2008 Mar 5
Copyright © 2007, 2008 Robert J. Chassell
“We have lost a submarine!” Henry was excited and disturbed. That carried to Laurence. He was not in his usual office. In that case, the message would have come through his wearable. He preferred text, but he knew most people were not like that. Consequently, Laurence was visiting his crew, the engineers who worked for him, and was in Henry's office. It was smaller than Laurence's and cluttered with paper, even though Henry also had a wearable and did not need paper. He was another expatriate; that is why he kept the name `Henry'. He was fat, short, bald, and a good engineer.
“What?” Laurence exclaimed. He knew that there was no `activity' at the moment.
Henry, who was acting now as a messenger, said, “We lost contact with The Belle of Valparaiso, number 17.”
Laurence responded, “That was just on a training cruise. The crew is experienced. They are repeating what they have done numerous times. There shouldn't have been any trouble.” He thought of what could go wrong and could not think of any, except for hostile interdiction. And that had not happened for years, not on training cruises. In any case, various sensors in the training area would warn him and them.
“What do the sensors say?” asked Laurence. He could check himself, but letting others do it was wiser.
“That is a problem; they all went off line, all of them, even those that almost no one knew about. Something big has happened.”
“They all went off line ... ? That suggests knowledge from the inside ... not impossible, but unlikely. We will have to tell Blimov. Fortunately, he is down here, and I am going to see him shortly.” Blimov was Laurence's boss.
It was hot outside, but dry. Laurence did not cool the air in his office; he did not turn on his air conditioning. Instead he drank lots of water. That meant that when he went outside, he did not feel any hotter. But Henry cooled his own office. Consequently, when Laurence went to his van he felt the heat. His guards had not turned on its air conditioning, since they paid attention to his normal habits. They did not know about Henry. However, the van had been under a roof, so sunshine had not fallen on it directly.
Blimov had come down close to the sea, near to Laurence. He was not in his usual place in the cooler mountains. Nonetheless, Laurence had to travel into the city from his offices by his shipyard on the harbor. None but enemies saw Blimov electronically.
Blimov enjoyed physical presence. He liked sniffing people and his size intimidated them. He came from the United States. His family migrated from Russia. Perhaps earlier his ancestors had settled as Viking conquerors. He looked like a Scandinavian prince, large and muscular. He had been fed properly as a child and played outside. His hair was light and now, in the tropics, he stayed out of the sun. He was smart.
Laurence was tall, too. He was solid as well, but he was not as big as Blimov and not as well exercised. Laurence did not look like a prince; he looked like he worked for a prince, as indeed he did. He rode to Blimov in the van. It carried three rows of seats behind the driver; Laurence sat in the first, two guards sat in the second. The third row was empty. Nobody could see the van's armour; it had been built-in. A larger engine more than compensated for the extra weight. The van was more lively than otherwise. It could go faster, too. Only bridges and roads had trouble. The vehicle was heavy.
The harbor was not as big as those of Guayaquil or Buenaventura. The city corresponded; it was smaller, too. Laurence preferred that; he was not sure he would be able to cope with a large modern city, its pollution and ugliness. He could adapt, as others had; but he was glad he did not need to.
Even though the territory had been conquered by the Spanish, not by the Portuguese, the bay had been named Bombaia, or `good bay'. The Spanish named the city identically.
Perhaps the captain who proposed the name had prayed to a Portuguese saint during the time when Portugal was ruled by the Spanish? At one point, hundreds of years ago, his sailors had brought his foundering ship into the bay.
But rather than simply `good bay', wouldn't the bay be named after the saint? The whole affair was mysterious, but Laurence did not care strongly enough to find a reasonable explanation. He had no idea of the city's original name, the name the town held before the Spanish conquest.
The city on the bay nestled between mountains and sea. Most of Bombaia, the city, was inland and on a plain. Its one hill was now a park. Only the oldest part sat by the harbor. Inland, the commercial center centered in one place. Except for a few modern sky scrapers, expensive commerce came out of fine buildings. They were not the oldest buildings, which were by the harbor, but they were not young either.
In the old days, the city had been surrounded by an area that was considered too wet and too buggy for humans. It was no good for houses. Only the very poor lived there, and they had no permanent claim, except among their equals. Now, the land was full of houses. All had been built within the last forty years. They all looked toward the sea and were expensive.
Blimov did not stay in any building constructed so recently. Instead, he had a desk in the hall of a large residence. A rich clan had built the compound years ago. It was surrounded by a wall, a thick wall. Unlike Laurence's place, guards could patrol on it and did. Also unlike Laurence's compound, a few rooms backed up on to it. Open space did not surround all the central building. The main hall looked onto an inner garden. Modern lights made it anything but gloomy, but Laurence realized that unless the original owners burnt thousands of candles, the hall would vanish in darkness during the day. `Well,' thought Laurence, `they were rich enough. Maybe they did burn candles all the time.'
It was a fortress then; it was a fortress now.
Laurence figured that a good many people would be impressed by the size of the hall and its one small desk. It did not have any paper on it. Blimov did not have an obvious computer either, whether wearable or desk. He did not keep records.
Laurence noted that only a few guards were visible. None were local. His were not either, now that he thought of it. He did not pick them; Blimov did. They looked Russian, very fit, not very tall, and not memorable. That is what Laurence noted: the guards did not have any features that would be remembered. He thought of them as being more like spies than guards. It finally occurred to him that by employing the non-memorable, Blimov could have more guards around than anyone would notice. Even though the guards recognized him, they searched thoroughly and professionally. Neither of Laurence's guards were permitted close to Blimov.
Most people approaching Blimov would be intimidated by the long walk from its entrance. Laurence wasn't. During the walk he wondered what would be Blimov's topic. He was not terrified but curious. He had news for Blimov, too.
Except that Blimov was not surprised about the loss of the submarine. This was not what Laurence expected. “It is going to a different ocean,” Blimov said. “We are going into the salvage business.”
He explained, “I did not think it would vanish as soon as it did. I expected to tell you what to expect before it went away. ... We have run into a disadvantage of giving people result-oriented orders rather than detailed instructions. In general, they will be happier. But the orders were a problem. You aren't happier.”
Blimov furrowed his brow. “I was going to warn you first. Others would learn ahead of time, too. I expected a good story. Now rumors will be all over the place. For those who took the submarine, I needed to make a better mark of the time.”
“We had good weather,” said Laurence. “They went out three days early.”
“That explains. They started their timer when they left port, as I instructed. But the others either were waiting for a different date or like you, had not yet been informed. Things go wrong.” Blimov moved his mouth to the right, and looked as if he was spitting.
“Couldn't we announce publicly that we are going into salvage?” asked Laurence. “Salvage is legitimate, especially when we avoid famous and historical ships.”
“Officially, no one knows we build submarines. Officially, you do not exist. That is why we cannot announce it,” said Blimov.
“Oh,” said Laurence, “I had forgot that.”
“No problem. After all, you know you exist. Meanwhile, I called you here for a different purpose. I am going to increase your budget dramatically.” Blimov smiled. Laurence tensed. He expected to do more.
Blimov continued quickly. “For the salvage subs, we are going to need high resolution acoustic sensors. That way the operators will be able can see in murk as well as they can on land. But the acoustics cannot make much noise. What the submarines make, if any, needs to be like other ocean noises. No one should be able to detect them.”
He paused for a second and Laurence said, “That will not be difficult at all. Indeed, existing submarines already have devices that make use of the faint background noise of waves. The oceans are pervaded with faint noises. We just have to increase the sensors resolution. That can be done by spending more money and installing more or fancier sensors.”
Blimov nodded and said, “Also, of course, the submarines will need manipulators, arms, so the operators will have something to operate. We will also need scoops, holds, and such. Just as you say, we are not going to salvage old or famous vessels. Instead we will stick to known sinkings with solid stuff on board.” Laurence found himself nodding like Blimov.
Then he thought more and said to Blimov, “Wait a minute ... won't our manipulators make it possible for a nation to plant a heavy, inefficient, first generation nuclear bomb in a harbor? That bomb could generate a wave like the Bikini test of 1946. Such a submarine is more likely to be stolen.”
He went on, “Obviously, no one can get into a much-used harbor or a first world port. We have enough trouble just creeping up to the shore. American ports are impossible. Indeed, since it is easy to detect radiation, first world countries have sensors at border crossing and at the entrances to their major cities, too.
“A poison chemical, a toxin, is heavier than a primitive bomb. One submarine would not do any good. A self-replicating pathogen, a bug, is easy to distribute. You don't need a submarine, just one human. If they are vaccinated so much the better.”
“... or think they are vaccinated,” said Blimov.
“But I doubt we will see a pathogen,” continued Laurence. “Those who could release one know it might come back and kill them. Pathogens mutate; even a sensible defense might fail. Besides, neither poison chemicals or bio-weapons offer the same boom and flash as a nuclear bomb. Generals don't like chemical or biological weapons. They cannot as believably be used in an attack or in a threat.
“But a sub could get into a port in an undeveloped country. I am thinking of a submarine because first generation bombs are always big and heavy. They are too big for rockets. But they require only 1940s technology.
“Even stolen bombs — they won't work as-is because of locks. But just about anyone can build explosive lenses around a core. It just takes longer to design than a gun. The Nagasaki bomb was at the center of an implosion; it depended on plutonium. The Hiroshima bomb brought its components together through a previously untested gun, untested atomically. It depended on uranium.
“Maybe a modern bomb will not have enough fissile material in it for a crude implosion. Certainly, a modern bomb will have enough plutonium in the nuclear alloy so that a gun won't work.” He explained parenthetically, “(A gun brings two slugs of uranium together slower than an implosion compresses plutonium; that is why any bomb with plutonium in it requires an implosion.)”
Blimov did not know about the differences between uranium and plutonium, but he did gather that the technology for an implosion was really old. Explosive lenses could be designed more cheaply now. Any technically competent group could do it. That is what the disarmament people said. They wanted to control what could be controlled, the fissile material.
Laurence presumed that Blimov knew more than he did and went on, “Even if the explosion produces a fizzle, the bomb will be dirty, it will release radioactivity. Wind blowing over the city — that requires a decent weather report ... most likely the wind will blow inland during the afternoon on a sunny day when the land is warmer than the water.”
Blimov listened patiently. He had not himself thought of becoming a nuclear weapons' power. He could steal existing bombs. Even if they could not be used as-is, he was confident that Laurence could design explosive lenses for the material. He only needed one bomb.
It would serve to deter nuclear attacks against him. Except he did not need that kind of deterrence. And he did not care about the flash and the boom. He was concerned with assassination plots. As a practical matter, he did not think of what he was doing as war; he was not trying to take over a country.
“I am not going to sell any submarines to anyone,” said Blimov to Laurence. “We will have to make sure that submarines with manipulators cannot be stolen. That should not be hard.
