatly over a straight-backed kitchen chair, the kind you usually find in garages, missing two rungs and held together with picture wire. The morning air had that breathless, anticipatory feel, promising a hundred degrees or more. It had made a fair start in that garage, the usual cobwebs and motor oil rapidly losing out to a cloying slaughter-house odor.
This afternoon would be even more fun, explaining to the
News-Post
and assorted microphones—not to mention my division chief—why the patrolmen who had found the body during a routine curfew bust had puked all over the evidence. Shit, I’d almost done it myself.
I looked down at my sandwich and shuddered.
My stomach was giving me hell, anyway. Twenty-seven years on the force, and now the pain was creeping down my left arm into the wrist. Maybe it was the crummy hours, the awful food. Maybe it was worrying all the time: cancer; minipox; encountering an old friend in a packet of blackmarket lunch meat. Maybe it was a depression they wouldn’t call by its right name, or seeing old folks begging in the streets. Maybe I just watched too many doctor shows.
Forty-eight was the right age to worry, though, especially for a cop. Oh, I’d tried keeping in shape: diets, exercise, vitamins before they got too risky. But after Evelyn had split, it just seemed like a lot of trouble. I did manage to stay off coffee, quite a feat in a line of work that revolves around a station-house urn.
Nineteen years in homicide and the sight of human intestines piled on a gritty concrete floor could still turn me inside out. Well, it’s better than getting callous. Now as the sun baked my car top, fumes from a beat-up city bus were ruining what little appetite I had left. I missed my mealtime cigars, and couldn’t quite tell whether the little carton of milk in my hand was starting to sour. Somehow it’s worse, not knowing.
Most of all I longed to take off my sodden jacket, but the public’s supposed to panic at the sight of a shoulder holster. I knew that sweat was eating at the worn, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum jammed into my left armpit. The leather harness was soaked, the dingy elastic cross-strap slowly rasping through the heat rash on the back of my neck.
If it were only—hell, make that
five
years ago. A man could enjoy a sanitary lunch in an air-conditioned booth. Now, CLOSED BY ORDER signs flapped on half the doors downtown; the other half, it seemed, had been shut by “economic readjustment.” And unlicensed air conditioning was a stiffer rap than hoarding silver.
The bus at the corner gasped to a start, filling my car with blue smoke. Shouldn’t have parked so near the street, damn it. I’d had my choice in the empty, litter-strewn lot. I gave up on lunch, wadding up the wrappers, when the radio, its jabber ignored until now, began talking about me:
“Five Charlie Nineteen, respond Code Three, possible homicide, southwest corner of Sixteenth and Gaylord.” That’s me, of course, better known to everybody but dispatchers as Lieutenant Edward W. Bear. The W is for William, but thanks to that son-of-a-bitch A. A. Milne and a world full of funny-people, I settle for Win.
“Five Charlie Nineteen …” I threw the papers on the backseat and started the engine. It coughed asthmatically and a surge of adrenalin washed through me as it caught. Horn honking, I dipped and scraped into Colfax, spilling the half-empty milk carton on the floor. I cut across sparse traffic—squealing brakes and cursing bicyclists—roared an illegal hundred yards the wrong way up York, swerved left through a parking lot to Gaylord, and tore away in a wake of siren wail and swirling red light.
It was only another block. Four scuffed black-and-whites straddled the street, their lightbars blinking round and round by a littered curb fronting a crumbling neighborhood mosque that had seen previous duty as a Mexican Catholic church. Short of wind, I shrugged out of the car.
A body lay half-propped against the wall, blood streaming across cracked cement into the gutter. “What do we have here?” I asked the patrol sergeant. “Another VN-Arab rumble?” He shook his head and I remembered with embarrassment that he was an Arab himself. “Sorry, Moghrabi—just a bad day today.”
“Worse for
him,
Lieutenant.” The victim—late twenties—lay clutching his middle, as if to keep his guts from falling out. He had good reason to try, stitched from hip to shoulder the way he was. A gap in the closely grouped pockmarks on the wall above said he had fallen where he’d been shot. In one outstretched hand was a stainless-steel snubbie. No punk’s gun, anyway. A Bianchi holster identical to mine was exposed by his blood-soaked jacket.
I looked down at the curb. Sure enough, a brassy glittering in the windblown trash: two dozen spent cartridges. I levered one onto the end of a pencil: .380 Auto. That’d make it an Ingram machine pistol. Very fancy.
Lab people were arriving with evidence kits and VCR, uniforms herding up potential witnesses. I’d see their reports later, not that it would do much good: this wasn’t as down-and-out as Denver neighborhoods get, but the stiff against the wall was Mr. Collegiate Affluence, despite the gun in his hand, and that meant silence from the citizens. Or lies.
Moghrabi had been keeping busy, supplying translations. He nodded at a patrolman and jogged over. “We’ve got something, a late-model white station wagon, Brazilian make. Want an APB?”
“Better wait. Probably dozens of station wagons still running in this town. Anything else?”
“The car’s about the only thing they all agree on. You know witnesses. What about the victim?”
I shrugged. “They’re still preserving everything for posterity over there. Let me know if you get anything else.” He nodded, heading back where uniformed officers were trading broken Arabic for broken English. I got an okay from the video techs, bent over the body, and gently pried the revolver from its stiffening fingers. Ruger Security Six, like I’d figured. I opened the cylinder; dimples in four of the primers twinkled up at me. Four shots fired, Norma .357 hollowpoints. If any had connected, we’d be finding another corpse, possibly in worse shape than this one.
“Hey, Lieutenant?” A probationer hailed me from the middle of the street. On the other side, a meat wagon had joined the laboratory van. “Look what we found! We were measuring tire marks and spotted all this
stuff …”
I rose stiffly, trying to ignore my knees. “Hey, Lieutenant, do you think—”
“Not when I can avoid it.” It took an effort not to add “son.” His fresh-scrubbed eager-beaver looks clashed with the patched and faded department-issue hand-me-downs. I bent forward, grunting under my breath. Why does evidence always fall
down?
Then I remembered this morning’s ornament, hanging from a garage ceiling, and almost lost my spoiled-mayonnaise sandwich.
The sight in the street didn’t help: scattered glass; blood all over the fragments,
splashed.
Those hollowpoints had connected, all right. Might even be some brains scrambled into this mess if I looked hard enough. I resisted the urge. “Moghrabi!” I gestured that he should avoid walking through the evidence. “Sarge, you can have your APB, now. That station wagon’ll be missing windows.”
He nodded, heading for his radio. I went back to the body again, with a little more respect. His travel permit said he was one Meiss, Vaughn L., from Fort Collins, sixty miles to the north. His work assignment: Colorado State University As a Ph.D. on the Physics faculty, he rated his own wheels and the fuel to roll them. Car keys and parking lot receipt I handed to the sergeant, who would hand them to a patrolman who would dig up the heap and hand it to the lab people. It’s called “channels.”
They’d find candy wrappers, Kleenex, an ashtray full of illicit butts or roaches, probably not much else. They always had hopes, of course: half a ton of Laetrile or Ever-Clear.
Presumably Meiss had parked nearby There was never any shortage of space these days, and it was too damned hot to walk very far, especially for a small-town boy visiting the Big Heatsink. Which brought up a question: why does a cow-college professor end up soaking his B-negative or whatever into a Denver sidewalk, a roscoe in his fist that would stop a small locomotive?
The ambulance was ready to take our client to the taxidermists downtown. One of the techs passed by with a collection of plastic baggies containing personal effects. “Hold on. Let me see that.” He handed over a bright golden disk, larger than the silver dollars I remembered from childhood, in deep relief a picture of a bald-headed old coot with ruffles at his throat:
ALBERT GALLATIN
1761 C.E.-A.L. 76
REVOLUTIONIST, PRESIDENT, SCHOLAR OF LIBERTY
 
