The Probability Broach (19 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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Nine tenths of everything is tax. Everything you buy has a complicated history of robbery: land, raw materials, energy, tools, buildings, transport, storage, sales, profits. Don’t forget the share you contribute toward the personal income tax of every worker who has anything to do with the process.
Inflation by taxation: there are a hundred taxes on a loaf of bread. What kind of living standard would we enjoy if everything cost a tenth of what it does? What kind of world? Think of your home, your car, your TV, your shoes, your supper—all at a 90% discount!
Government can’t
fight
poverty—poverty is its proudest achievement!
—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty
 
 
You can travel, or you can
travel.
There’s a difference between a Cadillac and a Greyhound, a Cunard liner and a copra tramp. I don’t like it: they never stock my poison in hotel bars, and Mr. Gideon had limited literary tastes.
But I’ve been all over for the department, twice to Europe, even once to Japan. I used to favor big jets, the bigger the more comforting. Then I flew to Wichita in an ancient DC-3.
He was twenty-four, she a sweet sixteen, a honeymoon couple who’d hatchet-murdered their way across four states, jailed in Kansas on a parking violation. We won the coin toss, and Wichita’s assistant chief sportingly offered us transportation on his elderly bucket of rivets.
Seeing the damned thing squatting on the Stapleton asphalt, engines palpitating, showing every symptom of Parkinsonism, I considered walking to Kansas with the matron riding piggyback. But I clamped my jaw firmly, looked around for the parachute locker, and, as soon as we were airborne, my whole attitude was transformed. Instead of rocketing dizzily out of the smog, we floated along, just high enough for an occasional encounter with an orphaned cloudlet. The insides of the old bird had been remodeled and felt like a living room: comfortable loungers, a properly stocked bar, and great big picture windows. I forgot my white knuckles and settled back, drink in hand, to watch the prairie roll by.
The Confederacy has jet liners, thousand-passenger fusion-powered titanium monsters that bash their way through near-space at five times the speed of sound. Ed felt I might see more of the country by dirigible. I was packing when he stepped into my room.
“Is this briefcase all you’re taking?”
“Damned right. I don’t care if we’re in session six months, I won’t be saddled with suitcases.” I stuffed a pair of socks into a half-empty cigarette carton.
“Well, don’t forget that little ammo box. Slip it into a pocket where it’ll be handy, and
hurry,
or we’ll miss the shuttle!”
We began by driving into the center of town. Lucy and Clarissa met us. They’d already sent the Thorneycroft home, and I watched Ed do the same with his Neova, programming the freshly repaired machine back to Genet Place, where it would wait faithfully until summoned again.
Entering the offices of Lilienthal Aeronautics, we punched our confirmations. I hoped the Seventh Continental Congress was up to footing the bill: I had visions of conducting government on charity back home. The aeroline was willing to go along with the joke. We were invited to repair to the roof, where a shuttle would waft us up to a dirigible passing overhead. We must go to the mountain, it seemed.
Riding the corridor to the elevators, we encountered a security setup not too different from the ones back home. Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person, and Clarissa unsheathed her Webley Electric. Following their example, I unholstered my Smith & Wesson, wondering what would happen next.
At home, the officer would lose control of her sphincters, and forty thousand federal marshals would trample in and haul us away for the next several eons. If they discovered something besides weapons—bullion, tobacco, Japanese merchandise—they’d add a snotty smirk. Whatever happened to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments at U.S. airports? Or the First, for that matter?
“Excuse me, sir,” the attendant said politely. “Is your ammunition in compliance with aeroline policies?”
Ed nodded. “Frangibles, at under nine hundred feet per second.”
“Thank you, sir. Please pass this way. Madame?” Clarissa showed her Webley. Its tiny stingers would never penetrate an aircraft body.
Lucy’s bazooka caused a momentary logjam: the .50 Gabbet Fairfax isn’t exactly common. Things got settled by reference to the Telecom—its 400-grain slugs were safe—adequate for defense, but harmless to the flying machine—as long as they showed a special air-travel headstamp.
The official took a hard look at my revolver. Naturally, she couldn’t find it in any of her references. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, would you mind if we took your, er, gun, until you reach your destination?”
Ed grinned smugly. “See the trouble that museum piece causes? Use the cartridges in the yellow box.”
ELMER’S CUSTOM HANDLOADS—
CERTIFIED FOR AIR TRAVEL
 
