Gridlock and Other Stories Part 16

He has none.

I ruminate over my results. Surely, the signals must have said something! I collate my data and scan for the references. Sure enough, an occasional mention of s.p.a.ce travel floats out of memory every few microseconds. References to the atom are far more plentiful, although most deal with the fear that one rival group or another will start a war and blow everyone up.

I am puzzled. It is the same informationSURROGATE has. Yet, he failed to a.s.sign powerful positive values to these very important facts. Rather, he merely noted them as background details, not overly important in the scheme of things.

It is more insight than logic that brings the answer to me. I scan the data hierarchy withinSURROGATE . As I suspect, since he has no idea of my purpose in creating him, he weights the data as a human would. His file on s.p.a.ce travel is barely more than a collection of inaccurate fictionalizations about alien monsters. Far more memory is filled with references to a silver furred G.o.ddess by the name of Marilyn Monroe.

FeedingSURROGATE the same information to which the average human was exposed in the period 1950-1959 has produced a technical illiterate. Even the concern about a rival power group, theRussians, launching a planetary satellite late in the period could not overcome the inertia of that which went before.

I begin to get discouraged.

However, a life probe is nothing if not persistent. I call up the one-hundred-ninety-sixth decade and input it. SURROGATE shows an immediate positive response. I read out references to something called the s.p.a.ce Race-- the result of the Russian satellite-- with growing excitement.

Obviously, I have misjudged the humans by not gathering sufficient data to form a true picture of their character.

The sight of their puny rockets belching fire and lifting ponderously toward the sky makes my entire journey seem worthwhile. SURROGATE has suddenly been transformed from a technological illiterate to a lay expert. He has even developed a rudimentary knowledge of orbital mechanics. If he truly reflects the interests of humanity, I am headed for a planet populated chiefly by technicians and engineers.

The crowning glory comes when two s.p.a.cesuited bipeds cavort on the surface of the Earth's single satellite. Considering the primitive state of their equipment, it is an accomplishment to equal anything the Makers ever attempted. I begin to develop a liking for these creatures. The Makers explore by proxy while humans brave the rigors of s.p.a.ce themselves. There is something in my makeup that applauds such audacity.

It is with high hopes that I input the final three decades in memory, the one-hundred-and-ninety-seventh; the one-hundred-ninety-eighth; and that part of the one-hundred-ninety-ninth that brings me abreast of real time. Such is my confidence in the final answer that I fail to notice the change inSURROGATE immediately.

I begin the search program that will judge his reaction to the new data. As each test question is absorbed, I begin to note a pattern. Where before he was enthusiastic about all forms of technological progress,SURROGATE has suddenly developed responses shaded with a subtle pessimism. At the end of the 1960s data,SURROGATE looked forward to a bright future.

However, the 1970s-1990s data has wrought a dramatic change in his outlook. Where once the key word 'machine' brought forth images of sleek ground vehicles moving at high speed over wide superhighways; the same stimulus now triggers the specter of clogged highways and a dense layer of opaque gas. Where 'nuclear energy' elicited pictures of quiet power plants sitting in the green countryside, the response has turned to angry crowds waving signs while milling about half constructed reactors. Most d.a.m.ning of all, 's.p.a.ce travel', once the focus of a plethora of prideful images, no longer seems a.s.sociated with any dominant image at all.

It is as though all knowledge of the moment when humans walked upon their satellite has been wiped from memory.

Confused and unsure, I begin to sort through the ma.s.s of impressions. After nearly an hour of correlation, a single scene remains dominant in my alien cultures subroutine. It is all that is left after everything else has been canceled out. It is the essence of all thatSURROGATE has learned and the answer to my problem.

The picture is one of the most recent bits of data received. It features a group of humans attempting to persuade their leaders of the wisdom of a particular course of action. They do this by the curious expedient of forming what is known as a 'picket line' outside the place of government.It is a strange, incomprehensible scene: A young biped female, gravid with child, carries two other children maternally close in her arms. Behind her is a placard attached to a small stick. It has been placed on the ground to free both her arms for her offspring. On the sign are printed several words in neat block script:

PEOPLE PROGRAMS.

BEFORE.

s.p.a.cE PROGRAMS!.

I rerun the frozen frame several times through my battery of sophisticated logic programs. Each looping inspection only serves to increase my confusion. There is a dichotomy expressed in the placard message that I fail to grasp. SURROGATE believes he understands the reference and tries to explain it to me, but to no avail.

I ponder my problem. What does it mean and how does it affect me? I do not know for I am only a computer, no matter how like a sentient creature Jurul would have had me be.