On the other side, an old-fashioned hillbilly whiskey jug, and forest-covered hills behind:
ONE METRIC OUNCE
GOLD 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, L.T.D.
 
Was this what the shooting was about—a couple thousand neobucks? Maybe if there were more … It felt cool in my hand, a solid, comforting weight. Gold, legally kosher a few brief years ago, was presently hotter than vitamin C, and—
“
Coin
collecting,
Bear?
” I jumped despite myself, jerked back nearly thirty years to the Colorado Law Enforcement Training Academy I turned resignedly to confront Oscar Burgess, several years my senior and small-arms instructor during my academy days. While I had slogged from rookie to patrolman, from investigator to homicide lieutenant, he’d left CLETA for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms during its heyday in the early eighties, and now was Denver station chief for the Federal Security Police.
The years had only refined our mutual distaste. Where I was … let’s say “heavy set,” he was gray and lean, cat-fast, with a frightening moon-map of a face, the hideous legacy of minipox. Behind him, his crew in fresh-creased jumpsuits brandished automatic shotguns. Their unit crest was emblazoned on the side of a black and scarlet van: a mailed fist grasping the naked edges of a dagger, blood creeping out between the fingers.
“I’ll take that!” he said. I handed him the coin, trying not to make it meekly. “Got a smoke?” he asked. I started to reach for my shirt pocket, but recovered quickly. It was an old BATF trick, getting a citizen to betray himself out of generous reflex. He leered knowingly at my reddening face.
“What brings SecPol into a simple street killing, Burgess?”
He hooked a negligent thumb toward the grisly symbol on the van. “You ought to know better than to ask foolish questions. We’re thinking about preempting this case—National Security. When the papers come through, you’ll have to turn everything over to us and go back to busting jaywalkers.” He grinned and watched his men confronting mine, knuckles white on holstered pistol grips all around.
“Didn’t realize there was a full moon last night, Oscar,” I said. He turned back, puzzled. I pointed to a tiny cut on his pockmarked forehead, dried blood at the edges. “Cut yourself shaving?”
He whitened. “Mind your own stinking business, Bear, or I’ll have you back working curfew violations!”
“You and whose army, Fed?”
“I don’t
need
an army, flatfoot!” I caught a glimpse of the ancient Luger he wore cross-draw at the waist. Then he let his jacket drop and flipped the coin at me as if tipping a bellboy. “Take good care of this. I’ll be looking for it when we take over. Withholding precious metals is antisocial … and good for about forty in Leavenworth!” He laughed and stalked off to gather up his thugs.
The technician gave me an argument, but I signed six different forms and took the coin, to be surrendered at Properties tomorrow, on pain of pain. Eventually it would wind up in some bureaucrat’s pocket, or melted down to feed a multi-quadrillion neobuck federal deficit. Probably the former.
Shuffling through the wallet contents, I also took a small brown textured business card like one I’d seen somewhere before, if I could only remember … of course, one of the computer people downtown. That department number-fumbler and the late Dr. Meiss were both genuine, card-carrying crackpots:

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