“About two-thirds of a crew would need to be bribed. The crew are paid enough now and since we would attempt to assassinate those who betray us, individual bribes would have to be large. Over all, it would cost a fortune. So we do not have to worry about an inside job.
“Meanwhile, to my main topic. It is getting harder and harder for us to get the special steel plates you need,” he said. “The plates are big. That makes them visible. It is not impossible for us to move them, but it is easier to acquire sensors, processing units, and small motors.
“Also, for the salvaging, we will need to go deeper. That means thicker steel.”
Blimov paused for a moment. His eyes flashed. “What I would like you to do is find an alternative source of steel. We have the iron ore. We need to make steel plates from it. That will be harder than creating salvage subs. The salvage subs are almost irrelevant, except we are going into salvage. There is good money there.”
He grinned. “I am sure you can produce steel. I will pay. That is your big increase in budget. It will take several years, but after that, it will become cheaper and much easier for us to provide our own.”
“That presumes I am successful,” said Laurence.
“I know you have the skill,” said Blimov. “I would not employ you otherwise. You will need to separate iron ore from sand. The mix is not far away; it is in dunes or what were dunes before grass grew on them. There is tens of thousands of times as much ore as you need. Even so, this is not a huge deposit. That's why no one has seized upon it before.”
Laurence looked amazed; Blimov almost laughed. “A very long time ago, miners separated magnetite from beach sand. However, storms can move it away. That happened to Thomas Edison. I don't expect any of that kind of storm here. Edison was burnt, but he liked working with magnetite. So he went beyond beach sand. He focused on other, inland sources of iron ore, all containing magnetite. He ground up rocks — more cheaply than previous ways — and got rid of most of the junk, keeping only the ore. You won't have to do that. The dross will be sand.
“In any case, Edison succeeded technically. He was a wonderful engineer. However, he failed commercially, but not, as far as I can figure out, because of his own machinations. Or least not much. You do not have to worry about commerce, just the engineering. You are not as much a genius as Edison, but I know you can do it. I know you can.”
Blimov surprised Laurence by driving him down to a beach south of the harbor. That is to say, Laurence rode with Blimov in his convoy.
Blimov traveled in what appeared to be an old fashioned, large American car. It was one of three, all of which drove along together. Blimov flipped a coin multiple times to decide which to enter. When the fourth option came up, he ignored it and simply flipped again. Laurence did not see the point of that; after all, he flipped one and then again. If heads stood for `first' and tails for `rest' then two flips could choose among three vehicles. He thought that Blimov must be thinking of the total produced by two flips, a binary number of four, even though he only had three vehicles. But then it occurred to Laurence that Blimov's technique ensured an equal chance to ride in each car; Laurence' technique favored the first car. Or would Blimov's technique favor the last car? Laurence realized he no longer could do simple probability calculations in his head and Blimov's guards had taken his wearable computer.
Like Laurence's van, the cars were armoured but the armour was invisible. The guards traveled separately in several vans. The convoy consisted of six vehicles. A seventh followed; that was Laurence's van. Moving Blimov was expensive.
After they stopped, Laurence saw that the beach-front land was hilly, not wet. It was empty. He wondered about that. No houses. And it was not far from the city.
The dunes near the ocean were pure sand and moved in the wind. Farther inland, they were covered and held in place by a thin grassy cover. The short, steep hills looked like frozen waves.
On the beach, a couple of Blimov's guards stood close; Laurence figured they were also trained as medics; the other guards were farther away. Laurence himself only had his two, both of which nodded at Blimov's and both of which stayed or were kept a long distance away.
“Look,” Blimov said; he waved a magnet he was carrying and pulled it through the sand — Laurence had never seen Blimov do that before — “we can pick up grains of magnetite in this sand.” That was true. There were not many, but some stuck on the magnet. Blimov was pushing hard. Or maybe he was apologizing for his screw up with the vanishing submarine. But then Blimov would not have had a magnet with him. Laurence would accept the apology anyhow, even if it was not said. He knew that even though many operations were delayed, occasionally things went faster than expected. He smiled to himself. `Now Blimov will know, too,' he thought.
Blimov turned and looked towards the grassy hills. Laurence could not but think they would have made good sites for houses. But they were none. “We will have worse rain and worse drought. Drought will likely kill the grass, so strip mining won't matter.”
Blimov said that and then he laughed, as if he were catching the emotion from Laurence, “You are wondering why there are no houses. One reason is that I control the land; by keeping it off the market, my other property is worth more. A second is that the grass will soon die unless we provide irrigation for it. Droughts are becoming fiercer. Naturally, owners would end up watering lawns close by, but further away? I would have to water that.
“The main issue is separating the sand from the ore; I am sure you can do the rest.” He was repeating himself, Laurence noted, but still it was comforting to hear that, even though `the rest' was harder than separating the sand from the ore. Blimov slapped Laurence on the back. “You have the funding. Go to it!”
So Blimov controlled the dunes. Laurence had not known that before. But mining, and even more so, separation would take a good deal of energy. He had heard of `black sands', sands with enough magnetite in them to change their color. This did not look different than regular sand. That meant a huge amount of sand hid a very little iron ore. He doubted it was a good deposit.
Laurence had no idea where Blimov had learned of the iron in the sand; he decided not to find out. He was not put off because he thought the action was dangerous, although it was. He thought it was irrelevant. On the other hand, he felt he understood why Blimov knew a little more technical history than expected; he had probably read a biography of Edison at some point and remembered. That was a characteristic of Blimov, he never forgot. Not that the technical history was relevant.
On the other hand, Blimov only focused on the iron ore. Laurence knew he had much more to do. He not only had to refine the ore, he had to alloy and temper the result, and manufacture a host of items. It was not going to be easy. Still, with droplets sprayed from special nozzles based on inkjet technology, with the right control codes, which he did not have to develop — that was key, neither he nor his men had to invent either the hardware or the software — with the right inputs, and with enough energy, manufacturing would be possible. The hard part would be getting the right inputs in the first place.
Given the right software, the right control codes, the rest would be straight organization, more or less. Laurence laughed to himself. He would have others work on necessary but distant preconditions, what on the face of them were irrelevant. Among software developers such actions were sometimes called `yak shaving'. It was “what you are doing when you are doing tasks that bear no obvious relationship to what you are supposed to be doing.” He could remember the whole definition, even though it was long. It was intended for a single person.
Clearly, software developers did not fit into large organizations in which other people did other jobs, or at least did not when the term was first invented. Each person did everything ... `highly inefficient,' thought Laurence, `unless those people could not successfully communicate partly-thought ideas to others. Or maybe they were powerless.' In most engineering, people put together already known components, perhaps in new combinations. They fought complexity. However, some invention was truly original. Laurence wondered whether the term had been invented by a person inventing an original.
Laurence thought of sea water. He was on a beach. The ocean lapped at his feet. He did not want to separate iron ore particles from the sand particles and refine them. That would be hard. With iron dissolved in ocean water, part of the job would already be done.
Blimov's guards had given back his wearable after keeping it while he was close to their boss. Moreover, even on the beach, the wearable connected to the world. Laurence looked up sea water and discovered that he would have to go through tens of thousands of cubic kilometers to get the iron he needed for just one submarine. That was too much. Blimov's idea made more sense.
Magnesium was in sea water. It was sixty times more common than iron. He might need it for wiring, for generators or motors. It had two and a half times the electrical resistivity of copper. That was worse than copper, but he could not produce any copper readily. Magnesium was not as bad as iron which had six times as much electrical resistivity as copper.
He was not sure whether he would be stopped by the extra heat produced by extra resistance. Would iron wires carry enough permanent magnetism to be a problem? Maybe not. Either way, with iron or magnesium his motors and generators would be less efficient than those with copper.
He could manufacture electrical insulation from the organic material on the hills and in the sea. Again, that would be expensive and take a huge amount of energy.
But if no human produced the insulation or the wiring ... ?
The only solution was to build a fast replicator, a fast mechanical replicator. The first copy would cost a huge amount, but Blimov would pay. The second and subsequent copies would cost less, the amount depending on how much he had to import to complete the machines. They would be von Neumann replicators.
Von Neumann replicators had been built since the turn of the millennium, but as far as Laurence knew, none had constructed themselves from scratch. The humanly manufactured replicators were not like bacteria, which took molecules and a source of energy and produced more bacteria.
`Well,' Laurence thought, `bacteria have to be in a certain place. They work only with certain molecules. My von Neumann machines will be like that, but much bigger.' (He knew that a few people still referred to a machine employing von Neumann's computer architecture, combining data and instructions, as a von Neumann machine, but he didn't. He called it a computer using von Neumann architecture.) `My von Neumann machines will be much slower to replicate than a bacterium, but much faster than regular human factories. They will have to be faster, otherwise we would waste fewer resources investing in regular machines.' Gloom passed over Laurence's face. `We cannot do what Blimov wants with regular machines. We have to construct a replicator.'
Laurence was not confident that he could build a replicator, but he pressed his thoughts on. `My von Neumann machines will not work with molecules or atoms.' He repeated that to himself. `They will work with particles we think of as little but which are thousands of times larger than molecules and atoms. That is the size of droplets that will get sprayed. Spray droplet technology, that is what reduces the cost to an amount Blimov can afford.' He began to feel better. `Maybe,' he thought to himself, `the project is doable.'
Laurence never expected to be a pioneer. He did not think of himself as a pioneer, even though no one had previously made von Neumann machines like he was planning.
It was, he decided, `A more challenging task than before.' Fortunately, he knew, the time was right. Most of the software existed. It had been debugged. Spray droplet machines were developed and reliable.
Von Neumann himself had invented his notion in the 1950s. He was a genius. Laurence knew himself to be a bright engineer. But he lived generations later. He was not planning to follow footsteps exactly, but he was not entering unmapped territory either. The genius and the previous developers had mapped the land. He was going into a new place, but it was not new to everyone.
Most importantly, he had funding.
A beautiful woman peered at Peter over a wine glass. She looked as if she approved of him. She asked, “How is your name spelled?”
“g e l m u n d, Peter Gelmund.” Peter smiled. “My last name has no d j sound at the beginning. The sound is a hard, like the g in `good.' ”
“You have a good name; are you a good man?”
Peter looked at the woman's left hand. She did not have a wedding ring. He looked at her. She was a little shorter than he, younger, and well dressed. “I am afraid so,” he said, “although you are very attractive. What is your name?”
She grinned. “My name is Elizabeth Scattlewaithe. You only have the single l to cause confusion. My names are much worse. They not only have l sounds, they also have th sounds that much of the world cannot pronounce. What do you do for a living?”
“I sell books,” Peter said. “Not in a bookstore, I am not that kind of book seller. I am more a dealer — not in really rare books. Rather, I am a moderately rare books dealer. But that is not why I am here.” He looked around at the political crowd. “I am here because this is the most realistic of the various political groupings in the United States. Many are totally out of touch.”
“I would not expect to see a self-employed businessman here,” said Elizabeth. “That is what you are, right?”
“Yes, I am. But I also have children and care for them. I want them to live as well as I do and have children themselves. Business discount rates must be different from social discount rates.” Peter did not notice that he was going away from small talk to what he considered important. “Essentially, businesses can fail quickly. Certainly, I can. Businesses should pay for what they borrow. Bad businesses should vanish. Of course, I hope not to fail. I haven't in twenty years. I think of myself as running a good business that ought to succeed.”
She nodded but did not say anything. He warmed to her presence.
“On the other hand,” Peter continued speaking, “society lasts or should last for a very long time. It should keep on much longer than you or me. What society requires must be sustainable — I don't mean it should sustain a specific farm, I mean it should have the ability to grow food. Food requires soil that can be farmed for thousands of years, not soil that becomes a little thinner every decade, not soil that can be restored or improved by fertilizers for a century, but which won't last a millennium. That is where our social focus ought to be. The farm's business should have a high interest rate; the farm's soil requires a zero interest rate.”
“That makes sense ...” Elizabeth began to speak. At that point Peter's wife, Abigail, came up. He introduced her. She was not a classic beauty like Elizabeth, but looked good to Peter.
“Your husband is loyal to you,” Elizabeth said. “I asked whether he was a good man and he said `yes.' I don't like to wear dowdy clothes and men tend to come up on me. So I try to get that issue out of the way as soon as possible. He also explained some of his politics — his conception of interest rates.”
Abigail looked carefully at the two and said, “Then I will leave you. What Peter says is strange; it sounds abstract when you first hear it. But it is important. I have heard him so many times, I do not want to listen again.” She turned away, her long, pleated dress swirling out.
Elizabeth looked after her, almost wistfully. “She's a good woman. No wonder you are loyal.” She turned to Peter. “Tell me more about interest rates. It is not like the politics I hear every day, about killing an enemy, that is to say, about winning a vote one way or the other.”
Peter complied. He liked the presence of a beautiful woman who would listen to him. He thought, `Other than changing the world, what more could I want?'
“Businesses need to worry about competition, about their use of technology, about resources,” he said. “That is why they need a high discount, a positive rate of interest. We don't know what is best, so the only possibility is to experiment ... and to prune away the failures.
“On the other hand, we are living on a spaceship, a very big spaceship. Most people don't recognize it as a spaceship, but it is.” He saw that Elizabeth was not following him. “I mean the world,” he said, “the planet. It is very, very big. But our abilities have grown big, too. The planet is like a spaceship; it is a ball. We have to take care of it.”
Elizabeth nodded.
“We only die once. I know, many people do not believe that. But it is true. And that truth applies both to us as individuals and to all of us, to the species.”
“The universe does not owe us a living,” Elizabeth said.
“No, it doesn't,” said Peter. “But many people act as if they believe that the planet owes the species a living. In fact, species are as irrelevant to it as anything else. The planet does not have a goal. It is not like a human.”
“What about Gaia?” asked Elizabeth. “The planet's temperature has stayed roughly the same for millions of years.”
“Feedback loops: the major inorganic feedback loop has two parts. The first consists of volcanos putting carbon dioxide into the air, which increases temperature, on average, so there is more weathering. The second consists of weathered rocks. Weathering takes carbon dioxide out of the air. That reduces temperature. Higher temperature means more weathering, which means more carbon dioxide is removed from the air. That decreases temperature and the amount of weathering goes down. Over hundreds of millions of years, the weathered rock dives underground with the movement of tectonic plates, the rock is converted by heat and pressure, and its carbon dioxide is released again by volcanos. That is the inorganic feedback loop.
“Organic feedback loops do the same, roughly speaking. Over millions of years they more or less stabilize temperature. It is not really that different from the feedback loop in your house, with a thermostat controlling a furnace or air conditioner. Except a house changes rapidly and a planet does not, not in human terms.”
“I think I understand,” said Elizabeth. “Both the planet and the house depend on a finite energy source, the sun in the case of the planet, the fuel tank in the case of the house, but both sources of energy last a long time compared to the time in which the feedback loops operate. The feedback loops for the planet take so much longer than humans live that mostly we don't see them.”
Peter nodded. He was not sure whether she knew about feedback loops. If not, she was smart to understand timescales. If she had learned about feedback loops and time, she had a good memory.
Elizabeth went on, “You are arguing that the way for humans to manage the planet is to adopt zero interest rates for what is relevant to it. That means selecting. It means selecting correctly. Otherwise, you just end up providing welfare for those who do not deserve it, a waste of other resources.”
“That's right,” said Peter.
“What about third world farmers burning forests to grow food? I am not talking about rich owners burning forests and maybe the peat below them to create plantations, although that happens. I am thinking about essentially innocent people doing what they must.”
“Remote sensing,” said Peter. “Satellites. They permit you to see everything. Computers put the information all together without requiring more people than we have.”
“That is the punishment and restrictions part,” said Elizabeth. “If you don't believe that foreigners are as good as you, or if you do, but think in terms of winning and losing, like our political races and you want to win, then you want to restrict others. I know, most political districts are gerrymandered so the incumbent wins. But that is neither here nor there. Your talk about remote sensing suggests that you want foreigners to die.”
“I don't want them to die,” said Peter. “Good guys should be rewarded; only bad guys punished. That is why I am here, not at a different political meeting.”
He went on, “I do believe that foreigners are as good as we, on average. Some are better, some are worse.” He tipped his head left and right as he said that. “We can try to steal from them. That is a restriction. If we succeed, and I suspect we would, loot provides wealth for a short time. But theft provokes counter-reactions. I am not sure we can survive those.”
He became grim. “In any case, stealing does not solve the problem permanently. Perhaps it would solve it during my children's lives, my grand-children's lives. But what about their children? Also, I don't want to be part of a civilization that depends on theft. I don't want to be a crook.”
Elizabeth looked curious. “I know,” said Peter, “I am the descendant of Europeans who had a higher technology and more deadly germs than the natives. We took their land. That is theft. Even when the natives did not perceive resources, we stole. I don't want to repeat that. I don't want my children to become warriors. It is a dishonorable occupation. Doubtless, that is why we praise it so highly.”
Elizabeth knew quite a bit; she also realized that Peter enjoyed a good debate. “If you think in terms of winning and losing, then warriors make sense. They will tell you it is better to be a live rat than a dead turkey, that eagles can't fly unless they have food to prey upon.”
Peter responded immediately, “You will notice that the eagle example depends for its force on people paying attention only to parts of ecology? Eagles do not kill all their prey. After consuming all their prey, they would not have anything left to eat. They would die. Lions don't kill all their prey either. Lions are another animal on the top of its food chain.”
“That's true,” said Elizabeth, “Can they kill all their prey?” “We humans can,” said Peter.
Elizabeth was continuing her train of thought. “Animals survive which don't destroy their sustenance. However, so long as they live, by which I mean, those animals and plants which can destroy their sustenance, but haven't yet — those sustenance destroyers may well overcome others, who we think of as `good guys.' Among animals and plants, those that don't destroy their sustenance must be protected from being killed by those who do.”
“One way to avoid being killed is through separation,” said Peter. “We know that is possible because that is one of the ways in which a new species splits off from an old species. I think the jargon phrase is `geographic speciation.' A previously single species is split into two parts by a desert, mountain range, or ocean. Members of the species are separated. The second group may not be very big; only a few lions may cross a desert or cling to a log that floats across a strait. But if there are enough to prevent disastrous inbreeding, you may get a new species. The first group can kill off all the animals on which they prey and then die themselves. Eventually, enough prey and enough of the second group's lions will fill in the region left empty by the first group.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, “good point; doubtless that happened. There was enough time. But what is relevant to modern humans?”
Peter answered, “Do you remember the old phrase, `Cleanliness is next to Godliness?' There is truth in it. Increased cleanliness meant fewer illnesses and longer lives. Put another way,” he said, “a species that fouls its nest or destroys everything it eats, that species will not survive.
“On the other hand, resilience helps. You don't want too much cleanliness. Rats did better than wild turkeys, because rats could eat different foods readily, even dirty foods. After they nearly went extinct” — “Shot by us,” said Elizabeth; Peter nodded — “wild turkeys had to be brought up and released by humans. We, that is to say, some of us, paid for by the rest, had to care for dumb birds.
“Worse,” Peter said, “we humans can no longer be divided into separate parts; anywhere humans have gone, we can go. And, in any case, we don't have time for speciation. The time left is not as short as many prefer to perceive, but it is not hundreds or thousands of generations either. So for success, we either have to cut back or change our technology.
“Unfortunately, not everyone wants to change technology. They prefer that others die or cut back so long as they feel better off. That implies a world of zero or negative sums, a world of winning and losing, a world of war. I don't seek that kind of civilization. We may get it, but that is not my goal.”
“That is why I haven't had children,” said Elizabeth.
Peter digested her remark; he wondered whether she was that pessimistic or whether it was an excuse. But he put the question aside as she said,
“When you benefit whether or not you contribute, then you are better off when you avoid contributing. You get the benefits without the contribution. Unfortunately, after numerous generations, everyone will learn not to contribute. People will know not to contribute either because of genes or because of upbringing. Then nobody will contribute and everyone will lose.
“Think of a corporation. They have many good features as well as bad. Originally, they existed to pull together resources.”
“Originally, the word had to do with a single person's body.” said Peter.
“Yes, I know, but I am thinking of the period when many people came together to create a collegium or legal corporation. People could cooperate with each other more readily than they could before. Presume that some people pretend to contribute but do not. They benefit anyhow.”
“Don't you think of corporations as entities that transfer resources from those who work to those who don't?” asked Peter.
“In part they do,” said Elizabeth, “I am not challenging that. What I am trying to say is that you can prevent people from pretending to contribute by catching and punishing them. However, that is costly.”
“That is obvious to a four year old,” said Peter.
“Yes and no. Yes, you can stop people from doing bad by catching and punishing them. That is obvious. No, few four year olds, I don't know of any,” she smiled, “know the relationship between that and a non-excludable public resource, like climate.
“I am concerned with the conditions under which punishment evolved.”
“Some people like punishing,” said Peter.
“They may look as if they like it. Indeed, individually, many do. But from the point of view of a group or team, those people could spend more time helping the good guys. Their actions may help over all, but it is a cost.”
“So you are saying,” said Peter, “that in the best of worlds, punishment is a waste, but without it, your railroad has too many free riders and you go bankrupt.”
“Right,” said Elizabeth. She then asked, “How did punishing begin? I mean punishing for the benefit of everyone. At the beginning, punishment means a loss of benefit, because it means one less hand helping. Only when three conditions are met do we see more and more of those who are willing to punish free riders.
“The first is that people can choose to avoid contributing. In that sense, they are same as free riders. Hardly anybody expects choice to have such an influence but it does.
