The Probability Broach, chapter 24
When we left off, Win Bear’s ignorance had indirectly caused the villains of TPB to blow themselves up. The Hamiltonian plot is foiled; no nuclear bombs or invading armies are coming through the portal; the North American Confederacy is saved. Happy ending, ticker-tape parade, et cetera.
But wait a minute. There’s a problem that L. Neil Smith glides right past.
As we read earlier in the book, if a Probability Broach closes when an object is partway through, you get a big explosion on both ends. The size of the explosion depends on the mass distribution of the object. Depending on how much mass there is, it could be into the megaton range.
Win and his friends were on the smaller side of the blast, so they escaped with only minor injuries:
The explosion in Auraria was a mild summer breeze compared to what had happened across the river. Clarissa and I were last out of the building, and escaped with mostly minor scrapes and flash burns. She lost the back half of her coveralls, and, sadly, a lot of her beautiful hair. Protecting her eyes, I got a little careless about my own, so I am now sporting a rakish eyepatch until they clone me a transplant.
At least Lucy says it’s rakish.
But if the explosion on the other side was much bigger, what happened to the innocent people who were living next to the Hamiltonians’ hideout? Does Win feel any guilt about that?
Fortunately for his protagonist, Smith has an answer to this:
The Saint Charles Town explosion left a crater a hundred yards across. Of Madison and his people, we never found so much as a shirt button. Their hideout was an isolated building in the middle of an abandoned buffalo feedlot. I was grateful for that, although neighbors who had to shovel themselves out from under several kilotons of bison flops weren’t quite so happy.
This convenient coincidence spares Win from having innocent deaths on his conscience. However, we can infer he wouldn’t have been too bothered either way. He holds the misanthropic attitude common to libertarians, as we see when he speculates about what would have happened if the Hamiltonians had made contact with his world and the explosion had taken place there instead:
It could have been worse. The coextant point in Denver is a densely populated area, the four-hundred block of East Eighth Avenue. Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.
With these lines, Smith figures he’s disposed of the problem. But he didn’t. There’s a loose end he’s forgotten to tie up.
Even if no innocents were killed in the explosion, Madison and his confederates certainly were. Are there any legal ramifications for that? There must have been an investigation into what caused it. Does Win have to face criminal charges or answer to a tribunal?
Smith’s implicit assumption is that the Hamiltonians were bad guys and no one mourns them, so no one would care that Win effectively murdered them by sabotaging their technology. But that’s not true. People have rights in the North American Confederacy, remember?
In fact, they take those rights so seriously that the entire Continental Congress voted to disband in the face of a looming invasion, because thwarting the plot would require violating individual rights and they don’t do that no matter the stakes. If the Congress was unable to take action against Madison for that reason, why doesn’t Win get in trouble for doing the thing they refused to do?
Perhaps most people don’t like the Hamiltonians, but Madison should have had some next of kin. Even if he had no relatives, he must have had other ideological allies in the world who would care that he was dead. In the very last resort, one of those professional civil liberties groups that represent people with no other representation should have looked into it. There should have been someone to lay charges against Win.
As Smith said in an earlier chapter, the NAC’s law requires criminals to make restitution to their victims. If you commit an “irrevocable crime, like murder” for which restitution is impossible, then you get ostracized from civilization and either accept lifelong exile to the asteroid mines or else face death by starvation.
So, why doesn’t Win face any punishment? True, he didn’t cause the explosion singlehandedly, but he definitely played a part in it (the legal system calls this comparative fault). If it’s not murder, it’s manslaughter at the very least. Why isn’t he being sent to the asteroids?
It would be one thing if Smith wrote that there was an investigation and Win was acquitted. But he doesn’t. Just as in the earlier scene where Win tortured a prisoner—and, again, should have faced punishment for that under the NAC’s laws, but didn’t—the author takes it for granted that his protagonists are exempt from consequences.
I doubt that Smith noticed this inconsistency, which is a telling piece of evidence for what he really cares about. His overriding belief, like many other conservatives, is that laws should only apply to the outgroup, not to people like him and to those he cares about. He proves it in his own novel, going to great effort to describe a society where everyone’s rights have ironclad protection, then showing people flagrantly violating those rights but facing no consequences for doing so. This dangerous hypocrisy is an object lesson in why people with this ideology should never get to exercise power in the real world.
