The Probability Broach, chapter 21
In the last chapter, Win Bear and his friends failed to stop John Jay Madison at the Continental Congress, or even persuade the rest of the North American Confederacy to help in any way. However, they got a clue to the location of their kidnapped friends Ed and Clarissa: a turncoat henchman said they were being held at Hamilton House, Madison’s residence.
Win and Lucy take a “cannonball” transport to get there in record time, and they call Captain Forsyth and the rest of his private bodyguards to meet them there for backup:
A hovercraft on full fans skated up to the curb. Pistols drawn, Forsyth and two of his men jumped out.
I straightened. “Let’s hit the door!” I charged up the steps, bounded onto the porch, drawing my forty-one, and blasted the lock panel with three quick shots. The door creaked open. No one was there to greet us.
“Search the place!” I ran wildly through deserted corridors, nearly shooting several man-size pieces of covered furniture. The entire house seemed empty.
Wait. Why do they suddenly have the right to break into Madison’s house?
The North American Confederacy is supposed to treat private property as inviolable; it’s pretty much the only right they recognize. In an earlier chapter, the protagonists had an intense debate about whether to trespass on Madison’s property to uncover evidence of his crimes. Ed and Win eventually burglarized the place in the middle of the night, sweating bullets the whole time, and only narrowly escaped.
But now Win busts down his front door with no qualms. Why? Because one of Madison’s goons told him he could?
You could write this off as Win being so angry, exhausted and desperate that he no longer cares for such niceties. That would be a perfectly adequate explanation, except that Captain Forsyth and the rest of his squad willingly assist Win in breaking in, with no idea what they’re walking into.
We were told that security companies don’t fight each other in the North American Confederacy; they compel their clients to work together to resolve disputes peacefully. However, that doesn’t seem to be true either. What if Madison had left his hired guards behind? How did they know they weren’t about to kick off a security-company war?
The real explanation is that L. Neil Smith, like Ayn Rand, believes in protagonist-centered morality. Whatever he says about freedom and non-initiation of force, his actual core principle is: “The good guys are allowed to break whatever rules they want because they’re the good guys, and you know they’re the good guys because they say they are.”
This hypocrisy further underlines the point that an anarcho-capitalist society couldn’t work the way Smith insists it would. If his protagonists actually followed its rules, and didn’t have the all-purpose morality exemption their author grants them, the villains would have succeeded in their world-conquest plot.
But regardless, their search comes to naught. The house is deserted; all the machinery Madison was building to create his own Probability Broach has been shipped out. The bad guys have made a clean getaway. There’s no sign of Ed or Clarissa.
They’re about to give their friends up for dead, when Win has a brainstorm. He kicks down the freezer door—the same one where they found the frozen body of Richard Nixon—and Ed and Clarissa tumble out. They’re hypothermic, covered in frost, but alive. Strangely, they’re also wrapped in aluminum foil like mummies.
After Win and Lucy make some hot coffee to help their friends warm up (this is technically stealing Madison’s property, but no one seems to care at this point), Clarissa explains. The foil shielded them, somewhat, from the high-tech “paratronic” freezing rays:
“Paratronic radiation,” Clarissa explained, “the kind used to keep patients in stasis. It damps molecular motion, but metallic objects interfere, slow the process down. It doesn’t matter with something like frozen food, but with patients you have to be very careful. That’s why you didn’t get stasis, Win. Too many bullet fragments. Anyway, we peeled foil off a lot of food in there, and wrapped it around ourselves.” She’d finished her hot drink. Lucy shoved another into her hand. “It wouldn’t have bought us much time, but—”
“Enough to save our lives!” said Ed.
If this freezer is so dangerous to human life, shouldn’t it have an emergency release to open the door from inside?
In the real world, Congress passed a law called the Refrigerator Safety Act for just this reason, to force a redesign of refrigerator doors in response to children getting trapped and suffocating. Of course, an anarcho-capitalist society like the NAC has no one whose job it is to care about dangers like that, so that tracks.
Win and Lucy fill their friends in on how they utterly failed to accomplish anything at the Continental Congress. As Lucy notes, the bad guys didn’t really need to go anywhere: “They had us stopped in Gallatinopolis, and they knew it.”
