Zeroth Order Approximation

Tales of the Weird

2010-12-29T17:11:00.002-05:00

For Christmas, we got one of those boxes that lets us stream movies to our TV. One of the things I like about it is that you can watch junk on demand. After all, a truly great movie is not always what you need. If you are just looking for something to absorb a little excess attention while you do chores for an hour or two, then you don't necessarily want to go with Lawrence of Arabia. That would be . . . wasteful.

So yesterday while I did laundry, I fired up the box and selected out one of those "History's Mysteries" programs from the History Channel, just the sort of weird junk I was looking for. Conspiracy theories, the Roswell crash, secret Nazi occultism, the Loch Ness Monster -- I find that all sort of thing endlessly interesting and amusing. The episode I picked was about the legendary "Philadelphia Experiment", the story that the US Navy did a test in 1943 (based on Einstein's unified field theory, of course) to make a warship invisible and teleport it from one place to another.

The program was actually pretty good. It traced the rather curious origin of the story in a strangely annotated paperback copy of Morris K. Jessup's The Case for the UFO, mailed to a couple of naval officers at the Pentagon by a mysterious man calling himself Carlos Allende. It traced the evolution of the story, debunked the details and explored its persistent appeal.

And then, suddenly, things got weird. Taking their cue from the teleportation part of the legend, the documentary took a few minutes to discuss quantum teleportation. And there was my friend Chris Fuchs, discussing Einstein and quantum entanglement. I stopped sorting the clothes and just stared at the screen in amazement.

And I thought: Here I am watching a show about the craziest of all the crazy tales in the paranormal literature, and the the one part I find really startling and eerie is seeing my old friend chat about quantum mechanics, the thing I have seen a thousand times before.

Author!

2010-12-15T11:44:00.003-05:00

As an experiment in media disintermediation, I had a bit of fun creating my very own Amazon.com author page and linking my two textbooks and the Teaching Company course. (The second Teaching Company course is not yet available through Amazon.)

To make sure I had enough interesting stuff on the page, I used the automatic Amazon system to create a Kindle version of my novella The Pasadena Rule. You are certainly welcome to spend $1.99 to buy it! (I get about 70 cents of that.) But you can also read it for free on this blog (in four parts (here, here, here and here) or as a six-part serial in the online magazine Ray Gun Revival. (Check their archives beginning with the 01 September 2007 issue.)

Isn't this a fun time to be alive?

Renaissance

2010-12-15T11:38:00.005-05:00

Last Sunday I preached this sermon at our church. Not my best effort, I think; it feels like a rough draft for something better. But some people seemed to like it, and it may be of interest here. The Scripture passages appointed for that day (3rd Sunday in Advent, Year A) can be found here. I've also added a link to the Civil War website I mention. (Update: An audio recording, mostly intelligible, can be found here. Weirdly, the last two words are cut off.)

This year my brother Will has been emailing a daily Advent meditation to his friends and family. (I should tell you that this is my brother the theologian, not my brother the rocket scientist or my brother the computer guy. Advent meditations from them might be very different.) Anyway, in one of his first pieces, Will writes how the coming of Christ is the center point, the pivot, in all human history. We reflect this in our calendar; the birth of Christ is the dividing point between BC and AD. We live on the AD side, in the age after Christ has come into the world. But according to Will, during the season of Advent, for a little while we inhabit BC.

It's all very nice. But I confess to you that when I read it, a part of my reaction was, Oh, isn't that a little hokey? I don't think of Advent as a kind of personal exercise in historical re-enactment, like going to the Renaissance Faire. Now, I enjoy going to the Renaissance Faire. I walk around, see the costumes, listen to the music, maybe take in the swordsmen show or watch the joust. It's fun -- hokey, but fun. It isn't very much like the real Renaissance. There is no hardship, no sickness, no human tragedy. And of course, nobody wants to have such things at the Renaissance Faire. The point of it is to have a good time. It's pretend, not real.

But a "let's pretend" approach to Advent cannot really satisfy me. I'm a serious sort of fellow. Costumes and pageants and so forth seem to ignore the serious business of following Christ, here and now, 2010 years AD. I am looking for a present reality, not a pretend historical re-enactment. And that is why I rolled my eyes a bit when I read that passage in my brother's email.

On the other hand, there is an exercise in historical re-enactment, an ongoing commemoration, that does truly capture my imagination these days. Let me tell you about it. Last month was the 150th anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, the event that sparked the Civil War. And since last month there has been an internet website called "The Long Recall" about the history of those days. Each day, the authors of the site put up a new post telling what happened in the country exactly one and a half centuries ago. They include links to reprints of newspaper stories and editorials from New York, Richmond, Philadelphia, Charleston and other places. They pass on rumors. They give the financial news. They report on world events too, whenever steamships arrive from Europe and Asia. For Sundays -- which actually appear on the website on Thursdays -- they reprint the texts of sermons preached in notable churches across the land.

It is fascinating to see how the history of that era unfolds day by day. It is fascinating -- sometimes bracing, sometimes sad, sometimes ironic -- to read what the people of those days say about the crisis they face. It is fascinating because, to put it plainly, those people have no idea what is coming. They do plenty of talking about secession and conflict and so on. But they do not really comprehend that they are standing on the threshold of a vast, heartbreaking, almost unimaginable war, a war that will change everything. They do not know. But then, how could they? They are living inside their time. They do not stand outside of it, as we do. The great and terrible shape of history, so obvious to us, is almost invisible to them.

And it only requires a little reflection to realize that you and I are in much the same situation today. We live inside our own lives, inside our own time. What great or terrible history is being shaped now, we are not really in a position to see clearly. Like the people of 1860, we do not know. And the fact that we do not know, that we cannot know, is a fact worth remembering.

John the Baptist is a prophet, which means that God has gifted him with a vision of the true shape of his own time. He knows that God is about to do something stupendous. He thinks he knows what that is, and he thinks that, in Jesus of Nazareth, he has found the One that God has sent to do it.

But a lot has happened. He has been thrown into prison for preaching against the immorality of the King. His head is almost literally on the chopping-block. And meanwhile, the career of Jesus is not quite what John has been expecting. There is a lot of preaching and healing going on, and not much judgment and unquenchable fire. And it seems that John, even John the Baptist, now finds himself in doubt. His prophetic vision has faded. Like the rest of us, he does not know. That is why he sends his disciples to Jesus. They bring a direct question: Are you the One? Or should we be looking for Somebody Else?

And Jesus's answer is, in fact, pretty direct. He does not tell a parable or answer the question with a question. He says: Tell John what you see and hear. The blind see and the deaf hear and the lame walk. The lepers are cleansed and the dead are raised. The poor have good news preached to them. Tell John all that.

Jesus is not merely saying that there are some good things going on in Galilee. He isn't just saying that these are signs from God. He is telling John, reminding him really, that these are the signs, the signs that Isaiah and the rest foretold long ago, the signs of the beginning of the regeneration of the world. This may seem like an ordinary time, but it is not. This is the pivot point of all time. Blessed are you, John, if you can open your mind and take it all in.

And it only requires a little reflection to realize that John's question is my question too. Yes, I think I know what is happening in the world, in my life. I think I know that Jesus is the One that God has sent. But then the vision fades, and things happen, and I struggle with doubt. I find myself languishing in my own metaphorical prison, hemmed in by grief or pain or sin. And I want to ask yet again, Are you really the One? Or should I be looking for Someone Else?

It is the very heart of our faith that the Great Thing that happened once in history, the Advent of our Lord, also happens for each one of us. This is not some kind of pretend historical re-enactment. As far as I can tell, it isn't even a metaphor. It is the literal truth. The coming of Christ into the world of time at that joint between BC and AD is actually part of the same eternal reality as when He comes to me, or to you. Today seems like an ordinary day, but maybe it isn't. Maybe for us, this is the pivot point of all time. Maybe for us, this is the beginning of the regeneration of the world.

If you and I could stand a little way outside of our lives and see their true shape, I think we would know this. We would see how near we are to that realm that Isaiah describes. Without realizing it, we are standing almost on the threshold of the realm of salvation and freedom and joy. And when it is our time to enter into that realm, we will find ourselves reborn, remade in Christ. The wounds and the deformities of our souls, our doubts and our fears and our sins, will all be mended. For the least in that kingdom will be greater than the best that we have ever known.

Meanwhile, of course, you and I are living inside of these days, and that clear wide view of things is available only to the angels. We do not know, not really. We do not see how near the kingdom is to us, or what is already beginning to happen. And so today may be hard for us; tomorrow too. The kingdom often seems remote, or unreal. Yet we must never forget that our own viewpoint is limited. We do not know. And therefore, as James says, our present task is to learn patience. We must strengthen our hearts and make ready for the Lord's coming.

So it turns out that my brother the theologian was onto something after all. John's question is my own; Isaiah's hope is my own. In our lives, even today, we do always have both BC and AD -- with Christ in the center of everything. That is not pretend. It is not some kitschy historical re-enactment. It is the true shape of our lives, the beginning of our new lives in Christ, even if we do not always perceive it clearly.

I guess I should send my brother an email and apologize for that crack about the Renaissance Faire. Or maybe not. Maybe I spoke better than I knew. For now that I think about it, what is renaissance after all but an old, old Frenchified word for rebirth?

Summary dismissal

2009-11-17T07:42:00.004-05:00

Not every civil court case proceeds to trial. Some are settled "out of court" by the parties involved. Others are settled by the judge in a "summary dismissal" or "summary judgment". The suit is deemed to be unworthy of trial, even without a full hearing. In this way valuable time is saved and litigants are discouraged from bringing frivolous lawsuits.

We often do the same thing with ideas. In fact, a great deal of what appears to be debate about ideas actually takes place in a "pre-trial" phase, in which people discuss whether an idea should even be granted a serious hearing. Many – most? – discussions go no further.

Now, this is no bad thing. A serious logical and factual argument – a full case for trial, so to speak – is not all that easy to put together, even if we are attacking a very bad idea or defending a very good one. And many ideas are so stupidly wrong or so transparently wicked that they do not merit that kind of response anyway.

So I am not opposed in principle to the "summary dismissal" of an idea – a rejection that precedes a full discussion of the factual merits. Such judgments are necessary and inevitable. They are a legitimate part of the practical art of reason. Yet I am uneasy, because this kind of preemptive action carries obvious risks. After all, the idea that I reject might be a good one. If I never grant it a real hearing, how will I ever find out?

But even when this possibility seems remote, there is a deeper snare, a subtler temptation. If we can get the opposing point of view summarily dismissed from discussion, then we win. Our ideas not only prevail, they prevail without challenge. We know this, and the advantages of it are so great that we work very hard to win the preliminary phase of the debate.

The reason I call this a "temptation" is because such "pre-trial" actions take place, by definition, prior to the start of serious factual debate. These actions involve claims of consensus, invocation of social norms, emotional appeals, rhetorical strategies, and so on. The tools used in this phase of a debate remain largely unexamined because the whole point of this phase is to avoid the arduous business of careful examination. And if someone cries foul – if the "motion to dismiss" an idea is challenged as being out of order – then this suggestion itself can be attacked in the same way. The locus of discussion creeps backward to questions of mere form and propriety; and in my experience, it usually happens that the actual issue is never actually engaged.

I do think that "summary dismissal" is the rational way to deal with a great many ideas. But on what grounds should we invoke it? In other words, when should we not discuss the factual merits of a proposition? When is it proper to arrive at a "summary dismissal" without, so to speak, going to trial?

This is a hard question. As a start on it, I've tried to identify some ways in which "summary dismissal" is actually employed in public and personal debates. Imagine that X stands for some proposition, and let SD stand for the summary dismissal of X. That is, SD means, We should not discuss the factual merits of X. It seems to me that SD has several forms.