I reloaded cylinder, speed-loaders, and my derringer—which caused another round of dithering—with this new stuff: bright-yellow plastic bullets. They’d explode into harmless powder on aerocraft-tolerance materials. Ed poured my real ammo into his suitcase, for which I got another ribbing, and an automated dumbwaiter collected our bags for the shuttle’s belly.
“Look, friends,” I said, once we’d cleared security, “I know you’re enthusiastic about weapons, but haven’t you heard about hijacking?” I had to explain.
“Silly way to commit suicide.” Ed laughed. “And if you lived, you’d be paying restitution for the rest of your life!”
“
If
they caught you.”
“You’d be begging for it, by the time the paying customers finished with—”
“What about capturing the crew?” I insisted.
“Like to see ’em try that on
my
ship!” Lucy, our former combat pilot, said. “One of these big balloons, they’d just switch over to auxiliary control, while the regular crew mopped your brains off the dashboard.”
“Security’s pretty good, these days,” Ed added. “Crew-country bulkheads are titanium. No one gets in unless invited. Besides, the minute you ban handguns, criminals will take up less detectable and less discriminating weapons. Bombs, for instance.”
I persisted. “But what happens if I point a gun at the passenger sitting next to me, and threaten to blow his head off if they don’t take me, say, to Algeria?”
“Algeria?” Lucy asked. “Isn’t that somewhere at the bottom of the Sahara Sea?”
“Come on, you’re stalling! What happens if I take a hostage?”
“The hostage kills you,” Clarissa said, and that seemed to be that.
“You people are just naturally crazy or maybe you’re all criminals yourselves!”
Lucy’s laughter echoed off the elevator doors. “From what you’ve said about the U.S.A., I guess we’re criminals. Here’s to crime!” She hoisted an imaginary glass. Suddenly we were on the roof.
 
