The Probability Broach
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 pa
ssengers 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.”
“Why don’t we leave them out of this, especially if there’s going to be shooting? We can deal with Lucy afterward.”
“You deal with her.” He inserted a copper, punching 1919. The screen rearranged itself into John Jay Madison, reclining in his smoking jacket, Oscar Burgess glowering in the background. I pushed past Ed.
“Ah,” breathed the Hamiltonian, “I wasn’t expecting so prompt a reply.”
“Can it, Madison. What do you want—before you’re shipped out to Pluto, that is? And leave your trained pit viper there out of this!”
Burgess charged the pickup, veins standing out on his cratered forehead. “Save it, asshole! You won’t be so glib when I get you back to the—”
“You and whose—”
“Gentlemen!” Madison said. “Oscar, the world loves a gracious winner.” He levered Burgess away and leaned back again. “I’d like to offer you fellows a truce, an essentially friendly meeting to discuss exchanging certain ‘valuable considerations.’ As you might surmise, I’m attending the Continental Congress to speak for my society. However, there’s no reason we can’t do business along the way, and it might render this whole Gallatinopolis affair unnecessary.”
Ed barged in. “That’s why you’re importing thermonuclear weapons—for purposes of a truce? We’ve seen your films!”
“Ah. Direct to the heart of the situation. I know you’ve seen the films: a small gift from Mr. Burgess to our organization, before the lieutenant’s entry disrupted communications. There, you see? A token of good faith: free information. At Oscar’s urging, Dr. Bealls contacted us, not long after Paratronics recruited Dr. Meiss, and in not too dissimilar a manner. Unfortunately, you had an equally disruptive effect on Dr. Bealls’s apparatus. A matter of harmonics, I’m informed. He followed you here with Oscar, or would be dead long since.
“Permit me to add that I argued strenuously against prosecuting you for your unexpected visit? There were others among us who—”
“Yeah,” I said, “right after you ordered a hit on Clarissa Olson!”
“I thought I’d made that clear, Lieutenant. I won’t be held responsible for what our less self-disciplined members may do—especially by those who willfully misunderstand our motivations. It’s your assumption that we intend importing these weapons, for example. I am deeply interested in studying the plight of your world, and are not such weapons an element in its tragic history?”
“They’re never gonna be a part of history here, Madison! Stop kidding around. What do you really want?”
He looked squarely into the camera. “Very well, to begin with, the films, immediately—and I want this Congress nonsense called off. Also, you will cease harassing me, either by further intrusions or by means of the thugs you have placed around my property.”
“Anything else—while we’re talking about it?”
“Since you ask, I want Paratronics to turn over its technology in full and at once. I confess to growing impatience with Dr. Bealls’s flounderings. Both of you will permanently absent yourself from North America—that’s quite a concession, considering the desires of Mr. Burgess.”
Ed shrugged. I looked at Madison again. “Don’t want much, do you? What’s in it for us?”
Madison searched for the proper euphemism. “This is rather delicate. I’d rather not discuss it over the—”
“Spill it!”
“As you will: wouldn’t even a pair of perfectly capable ladies be found at some disadvantage, under a hair-dryer or in a darkened theater? I leave you to draw your own inferences and to consider my generous offer while you have time. Good day, gentlemen.” His image vanished.
“Ed, go find Lucy! Meet you back in the bar!” I ran, skidding at the corners, until I collided with an attendant. “Look—if I wanted my hair done, where would I go?”
“Sir?” he wriggled his wristvoder.
“I got a sudden urge for an emergency fingerwave!” I displayed a silver coin.
“Up nine floors, forward to frame eighty-two. The Bower of Pulchritude.” He put his hand out.
“That’s the only pulchritude joint on this ship?”
“By no means, sir. But it’s the only one we’re paid to—I mean, it’s—”
“Up eight floors and forward to ninety-two.” I gave him the money.
“Nine floors, sir, eighty-two. Will there be any—”
“Yeah—call the cops. Tell ’em to meet me, fast! I charged up an escalator, shoving riders aside. Eight, nine, down corridors in a wake of angry shouts and cursing, past tennis courts, bowling alley, and shooting range, out into the mall. There was the Bower of Pulchritude. It looked like a bower of pulchritude.
Clarissa wasn’t there. I made a mess demanding to know where she’d gone. When I explained, and ladies’ guns were back in their holsters all around the shop, someone said she’d mentioned buying shoes. They’d recommended the place next door. It was the only one they were paid to—
She wasn’t there. At the next place over, I found her medikit on a chair outside the try-on booths. I considered shoving curtains back at random, but remembered the girls in the beauty shop, the ones with the artillery. Instead, I grabbed a clerk. “Where’s the lady who belongs to this bag?”
“Bag? Oh—she left her bag.”
“You mean she’s gone?”
“Afraid so, sir. Should I be telling you this? I mean, are you—?”
“I’m a lost little boy
, and she’s my mommy—I’m old for my age. What happened?”
“Well, she came in, tried on a few things. Then, while she was changing, her husband—”
“Her husband?”
“Yes, a very tall man with an accent and almost no hair. He came in to wait. Next thing I knew, the lady had collapsed. Fainted. He said it was her “condition.” Practically had to carry her out. She was quite a sight. Her eyes …” Suddenly I was very, very afraid. I asked where they’d gone.
“Their suite. Said she’d be fine if she could just lie down and—are you sure this is any of your—”
“You bet it is, honey. Whenever the cops finally get here, tell ’em I got a sudden yen to watch Galactic Horizons—get that? Now where would I do that on this levitating subdivision?”
“One of the Telecom lounges, I suppose. Number seventeen is the closest. I watch it myself when—” I headed back into the mall. Lounge seventeen would be about right, assuming Clarissa’d caught up with Lucy. If it wasn’t, I’d try paging her.
Lucy was there, but I can’t say the same for the two thugs they’d hauled out of the theater. A small crowd had gathered around the cashier’s booth, along with a medic, two security attendants, and Lucy, arms folded, gun dangling from one finger. “Miserable flea-bitten—You know I’m missing my program while you’re fiddle-farting around!”
“Now madame,” one of the official contingent pleaded, “if you’d put that away, and tell us what happened here. We must have an explanation. It’s a company rule.”
“Stuff your company! If two punks wanna get hurt—I’m practically an innocent bystander!” She gestured sharply with a toe at the figures on the floor.
The medic looked up and scowled. “Come on, lady—you’ve already fractured his skull! Trying for some ribs, now?”
“Lucy!” I elbowed my way through the crowd. “Kleingunther’s got Clarissa! Where’s Ed? He’s supposed to—”
“Ed ain’t here. These”—she kicked at the bleeding form again—“were lounging around when I—notice how this one matches Clarissa’s description? Anyway, they came in, sat on either side of me, and—” She aimed a kick at the other unconscious thug, but was restrained. “He had a hypo. They were gonna stack me! So I bopped ’em—couldn’t fire in a crowded theater. Taxation! They bent my front sight!” She peered along the barrel, the crowd in front melted discreetly away.