Weak form

The simplest and weakest form of SD is, A discussion of the factual merits of X is unnecessary. There are a couple of possible justifications for this proposition.

It may be that X has already been shown to be false. I should not spend my time logically refuting your proposed angle trisection, because such constructions have been proved to be impossible.

It may be that X has a very low a priori likelihood, so low that discussion of it is a waste of time. The claim that the Earth is riddled with gigantic caves occupied by a race of malevolent, psychotic dwarfs is so improbable that I have no need to work out a detailed refutation.

The second justification involves an estimate of likelihood, and this depends on my own rational judgment. That's okay. I'm not looking to get around such judgments; I simply want to understand them.

Strong form

In the previous version of SD, the basis for summary dismissal was that debate of X was a waste of effort. Sometimes a stronger sort of claim is made, however: A discussion of the factual merits of X would be bad and harmful. Again, I see two possible justifications for this position.

Some principles are so foundational to civil order or polite society that they must not be contradicted. If the proposition X contradicts them, then public discussion and debate of X – a discussion that presumes, at least in a formal way, that X might be true – is harmful. Examples abound. For instance, even if the thing is easy to refute – or especially if it is easy to refute – it would be harmful to bring up for debate the proposition that Fred is a serial child molester. A discussion of this could be almost as damaging to Fred as an actual accusation, so we should give it a summary dismissal. (The exception, of course, is when there really are serious grounds for believing that Fred is a serial child molester. Since the "pre-trial" action can involve a preliminary look at evidence, such an exception does not undermine our discussion.)

This sort of thing is easiest to see in debates about practical reason – that is, in debates about what should or should not be done. Thus, it would be impolite (at least) to debate the proposition that old Fred should be taken out and shot dead. It would be invidious to give such a suggestion serious discussion, even if we ultimately decide to let Fred live.

Another justification for this strong form of summary dismissal is less direct. It may be that a public debate of X might be harmless in theory – X itself does not contradict a foundational principle – but the practical reality could be that any debate of X would almost certainly cross the line. I think that this is how a great many well-intentioned people approach questions of gender or racial differences in IQ. The proposition that Oompa Loompas are on average smarter than Pottsylvanians does not necessarily entail the evils of racial discrimination and so on. It does not contradict the foundational principle that human beings should be equal in dignity and before the law. But in practice (so the argument goes) it will surely be used to rationalize many such evils. Even the proposed debate can awaken them. Therefore it is better to reject the question altogether, to summarily dismiss X without probing its factual basis.

I hope I've made it clear that I do not simply reject this strong form of SD. Nevertheless, we should be aware of the danger: this form recommends that we dismiss debate of X for a reason other than its probable truth or falsehood. Instead we appeal to moral principles or social norms. But what if those principles or norms cause us to reject unheard the case for a new truth? Society may desperately need to recognize and adapt to this truth, but this cannot happen unless the case is made. The history of science has many examples of this – not as many examples as some would claim, but enough to be cause for worry.

Conversely, wrong or bad ideas can persist as prejudices, unspoken but also unchallenged, if they are never admitted to open discussion. In this way, the very action we take to preserve our foundational principles can in the long run weaken them.

Ad hominem form

There is an even stronger and more definite form of summary dismissal, which may be conveniently expressed thus: People who wish to discuss the factual merits of X are bad people. Discussion of X should thus be avoided. In this version, the phrase bad people might either mean defective people or wicked people. The underlying justification for this runs as follows:

Let us suppose that either the weak or strong forms of SD hold – that is, debate of X should be summarily dismissed on the grounds already discussed. If this is true, then we must question either the intellect or the motives of those who propose X for discussion. Either they are stupid and ignorant, or they are up to no good. Either one is bad. If they are stupid and ignorant, we should not give them the chance to spread their crummy ideas. If they are up to no good – if they are not interested in truth or wish to do harm by damaging a foundational principle – then their wicked intentions should be thwarted at the earliest opportunity.

