The Practice Effect Part 1

Brin, David.

The Practice Effect.

1 Sooee Generis

1.

The lecture was really boring.

At the front of the dimly lit conference room, the portly, gray- haired director of the Sahara Inst.i.tute of Technology paced back and forth-staring at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his back- while he pontificated ponderously on a subject he clearly barely understood.

At least that's how Dennis Nuel saw it, suffering in silence in one of the back rows.

Once upon a time, Marcel Flaster might have been one of the s.h.i.+ning lights of physics. But that had been long ago, before any of the younger scientists present had ever considered careers in reality physics. Dennis wondered what could ever have converted a once- talented mind into a boring, tendentious administrator. He swore he would jump off of Mt. Feynman before it ever happened to him.

The sonorous voice droned on.

"And so we see, people, that by using zievatronics alternate realities appear to be almost within our reach, presenting possibilities for bypa.s.sing both s.p.a.ce and time. . . ."

Dennis nursed his hangover near the back of the crowded conference room, and wondered what power on Earth could have dragged him out of bed on a Monday morning to come down here and listen to Marcel Flaster expound about zievatronics.

His eyelids drooped. He began to slump in his seat.

"Dennis!" Gabriella Versgo elbowed him in the ribs, whispering sharply. "Will you straighten up and pay attention?"

Dennis sat up quickly, blinking. Now he recalled what power on Earth had dragged him here.

At seven a.m. Gabbie had kicked open the door to his room and hauled him by his ear into the shower, ignoring his howling protests and his modesty. She had kept her formidable grip on his arm until they both were planted here in the Sahara Tech conference room.

Dennis rubbed his arm just above the elbow. One of these days, he decided, he was going to sneak into Gabbie's room and throw away all the little rubber b.a.l.l.s the redhead liked to squeeze while she studied.

She nudged him again. "Will you sit still? You have the attention span of a cranky otter! Do you want to find yourself exiled even farther from the zievatronics experiment?"

As usual, Gabbie hit close to home. He shook his head silently and made an effort to be attentive.

Dr. Flaster finished drawing a vague figure in the holo tank at the front of the seminar room. The psychophysicist put his light-pen down on the podium and unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants, though the last piece of blackboard chalk had been outlawed more than thirty years before.

"That is a zievatron," he announced proudly. Dennis looked at the light-drawing unbelievingly. He whispered, "If that's a zievatron, I'm a teetotaler. Flaster's got the poles reversed, and the field's inside out!"

Gabriella's blush almost matched the shade of her fiery hair. Her fingernails lanced into his thigh.

Dennis winced, but managed an expression of lamblike innocence when Flaster looked up myopically. After a moment the director cleared his throat.

"As I was saying earlier, all bodies possess centers of ma.s.s. The centroid of an object is the balance point, where all net forces can be said to come to play... where its reality can be ascribed.

"You, my boy," he said, pointing to Dennis. "Can you tell me where your centroid is?"

"Umm," Dennis considered foggily. He hadn't really been listening all that carefully. "I guess I must have left it at home, sir."

Snickers came from some of the other postdocs seated around the back of the room. Gabbie's blush deepened. She sank into her seat, obviously wis.h.i.+ng she were elsewhere.

The Chief Scientist smiled vaguely. "Ah, Nuel, isn't it? Dr. Dennis Nuel?"

Across the aisle, Dennis caught a glimpse of Bernald Brady grinning at his predicament. The tall, beagle-eyed young man had once been his chief rival until managing to have Dennis completely removed from the activity in the main zievatronics laboratory. Brady gave Dennis a smile of pure spite.

Dennis shrugged. After what had happened in the past few months, he felt he had little left to lose.

"Uh, yessir, Dr. Flaster. It's kind of you to remember me. I used to be a.s.sistant director of Lab One, you might recall."

Gabriella continued her descent into the upholstery, trying very much to look as if she had never seen Dennis before in her life.

Flaster nodded. "Ah, yes. Now I recollect. As a matter of fact, your name has crossed my desk very recently."

Bernald Brady's face lit up. Clearly, nothing would please Brady more than if Dennis were sent on a far-away sample-collecting mission . . . say, to Greenland or Mars. So long as he remained, Dennis presented a threat to Brady's relentless drive to curry favor and climb the bureaucratic ladder. Also, without really wis.h.i.+ng to be, Dennis seemed to be an obstacle to Brady's romantic ambitions for Gabriella.

