The Probability Broach, chapter 21
Chapter 21 of TPB begins with another fictional quote, this one attributed to “Rosalie Wilderlane” (a reference to real-life libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane, who was also the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder):
The source of every human misery, the cause of every war, the great issue before every society for six thousand years has been the question, “Who shall have the power?” The significance of the Whiskey Rebellion is that, for the first time in history, individuals created a civilization in which the answer to that question is “Nobody!”
Impossible.
As I’ve observed before, power is like water. It can’t be squeezed out of existence; it will always take the shape of the society it exists within. In a democracy, power rests with the will of the majority. In capitalism, it’s held by those who have the most money, which they can convert into material resources or into influence to compel others to do their bidding.
Smith clearly doesn’t believe that no one in this society has power. He’s shown massive skyscrapers, road networks, irrigation projects, and other monumental works. The creation of these logically requires some person or group of people with the ability to control and coordinate the labor of thousands or millions of others. That’s what power is. If it’s literally impossible to have war or oppression because no one can exert any control over anyone else, it should also be impossible to build roads, bridges and skyscrapers.
In the last chapter, Madison’s turncoat ally Freeman K. Bertram gave Ed and Lucy a clue to where their friends Ed and Clarissa are being held hostage. For some reason (because the main characters do everything), rather than calling local security to handle it, they’re going themselves. They’re taking the fastest means of transport available in the North American Confederacy, a vehicle used only in emergencies:
Attendants hustled us out of the hoverbuggy toward a stubby metal cylinder the size of a Volkswagen bus. The nose was sandblasted and missing paint, the stern scorched and blistered. Between them was an oval hatch, and the legend Columbiad. Then we were through the six-inch hull, being belted into deeply cushioned seats. The machine’s interior was almost featureless: two couches in tandem facing a Telecom screen, no windows, and, when the door slammed shut like a coffin lid, dimly lit by a few instrument pilots.
Smith tells us that this method of transit is called a “cannonball”. It consists of a tunnel with the air pumped out to create a vacuum, and liquid hydrogen and oxygen poured in behind the vessel and ignited to accelerate it to immense speed. Win quips, “Now I knew what a rifle shell feels like.”
As the vehicle began moving ponderously, a man appeared in the screen, head and shoulders, wearing coveralls like the attendants who’d sealed us in. “Columbiad, Traffic Control. We’ll have you chambered in a moment. Please don’t touch any controls, keep your arms and legs within the couches. You’ll be pulling close to six G’s. Questions?”
The vehicle slanted downward ominously, rocking from side to side. “Where will this frammis dump us out?” Lucy asked unperturbed.
The controller glanced down at his keyboard. “Right now you’re simply routed for LAP. You have a specific destination in mind?”
“How about eighty-nine Tucker Circle?” I asked sarcastically, trying to ignore my heartbeat. He punched his console, paused, punched some more, then looked up.
“We’ll shunt you into the underground system, to the south-east corner of that block. Be prepared to exit quickly—I could only get a thirteen-second window between two scheduled trains. Your restraints will release when you drop below five mph, door-releases to your left will be illuminated. Good luck. Keep your hands and feet inside the couches.”
This may be a nitpick, but I have to say it: Did no one ask Win and Lucy to sign liability releases before getting into this contraption?
The text itself compares this mode of transport to being shot out of a giant cannon. Even if nothing goes wrong and the vessel doesn’t explode catastrophically, or miss its target and splatter them across the landscape, the immense G-force could certainly cause a fatal heart attack or a stroke in someone who’s in poor health. And to cap it all off, when they land, they only have thirteen seconds to get out—presumably before they get hit by a train!
I don’t care how advanced the NAC is, this must be an incredibly dangerous way to travel. Even if they have no laws governing whether this or any other form of transportation can exist, we know they have civil liability suits against the makers of harmful products. Smith brought this up himself as a solution to how an anarcho-capitalist society could put a stop to pollution. If one of these cannonballs blows up, shouldn’t the passengers’ next of kin sue this company out of existence?
An invisible hippopotamus suddenly draped its full weight the length of my body. I tried screaming, but couldn’t even breathe. My bruised arm began burning; I couldn’t move to see whether it hung over the edge of the couch. Too late anyway, I figured. I found myself wishing I’d taken time to arrange certain private parts a little more carefully. I was going to have bruises in some strange places.
…Another sudden lurch and the deceleration eased off. Suddenly we were in an ordinary subway tunnel. We rocked, gasping and screeching, to a halt. I let the belts fall from me, saw Lucy hit the door, and followed her into the coolness of a shopping center, up the escalator as fast as our elbows could push us, and out, blinking in the sunlight.
I’d left my coat in North Dakota. I wondered who was paying for the ride.
I’m assuming L. Neil Smith just put this part in because he thought it was cool, but it says a lot about how his anarcho-capitalist society manages risk. Namely, it doesn’t.