The only bright spot is that the Hamiltonians (for some reason) neither killed Ed and Clarissa immediately, nor took them away to continue using them as hostages. They’re grateful for the rescue, all the more so because it turns out—at this late date—that Clarissa is in love with Win:
“There we were,” mused Ed, “freezing our asses off in there, and all she could do was blubber about never seeing you again, and how worried you must be. That’s why she thought of the aluminum foil—said it’d give you a little more time to rescue us! Never stopped hoping, right up to when we heard you blow the hinges off the front door. About half an hour after I’d given us up for dead.”
There isn’t really any justification for this, other than that the book is almost over and Smith wanted his hero to get a love interest. Until now, Clarissa has treated Win like a barbarian; she was furious at him when he tortured a prisoner to make him talk. But by authorial fiat, she now reverses her opinion and falls in love with Win, without even attempting to justify what redeeming characteristics she thinks he has.
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Other posts in this series:
I’ll give Smith some props: this is unremarkably stupid writing as opposed to his usual epically stupid writing.
Paratronic radiation… damps molecular motion…
An input of energy that reduces energy. Aside from the basic violation of the laws of thermodynamics, howcum the Confederacy doesn’t have death-ray guns?
Refrigerators are devices where an input of energy is used to reduce energy.
Perhaps more to the plot point – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling
Good point (likewise to andrewnotwerdna @ # 3) – I could offer a lot of quibbles, but all within the usual range of science-fiction handwavium.
Smith still doesn’t seem to have worked through what the applications of such tech would imply socially.
Refrigerators don’t “reduce” energy, they just transfer it elsewhere via a more complex process than hitting stuff with radiation that magically makes it colder.
A classic “stressful situation leads to love” scenario. Sure to guarantee a long-lasting and healthy relationship (sarcasm).
P.S. Thermoacoustic cooling also exists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustics).
Regarding Win’s actions – libertarians sometimes accuse non-libertarians of believing that actions that would be criminal for an individual are automatically fine for a group. Here we see that Smith argues the reverse – actions that would be evil statism if directed by a group representing over 90% of the population are just fine when done by one guy and some buddies.
To be fair, protagonist-centered morality is common enough in stories set in the real world, because sometimes it works… at least from an purely entertainment perspective. There’s a saying, “Consistency only matters if you don’t like the movie” (attributed to Roger Ebert), which means something along the lines of “obvious flaws are easily overlooked via suspension of disbelief if you experience the story as a whole as entertaining, but not if you don’t.”
But from the perspective of someone who is critically analyzing his work, regardless of whether they found the initial read entertaining, it severely weakens his message. At least with Atlas Shrugged (I’m not familiar with Rand’s other works) it was an attempt to portray the sociopathic “morality” of John Galt as being superior to that of ordinary people, so protagonist-centered morality greatly enhances the message there. What’s wrong with it is everything *except* that.
Here, the entire point is supposed to be that Win Bear’s world (which is meant to be our world, but mostly isn’t) is wrong about everything and Broachworld morality is superior… but it uses a familiar action-movie style protagonist-centered morality in an attempt to create an entertaining plot. Because this is actually successful, in-story, literally saving the world in the process when anyone restrained by Broachworld morality would be helpless… it’s not a great approach for an author tract. Unless it was attempting to point out that no system is perfect, all have flaws and weaknesses which can be exploited by bad actors and sometimes you have to work outside of the system to protect it (and when in tract form, that sort of thing is usually apologia for problematic government agencies), but that’s definitely not Smith’s goal here.
This is actually kind of funny when you consider that Smith didn’t bother to explain how anarcho-capitalism results in accelerated technological development to instead focus on how ancap morality and/or legalism “just better” for everyday life and ordinary practices… but in the end, it was *only* the technology which actually made anything better. And even that’s only if you ignore the part where apparently some of this technology empowers reckless idiots who might accidentally kill you at any moment, and you’re very limited in how aware of them you’re allowed to be and what you’re allowed to do to stop them.
Until now, Clarissa has treated Win like a barbarian; she was furious at him when he tortured a prisoner to make him talk. But by authorial fiat, she now reverses her opinion and falls in love with Win, without even attempting to justify what redeeming characteristics she thinks he has.
This is standard cheesy romance: the tough and sensible woman is initially put off by the man’s tactlessness, barbarism or savagery, but it doesn’t take her long to realize that’s exactly the kind of rule-breaking, brutish manly-man she needs both in her life and in her babies’ gene-pool.