"In any event, Dr. Nuel," Flaster continued, "you certainly cannot have 'left' your centroid anywhere, I believe if you check you'll find it somewhere near your navel."

Dennis looked down at his belt buckle, then beamed back at the Director.

Why, so it is! You can be sure I'll keep better track of it in the future!

"It's disappointing to learn," Flaster said, affecting a hearty tone, "that someone so adept with a makes.h.i.+ft sling knows so little about center of ma.s.s!"

He was clearly referring to the incident a week ago, at the staff formal dance, when a nasty little flying creature had come streaking in through a window, terrorizing the crowd around the punch bowl.

Dennis had removed his c.u.mmerbund, folded it into a sling, and flung a shot gla.s.s to bring down the batlike creature before it could hurt someone seriously with its razor-sharp beak.

The improvisation had made him an instant hero among the postdocs and techs and got Gabbie started on her present campaign to "save his career." But at the time all he had really wanted was to get a closer look at the little creature. The brief glimpse he caught had set his mind spinning with possibilities.

Most of those present at the dance had a.s.sumed that it was an escaped experiment from the Gene-craft Center, at the opposite end of the Inst.i.tute. But Dennis had other ideas.

One look had told him that the thing had clearly not come from Earth!

Taciturn men from Security had quickly arrived and crated the stunned animal away. Still, Dennis was certain it had come from Lab One... his old lab, where the main zievatron was kept. . . now off limits to everyone but Flaster's hand-picked cronies.

"Well, Dr. Flaster," Dennis ventured, "since you bring up the subject, I'm sure we're all interested in the centroid of that vicious little varmint that buzzed the party. Can you tell us what it was, at last?"

Suddenly it was very quiet in the conference room. It was an unconventional thing to do, challenging the Chief Scientist in front of everybody. But Dennis didn't care anymore. Without any apparent reason the man had already rea.s.signed him away from his life's work.

What more could Flaster do to him?

Flaster regarded Dennis expressionlessly. Finally he nodded.

"Come to my office an hour after the seminar, Dr. Nuel. I promise I will answer all of your questions then."

Dennis blinked, surprised. Did the fellow really mean it? He nodded, indicating he would be there, and Flaster turned back to his holosketch.

"As I was saying," Flaster resumed, "a psychosomatic reality anomaly has its start when we surround a center of ma.s.s by a field of improbability which..."

When attention had s.h.i.+fted fully away from them, Gabriella whispered once more in Dennis's ear. "Now you've done it!" she said.

"Hmm? Done what?" He looked back at her innocently. "As if you don't know!" she bit. "He's going to send you to the Qattara Depression to count sand grains! You watch!"

On those rare occasions when he remembered to correct his posture, Dennis Nuel stood a little above average in height. He dressed casually... some might say sloppily. His hair was slightly too long for the current style-more out of a vague obstinacy than out of any real conviction.

Dennis's face sometimes took on that dreamy expression often a.s.sociated either with genius or an inspired apt.i.tude for practical jokes. In reality he was just a little too lazy to qualify for the former, and just a bit too goodhearted for the latter. He had curly brown hair and brown eyes that were right now just a little reddened from a poker game that had gone on too late the night before.

After the lecture, as the crowd of sleepy junior scientists dispersed to find secret corners in which to nap, Dennis paused by the department bulletin board, hoping to see an advertis.e.m.e.nt for another research center working in zievatronics.

Of course, there weren't any. Sahara Tech was the only place doing really advanced work with the ziev effect. Dennis should know. He had been responsible for many of those advances. Until six months ago.

As the conference room emptied, Dennis saw Gabriella leave, chattering with her hand on Bernald Brady's arm! Brady looked pumped up, as if he had just conquered Mt. Everest. Clearly he was crazy in love.

Dennis wished the fellow luck. It would be nice to have Gabriella's attentions focused elsewhere for a while. Gabbie was a competent scientist in her own right, of course. But she was just a bit too tenacious for Dennis to relax with.

He looked at his watch. It was time to go see what Flaster wanted.