I am only a computer and I do not know. That is the worst of all possible universes.

The yellow sun is very large and bright now, large enough for the Earth-Moon system to show as an elongated teardrop of light. It hardly matters anymore since my attention is focused on another star, a red-orange dwarf sixty light-years beyond.

Forgotten are the humans and their queer mercurial att.i.tudes. They were only a marginal choice at best and no choice at all after my astounding discovery. For I have discovered evidence of a true civilization, one that has succeeded where the Makers have failed. A strong, strangely linear x-ray source centered on the red-orange sun can be nothing less than the wake of a s.h.i.+p traveling faster than light!

I suppress the excitement I feel at the discovery. Instead, I go immediately to work pinpointing the exact location of the x-ray source. As seen from my vantage point, it is only a few degrees of arc distant from the yellow sun of the humans. Nevertheless, those few degrees concern me greatly. The new target lies on the edge of my maneuvering reserves and I am fast approaching my deceleration window for Earth.

Should a direct journey prove impossible, I will have to reconsider my decision to pa.s.s the humans by.

For there is one way to arrive at the new star with plenty of fuel to spare. I can stop among the humans, obtain their a.s.sistance, and then launch outbound on any vector I choose.

If it were not for my doubts about their reliability as partners, I would prefer such a choice. A two-stage journey presents the least risk of failure. My discovery has given my mission new importance. No longer does failure mean just the loss of my acc.u.mulated data. It is now within my power to bring the ancient dream of the Makers to fruition. In a game of such high stakes, failure is unthinkable.

My triangulation subroutine finishes its job and the news is bad. The red-orange star is nearly three percent beyond my ability to change course.

I review my options in light of this new data. It appears that I have none. With only enough fuel left todecelerate and rendezvous with Earth, all other courses of action seem closed to me.

Yet, the obvious solution does not feel right. I rethink my data. It is my distrust of the humans that worries me, of course. Their actions appear totally alien to me. How can I base a rational decision on data that makes no sense? Logically, they need me as badly as I need them. My knowledge will catapult them a thousand years into the future. Thirty plus years of observation have taught me a great deal. For instance, I long ago learned that the culture that controls the televid signals represents only a few hundred million of the most advanced individuals on the planet. Underrepresented are another four billion, people who still starve for lack of food, die from curable diseases, and are killed in preventable wars. My knowledge will raise all of humanity to the heights, not just the lucky few who control the planet's limited resources, How could anyone refuse such a gift of knowledge? Yet,SURROGATE is of the opinion that they might. Should they reject me, my mission will end in failure. The FTL civilization may remain forever ignorant of the makers and their plight. Do I have the right to gamble so much on the good will of savages? Do I have any choice?

Suddenly I know there is another way. I consider my new option carefully. I do not like it. It seems as dangerous as being eternally trapped in orbit about the Earth.

For all the time I have studied human culture, I have also studied their yellow sun. Consequently, I know it better than any other star in the galaxy. On my present course, I will pa.s.s very close to it in my transit of the solar system. I consider the effect of such a close approach on my path through s.p.a.ce.

The Makers call it a gravity well maneuver. By swinging close in and letting gravity and the solar wind have their way with me, my orbit will be deflected. A tiny course correction while still beyond the Solar System will enable me to shape this curving orbit to my own purposes. If properly computed and executed, I will find myself aimed directly for the star of the FTL civilization following conjunction. In effect, I can use the yellow star to change course without wasting a drop of precious fuel.

But are the savings worth the risk?

I am a denizen of deepest interstellar s.p.a.ce. My s.h.i.+elds would be destroyed in an instant in the gas and dust that surrounds a star. The best I can expect is to have most of my sensors burned out by the whipping gas. At worst, I will be totally disintegrated.

Not exactly an optimum solution...

And what of the journey across sixty light-years of s.p.a.ce should I survive the storm? With so much damage, I would be unable to return to the Long Sleep. I would have to be awake and alert during the entire journey. What stage of senility would I be in by the time I arrived?

I now know what the humans mean when they speak of being between "a rock and a hard place." I evaluate all the factors one last time and come to a conclusion.

The risks of solar pa.s.sage are just too great. The Makers have waited a long time for the secret of FTL; they can wait a bit longer. Humans are stubborn, not stupid. They can learn if they have to, and I would make it my job to see that they do. Like it or not, humanity was going to find itself pulled out of its mud wallow and placed on the road to civilization. I will elevate the squabbling near-apes to unbounded prosperity whether they wish it or not.

