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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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“Spread the misery around! My friend, government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.”
“We must be doing something right, the U.S. is the most prosperous—”
“Slum
in your world.”
“The poorest American’s rich, compared to other countries!”
“And the poorest Confederate’s rich, compared to most Americans. All your taxes and regulations freeze old wealth, and make new fortunes impossible—except for those with political pull. The rich fend off the law, while those below get picked clean by your IRA.”
“IRS, though I’ll concede there isn’t much practical difference.
“New opportunities, Win, new ventures! That’s how wealth really gets distributed. In any civilized society, the poor get richer, too. Pretty soon it’s hard to tell who’s who. Tell me, how long does an American work to buy a car?”
“He can’t, any more. We used to spread it over a couple of years, why?”
“Win, a Confederate hoverbuggy represents about three weeks’ earnings—don’t look at me that way! How about a home?”
“Nowadays, forget it. Ten years ago, maybe five years’ wages. Actually, you’re talking a forty-year mortgage, even with—”
“I paid my house off in six months. And Win, this meal you’ve kindly provided is an expensive one. Meep’s got decorators to pay, after all. We could’ve eaten under the corner for the same price in copper!”
“How come everything’s so fucking cheap? Don’t your workers have to eat? Or is everything automated?”
“Automation doesn’t help: it always takes more people to create and maintain the machinery, and a healthy economy’s real problem is chronic labor shortages. Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy! You people have been trying to get by on a quarter of your productive capacity—an eighth, when you count the costs of regulation—while the State eats up the rest! It’s a wonder you’ve survived at all!”
I thought about that for a minute. Maybe we weren’t surviving. “So you’re saying that none of you are really poor?”
“Not the way you mean. You’ll find we’re ‘hiding’ our rich people, too, in exactly the same way. They’re us!” He laughed and fished out a cigarette. I lit it for him and relit my cigar.
That complimentary lighter must have been old stock. It was embossed
Meep Feng’s Oriental Palace.
 
WE BADE FAREWELL to our host. Lucy’s image was on the screen the second we climbed into the car. “Been trying t’raise you half an hour. Eddie! There’s a flock of newsies on your front stoop. What do I tell ’em!”
“I said all I’m going to say when they woke me up this morning!” Apparently I’d slept through that, another advantage to electronarcosis. “I’m invoking privacy—and so are my neighbors.”
“Got it, kiddo! I—” Someone peered over Lucy’s shoulder. He didn’t need a press card to have “reporter” written all over him.
“Which one of you clowns is—
Ow!
That’s my best pair of shoes, lady!”
Lucy faced the intruder nose to nose. “Wanna be
burried
in ’em? Get outa here!” She turned to the pickup. “Sorry, Edward.”
“That’s all right, Lucy. Hold the fort. One more errand, then I’ll come home and punch you up a steak.”
“Nothing’ doin! I’ll do the programmin’, something that bleeds for a change! Good luck, boys, try thinkin’ kindly of a senile old lady who lets smartass young whippersnappers sneak up an’ get the drop on her.”
“Buffalo shit, Lucy.”
“I was kinda hopin’ you’d say that, Eddie. Bye!”
“Half an hour?” I asked. “You ought to carry a pager, so your calls get—”
Ed looked at me sourly. “You
are
a barbarian, Win.”
 