New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!
Other posts in this series:
The out here would be that an investigation may not be able to pin the explosion on anybody. The whole idea of intercepting/blocking the portal is something they came up with after the Continental Congress. In the NAC nobody has the power to demand answers to investigation questions. If they keep their mouths shut the situation is suspicious but nothing ties the heroes to the explosion.
I doubt that Smith is worried about that. I’m not sure if it’s a flaw in Smith’s thinking or it’s just the action adventure style of the book. In this style of book villains may suffer legal consequences for their actions but heroes ultimately never do. They might be threatened with consequences on occasion but in the end won’t.
I’d agree that there would be nothing to tie the good guys to Madison’s death, if it weren’t for the fact that Win and his friends were injured (and had to get medical attention) in a smaller explosion that happened at the exact same time as the big one. Even an investigator who didn’t know anything about Probability Broach physics ought to be able to infer a causal connection.
“Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.” Which implies most of them had it coming. No, that’s not creepy at all.
I agree with JM, it’s quite possible nobody will have a clue how this happened or how to track it to its source. As you’ve pointed out, there are no cops, no IDs, no forensic science. JM also has a point about hand-waving consequences for protagonists (https://frasersherman.com/2011/08/31/do-you-really-think-you-can-get-away-with-that/).
“If you commit an “irrevocable crime, like murder” for which restitution is impossible, then you get ostracized from civilization” Except shooting someone in self-defense is very legal. Given they’ve been trying to kill Win and kidnapped his friends, even if there was an investigation he could claim self-defense plausibly. As I mentioned commenting on an earlier post, Smith doesn’t specify the cutoff — if someone stalks or intimidates you without (so far) overt violence, at what point do you get to make a pre-emptive strike?
This is pretty much what I was talking about on the last post.
So, yeah, the good guys now have the ultimate terrorist weapon. Open up a broach, stick something through, control the power via a dead man switch, and start making demands. Nobody can even risk disrupting the power supply to the location. Depends on how expensive something like that is to set up, of course.
I will admit to being wrong in my initial guess that it wouldn’t even be mentioned, but I stand by my statement that it’s still mostly Smith’s lazy writing. Combined, of course, with his hypocrisy about how his heroes can do no wrong even when they obviously do as far as any uninvolved observer is concerned.
So much of this is still reminding me of Fred Clark’s takedown of Left Behind. Just as with that, you have a book that is supposed to convince the reader how great the idea is, but which in practice will do the exact opposite to anybody who isn’t already convinced and who has a shred of critical thinking skills, as large chunks of the story will get met with “But people aren’t like that!”
Smith could have engineered a “Self-Disposing Villain” (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDisposingVillain) with something like “Madison was so eager to rule the world that he carelessly rushed the Broach process (while twirling his mustache) and ended up destroying himself, his apparatus and his allies, without Win needing to be at all culpable, but somehow did it worse than that – Win is responsible for the deaths, and no one cares.
@4 andrewnotwerdna: That nobody cares actually makes sense. Considering the indifference the people of the NAC have to harm to others that part makes sense in the context. In the NAC your expected to defend yourself, have body guards or have close friends retaliate. Nobody beyond that cares. There is no real judicial or criminal system at all.
It’s a pretty pure example of a libertarian ideal, where people are expected to defend themselves with lethal force and the risk of getting into deadly fights is expected to discourage crime. This doesn’t work for many reasons.
Among other things, decades of history of organized crime shows that this doesn’t work. Not only do deadly fights still happen, but the human wish to want to belong to something is weaponized to make people willing to go ahead and die for their cause. As has been noted previously, in any world with actual humans as we understand them the real result of having no government would be organized crime syndicates effectively becoming the government. We’ve got actual historical evidence of that, too.
And even just at a more fundamental level, any sort of ‘punishment to deter crime’ setup operates under a fundamental assumption that criminals are making rational decisions. And even before you get into addiction-related crimes where the criminal blatantly isn’t rational, a lot of criminals just simply refuse to believe they’re going to get caught, because they haven’t been caught yet. Paul Bernardo being an excellent example up here in Canada: right up to his sentencing he still seemed to believe that he was smarter than everybody else and he could talk his way out of this, despite his girlfriend turning Crown’s Evidence, and even after driving away his original lawyer over the matter.