Libertarians are supposed to be against initiating force. In any vaguely rational society, that should include not subjecting your neighbors to unreasonable risk of harm. If you build a shooting range on your property, you should have to build walls and backstops, and not just assume that no stray bullet will ever miss the target and crash through the windows of the kindergarten next door.
The NAC as Smith depicts it is a far wilder and more chaotic place. It’s a society where anyone can do anything, regardless of the danger it poses to others. Individual freedom reigns supreme, to the extent that you can swing your fist regardless of whether someone else’s face is in the way.
We saw this in the chapter about highway safety, or rather the lack thereof. You can drive a car powered by nuclear reactors, speed at hundreds of miles an hour, or drive drunk without a problem. But this chapter makes the problem even more glaringly obvious.
I mentioned the personal liability of the travelers who willingly board these vehicles, but there’s also the collective risk imposed on everyone by a means of transport that amounts to firing giant artillery shells across continental distances. What if one of these cannonballs misses its target and comes crashing through your roof? What if they collide with one of those big fancy zeppelins? You think people complain about the noise and hazards of living near an airport—imagine what it would do to your property values to live underneath their firing trajectory!
Who on earth built this? How did they test it? How did they fend off the inevitable onslaught of complaints and objections, in a society where every angry NIMBY is armed and has the power to take justice into their own hands? Smith neglects these questions for the sake of cool, which only highlights how deeply unrealistic his utopia is.
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Okay, I’ll give Smith credit for using “an invisible hippopotamus” to describe to describe the G-force of rapid acceleration.
“We’ll shunt you into the underground system, to the south-east corner of that block. Be prepared to exit quickly—I could only get a thirteen-second window between two scheduled trains.”
This is just stupid. Not only stupid worldbuilding, it’s a really bad way to attempt a rescue. Why not look for somewhere further away but with a better time window?
Once the passengers leave, the “frammis”* still remains on the tracks, and colliding with a 6” hull will cause even an express subway train to get behind schedule. How does traffic management arrange for an open track all the way across the country in an anarchy anyway – and to get wherever the “cannonball” is going without having to slow for curves?
*I’d thought Smith borrowed that from Mad magazine, but it goes back even further.
… a tunnel with the air pumped out to create a vacuum…
O. M. G.
Could Probability Broach be where Elon Musk got his hare-brained “Hyperloop” scheme (and who know how much else of his deranged mentality)?
It would absolutely not surprise me in the least.
Doubtful. The concept of a “vacuum train” (which is what Musk calls “hyperloop”) goes all the way back to the late 19th century, with the first prototype having been built in 1906. It’s been a far-future sci-fi staple for pretty much all of the 20th century. Some 1970s and 1980s sci-fi novels assumed you were already familiar with the concept and merely hinted that they were in common use, or provided context clues that “the tube” or whatever they called it was much more than a subway, which you might not pick up on if you weren’t familiar.
No one could make it work on a level practical enough for commercial use, and bullet trains (invented in 1964) becoming common during the 1980s killed off the idea for a few decades. Elon Musk merely revived serious interest in the idea. There are currently ongoing development efforts in China, South Korea, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, and India to try and make it work, it’s just not as visible and widely reported on as the mostly-abandoned US “hyperloop” effort.
It’s unlikely that Musk was specifically inspired by this book. Some people suspect that it might have been Asimov’s Foundation series, since it’s well known he’s read that, but that’s purely speculative.
Roddenberry’s Genesis II had worldwide, underground vacuum trains in the early 1970s, predating Smith and since TV SF generally lags written SF by decades, vacuum trains must have been quite well known among SF aficionados by 1979
…But on the other hand, the idea of transporting people long distance via giant cannons dates from the 1850s (and inspired the 1865 Jules Verne novella From the Earth to the Moon) but the discovery that high-G forces are unpleasant and very high G results in people becoming unconscious or dead ended that idea permanently. Not sure why Smith thought bringing back a high-tech version of that concept was a good idea. There *is* a physics loophole which allows you to get around the high-G problem, and some hypothetical “space catapult” designs take advantage of it, but Smith doesn’t seem to be aware of it.
One might be surprised how old some technological ideas really are. One of the longest spans of concept-to-working-design was the helicopter, which was invented in the 1490s (generally credited to Leonardo da Vinci thanks to his “aerial screw” design, tough he may not have actually been the first to come up with it), but no one could get it to work on a practical level until the 1910s… over 400 years! And even then they weren’t used much until after WWII.
There are a few approaches.
One, as noted in the xkcd ‘What If’ ‘No Rules NASCAR’ question, is that there’s a direction in which your body has the best response to extreme gravity, and if you mount the body in a gyroscopicly-stabilized space that you can spin, you can turn the body to always be in the best orientation to deal with the acceleration/deceleration.