As an example, consider Holocaust denial. The basic facts of the Holocaust are well established. What then shall we make of those who wish to bring these facts up for challenge and debate? At best, they are complete idiots. More likely, they are anti-Semites and worse. In the latter case, we must regard them as the enemy, and we ought not grant them legitimacy by bringing their ideas to debate.

Alternately, it might be that public debate of X is harmless in theory – but a desire to debate X serves as a reliable "dye marker" identifying people with bad and harmful aims. (These people may, in fact, be using X as a "stalking horse" for worse ideas.)

I think this type of SD describes the arguments of certain fierce critics of the Creationists. Because Creationism is so obviously ludicrous as science, the critics argue, those who seek to have Creationism widely debated – to give it "balanced treatment" in the schools, for instance – fall into two groups. There are the ignorant fools and the intellectual charlatans. What they really seek is to promulgate their anti-scientific fundamentalist religion, to close off the space our society affords for free scientific inquiry. The same critics have a similar reaction to "Intelligent Design" theories. Although ID comes in the form of a debatable secular idea, its proponents are actually the same old dumb and deceitful Creationist crowd with the same bad aims.

Even this form of SD, I think, is defensible in some circumstances. Some people might be so completely stupid and wrong that we should not waste time debating their ideas. (I recall one movie reviewer for a university newspaper, for instance, who was wrong so frequently that he was actually quite reliable. If he hated it, you should see it.) I also believe that evil people do exist, and I think that some of them want to use the forms of intellectual discussion to further very wicked causes. We are under no obligation to give them the oxygen to do so.

Yet when I lay this out as a principle, it gives me a queasy feeling. It is too powerful a weapon to be comfortable with.

If I can win a "pre-trial" action on these grounds – if I can have my opponent designated as either ridiculous or reprehensible – then I have won a victory indeed. Not only have I secured my beliefs against the present challenge, but I have also undermined the legitimacy of my opponent. His future standing to insist on debate has been destroyed. It does not matter what he says, because any proposition he advances is tainted at its source. I have not merely won this debate. I have won them all.

A lot of modern political "debate" functions at this level. The actual issues at stake are almost never discussed directly. That would require some costly engagement with facts and logic. Instead, the discussion remains in the messier, more emotional and rhetorical "pre-trial" phase, where everyone is seeking a favorable summary judgment. If I can convince the majority of voters that my opponent is not merely wrong but actually farcical or fiendish, then I win the game, whether or not I can make a coherent case for my own policies.

The example that comes to my mind is sure to irritate some of my friends, but I will invoke it anyway. It seems clear to me that Sarah Palin was the target of exactly such a "pre-trial" attack during the presidential campaign last fall. This campaign was largely successful – completely so in my own social set – with the result that her actual ideas (yes, she does have a few) need never actually be discussed. You can simply ridicule her as a clown or hate her as a witch, according to your taste. I don't think you have to be a fan, or even agree with her at all, to be a little disturbed by the whole thing.

Transitive or associational forms

Believe it or not, I think that there are even more extended versions of SD that are in reasonably common use. Here are two:

Proposition X is logically distinct from Y, but X is nevertheless associated with Y in some fashion. (For example, many people who favor one also favor the other.) Proposition Y should be summarily dismissed for one of the reasons above. X "inherits" this property because of its association with Y.
People who wish to discuss the factual merits of X are associated in some fashion with other people who are bad. (The association might be via agreement on other propositions Y, Z, etc.) This association is itself sufficient for summary dismissal of X.

In each of these, the grounds for summary dismissal of X are transmitted via a chain of association, either between ideas or between people. (Note that people can mediate associations of ideas, and ideas can mediate associations of people.) I'm trying hard to come up with plausible justifications for either of these, but I have to admit defeat. To me, they appear to be nonsense on stilts.

