The Probability Broach, chapter 6
In the previous chapter of TPB, Win Bear stumbled into a parallel universe, discovered he had a doppelganger there, and sought him out – only to be near-fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting just as he found his other self’s home.
This chapter flashes back, showing these events from the perspective of this universe’s Edwin Bear. The text calls him “Ed”, to differentiate him from Win.
Ed was investigating a robbery at a company called Paratronics, but he’d had his fill of work and was planning a vacation:
One Freeman K. Bertram of Paratronics, Ltd, had a problem: someone had gotten away from a company warehouse, laden with a half-ton of valuable parts and equipment…
Ed might not be the best-known consulting detective in the land, nor the most highly paid, but he was clearly headed in that direction at an age most North Americans considered young. There were more clients than he really had time for, and although he’d worked for Paratronics, Ltd. before, and this sounded interesting, plenty of schedule-juggling had gone into shaking three vacation weeks loose.
This universe’s Ed Bear is a private “consulting detective”, the closest thing that L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist society has to police. But you have to ask: What, exactly, does this job entail?
Ed has no official legal authority, because there’s no legal system. There are no courts to back him up; he can’t get search warrants or subpoenas. He can’t enter anyone’s property without permission or compel anyone to cooperate with him if they don’t want to. He can’t arrest criminals, even if he catches them red-handed.
Also, there are no public records in this society. There are no IDs he can check, no databases he can consult. As we’ll see later, the North American Confederacy has never even heard of fingerprints. What evidence does he acquire, how does he get it, and what does he do with it? The book never really answers this.
You might point out that the phrase “consulting detective” is meant to echo Sherlock Holmes, who also lacked these powers. But Holmes did have police allies he could call on whenever the situation required it.
Ed is in his garage, getting ready to leave, when he hears a commotion outside:
Beneath the half-open door, a baggily clad form ran toward him then slammed violently into the slowly rising panel. Spots of sunlight pierced the door as a brilliant dotted line raced toward Ed… he dived, flinging back his sportcloak for the .375 on his hip. The shadow, faceless against outdoor light, slumped and fell in a pool of splattered blood.
A huge Frontenac steamer crabslipped up the driveway, bullets streaming. Ed pulled the trigger. Heavy slugs spat toward the steamer—five! six!—and silenced its machine gun… It fishtailed clumsily across the lawn and limped away.
“Death and Taxes! What was that about?” Enter a frail-looking elderly woman, 50 caliber Gabbet Fairfax smoking in her hand. She clutched her bathrobe together, shoving the monstrous weapon into a pocket, where it hung dangerously.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lucy.” Ed swapped magazines and holstered his gun, cautiously approaching the inert figure lying in the doorway. “Give me a hand. This fellow’s badly hurt!” He gently rolled the body over and looked down. At himself.
And as we’ve covered, Ed and Lucy drag Win inside and treat his wounds for free, because they’re just that nice – as opposed to, say, rolling his body over the property line into the gutter, hosing his blood off the driveway, and going back inside and pretending they saw nothing.
Back to Win’s perspective. While convalescing, he reminisces about the first time he shot someone, back in his own world:
I’d run out of cigarettes about 2 A.M., pulled pants on over pajama bottoms, and strolled over to one of those little twenty-four-hour groceries with inflated prices and lonely teenage clerks. Only this one wasn’t lonely—not with a 25 automatic pressed against her temple. He stood well away, gun arm fully extended, prancing nervously as he watched her shove small bills into a wrinkled paper bag, preparing herself for death.
You’re a cop around the clock. On my own time, I carried a beat-up .45 S & W sawed off to three inches. The door stood open, ten yards away—I didn’t dare get closer. I knelt, braced my hands on the rear corner of his ’57 Chevy, and pulled the trigger. She screamed for thirty minutes.
…Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy.
L. Neil Smith seems to agree that it’s a bad idea to have law enforcement officers who enjoy killing people. The problem, of course, is that his ancap universe has no means to “weed out” these psychopaths. Whoever has a gun and is willing to use it can do whatever their blackened heart pleases.
I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved—except at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.
L. Neil Smith takes pains to portray Win in the most heroic possible manner: an off-duty cop using deadly force to save a humble clerk’s life from an armed robber. It’s the Platonic ideal of the scenario that all gun worshippers want us to imagine.
But those situations – the mythologized “good guy with a gun” – are vanishingly rare in reality. Real-world experience shows that, when everyone is armed, what happens more often is that two people get into an argument which escalates to them drawing and shooting at each other. Both are culpable, but the one who lives gets to frame the situation as self-defense. Or angry, violent people whip out a gun and start blasting away for no good reason, just because someone annoyed them or triggered their racist paranoia.
The real purpose of these “good guy with a gun” scenarios isn’t to win over skeptics with the case for gun ownership. It’s to feed the egos of people who already own guns. It tells them that they’re lone heroes in a dangerous world, self-deputized to defend law and order from the scary outsiders all around. In that sense, this narrative may well make them feel less inhibited, and therefore, makes gun violence more common.
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For a private detective there isn’t schedule juggling to get vacation. Cases don’t happen on your schedule and the people with cases want them solved now. If he is that well off he can make whatever time he wants by not taking cases but 3 weeks is a very long period for somebody in a job that depends on being available. Private detective is the sort of job that gets vacations when there is a gap in the work.
As a private detective I will excuse his curiosity about somebody getting shot outside his door. An average person is likely to want to not get involved. A detective has to consider that the victim is tied into a case or a potential client.
His anti-federal bias is real strong here. The federal government does more then local police to get rid of the gun happy. They don’t do a lot but they do some. Local police often recruit officers that got kicked from other police forces for excessive violence.
Real world experience gives us police officers shooting dead unarmed children playing in a park, the elderly, and small family-pet dogs–all with zero provocation. Also, we have no end of cases of police officers brutalizing their own wives and children, often shooting *them* to death as well.
@Katydid:
Yeah, it says something that when there was discussion at one point about automatically banning handgun ownership for anybody with domestic violence charges, some of the strongest opponents were… police unions. Because actually enforcing that would result in a lot of police officers losing the right to carry firearms. And they considered this a good reason to oppose the law rather than, say, doing something about the fact that there seemed to be a disproportionately high number of domestic abusers on the police force.
Damn, that shootout scene is such a masturbatory fantasy that I wonder whether Smith typed it one-handed.
And why, Smith, would your oh-so perfect NAC have robberies at all? After all, you somehow have a capitalistic money-using society where nobody is poor, which eliminates pretty much all motive for theft. So this admits that not everyone benefits in his “utopia”.
That said, does it actually say there are no public records or did you just assume that? Wouldn’t the very existence of the telephone directory imply that they do have public records? Of course, I’ll LMAO if Smith explicitly wrote that this society has no records, because that would be a contradiction, and if he doesn’t understand the consequences of his own worldbuilding, how could we trust him with the real world?
Like, why would the natives use the two certainties in life as an expletive? If they don’t have taxes (implied by being propertarians) then they have no experience with them and they aren’t inevitable. So why would they care about the adage at all?
Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy.
Who’s this “we” who “try” to weed out trigger-happy cops? And by what means do “we” do this?
Also, this is just straight-up States’-Rights/anti-Federalist blithering dating back to AT LEAST the
War of Slaveowner RetrenchmentCivil War. States are closer to the people, state and local law-enforcement protects people and property, Federal officers are evil interfering tyrants and rude Northern Yankees to boot.And as we’ve covered, Ed and Lucy drag Win inside and treat his wounds for free, because they’re just that nice – as opposed to, say, rolling his body over the property line into the gutter, hosing his blood off the driveway, and going back inside and pretending they saw nothing.
This just shows the sloppiness and inconsistency of Smith’s loony-ideological thinking. Everyone’s armed to the teeth; everyone is happy in a peaceful anarchic “society” (so why does everyone carry guns all the time again?); there’s no need for aggressive police or security forces; but at the same time, some armed goons regularly drive around in vehicles with MACHINE GUNS ON TURRETS (as in, TANKS?), so of course peace-loving neighborhoods full of neighborly folks have to choose between helping each other (likely including organized/collectivist militias) or hiding and hoping the better-armed bad guys just…go away?
As we’ll see later, the North American Confederacy has never even heard of fingerprints.
Are ye fookin’ kiddin’ me?! It’s a thriving ancap society where innovation runs wild, there’s no gummint stopping them from inventing things like a cast that magically heals bullet-wounds in a day; but no one’s ever thought of using fingerprints to identify people? Smith’s mind is like a cuckoo-clock in Hell.
1, 4, 5 did such a great job of showing the idiocies and inconsistencies of Smith’s story.
@ 3, absolutely: local people on a small scale are troubling when they get their hands on power, and some will absolutely use it for their own gain.
Years ago, I lived in a cul-de-sac community with three police officers in residence. You would think this would have made the community safer, but you would not believe the stupid and illegal stuff that went on…done by the police officers themselves. What were we going to do–call the cops on them?
Circling this back around to the topic,Smith’s world he built seems very much to be might-makes-right–which we all know from dystopian movies and real life dystopias (e.g. Somalia) does NOT make for a utopia.
I’m also raising an eyebrow in disbelief that an armed tank going after Win Bear would be stopped by a Edwin’s handgun. Also, that these people live in a utopia, but they’re only mildly upset by being attacked in their own home–clearly this is nothing too out-of-the-ordinary for them.
If I’m reading fiction, I can overlook minor inconsistencies. As the theme song for MST3K instructions, “If you’re wondering how he lives and breathes and other science facts, repeat to yourself “This is just a show, I really should relax”. However, this story is nothing but inconsistencies and truths swept under the rug, and worse, it’s a sermon on the righteousness of Smith’s chosen ideology.
For example, in a society where everyone is rich through their own efforts, and supremely capable and good-looking and highly accomplished, too, what happens to those people who are born differently-abled? Some genetic conditions are not apparent in utero, and complications at birth itself can lead to some lifelong disabilities. Talk to any family in the USA with an exceptional family member and they will tell you how difficult and poverty-inducing life is even with the crumbs of support they’re given from the gov’t, like special education programs or occupational therapy–what happens in a society that provides none of that because they have no federal government? Where would these families go in Smith’s utopia–would they crawl off and die in a gutter? Who would then clean up the remains of these families?