A better one is using Perfluorocarbons, where you basically surround the traveller with a breathable liquid that acts as better support and pressure control.
And if you want to reduce the worst-case momentary acceleration while still getting up to speed, there’s always the ‘supergun’ approach using a sort of staged firing system like what Gerald Bull worked on with the intention of launching satellites into orbit from an oversized howitzer.
A combination of gyroscopic stabilization and gradual acceleration in a vacuum ring or disc before diverting the transport pod (or other vehicle) to its flight path is the loophole I was thinking of. (Yes, there would be a shock as it transfers from vacuum to air, but there are ways to minimize that.) I don’t think perfluorocarbons would be a very practical idea, but I suppose you could do that if you need to get on the other side of the planet within a single-digit number of minutes… but hard to imagine that ever being a necessary enough reason for anyone to build it. In an emergency it would be far more practical most of the time to tele-operate a physical avatar, and we kind of already do that with telesurgery.
It’s not ideal for point-to-point transfer on the surface of the Earth, because you’d need to catch the vehicle on the other end *very* precisely so that it could be safely decelerated. And even a slight gust of wind would cause a crash if the vehicle were unable to perform ultra-fast adjustments. But given good enough technology you *could* do it. It’d be better for surface-to-space launches, where being picked up by a space station or a spaceship doesn’t need as precise of control and guidance, and you don’t need much deceleration because the target ship/station is already traveling in a similar speed and direction. Or I guess you could shoot it through a guided path in an underground tunnel, but that’s essentially a vacuum train which mostly doesn’t travel under its own power.
I wasn’t aware that Elmo could read. He spouts off half-truths and utter fantasy so glibly that he imitates a certain brain-dead, dementia-ridden politician, and we know he can’t even read at much above a third grade level.
At the very least, Smith and Musk most likely got their deranged libertarian mindset from a common source.
What’s this “suddenly” business? Don’t they have to go through an airlock to go from the evacuated tunnel to the presumably air-filled ordinary subway?
In a windowless vehicle, how would Win & Lucy have any clue they’d entered “an ordinary subway tunnel”?
The screen displays an outside camera view when not being used as a Telecom?
It’s a little bit unclear from Smith’s description, but I think we’re meant to conclude that they’re actually being fired out of the tunnel like a cannon shell, flying cross-country on a ballistic trajectory, and that something (this is the unclear part) “catches” them at the destination and shunts them into the subway system.
… I think we’re meant to conclude that they’re actually being fired out of the tunnel like a cannon shell, flying cross-country on a ballistic trajectory…
Then what does the “tunnel with the air pumped out to create a vacuum” do? If that’s just the launching tube, opening at the last millisecond when the “stubby metal cylinder the size of a Volkswagen bus” approaches, the ride won’t last long and the payload won’t go far.
Either way, Smith’s engineering world-building fails as hard as his socio-economic world-building.
If that’s the case, then the G-force of acceleration and deceleration wouldn’t feel like an “invisible hippopotamus,” it would be more like a 16-ton weight dropped on the passengers’ chests. And each half of that journey would be fatal. Smith was a zarking idiot.
After re-reading everything, including all of the comments, I realized that there was a way that this scene could almost work. Emphasis on “almost”. I glossed over the “giant howitzer” part of Jenora Feuer’s comment, but that’s the key here. How it would work is a blast is detonated behind the transport vehicle, part of the shockwave is absorbed by a “pusher plate”, the passengers endure 6 Gs of acceleration… and once the worst effects of the “invisible hippopotamus” wore off, another blast would be set off. This would happen again, and again, and again, up until the midpoint of the journey… at which point the vehicle would either spin around 180° or the blasts would be detonated in front and be absorbed by a second pusher plate, slowing it down either way. This is the principle behind which the hypothetical Orion Drive Spaceship works, and 1979 Smith might have been aware of that concept. Though this might be overly generous, as there appears to have only been a single blast mentioned in-story.
Setting aside whether near-continuous exposure to the effect of 6 Gs would leave even a healthy and high-G-experienced person functional enough after the trip to deal with the ensuing 13-second disembarkation window (and I strongly suspect the answer is “no”) that still leaves the problem of why are they even using the subway system. If there’s a dedicated emergency transport system, then it would have its own tunnels and stations separate from the subway. If there isn’t one, then doing this would wreck the subway. If the subway system was severely overbuilt under the anticipation that people would eventually do this, then why? And maybe I’m just a bit confused or missing context, but it seems like there is both a dedicated emergency transport system *and* it also partially uses local/regional subways. This feels like it is some sort of jury-rigged system which couldn’t be made to work in a sensible way because when it was built, the existing infrastructure didn’t allow it to.
When the implausible society becomes hard to sustain, it’s time to throw in some implausible technology to distract the reader.