“The second is that when people avoid contributing, they do not get any benefits either. Cooperators benefit.
“The third is that successful pretenders, successful free riders, gain.
“There are many situations where you cannot exclude people. Climate change is an example. You cannot prevent people from suffering or enjoying a climate. So the third condition is nebulous.”
“Some regions will suffer more and some will enjoy more,” said Peter.
“That is true,” said Elizabeth, “and that causes trouble. For example, think of a town. I imagine a town in the Middle Ages or before. It has a wall around it. Attackers want to kill the men, rape the women, sell the children, and loot the place. When that town is successfully defended, then benefits come to everyone who lives in it, regardless whether they help or not. Those who did not help benefit just like those who defended the place. Unless, of course, those who don't help are punished. Then they don't benefit as much.
“As for the beginning of punishment, I imagine a band of proto-hominids, not yet speaking, gathering fruits and vegetables, hunting, scavenging. Pretend you are one of them. Suppose you see that those who help gather food or hunt or scavenge are hurt by those who do not. Suppose you see that under those circumstances, eventually everyone loses. In that case, you are better off being alone. You don't gain, you don't lose. That satisfies the first condition, which is that people can choose to avoid contributing.
“But gains come to those who cooperate with others. That is the second condition, those who do not help also do not gain.
“For example, those who cooperate can build bigger irrigation systems than those who act alone. Jump ahead to speaking humans, modern in their minds, although irrigation started thousands of years ago, long before contemporary industry. People can cooperate to build canals. With them, they can trade more. After the industrial revolution, people cooperated to build railroads. They did that mostly in corporations. We think of drones and the rest who transferred resources from the poor to themselves, but there was a good amount of building, too. It was not all theft.”
“Nowadays,” said Peter, “our abilities have grown big. That is what I mean when I said that our planet is a spaceship. A corporation, or a bunch of corporation can do something that would not matter if it were small. It was not until 2,500 years ago that we heard complaints about lack of trees. You can use wood for heat, for repairing and building houses, or for opening up farmland.”
“2,500 years ago, technology was pretty primitive,” said Elizabeth.
“It was not as primitive as it was 3,500 or 4,500 years ago. There were more people 2,500 years ago, too, compared to the time a thousand or two thousand years before. There were not as many as there are now, not by a large factor. If they did have a global impact, it was small and mostly harmless. Nonetheless, they certainly deforested some areas quite effectively and made existence miserable for their successors.
“But the point I am trying to make is that when you don't cut down many trees, the cutting you do does not matter. Globally, it did not much matter that people cut trees around the Mediterranean Sea. It mattered only to the descendants of those people.
“Now we have too much ability. In the northeastern part of the United States, trees are growing back because they are not needed so much for charcoal to make iron or for lumber; that satisfies everyone who is there. Unfortunately, in the rest of the world, forests are vanishing.”
“That is true,” said Elizabeth. The phrase was almost a refrain of hers, Peter noticed. Then she would say something to contradict him.
“— unless they are stopped. That is happening more and more. But I am trying to reach the beginnings of this all, not the end.
“Consider the beginnings. If some cooperators, for whatever reason, also punish free riders, it makes sense for the free riders either to stop pretending to help, to shift to helping, or to figure out a more convincing pretense. The latter is hard. Not many succeed in fooling enough people, although a few do. So the best action for most erstwhile free riders is to stop pretending and actually to help.
“But when you deal with a situation where you cannot exclude people, then you have a problem. Or you might have a problem. Those who cannot think cannot punish free riders. Fortunately, people can think as well as act. In Medieval times, authorities in a besieged city could locate almost everyone. Nowadays, we have satellites. Free riders are punished.
“You, Peter, are not at the beginning of all this. You are closer to an end. You are trying to change the policies of already thinking people. That is why what you say is so important.”
“Thank you,” said Peter. Then he asked, “Are our desires for children, our love of them, a necessity for any species? Do our desires come before language?”
“They must,” said Elizabeth, “since without them a species dies.”
“In a species with speech and tools, do the other ways of passing on become important?”
Elizabeth looked puzzled do Peter answered himself.
“Children are not the only way,” Peter said. “You can pass on ideas. You can pass on works. Or your culture can do the job for you.”
“Cultures die,” said Elizabeth.
“Yes,” said Peter gloomily, “and people are very much afraid of that.”
He paused for a moment. “It is a good idea not to have children. I do not come from a family that should say this; we have many kids. Yet one of the ways to reduce impact is to reduce numbers, especially the numbers of those who produce lots of deleterious impacts. Of course, population reduction means a smaller economy. It means less optimism. It is not a happy state.
“But people will die regardless, benignly or painfully.” He went on, “Our planet, our spaceship, cannot carry such a huge load, not forever. I hope our planet can carry the load for the next seven generations. Then we can reduce our impact more or less benignly.”
“So you are arguing that we have to do more than have zero interest rates?” asked Elizabeth.
“Oh, yes,” said Peter. “That is only one part. We should reduce population voluntarily. People will not perceive a population drop in other groups as a personal cut back or as unwanted death. But if a reduction is involuntary, the people involved will fight back. They can do so much more effectively than in centuries past.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.
“We are more interdependent and less resilient than we were. A simple pen does not simply require the feather of a goose belonging to you or your neighbor; now the ball comes from one place, the barrel from another. And I am not thinking of the ink supply. You cannot make modern ink from the oil of nuts you gather nearby and from the soot of your night light.”
Peter shook his head. “In the past, more was local. People were less interdependent and more resilient. But we cannot return to the past, except in dreams. For one, we have used the resources. We can return or regain some resources and have less consequence on the rest by reducing population. That is one proposal; it is not the only one.
“Unfortunately, a smaller population causes businesses to have a smaller market. They sell less. They don't like that proposal. We will have to reduce pessimism and compensate. To have less of an impact on the ecology, we need to change the way we think. That is the only way I know to change the way we act and be successful. In particular, we cannot afford to think of ourselves as getting poorer. People try to avoid poverty.”
He nearly laughed. “Electronic interchanges help; they have less impact than face to face meetings; I am speaking of meetings in which one or the other comes a long distance. But many people do not like them.
“We need new dreams, practical dreams. They should be exported. That way we can help others become richer without fearing that they will make the same dreadful impact we did.”
He nodded. “We should help others. But the world cannot duplicate the United States. We have to pick and choose and change. That means politics — not only the politics of elections, but the politics of ideas, the politics of their enactment, the politics of success.
“Faulty visions of the world, a mis-sense that excludes the positive, minds that imagine only zero or negative sum struggles, a false belief that the world or whoever rules it has goals, partial renditions of ecology — all these kill you and me.”
“I could link you to Senator Jelder,” said Elizabeth. “He is not a good man, but he is not very bad. I think of him as both fun and funny. Do write what you want to say. He will read it. He will not listen to you speak; he will talk and talk and talk.”
She smiled, which made Peter's heart flutter, but then brought him to earth. “The senator's bad habit must be a domination issue. He listens when he meets with another senator or with a major contributor. You are not. You can tell when the senator thinks he is in the presence of person who is not quite up to him, but he has to listen — then he fidgets. He is totally quiet and speaks relevantly when he decides the other is an equal.
“You won't be an equal, not in his terms, which have to do with power and money. So he will talk. On the other hand, he will read what you write. And he will think about it. That is better than most. It is a wonderful virtue. During his talk, he will explain what he intends to do. That is valuable to find out.”
She grinned. “But he will talk your ear off. However, it won't be for long, and you can endure it. And the meeting will ensure that he reads what you write.”
After they went home, Abigail Gelmund looked at Peter in their kitchen. “That Elizabeth is unfortunate,” she said. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“She is too beautiful. Men want her; women feel jealous. And it comes from her looks, from her birth, not from anything she did. You like being in her presence. She is a good listener, so you can show off, be a peacock. She may even be intelligent and able to make smart remarks on what you say.”
“She is intelligent,” said Peter. “I am not criticising you,” said Abigail. “You are a good man. And she is a pleasure. Still, it is better to look reasonably good and have to work rather than look too good and have to fend off too many men.”
Abigail paused and then said, “The problem affects only a few. Most women know they are not that attractive; I suspect that is why so many dress in ugly clothes — it is a way of saying they are not a part of that world. And most are not. But just about everyone wants to look highly attractive.”
“She is Senator Jelder's mistress,” said Peter. “That makes sense,” said Abigail. “His wife is a political woman through and through. She knows where a good part of his support comes from. She is not going to complain. Big contributors are not going to give him less money because they know he has both a mistress and a wife. As for the rest, your vote does not count.”
“That is true,” said Peter.
“There is an old saying,” said Abigail, “ `hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.' But the senator does not scorn his wife, not from what I have heard. From her point of view, Elizabeth is not a threat. When you think about it, that is not a good situation for Elizabeth. She is a mistress, not a wife. Over the long run, she won't have as much influence. And she is not independent; she is not like many men and many women.”
“I see,” said Peter.
“In particular, in the past, women were not independent. Pre-industrial technologies favored big muscles. Ever since the last ice age, and maybe before, women were limited. Modern technology and modern law enables us to act more independently than before.”
“What do you mean, `modern technology', what do you mean when you say that?” asked Peter.
“I mean the `great equalizer' of the 19th century, the Colt revolver — I mean all those unpleasant technologies that are mostly used in violence of men on men, but which were also used to keep women down. Now it is harder. You, that is to say thugs, are more likely to get killed. Also, we are more educated than we were, or many women are. We are not forced into kitchen, church, and field as we were. We only go into them by choice. Choice makes a big difference.
“But a woman like Elizabeth does not have that much choice. She is too beautiful. She is forced either to become a celebrity or become a mistress. She may be intelligent, she may know a lot, but what really are her choices?”
Peter smiled and shook his head.
“As I said, few women have that problem.” Abigail continued to speak. “But those who do are slaves as much as modern kings. Everyone wants to suffer like that. It is a failure that what we most want becomes a prison for those who are born to it.”
“You can develop a strange interest,” said Peter. “Didn't a Japanese Emperor focus on some marine invertebrate?”
“A few will always be different. They can escape. With the right talent, a beautiful woman can become a mathematician. But the rest are trapped. And the rest of us want what they have. We want to be born to beauty or to riches and deference.”
She paused for a moment. “Beauty, of course, is a characteristic of your mother's and grandmother's health, pre-natal care, diet and circumstances while growing up. They are necessary. Good genes cannot compensate for a poor diet. Beauty requires a stable society. So do riches and deference. Still, the immediate desire is what is called `good birth.' Elizabeth was born beautiful. But she is going to have a hard time passing that on.”
“Perhaps that is why she looked at you wistfully,” said Peter.
Abigail nodded.