When we humans reason about the world, we often use heuristic strategies that are difficult to defend on a purely "rational" basis. There are many experiments and studies showing that human beings are actors of "limited rationality". Yet I think that our flawed strategies often represent sensible ways to deal with the real world. We are mortal and have a lot to do, so we take a lot of short-cuts. Our own knowledge is limited; so is our intelligence; and at bottom we know this. We therefore take our own abstractions far less seriously than we might, often appearing to act "illogically" or "inconsistently". (Academics like me, who are trained to take abstractions with deadly seriousness, can mistakenly ascribe to folly what really represents practical wisdom.) In any discussion, our overall assessment of a speaker's smarts and sincerity – a type of judgment we are fairly good at – will likely outweigh any logical or factual assessment of his words. All of these things do leave us vulnerable – just ask a successful confidence man – but they are actually necessary adaptations to our real situation in the world. We can't do without the short-cuts; but we must be wary lest we be led astray.

Yet we must also ask how we ourselves – not quite on purpose, maybe, but not wholly by accident either – abuse these heuristic strategies for our own ends. We are, at root, more lawyers than philosophers. We want to win our arguments, and we do not mind doing so by manipulating the quick and informal process by which we and others decide which ideas merit serious consideration. In this regard, our imperfection as rational beings is of a different order. We are flawed, not merely in the intellect, but also in the will and the heart. We are fools, but also sinners.

I cross a threshold

2009-11-17T07:06:00.002-05:00

What's new since the last post?

I've finished taping the new course for the Teaching Company. Now all I have to do is finish the written materials -- a big job that I'm behind on, true, but a little less of a crisis. The course should be a fun one.
A total of four "Friday Afternoon Physics" videos are up, including my favorite, Episode 4 (in which we blow things up). Episode 3 is on quantum physics, and it has some fun computer animations that I made.
Mike and I have corrected the proofs of the new quantum mechanics textbook, which is supposed to be out in the US in March. We created the cover image, which was fun. It's a circular diffraction pattern. On one side, it fades into a scattering of discrete dots; on the other side, it turns into 1s and 0s.
I gave a talk at a Theological Symposium sponsored by my brother's seminary. To make things weird, the whole thing is posted, in both audio and video formats, on iTunes U. So you can watch my lecture, and my brother's reply, there. This means I've officially crossed the threshold from "user" to "content provider" on iTunes.

I'm hoping all this means that I'll have some more time for blogging and other kinds of writing. The next post should get things going.

Friday Afternoon Physics

2009-07-20T19:26:00.002-04:00

On Friday afternoons, when we do not have any regular labs scheduled, our department sometimes indulges in "Friday Afternoon Physics". This can be anything from playing with Lego Mindstorms robots to a "Bungee Barbie" contest in which 12-inch fashion dolls go plunging down the stairwell at the ends of long rubber-band chains.

We've decided to produce a set of videos showing some of the fun. The first, which we made last Friday, is now posted on YouTube. In it we play around with our new Canon EX-F1 high-speed video camera. You can watch the resulting video here. Tell your friends! I'll announce further episodes as they are finished.

Movies: Time Travel on a Budget

2009-07-06T21:51:00.004-04:00

One of the things I like about Netflix is that it gives me a chance to watch lots of obscure, independent, often low-budget science fiction movies. This time, I'll review a trio of time travel films that I've watched in the last couple of years. (Minor spoilers ahead.)

Time travel is a natural theme for this kind of film, since a lot of the really cool ideas about it require no glitzy special effects. You just need an intelligent script and sufficient acting and production quality to put it across. Such movies can have twisty plots and complex narratives. The same scene might appear several times, each time imbued with new significance. Because of this, I often like to watch a good time travel movie more than once.

Primer (2004). This movie, shot in suburban Dallas for something like $30K by Shane Carruth, has a reputation as a superb "underground" science fiction movie. In my view, the reputation is well deserved. Two guys -- engineers at high tech firms during the day -- are trying to invent antigravity in their spare time. They invent time travel by mistake. The process of discovery is wonderfully portrayed, and the operating rules of time travel are extremely well thought out.