The more I think about this, the stupider it seems.
Either you have an underground rail system that has a signalling system robust enough to slow down or stop rail traffic when unusual situations arise, such as a train having mechanical problems, or a storm disrupting the traffic due to flooding, or whatever — or you have an underground rail system that is so fragile that it constantly has multi-train accidents and cascade failures.
.
L. Neil Smith probably had some vague idea that underground rail existed, but never gave a single fraction of a second to research them, or even just think about how they work.
Why not both?
You’ve got a rail system which has a robust tracking and signalling system, which is publicly accessible, which allows people to do stupid stuff like this and have a reasonable hope of not committing accidental mass murder, but it occasionally happens anyway, because people sometimes do stupid stuff like this. Totes freedom for all, gotta like.
Having read this decades ago, I think Mr. Smith may not have been clear enough as to the hypersonic bulletmobile’s mechanics. Our Fearless and Totally Independent Heroes are traveling at near-orbital speeds in a vacuum tunnel _underground_, all the way from mid-North Dakota to Denver-ish. If I remember correctly, this system is built under the Greenway, a grass-covered freeway for the hovermobiles that this society seems to love, which also stretches the same route (and presumably is being used at 200mph or so). The vehicle never leaves the ground or even rises to the surface. Somehow, in this every-company-and-person-for-itself society, this bulletmobile contraption is also compatible enough to connect with the local Fort Collins subway system, and is allowed to use it between trains (and there is enough profitable subway traffic in this highly individualistic society to have only a 13-second useable window between scheduled trains), and presumably already has some contracted situation with whoever runs the Ft. Collins subway (or that part of it, anyway, maybe with a separate station owner too…oh, dear, now I’m going down the whole rabbit hole of how do people even get around in a society with no public roads/travel right-of-ways…anyway…).
As to speeding and suchlike, if I recall correctly from some of the sequels (don’t bother, the ratio of author filibuster to things like plot and characterization and exposition approach late Orson Scott card levels), whoever owns the road/intersection/whatever sets the rules; there’s a throwaway comment from Win at some point about how this road company is going into receivership soon if they keep up their ‘stay alive, drive 85’ thing. My guess is that these individualists understand that they have to give the individual who owns the road a certain degree of control over their car in order to use that road, especially since ‘Confederates’ (hmm…) like to drive on autopilot on the highways (there’s a scene earlier where Ed startles Win by folding the steering wheel into the dash and kicking back once they’re on the not-actually-freeway).
Hmm. That’s an interpretation I hadn’t considered.
Based on Win’s description of his situation as feeling like a bullet loaded into a rifle barrel, I assumed it was literally launching them on a ballistic trajectory to their destination. Another reason I read it that way is because Smith says the vehicle is accelerated by igniting liquid hydrogen and oxygen behind it to propel it in a controlled explosion, like a rocket. If it’s traveling in a tunnel the whole way, why not use linear induction motors, or pneumatic compressed air, or something else less liable to result in a giant crater?
Also, one other point of textual evidence: the vehicle they travel in is named Columbiad, which is both a kind of cannon and, more specifically, the name of the giant cannon that launches the space capsule in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.
I hadn’t pictured this as an Elon Musk-style hyperloop system. I suppose that’s also a possible read, but the economics of that are even more inconceivable. After all, Smith says this means of transit is expensive and is only used in dire emergencies. What would that even look like – a global network of subterranean titanium-lined vacuum tunnels connecting every major population center, just for the very rare occasions when one or two people need to get somewhere fast? The idea of an anarcho-capitalist world paying to dig all that out is more implausible than traveling across parallel universes!
So, I went and dug up my copy (yes, I still have it), and yes, it does seem to be a vacuum tunnel underground. Lucy says something about metal doors irising about 20 miles ahead of them at any given time (no further explanation of this system or why it exists is given). I’m guessing they’re pumping out the air as they go, but at what sounds like near-orbital speeds, this seems rather unsafe.
As to why Smith used what’s essentially free-ranging rocket fuel rather than linear induction motors, I think the answer is the same for all the other nonsensical but NONideological things in this book, which is he thought it was cool (probably the same reason for the danger tunnel in the first place).
I have no idea how the economics of it works, or why it was built (in-universe); perhaps the Greenway people put it in when they built it because it was inexplicably cheap like everything else in this don’t-look-too-closely-at-the-details world so why not set yourself up for a few extra improbable bucks, sorry, ounces.
The discussion of how daft this rocket tunnel is makes me think of a line by the film critic Roger Ebert: “Consistency only matters if you don’t like the movie.” (quoted from another critic).
If Probability Broach were solidly entertaining or if it were an intelligent look at life in an anarchist society, I’d be at least a little forgiving that this go-devil makes zero scientific or logical sense. But it’s not entertaining and it’s not intelligent so I’m not at all forgiving.