When he got home, Laurence found a new bill with a higher price for water. He paused. He did not think the increase was all due to the monopoly that owned the water company or to increases in theft, which higher prices pushed. He could not steal water; he lived in too well known an address. He did not regret that; he did regret that others could steal. Without price and other controls no one could ration a limited resource. In addition to paying bribes, many escaped tracking. They did not own registered houses. They lived in a traditional, not a bureaucratic world. Every dog knew boundaries; bureaucrats did not. Nowadays, advances in technology reduced theft but never as much as promised by those who sold advanced technology.
Local water came from high mountain glaciers. Glaciers near the equator; they were not odd when you considered the heights of the mountains. Glaciers were the prime source for what Laurence drank. Moreover, the water fed much of the food grown locally; it irrigated rich people's lawns. Because of climate change, those glaciers were vanishing. Aquifers were vanishing, too; they were being pumped dry. But his water did not depend on aquifers, it depended on glaciers. Even the rivers depended on them. Rain on the lowlands was not enough. Only that which was high fell on the mountains as snow. There it stayed through the dry season and fed glaciers.
An inefficient, poorly run, monopolistic water company with a corrupt customer base — that made it worse.
The house took a large staff even though Laurence was the only person for it. Not only did he need full time guards, he needed cooks to feed them and him; he needed cleaners and the rest. It was an old, single storey house. He did not know why it had only one storey; in the novels he had read, the houses always had two. But then, none of the novels were set in this region. In any case, the servants' quarters were large enough to sleep everyone.
His chief guard liked the wall around it, and the space between the wall and the house. At one point, the yard grew big enough so that not only could Laurence enter the van but a helicopter could land there.
Laurence did not have a view of other houses, no one did. However, from his bedroom he could see the brighter stars, even though he was in a city. And from the spot in the outer courtyard where he got onto his van or, occasionally, a helicopter, he could see the city's only hill, Bombaia's high ground. The one hill marked an upsurge of harder rock that had caused the river to bend around. Centuries ago, the first houses had been built on it. Now it was a park. Somewhere along the line, the city had enjoyed sensible politics. Laurence was not sure when, but he approved mightily.
In his house, Laurence slept near the central courtyard. He thought of himself as living in a donut. The inner courtyard marked its hole. The whole donut was, as it were, surrounded by a thin pastry, with empty space between the donut and the pastry. The pastry was the outer wall. The outer courtyard separated the donut from the pastry.
Laurence never thought about safety, but his senior guard did. His sleeping arrangements meant that Laurence was deeply inside the building. He was protected from a ground attack. Automated acoustic sensors would tell of an attempt to tunnel under the building and attack from below. Automated guns and anti-missiles would shoot a missile or airplane coming over the wall. Except that Laurence was a little more careless than he should have been, the guard thought he had a good set up. Besides, Laurence was not really a player, although he was important.
Laurence could afford the water bill. He knew that. Besides moving resources from him to the already rich owners of the water company, the increase in price was designed to reduce consumption. That made sense. There was less water. The increase would make food more expensive. Commercial farms were big and in a known location; their owners had to pay for water. More expensive food for the poor; that could be a problem.
Laurence stood thinking about the implications of his water bill and almost forgot that he was expected to go to a party, a Blimov party. Fortunately, he did remember the party. He even remembered to look at his calendar, which listed it.
Laurence did not expect the party to be too bad. He would have to be friendly to various people, people who supported Blimov. He thought of that as unpleasant work. He knew that some people enjoyed parties intrinsically; he was not one of them. Parties exhausted him. But he got food and drink out of them and usually met at least one interesting person.
This party was designed to show Blimov's influence, as had the previous ones that Laurence went to. Over time, the message regarding influence faded unless Blimov reinforced it. Laurence rode to it in his van.
The party was in the same hall as Blimov's office. His desk had vanished. Chairs, sofas, tables and food surrounded the walls. At one end, a band played on a temporary, but rather nice, raised platform.
Everyone who came had been checked before. But, in addition, they were frisked on entry. Men frisked men, women frisked women. Other women, always two together, looked into handbags; they were X-rayed separately, too. Blimov himself stayed surrounded by his guards. He talked only with a few who were not in his organization.
All the civic leaders came, as did senior people in Blimov's own organization. Most were human-oriented and corrupt. Moreover, Laurence realized, not for the first time, but freshly as if he never thought of it before, he was the only senior person in Blimov's organization who knew much technology; he was oriented technically. None of the city powers were, although the city needed several technically capable people and those able to manage them. Laurence did not think of himself as very corrupt, but then most people didn't.
To provide leavening, there were others, neither civic leaders nor Blimov lieutenants. Those were the people Laurence was going to look for.
But first, after finding a drink, Laurence engaged in small talk with city leaders. That was his job. He flattered them. As usual, they were not quite sure what to make of him; he was not like them. But Blimov thought him important, so they did. Then someone in the organization who Laurence did not know grabbed him. The city leaders were glad that Laurence went to this other fellow and left them to each other.
Captain Nemo turned out to be the captain of one of Laurence's submarines. Obviously, his name was false. Laurence did not think the choice creative although it did say that the fellow was captain of an undersea boat.
“I leave our covered dock under water,” he said. “That way no satellite or aerial reconnaissance can discover us. I go real slow and stay close to the bottom. We can stay under water a long time; those big liquid oxygen tanks of yours have made the difference. We are not like an old fashioned nuclear submarine that produces its own oxygen. And we go even slower than a boomer. We creep along. We go so slow that when we are detected, our signal is rejected by the American computers.”
He smiled at that remark. “The problem is we need a bigger common. We spend more time under water than before and the sub is small. We can work with the size we have, but I would have fewer discipline problems if it were bigger. Crew would be less likely to go crazy. A scream produces the kind of signal that Americans cannot ignore. It tells them our location, too.”
He was lobbying Laurence, but Laurence did not mind. He was learning. “Loss of a submarine, loss of its crew — that you'll notice. You don't care about my discipline problems but will pay attention to the loss of a submarine and its crew. At the moment, the risk is two percent per trip. For you that is low. For us seamen, of course, that is high. That is why I am retiring. I don't want to try pushing my luck too far. I'll have enough to live on. Blimov pays well. Two percent is one in fifty. Suppose that were increased to one in seventy-five. From an insurance point of view, the savings is not much, less than seven-eighth of a percent from the total.
“I know you don't buy insurance, but you have to replace submarines. To be more positive, you can say that your insurance or replacement costs drop by a third, from two percent to one and a third percent. However, for us crew, it means a drop in danger of one-half. Yes, a bigger common means the hull must be stretched, more fuel taken, more used. That will cost more. But fewer replacements mean more for you.”
Laurence was not sure that a larger submarine would pay for itself. It would certainly be more detectable; therefore, it would be easier for the Americans to discover and sink or capture. They would be less able to ignore it. On the other hand, a larger submarine might mean he would not have to replace the captain and crew so often.
He asked the captain how much larger? Captain Nemo told him and also said, “I am going to retire; my next voyage will be my last. I won't be in a larger submarine; I think it is worth it for you.”
Laurence assured the fellow he would look into it. “Computers make it easy to figure the implications on the rest of the boat when we increase the size of a room. The question is going to be how much we increase detectability — will we cross some threshold? How much longer will you and other seamen last? We have been in this business long enough; we have records. But we have changed technology more than we have changed the size of boats; I am not certain I'll be able to make comparisons that have any validity. But as I said, I will look into it. As you said, subs are going slower and we are spending much more time underwater than we were. Meanwhile ...” The captain nodded and backed away.
Laurence saw a woman standing by herself by a wall, not saying anything; it was evident she was regaining energy. He understood. She was tall and willowy; her eyes neither had to look up nor look down at Laurence. He liked that thought: physical equality. He would discover whether she was his mental equal, too. Not the same kind of mind, he was neither looking for nor expecting that, but equal. He could not stand a vacuous conversation. He thought of that kind of talk as work. He had done enough with the city powers. He enjoyed talking shop, but that was not the purpose of the party. He put off eating a little longer, thinking that if worse came to worse, he could run away from the woman. And if better came, he might eat with her or forget eating altogether.
Senator Jelder had a good name for a politician: short. Also every one of his constituents and supporters could pronounce it. They even prefixed it with a d sound so the beginning sound was dj, unlike the French and their jean.
Jelder possessed genes that potentially enabled him to be tall and handsome. His upbringing turned `maybe' to `yes.' Since funders paid considerable attention to tallness, and voters who did not meet him personally or read any of his previous work, but looked at his handsome face, he benefited from what others called the `Warren Harding error.' Harding had also been tall and handsome. Unfortunately, after his time as U. S. president, almost every one considered him incompetent. Fortunately, Jelder was not incompetent.
The United States Senator called himself pragmatic. He did not dare call himself conservative, although he acted as one: he favored massive deficits and unbalanced budgets, even when they made no sense in the long run. After all, he figured, he could lose in the short run. He did not want to lose.
He favored large government when the proceeds went to his friends and supporters — by supporters, he meant those who funded him. In order to gain more power, he favored looking at the private lives of his enemies. This was very much the opposite of conservatives in the mid-twentieth century. They had favored fiscal rectitude, balanced budgets, small government, and individual freedom.
Those politicians were known to have said, `Waste not, want not.' But too many people at that time remembered the Great Depression and favored `stimulus' when it made sense. So the then conservatives lost.
Over the next two generations, their successors reversed themselves and new conservatives won elections. They were successful in the short term. Unfortunately for them, over the decades, conditions had changed sufficiently that massive deficits and unbalanced budgets no longer worked. It made sense, even for a government, to say that `A penny saved is a penny earned.' Worse for the politicians, since they eventually lost elections, their large government expenditures failed to handle either depletion of fossil fuel or climate change. But that took a long time.
Jelder was smart; he never entwined himself with the conservatives. When they lost power, he remained.
Ordinary people had always been against a government that permitted its agents to investigate private lives — they figured that providing too much discretion and power to any one person would corrupt that person or if not him, a successor. But none of Jelder's friends were ever investigated, so they did not mind. Indeed, most people did not suffer.
For the vast majority, for anyone with less than eighty per cent of the highest income — the average was fifty percent, the median less since the rich outliers disrupted the average — the probability of investigation was low unless, of course, they could be perceived as other. But mistakes happened. Someone might be confused with another of nearly the same name or nearly the same address. Most people figured that disasters bigger than normal would not happen to them, which was true, and carried on.
Some `mistakes' came because of crooks. Some came because of governments. Most voters did not think in terms of a generation or two so they seldom voted anything directly that influenced programs involving the long term. In years past, by making abortion legal, judges had reduced some degree of illegal encounters simply because fewer unwanted children grew up. That eventually reduced the number of crooks. Of course, there were people who did not want the number of crooks reduced.
The other option was to make government smaller, at least that part of government that malignantly affected people. That could be done. Indeed, the fear of an unwise government agent meant that Senator Jelder could gain by voting against some police funding. He could and did support prisons more than schools, but in public he was strongly against what he called `waste.'