LAPORTE UNIVERSITY, LTD. is the local push-back-the-barriers joint where Bertram’s people shared facilities. The Confederacy draws no distinction between applied science and pure research. Those who can, do. They also teach. Those who can’t, maybe they wind up in Congress like back home.
Dora Jayne Thorens didn’t belong in Congress, unless you prefer the delicate way they put things in Victorian novels. A six-foot platinum blonde with a figure that should have won her a staple through the navel, she was also chief of paratronics research. Her office reminded me of Meiss’s, even to the squiggles on her blackboard. “Mr. Bear?” She looked at Ed, and then at me.
“We’re both Mr. Bear, Ed and Win. Did you lose this felt-tip recently?”
“I’ve got a deskful just like it. Is this what detectives do these days? It’s certainly service.” Her broad office windows looked across the park. I could see “my” Telecom booth, and part of the path I’d followed getting to it.
Ed smiled. “There’s more to it than, that, Miss—Doctor—Professor …”
“Deejay. Look, I hate to rush you, but I’ve got work in the lab before my next class. Mind walking?” We headed down a corridor that was
all
windows. The view—well, I was watching Deejay do things to a labcoat that—
“As I was saying,” Ed neatly derailed my train of thought, “it’s not so much
what
you lost—”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “these things are a dime a dozen.”
“Copper,” Ed corrected.
“Just plain fuzz, if you prefer. What’s important is
where.”
She paused. “I hope this isn’t anything about breaking a contract. I just don’t get involved with married—”
“Neither do I. I just thought you’d like to know I found this pen in a desk drawer, too. At Colorado State University. The United States of America.”
She touched my arm, then looked at Ed again, and back at me, a light dawning. Suddenly she snatched the pen and ran off screaming. “Ooloorie! Ooloorie! We’ve done it! We’ve done it!”
 
Life that is not only aware, but
aware
that it is aware, evolved separately on this planet at least five times, a fact that gives us reason to reflect. If five times here, how many times Out There? If in two distinct shapes in two radically different environments here, then how many shapes, in how many environments Out There? And if our civilization has willingly embraced five species and two shapes in two environments, will that help those Out There to embrace us? It should help us to embrace them.
—Kenneth Bronowski
Ascent of Civilization
 
Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet first conceived the Probability Broach in 192 A.L., when Deejay Thorens was a mere calf whose present position was occupied by another landling. Unfortunately, she’d been looking for a way to get to Alpha Centauri, and was particularly disappointed since her mathematics had seemed flawless.
At first she thought she’d simply missed by four and a half light-years. Microprobes indicated dry land, terrestrial temperatures, pressures, gravity. It was
Earth.
But how?
Swimming in faculty quarters at California’s Emperor Norton University, she pondered the landlings, whom a tradition more ancient than tradition itself named “those we love and know not why.” Perhaps it had been
their
clumsiness. She considered the possibility, lashing her flukes in annoyance. For all their pride in a manipulative ability to translate their childish abstractions into substance, she never really trusted their machinists and technicians. She had never seen the need to clutter philosophy-
science
, they called it, or
physics
—with apparatus.
Philosophy was a matter of cool contemplation in the quiet waters of the mind, of gentle debate through many generations, of decorous integration into the poetry and legend of her people. Why must the landlings always hurry? Let my grandchildren find the end of the migration, she thought, if only I can begin the path rightly. Why must the dry ones always
do something
with it? Is not philosophy enough, in itself?
 
“I’M GRATIFIED TO meet you, Mr. Bear. You and your counterpart from this continuum are a welcome though scarcely necessary confirmation of my hypotheses.” This Telecom was different, a wheelchair with a table model TV on the seat, a periscope sticking out of the top. Ooloorie guided it remotely, moving her “eyes and ears” around, peering critically over the shoulders of people who were her “hands.” There was no screen at her end, a tank of salt water twelve hundred miles away. The periscope cameras translated what they picked up into an auditory hologram, super-high-fidelity wave fronts that, to her, were “television.”
Like the squiggles on her blackboard, Deejay’s labs reminded me of Vaughn Meiss. Replacing rows of computers, Telecom pads were scattered here and there, but the rest looked unsettlingly familiar.
I told my story to the two scientists. Deejay listened with barely suppressed excitement. Ooloorie mostly in absorbed silence. “It grieves me to hear that Dr. Meiss is … is no longer …” struggled the porpoise. “He had an unusual mind for a landling and accomplished, by himself, much of what it took dozens to do here.”
“At least we know what happened to our Broach,” said Deejay. “If it had failed spontaneously, I’d never hear the end of it from fish-face, there.”
“If I were a pale, spiny, desiccated being, I’d insult beautiful females myself, distractable one,” Ooloorie remarked.
“Why don’t you tell me more about this Broach thing,” I interjected. “I figured it was some kind of time machine, but—”
“It is,” declared Ooloorie, “a paratronic locus, creating a permeable interface between two contiguous probability continua. Energy consumption is calcu—”
“Hold on!” I protested. “One more word and you’ll lose me. Try again, with short sentences and
no
numbers. Remember, I’m a public servant.”
“Perhaps you had better do that, Deejay. What is a public servant?”
“Tell you later, dear—a long, depressing story. Mr. Bear—Win, I suppose you could visualize the Probability Broach as a sort of time machine—”
“A sideways time machine?”
“Very good! But it’s better to think of it as a
window,
through the wall that separates two universes …”
 