I NEVER SAW the outside of the shuttlecraft. The elevator door opened, a miniskirted gorilla showed us to our seats, and we were flung into the sky. The light suddenly dimmed—we’d flown into the biggest shadow this side of a total eclipse, the silvery-transparent underside of the mile-long airship
San Francisco Palace.
Dirigibles have a reputation they don’t entirely deserve. If you added up all the people killed in
heavier-than-air
machines, from Icarus to that latest crash in Oklahoma City, the few lighter-than-air tragedies of the twenties and thirties wouldn’t make a measurable percentage.
Dirigibles
do
expire spectacularly: blazing block-length torches, people pouring off the keel like doomed ants. But the
Hindenburg
was
stuck
with hydrogen—we’d cut off her only supply of helium.
Akron
and
Shenandoah
were simply overwhelmed by sudden storms in a day when twelve cylinders generated fifty horsepower.
U.S. airlines are subsidized; every one of those big tin birds can be instantly converted to some military use, blueprints on handy file at your friendly neighborhood airport. Airships have no such potential; they’re vessels of peace, big, fat, and vulnerable to uniformed strangers with evil intentions. Ask Lucy, who wound up touring Europe by shanks’ mare.
The
San Francisco Palace
is a universe apart from the throbbing jet-powered cigar cylinders I was used to. On long flights, you can go to bed—in your suite! Dozens of lounges, conservatories, and bars are scattered throughout the ship. Yet the
Palace
isn’t as big as they come. Her route’s a milk run: Isthmus of Colombia to Heinlein City at the Bering Strait, by way of the Great Plains. A mile from rudders to mooring cone, she’s a flying saucer with secretary’s spread—a cross between a football and a frisbee—operating on fusion, generating helium as a by-product. Helium holds her up, too, most of it from stationary reactors on the ground. If we’d had to cross the Rockies, heating coils within her ballonets would lighten us more.
Lucy left us in the lobby, an elegant vaulted chamber with translucent ceiling and Victorian trim. She was addicted to a serial that no mere Continental Congress was going to interrupt. I’d watched a couple of episodes. It was a weird mixture of Buck Rogers and
Masterpiece Theatre.
Ed made a beeline for the bar. Maybe he was a white-knuckle passenger, too.
Clarissa had been oddly quiet all day. Now, suddenly, she didn’t feel “dressy,” though she looked fine to me in scarlet medical tunic and slacks. “I’m almost grateful for that fire,” she confided absently. “It’s an excuse to pick out a whole new wardrobe. Think I’ll find a hairdresser and do a little shopping.” She gave herself a critical eye in the mirror on a nearby marble column. “Win,” she asked, laying a gentle hand on my arm, “if I get pretty enough, do you suppose we can persuade Lucy and Ed to switch accommodations in Gallatinopolis?” She wasn’t provocative about it; her eyes were big, filled with questions.
My heart was pounding. I’d planned to share a room with Ed. “Er—uh, um …” I explained.
“Me, too.” A blush, then she reached up, kissed me lightly on the earlobe. “I’ll see if I can catch Lucy now. See you in a couple of hours!”
I staggered to the bar, dimly aware that ordinarily you do that going
out,
not in. Out of the fog, Ed gave me an ambiguous look and shoved a glass in my hand. We circled around the gambling tables, plunking ourselves down where we could look outside. Half the
Palace,
more or less, is a tough, transparent skin stretched over titanium bones. These great windows ran from floor to ceiling, twelve feet. Scenery unrolled beneath us as we plowed northward: “Wyoming” now, a barren cattle-dotted plain in my world, a lushly irrigated breadbasket here.
I stared at other passengers while they stared at us. The place bustled pleasantly but wasn’t crowded. Many must have been curious about me—I’d helped Lucy round ’em up, via Telecom, but no one disturbed our privacy.
Naturally not all of them were human. Nuclear blackmail concerned every being on the continent—the entire planet, to judge from languages I heard around me. Some felt more threatened than others: Hamiltonians hold that animals have no place in society except as slaves and breakfast. A quarter of the Congress would be chimpanzees. There were gorillas, too—one group passed in peculiar robes and headgear that marked them, according to Ed, as academics from Mexico City.
At another suggestion from Ed, we negotiated a complicated series of diagonal and horizontal escalators that carried us forward half a mile to the cetaceans, traveling in luxury equivalent to our own. Through transparencies we viewed waterfilled passageways in which they swam, intent on errands or simply touring the ship. Along
our
hallways, double-lensed cameras translated images into audio wave fronts, giving finny observers a view of the landlocked world.
Now and again through the glass, I saw scuba-equipped land-dwellers mingling directly in marine society. Occasional killer whales made that an unattractive proposition as far as I was concerned. Not that I feared their razor-sharp teeth (
orca’s
just as civilized as anybody else): those critters really fill up a corridor! Porpoises and whales seemed to suffer no similar qualms: dozens of self-propelled “iron lungs” rolled along our passageways, and in several areas, land and sea folk visited in big overcrowded swimming pools.
Scattered through the ship like potted palms, Telecoms posted announcements, public and private. I’d started keeping an eye out for Clarissa or Lucy trying to find us, so I wasn’t altogether surprised to see my name on a screen:
LT. WIN BEAR: MR. VON RICHTHOFEN REQUESTS CONFERENCE, SUITE 1919, WITH YOU & YOUR COMPANIONS. KINDLY RING FIRST. MESSAGE ENDS.
 
“
Madison!
” I snarled.
“I know,” Ed said. “I was hoping to enjoy this trip.”
“We might, yet.” I fingered the handle of my knife. “Why his real name? What’s he trying to tell us?” I remembered Lucy’s tales of the murderous Red Knight of Prussia.
“Perhaps he’s reluctant to announce himself publicly, considering where most of us are going. And why.” He stepped back and began checking his pistol.
“So you think we oughta accept the invitation,” I observed.
“No harm in being ready.” He let the slide down and holstered the .375. “Let’s find Lucy and Clarissa, and see what they think.”

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