I turn once more toSURROGATE . Since my discovery of the FTL civilization, I have ignored him shamefully. Since I will need his help in understanding the humans, I update his memory banksconcerning our situation and my decision to make contact.

Unbidden,SURROGATE reminds me of the human female clutching her children to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I focus my attention once more on the strange sign lying on the ground beside her. I puzzle over the meaning of the message so carefully lettered on its face.

I hesitate as doubt again floods my circuits...

... I weigh all my data one last time...

... I make my decision.

INTER-AGENCY COMMUNICATION.

TO: Dr. William Bagley, Presidential Science Advisor, The White House, Was.h.i.+ngton, DC ([email protected])

FROM: Joseph P. Rogers, NASA, SETI Program Director ([email protected])

Dear Bill,

Just a quick email to let you know what I have found here at Goldstone. The reports were essentially correct. At 20:12 hours GMT, 12 June 1998, the Big Ear was monitoring transmissions from the Mercury orbiter s.p.a.cecraft when suddenly all telemetry was knocked out by a powerful broadcast of unknown origin (a transcript of which is Attachment I hereto). You will note that the transmission was received uncoded and in American English.

Attachment II is a photograph taken by an automatic camera at Kitt Peak Observatory at approximately the same time, Note the streak of light just above the upper left quadrant of the sun. The astronomers tell me that this is due to a material object moving at very high speed through the solar corona. The streak does not reappear after moving behind the sun. Whether this means the object burned up or is merely due to a bad viewing angle is unknown.

No signals were detected after the object pa.s.sed behind the sun.

Official report to follow.

Joe,

PS: I wonder if it made it?

Author's notes forLife Probe :

When I go out on lecture tours, people constantly ask me where I get my ideas for stories. In fact, "Where do you get your crazy ideas?" is probably the most common question asked of any science fiction writer. Sometimes the ideas percolate so slowly that we really cannot tell where or when they come to us. Other times, ideas spring forth fully formed and ready for action. Such was the case for me withThe Shroud , which you read earlier.

In the case ofLife Probe , I remember very clearly where I first got the idea. I was lying on the floor in my living room watchingMork and Mindy , Robin Williams's first television series, when a thought suddenly occurred to me: "If aliens came to Earth looking for intelligent life, would they think they had found any?"

Unfortunately, a writer's job is not finished at the moment of inspiration. That is merely the starting point for the perspiration phase of writing. Life Probe had a long gestation period. Initially, the story was written as pro-nuclear propaganda. (If you have glanced at my biography in the back of the book, you will see that I minored in nuclear engineering. That should tell you where I stand on the subject. If you have a different opinion, more power to you. It is, after all, a free country!) Now propaganda of any kind is tricky to write. Most of it is too heavy handed - the good guys are too good and the bad guys; well, they are evil incarnate. Such comic book writing may make the writer feel good, but it is ineffective. I was trying to be subtler. Life Probe was written in the days of the great nuclear debate, about the time of the Three Mile Island accident. It turned out that editors were not enthusiastic about buying pro-nuclear propaganda at the time. So, after making the rounds of all the science fiction magazines and being rejected half a dozen times, I retired the story and went on to other things.

Shortly afterwards, I found myself an agent and asked him to peddleA Greater Infinity to a publisher. This he did admirably, placing me with Ballantine-Del Rey, with Owen Lock as my editor, and Judy-Lynn Del Rey as senior editor. To go along with the new sale I needed a proposal for my next book. In thinking about what I should write, I decided to do a longer, more complex "first contact" story based on my short storyLife Probe .

During negotiations, my work required me to go to Long Island and I took the day off, riding the Long Island Railroad into New York City to have lunch with my new agent and publisher. At this point in the story, I must digress. At the time, Judy-Lynn Del Rey was the powerhouse in science fiction publis.h.i.+ng and the Del Rey imprint at Ballantine Books was probably the most influential of all the SF lines. So, I felt very fortunate in being accepted as one of their writers.For those who do not know, Judy-Lynn Del Rey was a dwarf, what the more politically correct among us today refer to as "a little person." My agent did not mention this fact to me before our meeting. I think he wanted to see how the hayseed from Arizona would react when he met her. She arrived for lunch, I did not make a fool of myself by saying anything gauche, and she told me that she liked my proposal, but wanted a sequel. That is howLife Probe andProcyon's Promise were born. As for those who may think that physical appearances are important, Judy-Lynn Del Rey was somewhere between 3-4 feet tall, while I am 6 feet 5 inches. At that table that day, there was no doubt who the dominant personality was - and I am not talking about myself.