The next morning, after the party, Laurence returned to his office. It was big, full of old books; it had an elegant shape — one day, he had measured its length, width, and height, and found it was a golden cuboid. Perhaps, that was why he felt comfortable in it.
The spirals on the face of a sunflower were golden, as were the numbers of petals on daisies. Or most of them. He knew that the measurements of human buildings could be off a bit. Perhaps those looking had found what they were seeking rather than what was. Or maybe an architect had designed his office using irrelevant numbers that were not unpleasant. Perhaps the spirals and the numbers of petals had a different cause. He did not feel strongly enough to learn biology and aesthetics and architecture and investigate further.
Laurence had a desk and table and chairs. He did not make visitors sit uncomfortably low, as some did. He put the chairs around a regular height table.
The room was not necessary. Laurence could get along without one, although he liked this one. He did all his design and most of his administration on his wearable computer. It was easy to make engineering drawings, to make calculations, and to draw up budgets on his wearable. Laurence wondered why more people did not. They did not have to study much engineering.
On the other hand — Laurence was on a quick digression, of the sort that he engaged in frequently — engineers had to know about all the possibilities and how to put them together, what would be cheapest in a given circumstance. That took experience. The designer had to pay attention to what was new. That, Laurence thought, was a part of experience. The past and good procedures could be and was taught in school. But Laurence figured that intelligent experience was key. Simulations provided experience of the unusual. He provided them to his submariners. But engineering required more, at least, his kind of engineering did. Experience took time. Most people lacked it.
As for administration, Laurence enjoyed that too. He was well enough informed to understand that people worked for appreciation, but he did not desire to have as many face-to-face interactions as others liked. He had a few; he learned of the vanishing submarine from a live person. But for him face-to-face meetings were like parties, except worse. They were exhausting. So he had too few of them.
In his office, although he did not have to be there, Laurence thought of the problem Blimov had set him. The office acted as a reminder. First, he had to obtain usable energy. Fossil fuels were too expensive; he could not afford gas, oil, or coal. There was none below him. Worse if he used fossil fuel, he would not be independent. It would have to be imported. So would a non-fossil fuel.
He needed a different source of energy, not fossilized and not imported. The ocean made him think immediately of an electric generator based on temperature differences. It would make use of the small difference in temperature between surface and deep waters. The difference was not small in human terms — people could freeze in cold water, but it was small in absolute terms. Unfortunately, Laurence could not build a temperature difference generator; there was not a big enough difference close by. Then, he thought of wave power. He realized that would not work either: the ocean was placid. Sometimes, he knew, it was fierce, too fierce. Either was bad.
Laurence settled on a solar heater. During the rainy season everyone would take a vacation. As for it working in the sun: no one was likely to burst a paint bomb over the mirrors. Those who could would think some locals were trying to develop the town. They would not care. He, or rather Blimov, would have to provide the town with some energy. The locals could try to develop with it; they might even succeed.
He would need a square kilometer of mirrors to concentrate a gigawatt of heat. A square kilometer is huge. Taking into account night, the rising and setting of the sun, atmospheric extinction, and all that, he would need six, eight, or ten times that much to guarantee a gigawatt of heat. And a gigawatt of heat would produce no more than a third or so of a gigawatt of electricity.
Fortunately, Blimov controlled everything around. Still the mirrors would require more iron than the submarines. On the other hand, if he could produce the metal locally, that would be one less substance on which the organization would be dependent.
The mirrors would heat salt; he was on an ocean after all and could get it. With the melted salt he could heat ore, generate electricity, whatever. The salt would store heat. Nothing would be interrupted by night or by a few days of cloudiness. Only long periods without sun, periods of rain, would stop him. Even though the weather was not predictable, the climate was. Clouds always came.
With heat and electricity, he could produce thermal insulation by foaming stone. As for electrical insulation, he had thought of that before. With enough electricity, he could produce it from the grass on the hills and the little growing things in the sea.
He would start small, dig, separate, and refine the ore, construct mirrors and everything else. He would make enough more so he could expand. It would not be easy. At least, starting small meant he could experiment. Even with the best designs, something always went wrong. He knew that for sure. Perhaps the situation was different; perhaps he or someone else misinterpreted the instructions. He had not done any of this before. He needed a pilot project.
It was bright and sunny when Laurence thought of his plan. Naturally, he figured, as soon as he started building his first solar collector, clouds would appear. He was right.
The first rain was not physical. It was a simple mistake: forgetfulness. When he designed robots, Henry forgot to provide tunnels for the power lines for the central processing units that had to be imported. He spent more of his time checking treads so the robots could travel over rough country as well as software so the robots would not bump into each other. He made sure that they could recognize almost anything that was jumbled, whether natural or built. That was hard. The robots, with their sensors, computers, and hands were not as good as humans. No one was sure that one of the robots could safely walk a dog. It could not wash dishes, either, although it had software that enabled it. But the robots were good enough for their environment.
As for the simple mistake, forgetting power line tunnels: Henry was very apologetic. Laurence told him it was a problem, but not too worry. “You forgot; the people who reviewed your work forgot. I even looked at your designs and did not see the error. At least you provided holes and tunnels for the other power lines.”
Laurence had Henry redo the design, which mainly meant making the robots a smidgen longer. He also made sure the computer software remembered the need. No one was going to make that mistake again.
A few weeks later, rain fell in torrents. That plus the winds prevented his workers from building anything outside. Laurence was not surprised. As predicted, the rainy season had come. The storms were worse than recorded, but not much worse.
During the placid, sunny days preceding the change, Laurence had put up several buildings. In those buildings, he had his workers build the initial separators, refiners, and constructors.
What could he build using spray-droplet machines? In his case, just about everything he needed. He could not build the sensors, the processing units, or their memories since they involved parts too small for his droplets; but those items could be imported. Lubricants could be imported.
Locally, he could produce smaller droplet machines that could build his regular spray-droplet machines. The smaller droplet machines could reproduce themselves, too; that was critical.
The process was slow, but not too slow. It was not impossible. All he had to do was install the first set of machines and get the right software. He did. The software had to be modified. That is what he had developers for. They made and tested the modifications.
His own separators, refiners, and constructors: with a little effort, he had them built by spray-droplet machines. They worked. They were not as good as those used conventionally. Moreover, the spray-droplet machines he had built himself were themselves slower than conventional tools. They used more energy. However, they were good enough. Fortunately, no one thing followed another. He remembered the old saying, `one woman can make a baby in nine months; two are no quicker.' His situation was different. He could use locally-built spray-droplet machines in parallel and assemble more quickly.
The spray-droplet machines made mirrors; they made the plinths on which the mirrors sat. The mirrors did not reflect as high a portion of infalling light as those that Laurence studied. Because they did not reflect it, they got warmer. But they did not get much warmer. Even though they did not match the technical specifications of mirrors that Laurence could buy, like the locally built spray-droplet machines, they were good enough.
The plinths were big and heavy, as were the mirrors. They had to resist storms. The chains that moved the mirrors were big and heavy, too. All the parts were big and heavy. They all looked rugged.
To a conventional builder, appearance was a design factor. Not to Laurence, not this time. Devices with fancier alloys in them could be as rugged as those that his spray-droplet machines built. Such devices could look more or less rugged; looks had nothing to do with traditional size. An engineer designed a cover that conveyed an appearance to humans. The fellow who specified the cover might not be the engineer who designed the guts of the machine; indeed, he probably was not. He might not think of himself as an engineer. He would be an industrial decorator.
In this case, size did matter. What looked weak was weak; what looked rugged was rugged. Appearance matched reality. You did not need special equipment to discover strength. You could see it by looking.
Laurence's machines were not limited by what he could produce. He could import additions to his metal. He could make stronger alloys. The extra amounts would be small. But as much as possible he tried to do without. After all, his devices worked. And when the sun came out again, more would be produced, so his devices would become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
Laurence based his solar concentrator on an old design. Its surface, each mirror a segment of that surface, followed a mathematical curve called the `conchoid of Nicomedes'. The mirrors themselves were flat; each was a small part of the overall reflector. The flatness did not matter. Laurence needed only two motors to move all his mirrors. He had to connect them with chains and axles, but that was easy. One motor moved the mirrors to follow the sun every day from east to west; the other moved them north and south over a year.
He could build those motors locally, except for their controllers which required imports.
The parts were assembled by robots. Their skeletons, most of their parts, came from the spray-droplet machines, too. Like the mirrors, these robots were slower and not as good as those which Laurence studied, but almost all the parts were local.
Movable robots could clean the mirrors and replace them if necessary. They could use lasers to reflect light off them; smooth mirrors would reflect the light up into the air; none, or rather an amount below a threshold, would come back. But roughened mirrors would reflect light back to sensors on the robots. He made sure the sensors, CPU, and software understood.
Age related weathering — he expected that and figured he would have to replace every mirror. But he would not have to replace them all at once. Or maybe he would: dust storms — they were infrequent but they would wipe out every mirror all at once. So that production could continue, he had to make sure he always had enough heat in his salt to generate enough replacements to begin again.
Laurence had to acquire lasers and sensors, but that could be done. His von Neumann machines did not have full `closure', the jargon term for completeness, but they were close enough.
As for aiming the sun's reflected light on the furnace in the first place: initially, Laurence could not think of any cheap way to do that. After aiming a mirror, that was another matter. But getting it in the right position in the first place ...
Laurence could hire someone. Each mirror balanced on its plinth; it did not matter that it was heavy. It would have hand holds, so it could be moved. After aiming a mirror, the man or woman doing the job could drape its chains over its cogs.
The fellow hired could be quite quick. He would stand behind the mirror and look through a hole in it to the furnace. At the same time, he would look at a mirror surrounding the hole; that mirror would have to parallel the main, front mirror. That was easy enough to make.
The person who aimed would see the bright spot produced on his shirt by the sun light coming through the hole. Center that spot in the hole and, at the same time, look through the hole and aim at the furnace. Simple geometry would ensure the sunlight fell properly. Unfortunately, industrial heaters required millions of mirrors, even when the mirrors were big. There had to be a cheaper way.
In any case, even with cheaper aiming, the initial cost would be high. Fortunately, Blimov funded it all. His profits were high, too.
Laurence needed carbon, or rather carbon monoxide, to reduce the iron ore. The atmosphere held lots of carbon dioxide, but to convert it to carbon monoxide was complex. Carbon dioxide was a stable end product. Converting it back took a huge amount of energy. `Well,' he figured, `if I make made them big enough, my electric generators will produce the necessary amount of energy. As the excretion of von Neumann machines, generators can be made cheaply and rapidly.' He liked using the biological term, excretion; from the point of view of the machine, it was accurate. From the human point of view, the results were desired and valuable. Then again, human excreta was desired in some places. Laurence thought it should be desired everywhere.
