The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Having escaped pursuit in last week’s plot-obligatory car chase scene, Win and his friends have set up shop in Saint Charles Town, the North American Confederacy’s parallel version of Denver. That’s close enough to the villains’ hideout for scientist Deejay Thorens to set up her modified Probability Broach, which will let them jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from bringing in their invasion force:

It was dark by the time Deejay sat back, turning knobs and watching the Telecom. Abruptly, the screen blossomed into an intricate moiré pattern. She began making frantic adjustments.

“I think I’ve got something here! Wait—yes, here it is! He’s just warming up again! Okay, I’ve got him. Hand me that meter, Lucy… we’ll know more in a few minutes.”

…She inserted a slender filament into the guts of the machine, plugged the other end into the Telecom, pushing buttons. I jumped three feet as the screen bulged with the proximity-distorted image of John Jay Madison.

…The picture backed off and swooped around the room in Saint Charles, panning 360 degrees to catch Madison’s associates: Skinner, others I recognized from the Continental Congress, finally resting on Bealls himself, up to his armpits in haywired paratronics.

Deejay explains that the interface is one-way; they can see the bad guys, but not vice versa. The villains are having an animated conversation, presumably about how to get their device working and reestablish contact with the evil government of Win’s world.

Deejay started turning knobs again, the viewpoint whirled dizzily. “Forward a bit,” she muttered. “A little more… there! Now I’ll punch up a short program, and—Good! Bealls is still calibrating. When he goes on full power, we’ll match him, foul up his field symmetry, maybe give him some feedback to play with. The best part is, he’ll never figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t know enough field theory yet.”

Clarissa crossed over to the ‘com, dragging me along. We watched Bealls’s distorted, sweaty face as he concentrated. “One thing I don’t understand, Deejay,” she said. “Do we have to watch him every minute, from now on, just to prevent him communicating with the other side?”

“That’s the cockroach in the hollandaise, all right!” Lucy muttered grimly. “Say, y’don’t suppose we could put a couple dozen slugs through this contraption of yours and…”

… “Sorry, boys. It’s a great idea, but we simply don’t have the power. On regular wall current, this Broach is good for about three-tenths-of-an-inch diameter. I can louse up Beall’s operations, but that’ll have to satisfy us until we think of something else.”

“Nuts!” Lucy complained. “Can’t get a fifty-caliber bullet through a thirty-caliber hole!”

I include this dialogue because it shows that the protagonists take for granted something they shouldn’t take for granted: namely, that they’re the only ones in the world who can or will do anything about Madison.

The problem, as Clarissa states, is that they can use Deejay’s technology to scramble Madison’s Probability Broach, but it requires active effort and proximity. Unless Madison gives up, which he’s not likely to do, they’ll have to stay near him and watch him 24/7. It’s a lifetime commitment to keep the North American Confederacy from being invaded.

But wait a minute. Why is it up to these people specifically to do that?

After all, Win and his friends made their case to all the delegates at the Continental Congress and, in theory, all the people of North America. Everyone who saw the films of nuclear war was appropriately shocked and horrified. Our protagonists should have a huge pool of volunteers eager to assist them.

Deejay could train others in the use of her Broach jammer, and they could set up a rotating schedule to watch Madison and block his device whenever he tried using it. This would be an anarchist-friendly solution, even, since it would thwart his evil plan without initiating force or violating anyone’s rights.

But that possibility is never discussed, nor even mentioned as an option. Nor does anyone else seek the protagonists out to offer assistance. It’s as if the entire population of the North American Confederacy has collectively decided that this isn’t their problem, and they’ll leave it up to this small self-selected handful of people to do something about it.

Obviously, L. Neil Smith wrote it this way for plot purposes. He wants his main characters to be the ones who save the day, so he doesn’t have strangers get involved.

However, whether he realized it or not, this is a perfect demonstration of how an anarcho-capitalist society would fail. When selfishness is the rule, there’s a strong incentive to ignore collective dangers in the hope that someone else will deal with them.

It’s the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: why should I spend my time and resources, or risk my own safety, to solve a problem when all those other selfish jerks will just sit back and get a free ride off my efforts? And because everyone reasons this way, no one does anything.

This is a problem in our society, where commons problems like homelessness, climate change, pollution, groundwater depletion, species extinction due to overharvesting, and other such issues tend to go unsolved until a government steps in. In a society based purely on capitalism, with no authority that can compel people to cooperate, no one will want to be helpful at their own expense. As a result, big problems will fester and multiply unless a few heroic suckers are willing to sacrifice themselves. That’s exactly what we see here.

Bealls starts to power up his device, and Deejay tries to jam it—but recall she said that if her alignment is off by a tiny bit, the two Broaches will go “concentric”, becoming a portal linking two points in the same world. No prizes for guessing that Chekhov’s gun is about to go off:

“Here it comes!” Deejay warned. “I’ve got to be careful now. It tends to drift. Don’t jog my elbow!” She sat tensed at the controls, making minute adjustments. The screen blurred, then sprang into a mind-twisting kaleidoscopic display. “Shit!” Deejay startled all of us, ripping the fiber-optic tube out of the interface. “It’s gone concentric!”

A tiny silvery button popped out of the Broach and sprouted toward us on a slender supporting rod. When the second joint passed the interface, I recognized it. “Not a manuscript!” I whispered hoarsely. “Not even a note! That’s an antenna, an ordinary walkie-talkie antenna!” On impulse I snatched a pair of vise-grips from the bench and clamped them onto the chrome-plated shaft. “Let the son of a bitch figure that one out!”

The antenna stopped sliding into the room, backed up suddenly until the pliers banged against the Broach chassis, arched forward, and retreated again, trapped.

Win chortles at his prank (he starts recounting an obscene joke about a vice squad and a public bathroom), but he’s forgotten something extremely important. If a Probability Broach shuts down while something is partway through the portal, you get a big bang.

Luckily for him, Deejay is quicker on the uptake and realizes what’s about to happen:

“Out!” Deejay screamed in horror, pointing at her instruments. “Get out of here before he shuts the field down!” She scrambled for the exit, dragging Lucy by the gunbelt. I shoved Clarissa through the door behind Ed, just making it to the sidewalk outside, when—

The world erupted in fire and thunder. Windows bulged and splashed, twin balls of fire either side of the door… My hair and eyebrows crisped and singed. The world was hell, a raging, incoherent furious roar.

Yet, even above the explosion we’d escaped, I could hear a distant rumble, see the smoke and flame of a vastly greater cataclysm, a mile across the river in Saint Charles.

And so, the day is saved—not by the heroes’ clever plan or bold action, but by Win’s blundering combined with another sci-fi deus ex machina.

Given how Smith hails firearms as the solution to every problem, you’d think he’d want to dispatch the villains in an exciting, climactic shootout. At the very least, there should have been a final face-to-face confrontation between Win and his archnemesis. But none of that happens. There’s no heroic gunplay, no Dirty Harry monologues, no James Bond-style action-hero quips.

Instead, the bad guys blow themselves up: offscreen, by accident, and without even the satisfaction of realizing what’s about to happen to them. It’s a disappointingly anticlimactic ending.

There’s one more short chapter of TPB, in which Smith tries to wrap up loose ends and summarize the moral of the story. Next week, I’ll deconstruct that chapter and offer some thoughts on the book as a whole.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach