The Probability Broach, chapter 4
Win has found some enigmatic clues in Vaughn Meiss’ office, but nothing conclusive. He goes into the next room, which is the dead scientist’s laboratory:
Vaughn Meiss’s lab made all the stereotypes come true. Remember The Fly? It was just like that—strung with wires and insulators, bulky pilot-lighted cabinets looming in the twilight. Only the posters were out of place. One on the back of the door read, GOVERNMENT SCIENCE IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS—AYN RAND and, penciled below: Ayn Rand is a contradiction in terms.
L. Neil Smith never misses an opportunity to slip in a gibe at the government… except that Vaughn Meiss, prior to his death, was literally a government scientist. He was working for Colorado State University!
As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, government research has given us inventions like nuclear power, space flight, GPS and the internet. To that list, we could add the World Wide Web, hyperlinks and web browsers (created by Tim Berners-Lee at the European physics laboratory CERN), the inactivated-virus flu vaccine (developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Michigan with funding from the U.S. Army), magnetic resonance imaging (invented by Paul Lauterbur at Stony Brook University, part of New York’s public SUNY system), and many more.
This history of innovation doesn’t fit with libertarian dogma that only the free market can create anything new or useful, so they train themselves to ignore it. In fact, L. Neil Smith is so well-practiced at ignoring it that he can write a scene like this with a straight face – where a character invents something revolutionary while working for a government institution, all while decrying government science.
There are multiple levels of hypocrisy here he’s blind to. It’s the same sawing-off-the-branch-you’re-sitting-on vibe as Trump voters who work federal jobs because those are the only good jobs on offer in their fading rural counties, while at the same time yelling about waste and fraud and demanding the government be radically cut back.
As Win is poking around a console (“seemingly the command post, covered with knobs and dials”), he hears footsteps at the door, which he locked behind him when he entered:
Then a crash! The door bulged, glass shattering into paint-covered fragments. The forty-one flashed into my hand as I ducked behind the console. Again! The doorjamb burst, splinters flying, and a cataract of data disks fountained to the floor. A man stood framed in the doorway, tossed his fire-extinguisher battering ram aside, and drew a weapon from his right hip.
The man enters the room, but without spotting Win hiding behind the console. Win gets the drop on him:
As he drifted past, I swapped the Magnum to my left hand, laid the muzzle on the back of his neck, and rose. “Stand easy, asshole!” I whispered, trying to keep an eye on the door. He turned abruptly. I grabbed, jammed my thumb between the hammer of his automatic and the firing pin. The weapon pointed at my guts, the hammer fell. Pain lanced through my hand but the pistol failed to fire. I wrenched it away, smacked him backhand across the face with mine. Blood spurted, black in the dark, and he crumpled.
The stunned thug falls against the console, and his jacket snags on a control. Lights light up, circuits whir into life, and there’s a rumble from across the room. He hears Otis Bealls yell “No! No!”, just as someone else standing in the doorway starts shooting wildly at him:
My forty-one roared and bucked, roared again. The machine gunner was blasted out the door, blood streaming in his wake like crepe-paper ribbons, and slammed into the wall behind…. More company through the door, guns blazing—Bealls was still yelling in the background. I fired—saw things shatter, people fall—and ran for the fire exit, plunging into darkness. Bullets buzzed and pinged behind me. I scrambled down a passageway, feeling dizzy, twisted. Instead of stairs, I found blue sky. I was at the bottom of a freshly excavated hole—like a grave.
Win scrambles out of the hole into “green grass and sunshine”, just as there’s a violent explosion and he’s sent flying into the air.
I’ll say this for L. Neil Smith: he can write a solid action sequence. I had no trouble picturing this sequence of events in my head. Aside from the obligatory bad guys missing every shot, it’s also fairly realistic. (As opposed to Ayn Rand action scenes, where the characters can deliver monologues mid-firefight.)
I still have questions, though. The most important is, why wasn’t Vaughn Meiss’ lab sealed? If its contents were vital to national security, why did the bad guys leave it unlocked and unguarded for just anyone to wander in? They should have sent their goons to cordon it off and confiscate its contents the same day they killed him.
Also, when they found out Win was looking where he shouldn’t have, why did they burst in with guns blazing? Why not just walk in, identify themselves as federal agents and arrest him?
They could have taken him away to somewhere they could interrogate him at leisure, to find out what he knows. That seems preferable to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach – except, of course, it wouldn’t have given Smith the opportunity to write this very manly and violent fight scene.
If it wasn’t clear, the thug that Win knocked against the console accidentally switched on the machinery, opening a portal to a parallel universe. When he ran for what he thought was the “fire exit”, he passed through that portal and into another reality.
Everything in this book up to this point has been a prologue. Beginning in the next chapter, this book achieves escape velocity – rising from mundane political satire into psychedelic anarcho-libertarian fantasyland.
L. Neil Smith has said what he dislikes in our current politics, but now he’s going to present his alternative. In spite of his best efforts to make it seem reasonable and attractive, it’s a wild parade of absurdities and begged questions. Stay tuned!
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Other posts in this series:
I’ve been saying for years that the biggest problem functional government regulation has is much like the problem with widespread vaccination: it has been doing its job well enough and for long enough that most people no longer remember how horrible things used to be and why the regulations were actually put into place. They only see that things are going well and that the regulations only show up to their attention when something goes ‘wrong’
And then you get folks like Smith here who have actively trained themselves to ignore the cognitive dissonance by treating as an axiom the idea that everything that works can’t be part of the government even if reality says otherwise.
This does lead to a rather worrisome possibility that every few generations we might have to deal with people breaking everyone’s stuff, resulting an awful lot of unnecessary deaths, all so that idiots can learn the hard way that some things work and some things just don’t.
“Ayn Rand is a contradiction in terms” is hilarious, because that was certainly Smith’s idea of a lame comeback. Probably Bealls wrote it, and of course we aren’t supposed to like him.
But are the bad guys ever gonna follow Win to the other world? The portal is still open.
Small spoiler: The chaos in Meiss’ lab destabilized the portal just as Win went through it, which is why there was an explosion. However, the bad guys have their own separate portal, so they’ll arrive shortly.