At one point, we learn that one of the guys, at the very beginning of their time travel experiments, built a "failsafe device" -- an additional time machine to allow someone to go back to the beginning and fix problems that might arise. This idea is a great example of why I like this movie so much. It is clever, but also naive; so instead of being a safety measure, it turns out to complicate things immensely. (Especially after it turns out that a time machine can be folded up to fit inside another time machine....)

The movie is complex and makes the viewer work to "get" the plot. It soon becomes apparent that you are not watching the first "iteration" of the time travel loop. You are already being presented with a timeline that has been changed many times, recursively. Not everything is explained, so even after two or three viewings you may still have questions. If you like, you can check out one theories on one of the web pages devoted to discussion of this movie. I still find myself pondering certain aspects and scenes of this movie, long after I watched it.

Feedback (2002). Another extremely-low-budget movie about time travel. This go round, the device is a telephone that can call six hours into the past.

I did not like Feedback as much as I did Primer. For one thing, I did not identify with the characters as much. (One review, with less kindness than accuracy, called them "low-rent hoods".) The tension is provided by conventional dangers such as criminals with guns. There is one rather cool special effect -- I will not spoil the surprise -- but the film budget was similar to Primer's. Like Primer, though, it manages to look quite good.

12:01 (1993). This movie is often compared to Groundhog Day, which was made about the same time. The movies differ in two important respects: Groundhog Day gives no explanation for its basic premise, which puts it more in the fantasy category; and Groundhog Day is a truly great movie, while 12:01 is merely somewhat charming. In each movie, the central character has to live the same day over and over again, trying to learn enough to make everything come out right. (12:01 is very loosely based on a short film from 1990, which is included in the DVD. The short film is much, much darker -- real Twilight Zone stuff. The original source material is a short story by Richard A. Lupoff.)

This is not really an independent movie, since it was made by an established (third-string) Hollywood studio and has fine, recognizable actors (like Martin Landau and Helen Slater). There are some funny parts. The technobabble is especially babbly.

I suppose I need a ranking system for the movies I review. Here goes. Each movie gets three grades: Smart/Exciting/Pretty (S/E/P). "Smart" refers to how intelligent the plot and premise are; "Exciting" refers to how entertaining the movie is to watch; and "Pretty" recognizes striking images and cool special effects. All rankings are purely subjective; your mileage may vary.

Primer: S/E/P = A+/A/B+
Feedback: S/E/P = B/C/B+ (extra credit for one scene)
12:01: S/E/P = C/B-/C

All of them pass in all categories, but then I'm not a very hard grader. If you can only watch one of these, watch Primer. If you can watch two, watch Primer twice! But if you have lots of time, check out one of the others.

Next time -- two movies about forbidden knowledge.

Return of the Blog

2009-06-21T12:18:00.003-04:00

I haven't posted here in more than a year and a half. I had taken on a couple of huge projects, and something else had to give -- in my case, blogging. The projects were:

I did a course of 24 DVD lectures on quantum mechanics for the Teaching Company. Devising and recording these was a fascinating business; I'll probably do a blog post on it later on. The course is selling pretty well -- the folks at TTC seem happy -- and it has generated some interesting email correspondence with my new "students".
My friend Mike and I finished the manuscript of our quantum mechanics textbook, which is now in the clutches of the copy editor. The book will probably be out just after the first of the year.

I'm pretty happy with the way both projects have turned out. Each one, I think, has something new to offer. The two projects -- one for a lay audience, one for advanced undergraduates -- interacted with each other in an interesting way. There are things in each that I wish we'd had room for in the other.

Right now I'm putting together another Teaching Company course, this one on "The Physics of Impossible Things." We'll do the taping in August and October, and the course itself should be out next spring. This is going to be more fun and wide-ranging than the quantum mechanics course. Less math, too. You can get something of a preview by watching the public lecture I did at the Perimeter Institute in December.

I have been giving lectures on "The Physics of Impossible Things" since the mid-1990s, and I've always wondered whether there was a book or something in the subject. Then Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible came out last year, and I figured that I must have been right. Having looked at Kaku's book, though, I think my own take will be quite different -- sufficiently so that I don't have to worry about encroaching on his territory in my TTC course. (His book will certainly be high on my "Recommended Readings" list.)