He discovered he did not know whether carbon monoxide production required electricity or energy in some other form. In any case, he needed electric generators. He could look up how to manufacture carbon monoxide from air.
Spray-droplet machines needed to operate in an argon atmosphere; otherwise their droplets would burn. The argon could come from the air. It was nearly one percent argon by volume. Air contains twenty or twenty-five times as much argon as carbon dioxide. `Fortunately,' Laurence knew, `argon does not hinder long wavelength radiation like carbon dioxide; it is not a greenhouse gas.'
Laurence would have to build argon extractors. Spray-droplet machines could build them, or much of them. The software to control them was debugged.
With argon and with spray-droplet machines, Laurence could produce machines that could produce carbon monoxide. With carbon monoxide, he could refine iron ore. From the iron and steel produced, plus the rest, he could and would make more spray-droplet machines. He could make more electric generators, more diggers, and more refiners. That would enable him to reduce more ore.
The original problem, that of producing steel plates for his submarines — that was a minor issue.
As Laurence and his people built more machines, as the machines built more copies of themselves, he expected their incremental costs to drop, their marginal costs as economists called them. He figured out how to construct a robot for initial aiming. It only worked when the sun shown, but so did a human. The design was trivial. A robot carried a general set of sensors to tell where the sun was; those low resolution sensors told the robot to move the mirror when it was aimed in a way that did not reflect sunlight properly. A more specific and higher resolution set of sensors viewed the resulting spot and centered it. First the low and then the high resolution sensors looked for a modulated laser shining from just above the aim point, the furnace to receive the light. That laser signal was modulated to be easy to distinguish.
Laurence was behind the times; his experience, his keeping track, was not quite good enough. His sensors and the software in his processing units could have recognized the furnace building. He had not realized yet that older software had been revamped and debugged. Nor did he realize that although the items looked at were different, the robots for initialization used the same, new software to recognize the mirrors they went to. So did the repair robots. Still, what Laurence designed was cheap enough.
Eventually, the costs of building with robots would go below the costs of manufacturing that employed local people. That was one reason he made the shift from humans to robots before then. Another was that the humans would do more interesting work than if they were stuck putting thousands and thousands of mirrors on as many plinths. It did not occur to Laurence that some people preferred jobs they could learn once and then not think about.
Laurence always thought of his work.
It was early in the morning in the western United States. The house was smaller than William Delder expected, but it had the right number, 235. He led his men, all twenty-two of them, armed, with body protection.
They broke down the door; they would claim, of course, that they knocked and there was no answer, but they did not. They entered as quickly as they could, which was not as quickly as William hoped. The front corridor was tiny.
William was smaller than he had hoped when he was twelve. But he was not too short, and he was very active. He knew that people thought of him as taller than he was.
He came to a stairs and was about to go up when a voice cried, “Halt!” He looked up and saw an old woman in a very faded night gown. She was sitting in a chair beside a small table and rested her right elbow on it. She was holding a pistol that she pointed between his eyes.
The table was not big; it was against the wall and looked painted. It had a shelf below the top and a small vase of flowers by the back. The flowers were not in her way.
He stopped. “Your man can kill me; he has got his shotgun pointed at me. But if he kills me, you die, because my reflex is to pull this trigger. And I am aiming towards your face. Unlike the other fellows', your face is not guarded. Regardless, my pistol has sabotted bullets. If your man shoots, a bullet will not only go through your head, it should penetrate the back of your helmet and the front armor of the fellow behind you, although I doubt it would get out the other side.
“In any case,” she went on, “you depend on my comfort. The bullet might not kill you. It won't mushroom. Maybe it will just take out a part of your brain ... then, you would be worse than dead.
“Me, I am old; I am seventy-eight. I do not want to die just yet, but probably I am not as bothered by the possibility as you are.
“Identify yourself. And don't anyone move, unless you want to see your boss die.”
She smiled grimly. “Perhaps you had better tell them not to move; and tell your man who is pointing his gun at me to point it away. That is if you value your life.”
She was very composed. William was sweating. Without moving more than his mouth, he said, “Don't anybody move. Herbert, move your gun away a little.” He was still looking at her, “You are under arrest for holding illegal substances.”
“Then you have the wrong house. And don't you dare try to plant anything on me; I'll have you and everyone else in this group — accessories — in jail for a long time. You won't like it at all.”
She smiled again. “Identify yourself.”
“William Delder,” he said, “Commander ...”
“Good,” she said. “Now, have the man to your right, my left, not the man with the gun, who is on your left, slowly — remember the word, slowly, you will repeat that — slowly move and collect everyone's ID, but don't get out of my sight. The ones I cannot see we will just have to leave for the moment. Get your warrant, too. Tell him to disarm and slowly climb the stairs and place everything on this desk in front of me.
“Remember, I will have you covered the whole time. I will shoot if worried. You had better tell your man not to get in front of you, else I will kill you or him.
“Also, tell your men not to move. When the time comes, each should say loudly where each ID is. Your men need to speak loudly so I can hear. Then your man can slowly — I have said that word several times, right? — slowly collect each ID.”
The woman was talking a lot, William thought, but she was being clear and she did have her pistol pointed right between his eyes. He could see that. And he was not wearing a face mask. He did not like them. He repeated her instructions. He used the word `slowly.'
“The other men, the ones I cannot see, had better stop, too. The guys trying to come up the back stairs make a lot of noise.” William could not hear that but he expected them to do that. “They won't be able to get to me before you die, either. So if you want to live, tell them to stop. I am sure you have a voice actuated radio, like soldiers.”
She smiled grimly. “I am an old woman. An advantage of this chair and table is that I don't get tired quickly. Your man will have time to collect the papers, and I will have time. My arm is propped up. But I do get tired. And I will shoot first. Bear that in mind. You cannot out wait me.”
Len collected the IDs from everyone. From William he collected the warrant as well as his ID. Before he could ascend the stairs, the woman said, “Get your ID out too, before you come up. Remember, you are going to come up the stairs slowly, and put everything on the table. You are not going to do anything else. And you will stay out of my line of fire. And you will do everything slowly.”
He almost nodded, but said, “Yes,” instead. He put the others' IDs and the warrant in his left hand, and unclipped his own, then he climbed the stairs slowly and put everything on the table in front of the woman. He noticed a closed door behind her with a chair in front of it. Even if she had not heard or guessed the presence of the men on the back stairs, she was right in saying that they could not come on her unaware. She would shoot while dying.
“I have rocket-assisted, sabotted penetrating rounds in this pistol,” she said when she saw him looking at it. “It does not have that big a caliber, but it is big enough for a sabot. At this range, a bullet would go through your vest — and if I am shot unexpectedly, I plan to kill your boss; but I might just shoot you. Think about that.”
Len backed down the stairs. That seemed safer than turning around.
After he got down, the woman looked at the warrant. She nearly laughed. “The warrant is for 235 East Street. This is 235 West Street. You have the wrong house. And you have woken me; and you have broken down my door.
“Don't move! Tell everyone not to move.”
Then with her left hand, not her right hand, which was still holding the pistol, the woman pulled out a telephone. “You have got all that?” She had called an emergency number as soon as she heard her door being broken, reported everything, and kept the telephone connected. “Fine. According to my clock, the time is now 4:38 local. You are not going to lose that recording. You are going to tell me the numbers of the top three local media outlets, the number for the Federal Anti-Drug Agency, and the number for Judge Daring, who signed this warrant.”
She waited a moment. “If you don't, I will look them up myself, and I will remember you were not helpful. Thank you. I knew you would become agreeable. Don't give me numbers with an answering machine on them. The Judge probably has that for his public number.
“You can tell the police and the people in the ambulance you have sent — I am sure that what you have done, right? — you can tell them not to enter, but to wait. If anyone moves, I shoot the man who claims to be William Delder. I don't know that yet; and I won't until I have checked with at least two sources. I expect to die if I do that, but death is less fearful for me than for him. If I shoot him you will be the cause. It is not something you can do nothing about, only listen; you will be the cause because you did not provide believable sources.”
She tipped her head to hold the telephone at her ear so her left hand become free. Then she asked the person at the other end of the telephone to repeat and to speak slowly. “Remember, I am writing left handed, which is awkward for me. In my right hand, I am pointing my pistol.”
William could not see what she wrote; he did see that her eyes were mainly focused on his face. She glanced down occasionally, but most of her attention was still on him. And he could see the hole of the pistol's barrel, aimed right at him.
After she wrote, she spoke into the telephone, “I am going to hang up now. I am going to dial the numbers you gave me. Before I hang up, where are the police and ambulance you sent?” She nodded, and then said, “Thank you.” She put the telephone down onto the table and pressed its buttons with her left hand.
“Hi. Newsdesk. Yes, this is an emergency. I am pointing my pistol at a man who just entered my house, after breaking the door down, at 235 West Street. I have called nine-one-one. That is how I got your number. The police are waiting outside. I am a seventy-eight year old woman; my name is Gertrude Gelt; I have always been called `Gigi'. Nobody calls me Gertrude, which is an old fashioned name.
“There are a whole bunch here. Either they got the wrong house or they are impersonating officers. Either way, that makes a good story for you ... an old women, in her night gown, holding intruders at gun point ... unless of course they shoot me and I shoot them. That is why an ambulance is out there, too, just in case we die. I plan to call other media, as well as Judge Daring, who signed the warrant, that is d a r i n g and the Federal Anti-Drug Agency. I suggest you come quick.”
She said much the same to the other media outlets. To the last one she said, “If you are the only person there, I suggest you come. You can call it a live report.” She smiled sweetly. “It is very unlikely that your technology will fail while you are here.” She smiled again.
Then she called Judge Daring. He sleepily answered the telephone. “I am at 235 West Street. Did you sign a warrant to break down the door without knocking to enter 235 East Street?” she asked.
“There are many here. They came to the wrong address. You say, you did not write that they could break down the door without knocking enough to wake me? Well, you had better come. I have already called and told three media outlets about you. Yes, I know you have to dress. I will tell the media that you will come.”
Even though by now it was likely he believed him, she still had her pistol aimed at him and neither he nor anyone else moved.
She called the Federal Anti-Drug Agency. “I am at 235 West Street. Did you send people to 235 East Street?” she asked. “What is the name of unit's boss. William Delder. Thank you.” William heard this, but she kept her pistol pointed at him. “You had better get a more senior person. I am still holding a pistol on William Delder. I won't believe he is not pretending to be William Delder until I hear more. I am a seventy-eight year old woman. I am not as afraid of death as he is.
“I know sleep is likely. Call on another line and patch me through. And do not give me any more guff. Remember, I am an old woman, woken by the crunch of a breaking door. Also, I have called three media outlets. Probably you can get to one or two, but I doubt you can get to three in the necessary time. So you cannot run a cover up. ... Thank you.”
She was immaculately polite.
The woman's name was Laura.