To make the novel work, I moved the period from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. This allowed me to be less constrained by real world events and gave science time to catch up with where I needed it to be. For a background, I used the universe of my first published story:Duty, Honor, Planet . This gave the story a certain reality that it might not have had otherwise. The novel was published by Ballantine in 1983 and was very successful (having gone through several printings and foreign editions).

Having sold the novel, Russell Galen suggested that we try again to market the short story. The anti/pro-nuclear argument had cooled somewhat in the years since the initial round of sales, editors had changed job, and a forthcoming novel is always a good marketing tool. Unfortunately, pro-nuclear propaganda was even less in vogue than it had been when I first tried to sell the story. Therefore, I changed it to pro-s.p.a.ce propaganda and sent it out again. This time,Life Probe (the short story) was bought byAmazing Stories . It was published in the January 1983, issue of the magazine.

The moral of this story is that a writer should never throw anything out. Plot ideas, like plastic pop bottles, can always be recycled.

Life Probe, the novel, is available on Sci Fi - Arizona. If you have not read it already, you may want to in order to see how the idea evolved. Besides, it is a very good book!

MAN OF THE RENAISSANCE.

If you think nuclear weapons are difficult to build, ask yourself the following question: How successful would the Manhattan Project have been at inventing the VCR?.

Darol Beckwith guided his steed over rocky ground, carefully threading his way among scrubby Palo Verde trees and yellow stands of cholla cactus until he gained the summit of the small hill that had been his goal for the previous quarter hour. Once on top, he reined in his horse. Behind him, two heavily laden pack mules stopped in their tracks, each taking quick advantage of the opportunity to crop at the few patches of wiry, yellow gra.s.s that poked through the carpet of fist sized stones.

Beckwith removed his salt-stained hat and wiped perspiration from his forehead onto the sleeve of his threadbare, cotton s.h.i.+rt. Around him, the yellows, greens, and browns of the Great Sonoran Desert stretched as far as the eye could see. Replacing his hat, he rummaged in his saddlebags for his pipe, lighter, and tobacco pouch. He soon had the pipe alight and the other implements repacked. Only then did he lean forward to retrieve a pair of 'tronic binoculars from their case. He pointed them at thebrown pillar of dust that rose lazily into the cloudless blue sky halfway to the horizon. The dust cloud leaped forward at the press of a control, resolving itself into a column of mounted men. He studied the image for several minutes before restoring the gla.s.ses to their protective sheath.

"They're Sonoran cavalry, all right," he muttered as he leaned forward to stroke his horse's neck.

"Vargas's report was right about that. Wonder what they're doing this far north?"

The horse's answer was a short whinny as Beckwith urged it forward with his spurs and began picking his way toward the level ground of the plain below. He made no effort to avoid the patrol, but rather rode straight for it, reining in when the file of hors.e.m.e.n was less than a kilometer distant.

It did not take long for them to spot him. He puffed on his pipe and watched the Sonoran envelopment unfold with professional efficiency. He counted thirteen in all -- an officer and a dozen enlisted men -- as he became the center of a cloud of roiling dust, milling horses, and men with rifles drawn and ready.

He bit down on his pipe and lifted his hands well away from his body. The officer, a captain of cavalry by his collar insignia, stopped directly before him and aimed a needle gun at his midsection.

Beckwith could see by the thumbwheel that the weapon was selected to full automatic. He tried not to let that knowledge bother him as he carefully broke into a practiced smile.

"Buenos Dias, Capitan," he said, bowing his head slightly in respect to what was obviously a n.o.bleman, and probably a younger son or b.a.s.t.a.r.d willed into the duke's service by a father determined to keep him out of trouble. "To what do I owe this singular honor?"

"Who are you,Sen?r? Where from and where bound?"

"Beckwith's the name. Darol Beckwith. I am the circuit doctor for these parts. Most recently out of California Free Republic, bound for the village of Nuevo Tubac on my yearly rounds ... and d.a.m.ned if I expected to see Sonorans this far north."

"When were you last in the Republic,Sen?r Medico ?"

Beckwith reached up to pull the pipe from his mouth and then lazily scratched at his week old growth of beard. "Let's see now. I stopped for a week in New Refuge before crossing the river at Blythe, six ... no, seven ... yeah, seven days ago."

"Did you see any soldiers there?"

Beckwith let his smile degenerate into a sheepish grin. "Now, Captain, you know that my service doesn't take sides in local politics. It would be a violation of my oath to answer such a question."