Dennis brought his shoulders back. He had decided he wouldn't put up with any further put-offs. Flaster was going to answer some questions, or Dennis was going to quit!

2

"Ah, Nuell Come in!"

Silver-haired and slightly paunched, Marcel Flaster rose from behind the gleamingly empty expanse of his desk. "Take a seat, my boy. Have a cigar? They're fresh from New Havana, on Venus." He motioned Dennis to a plush chair next to a floor-to-ceiling lavalamp.

"So tell me, young man, how is it going with that artificial- intelligence project you've been working on?"

Dennis had spent the past six months directing a small AI program mandated by an unbreakable old endowment-even though it had been proved back in 2024 that true artificial intelligence was a dead end field.

He still had no idea why Flaster had asked him here. He didn't want to be gratuitously impolite, so he reported on the recent, modest advances his small group had made.

"Well, there's been some progress. Recently we've developed a new, high-quality mimicry program. In telephone tests it conversed with randomly selected individuals for an average of six point three minutes before they suspect that they're actually talking to a machine.

Rich Schwall and I think. . ."

"Six and a half minutes!" Flaster interrupted. "Well, you've certainly broken the old record, by over a minute, I believe! I'm impressed!"

Then Flaster smiled condescendingly. "But honestly, Nuel, you don't think I a.s.signed a young scientist of your obvious talents to a project with so little long-range potential for no reason, do you?"

Dennis shook his head. He had long ago concluded that the Chief Scientist had shoved him into a corner of Sahara Tech in order to put his own cronies into the zievatronics lab.

Until the death of Dennis's old mentor, Dr. Guina.s.so, Dennis had been at the very center of the exciting field of reality a.n.a.lysis.

Then, within weeks of the tragedy, Flaster had moved his own people in and Guina.s.so's inexorably out. Thinking about it still made Dennis bitter He had felt sure they were just about to make tremendous discoveries when he was exiled from the work he loved.

"I couldn't really guess why you transferred me," Dennis said.

"Umm, could it be you were grooming me for better things?"

Oblivious to the sarcasm, Flaster grinned. "Exactly, my boy! You do show remarkable insight. Tell me, Nuel. Now that you've had experience running a small department, how would you like to take charge of the zievatronics project here at Sahara Tech?"

Dennis blinked, taken completely by surprise.

"Uh," he said concisely.

Flaster got up and went to an intricate espresso urn on a sideboard.

He poured two demita.s.ses of thick Atlas Mountains coffee and offered one to Dennis. Dennis took the small cup numbly. He barely tasted the heavy, sweet brew.

Flaster returned to his desk and sipped delicately from his demita.s.se.

"Now, you didn't think we'd let our best expert on the ziev effect molder in a backwater forever, did you? Of course not! I was planning to move you back into Lab One in a matter of weeks, anyway. And now that the subministry position has opened up..."

"The what?"

"The subministry! Mediterranea's government has s.h.i.+fted again, and my old friend Boona Calumny is slotted for the Minister of Science portfolio. So when he called me just the other day to ask for help. . ." Flaster spread his hands as if to say the rest was obvious.

Dennis couldn't believe he was hearing this. He had been certain the older man disliked him. What in the world would motivate him to turn to Dennis when it came to choosing a replacement?

Dennis wondered if his dislike for Flaster had blinded him to some n.o.bler side of the man.

"I take it you're interested?"

Dennis nodded. He didn't care what Flaster's motives were, so long as he could get his hands on the zievatron again.

"Excellent!" Flaster raised his cup again. "Of course, there is one small detail to overcome first-only a minor matter, really. Just the sort of thing that would show the lab your leaders.h.i.+p ability and guarantee your universal acceptance by all."

"Ah," Dennis said. I knew it! Here it comes! The catch!

Flaster reached under the desk and pulled out a gla.s.s box. Within it was a furry-winged, razor-toothed monstrosity, rigid and lifeless.

"After you helped us recapture it last Sat.u.r.day night, I decided it was more trouble than it was worth. I handed it over to our taxidermist.. . ."

Dennis tried to breathe normally. The small black eyes stared back at him gla.s.sily. Right now they seemed filled less with malevolence than with deep mystery.

"You wanted to know more about this thing," Flaster said. "As my heir apparent, you have a right to find out."