PARATRONICS BEGAN AS a study of energy phenomena
not
related to the electromagnetic spectrum—at first, much like xenobiology before space travel, a discipline without subject matter. But as decades of mathematical deduction began to sire practical conclusions, it left the realm of computers and the minds of dolphins, to become an experimental science.
In 194 A.L., Paratronics, Ltd., attempting to reach beyond the limited range of ion-drive spaceships, stumbled upon the Probability Broach. Peering through a microscopic hole in the fabric of reality, they expected to view deep space from some vantage point other than their own solar system.
Instead, their first photograph showed:
NO PARKING
 
Reorienting themselves ninety degrees produced:
THE SILVER GRILL
FINE EATS SINCE 1935
 
This was not Alpha Centauri. Nor could it be the Confederacy, which hadn’t used a Christian calendar for two centuries. In fact, in all the system, only Hamiltonians disdained the calendar devised to honor Albert Gallatin.
Investigations proceeded slowly. Boring holes through reality is expensive: the university’s lights didn’t
quite
dim whenever they switched on the Broach; the comptrollers just felt that way. Even thermonuclear fusion had theoretical limits, and the Probability Broach approached them.
Microprobes went into the hole: air, soil, and a few tiny insects came back for analysis. The atmosphere on the other side was filthy with hydrocarbons and other chemicals, the water similarly dirtied. One source was quickly identified as crude internal combustion vehicles. But why didn’t anyone drag their owners into court?
In 198 A.L., Paratronics shelled out for a new reactor. Now a relatively stable hole could be punched through, and larger samples taken, but they told the same depressing story: an unknown, exclusively human, English-speaking people, wearing uniformly drab, tubular clothing, riding in poisonously primitive vehicles. A culture inexplicably bleak and impoverished.
The “portable” Broach head was achieved in 201 A.L. Now, from the deck of a medium-sized hoverfreighter, scientists could transport their point of view, explore beyond whatever happened to lie on the “other side” of their laboratory. They began modestly enough with something nearby called Al’s Newsstand—Candy, Newspapers, Tobacco. What they found there stunned them into cautiousness:
THE WORLD ALMANAC
& BOOK OF FACTS
1977
 
They deposited a half-ounce silver disk on the counter one midnight, reached with carefully sterilized tongs through the newly widened Broach, remembering the wisdom of Poor Richard before he’d gone Federalist. They learned a great deal, none of it encouraging: the Revolution; the Whiskey Rebellion;
a War of 1812?;
Mexico; and, horror of horrors, a
civil war-
three-quarters of a million dead. Financial crises alternated with war, and no one seemed to notice the pattern. World War I; the Great Depression; World War II and the atomic bomb; Korea; Vietnam. And towering above it all,
power politics:
a state growing larger, more demanding every year, swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive, swollen, crazed—staggering toward extinction.
And yet this catalog of horror admitted one tiny spark of light and hope: eleven minor but distinct references to a group whose values and goals might gratify any decent being in the North American Confederacy—the Propertarian Party.
 