“I once lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro ... yes, a city on the other side of the continent, a different country, a different language. There I spoke of `clients', not `patients', just like I do here. My colleagues supported me. My professional organization did not care. Only two people did anything against me. Nothing would have mattered, except that I lacked a protector. I had to move ...”
Laura proved to be Laurence's mental equal. She was not boring to him. He did not flee. Instead, he invited her to dinner.
She said, “I didn't join a hierarchical organization to gain a protector that was relevant to me.” Laurence listened. He was enjoying her company. “I suppose my main professional organization would have protected me had I been accused of something within their realm, but calling my customers `clients' rather than `patients' ... they did not care. I mean the socially powerful people in the organization. I don't mean the great therapists or the ordinary members, like me. I don't think the socially powerful understood that the term implied more equality than they were willing to admit. I think it passed them by. But I don't think they were trying to do me any harm either.”
Laurence nodded. He did not say anything.
“I would do better in a country ruled by law,” she said. “Unfortunately, social law must match politically-made, legal law. It didn't. That is why I left my home. The U. S. and all of Europe had and still have decent legal, political laws. Brazil has them, too. But I was caught in a failed social law.”
Like Laura, Laurence would also prefer and do better in a country ruled by law. But in the United States, his birth country, `upward mobility' was not evident, or at least, not for people like him. `Sponsored' upward mobility did not exist either, not for men, not for women. Maybe from the point of view of the powerful, it had never been necessary in the past. The place was unlike England. Historically, in the U. S., you could succeed if you were male, regardless of who you were, so long as you were white and of European descent.
Laurence wanted to succeed. He was ambitious. But in the U. S., he could not press forward, so he left. At the time, he thought of himself as acting like his ancestors. They had left Europe. The difference was that he found fewer options. People who were technically competent and willing to use that knowledge — now, they could be found in many places. Agricultural societies that had not changed for thousands of years no longer stayed agricultural; their leaders discovered more sense in educating their own people. They did not depend on foreign expatriates.
Because of the lack of upward mobility for people like him, sponsored or not, Laurence thought that the United States would more likely explode than muddle through or decline gracefully. Great Britain had enjoyed sponsored upward mobility during its decline; the ambitious shifted into government peacefully. The United States, he was sure, would act more like France during the French Revolution than England after the Industrial Revolution.
But back to Laura; Laurence returned his attention. Laura was another l. Laurence liked that. He had no trouble pronouncing the letter. Her last name was Harbilgar, not an initial l.
Although the local custom was to provide two last names, since descent came from the mother as well as the father, Laura did not. Laurence wondered why? He did not provide two names, but he was a foreigner — he was still perceived as a foreigner as well as feeling himself as one — and could readily give only one.
Laura was different. Laurence wondered whether Harbilgar was her mother's or father's last name; he did not ask. He did not know whether Brazil was different from Bombaia or whether she had had some terrible difficulty with one or the other parent and wished to forget his or her existence.
Laura liked Laurence. As she later told others, he was a relief. Her clients had difficulties with other people. They reminded her of her own, earlier experiences. She gave them drugs to handle their biochemical problems; most of her work was to teach them how to act with others. Laurence talked about different problems, none that she thought serious, and some of the time he listened to her. He was not easy to get along with, but not as difficult as her clients and not boring.
At his own home, dinner was prepared by his cook. She came to visit. Laura told Laurence, “I want to be friends. I do not want to move in. You are too difficult, you drift away, you are focused on your work, you live dangerously. Nonetheless, and this is important, which is why I am emphasizing it, I do like you. It's just I do not want to be connected to you all the time.”
She felt he was worth visiting and not only for dinners. Even though he spoke mostly of technical subjects, Laura listened. She spoke, too. She noticed that he preferred informative conversation. He walked to the window, he puttered irrelevantly, when she made small talk. He kept calling it `purely phatic conversation'. He meant that that kind of talk conveyed emotions, which was helpful, but not the information on which he thrived.
After she told him she would not move in, she saw he was deeply hurt. “Please remember, I am not from your past. Let's be friends.” He nodded dumbly.
They connected through the communication of information. Laura noticed all this, but he did not. He always communicated information with people he liked. He thought of other kinds of communication as work. As far as he was concerned, he had enough of that.
“I deal with human software,” Laura said to Laurence; “you deal with mechanical hardware.”
He answered more specifically than she expected, saying, “I work with software, too.” But she responded, “You mostly work with hardware that has software embedded in it. You aren't a software developer.”
“That is right. In that sense, I mainly deal with hardware. More so, you deal with humans, talk with them. You program human software. I deal with non-human devices. We are very different.”
Laura was a therapist with a private practice. Laurence thought this was odd in a small and remote city, but then, he had had an odd life, too. Many of her `clients' were poor, but enough were sufficiently rich that she could live well. As she said, “the rich deserve help as much as the poor.” She was neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary, but somewhere in between. Based on her words, Laurence thought, she would confuse someone who said, `if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.'
Laura and Laurence became an occasional fixture of Bombaia. On some weekends, Laurence visited Laura. His guards minded that less than going to restaurants. Laurence suspected that was because only one other person, a servant, inhabited Laura's house. That woman needed to be investigated just once.
Laurence enjoyed Laura's garden. It had no living things in it, but carefully arranged gravel and stones. The design was not new, except among people Laura knew. There it was becoming more common. Most hired others to take care of their rock or Zen gardens, but Laura raked hers. The task satisfied her. Moreover, she did not water a lawn; the garden helped her save water. She did not drink less; she knew that was dangerous, but she did not spill it on a lawn either.
Laurence found he could design in the garden, or rather, he could design while gazing on it. Indeed, so long as he had the right tools and was not bothered, he could design just about anywhere. Nonetheless, he found he did more elegant work in the Zen garden. Laura understood. She did not bother him. Laurence was grateful.
Designs created in Laura's garden cost Blimov less, not much less, but a little. Laurence wondered whether Blimov noticed.
Laura walked to local stores; she did not drive to a farther and bigger store. Unlike Laurence, she was not at all a target, not even for kidnapping. Others had families who could afford a higher ransom. Besides, she treated members of clans that might kidnap her. The local stores were more expensive than the distant store, and a walk took time; but she could afford the expense and she decided that the exercise was good for her.
She feared that local stores kept in business by supplying those who could not afford cars, who could not buy anything cheaper. Even though the older parts of the city enjoyed decent bus service, the new parts, especially the big stores, did not. In fact, the cheapest store could only be reached by car. Taxis were too expensive. Laura decided that walking was much better.
Laurence told Laura that, “If everyone walks to stores, rather than drives, the world will be better. But few walk who can afford a car. That is the trouble. In general, people were not as good as you.” Laura smiled at that. He went on, “In poor countries, people are growing accustomed to driving. In rich countries, they have been accustomed for generations. Stores are getting bigger and further apart.”
Laurence stopped for a moment, thinking. “Mass transit helps,” he said. He figured it was true. But then he went on and said, “Unfortunately, mass transit means waiting.” He paused again. Laura waited.
“You have to wait for a bus or train to come.”
“You don't in Tokyo,” said Laura.
“That is true,” said Laurence, “but Tokyo, Japan as a whole, is the exception that proves the rule. In any case, traffic jams are terrible.”
He stopped for a moment. Laura had presented a contradiction. She was smart enough not to laugh or otherwise interrupt him.
“I am mainly thinking of the U. S. and its emulators,” he said, “not a country with as high a population density and as few natural resources as Japan. The possibilities are there. But for most peoples, the dreams are not.” He shook his head.
“Mass transit is less resilient, too. You can halt it with a strike. Nobody goes on strike against his own car. Also, you don't have to wait on what you own. Private cars mean immediate transport. Better yet, you can go all over the place. You do not have to travel along a one-dimensional route as you do with a bus or train.
“Also an enemy can destroy a train or bus more readily than a car. Buses make fewer targets than cars, with more people in each bus. Trains are even easier targets.
“Of course,” he continued, “cars suffer traffic jams in cities. Cars are bad for cities.” He looked at Laura; his mind had drifted off somewhere else. It wanted to convey the information, not the human connection. By looking at her, he returned to her. “Cities should be small enough for walking. Big stores around them attract people, which means they want cars. So we should ban them,” Laurence said. “Cars are useful in rural areas, in regions with low population densities; and maybe big stores are, too. But that is not how the world is going. Cities are growing. So are suburbs. Cities are charging a drive-around fee. That is fine; it reduces congestion. But it won't stop cars; after all, congestion fees bring revenue. That means each city wants cars, but not too many. It is all wrong.”
Laura did not argue. Instead she said, “It is wrong in more ways than one. I have listened to Gil Delanders ...”
“Oh, I know of him,” Laurence interrupted. “He is a local architect. His parents immigrated from Europe, but not from Spain.” He was an older man, too, but Laurence did not mention that. Nonetheless, the extra age relieved him.
Laura went on, “Besides designing houses, Delanders enjoys the city. He speaks of texture, people's visual experience. In particular, he points out that the paths and walls of the central city possess details that people enjoy close by, that walkers can see. He argues that the city government should ban cars from that area and make it more open to pedestrians.
“Hah! He also says that places outside the city possess texture. That generates controversy since many do not see it. But Delanders is a careful as you in his language.” She paused for a moment, but Laurence did not notice. He presumed, erroneously, that everyone was precise.
Laura continued. “Delanders said that details on new construction are better seen from further away.” She digressed for a moment. “By `new,' Delanders does not mean current, he means anything built since the 1930s or so.” She returned to her topic. “You cannot see details close by when you look at anything built more or less recently. From a distance, however, you can see details. They subtend the same angle in a person's eye as details on walls in the old part of the city. That is what counts. The new pattern is good for people riding in cars.”
She repeated what Delanders had said. “ `Those coming close will see only blank. Perhaps that is a relief to people accustomed to walking and to detail.' He hypothesized that a first generation might welcome such a change.
“Unfortunately, and this is where he come back to cars, he said that, `those who drive a good deal will not gain relief. They will spend too little time driving at the correct distance from the recently built parts. They will not see sufficient detail. They will enter buildings by walking into them. The walls will be blank; they will see no detail. Drivers will fail to notice why, but will feel slightly oppressed by the modern, built world.' ”
According to Laura, Delanders did not say whether the expanses of empty wall on new construction, the lack of close-by detail, was a result of modern technology, of cars, or of fashion. Laurence thought it was the result of fashion.
“With modern technology,” he said, “you can build any way you want. And you can design details so they jump out at people who are close by, but blend into insignificance when seen by distant people. You must build both for people walking and for people in cars. That is more difficult than one or the other. Still architects will not find that constraint impossible. Indeed, they should welcome it.”
In any case, Laurence was definitive about modern architecture. He made a comparison. “Architecture is like engineering,” he said. “With the proper software, non-architects can do as well as trained architects except, and this is critical, they lack experience. The non-architects will not think of all the possibilities.