“YOU SEE THEN, gentlemen, how Vaughn Meiss became the focus of our hopes and fears. I rather imagine Fort Collins newspaper editors looked forward to the way he livened up their Op-Ed sections. We obtained such publications the same way we abstracted the almanac and other documents, including street maps distributed by your Hall of Childish Tradespersons.
“That’s the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Ooloorie.” I laughed. “But I like it better your way.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bear. We had little trouble locating the author of these strangely familiar sentiments. His office number was available from a directory that we purchased at the campus bookstore.” The police had likely never heard about this mini-wave of petty thefts, accompanied as each was by an ounce of so of highly illegal but instantly negotiable silver.
“We found ourselves in a narrow channel,” the porpoise said. “It was necessary that we have cooperation: power consumption would fall ten thousandfold
if
we could establish a resonant field on the other side, essential to bring larger samples—and people—through.”
“It’s like wireless.” Deejay added. “You
can
send messages simply by beamcasting so much power that bedsprings and lighting fixtures will—”
“So I’ve heard. But if the other person had a radio receiver, you need a lot less power.”
“I’m sorry, Win. I didn’t mean to be condescending.”
“Well, what was the problem in getting cooperation from the other side?” Ed asked.
Ooloorie answered. “You see, Mr. Bear—oh dear, I believe I shall call you Ed and Win—you see, the almanac alarmed us about a number of things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the unpopularity of Propertarian anarchism, as these primitives conceive it. Most will gladly murder anyone desiring independence from a coercive state. There are worldwide organizations
dedicated
to such violence, and—”
“That’s
my
world you’re talking about! I don’t know of any such—”
“Then what did
you
do for a living?” Ed asked. “Isn’t selling marijuana acting independently of the state?”
“You know what I did, I was a cop
—am
a cop!”
“I rest my case,” Ed replied smugly. “Ooloorie’s too. And a good thing—they were—”
“‘Getting pretty heavy,”’ I answered. “Groucho Marx, 1932. Okay, so Meiss was as politically naive as the rest of you. How’d you get in touch—hold a seance?”
“It’s pronounced ‘science,’” Deejay smirked. “No, we’d learned so much from the almanac that we prepared a document rather like it, describing ourselves, our project, and culture—and popped it onto his desk one afternoon, when—”
“That was risky,” I said, thinking of the empty notebook in Meiss’s lab. “It might have fallen into the wrong hands. Why not just holler through the Broach hole? Or string a telephone line?”
“Apparently our manuscript
has
fallen into the wrong hands,” said Ooloorie. “This person Bealls you mentioned worries me. Your culture is ahead of ours only in its ability to wage nuclear war. If this SecPol … well, we’ll just have to see.”
Deejay went on. “Understand our limitations: we couldn’t open a hole bigger than three inches, and not for more than a few seconds at a time. Beyond that, things would start to blow: fuses, circuit breakers, the department’s budget—as for telephone lines, just imagine the field collapsing on an occlusion …”
“I don’t understand,” Ed said, a beat behind me.
“I’m sure you remember the explosion that got you here.”
“Things afterward, not so well perhaps,” I agreed, “but the explosion—”
“All right, now if anything protrudes through the Broach when the field collapses, well, watch this—” She extracted a breadbox-size device from under a countertop, set it on the bench, and plugged it in.
“An early experimental model?” Ed asked, conspicuously not touching.
“Goodness no! It’s a classroom demonstrator. Our first mission-dedicated generators filled three rooms. It’s warm now—watch closely, I’ll shut it off.”
POP!
A blue flash at the center of the contraption reminded me of high-school tricks with hydrogen. “What you saw,” Ooloorie lectured, “was a few air molecules interpenetrating the theoretical junction between two worlds. When the interface ceases to exist so do they—or try to.”
“And bigger machines make bigger flashes?” I asked.
“Not particularly,” Deejay answered. “In theory, the interface is two-dimensional; enlarging the area doesn’t appreciably enlarge its volume. Ordinarily, the flash is about the same unless some mass extends through the Broach—then you get a
considerably
bigger flash, believe me!”

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