Besides quantum physics, here are updates on some other interests:

Politics. Those who know me or have read a bit in this blog will not find my opinions of political developments terribly surprising. In the last election, my guy did not get elected. (Actually, I'm not even sure "my guy" -- whoever that might be -- was nominated.) I'm not very happy with many of the policies of the new administration and definitely count myself as part of the Opposition. More about this, no doubt, later on.

Theology. This fall I'm giving another lecture at the seminary where my brother teaches, as part of a larger symposium on science and theology. Now all I need is something to say.

Writing. I continue to work on other writing projects, though the two big quantum projects ate up a lot of my writing time. Last Lent the rector of our church asked me to write a short (10 min) play for an event called "The Good Friday Project". When in doubt, turn to the classics -- in my case, the book of Job. The result, called "Comforters", can be watched here.

Books. My favorite book of the last year and a half, by far, has been Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Also, I love my Kindle (though mine, unlike the one at the link, is a 1st gen machine).

Movies: Movies released in the last year and a half that I saw and liked: Be Kind Rewind, Vantage Point, The Forbidden Kingdom, Iron Man, Prince Caspian, WALL-E, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Coraline, Knowing, Star Trek, and Up. I also saw and really loved the HBO miniseries on John Adams, plus some rather cool indie science fiction movies (about which I hope to blog in the near future).

That'll have to do for now. More bloggery later. I promise.

"On being wrong"

2007-10-16T08:07:00.001-04:00

I wrote a piece with that title for the faculty "Musings" column in our Alumni magazine. Here it is, if you are interested.

Ray Gun Revival

2007-09-02T17:12:00.000-04:00

... is the name of an online biweekly magazine dedicated to space opera and science fiction in the classic Golden Age style. It's run by Johne (Phy) Cook and his merry band of "overlords", and it's pretty good reading. They mix long-running serials and short stories, and every issue has some pretty terrific artwork by a featured science fiction artist.

Starting in the September 1, 2007, issue, they're running my story "The Pasadena Rule", which previously appeared here on ZOA. They're presenting it as a six-part serial, a couple of chapters every other issue, so I won't spoil things by linking to its previous appearance here. (It is in the archive, of course, if you just can't stand waiting till February to see how it all comes out!)

Which is all pretty cool. If this is the sort of fiction that interests you, you should definitely click over to RGR and browse around.

Postscript: Ray Gun Revival is part of an interesting flap involving the DMCA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the online open library Scribd. As far as I can tell, the folks at RGR are entirely blameless and the SFWA has been danged careless in their use of DMCA "takedown" provisions. You can find out more in the forums at the RGR site and in the current issue.

Law of Attraction

2007-08-09T18:34:00.000-04:00

I've been off-blog for a long spell, but all is well around here. The quantum mechanics textbook project is humming along pretty well, although it was interrupted this summer by (1) an unplanned trip to Arkansas when my Mom hit her head and went into the hospital, and (2) a month-long trip out west for physics, math and tourism. Mom is much better now and the Great Western Vacation (4000 miles in a rental car) has been successfully concluded, so it's back to work. And when I find a spare moment, perhaps I'll drop something here.

This entry is occasioned by correspondence with Lyn Perry, whose online acquaintance I've made via this blog. (He made some very kind comments about the story "The Pasadena Rule". I may have more to report about that story soon.) Lyn wrote a couple of posts at his own blog regarding "The Secret", which is a quasi-mystical self-help book that has been on the bestseller lists. In the course of our email exchange, he invited me to read these -- especially Part 3, which mentions quantum theory -- and tell him what I thought. It occurs to me that my remarks may be interesting to the rest of you. So OK, Lyn, here goes.

But first, a word to everybody else. In case you have been paying as little attention as I have, "The Secret" is a fundamental teaching about how to attain success, a teaching that has (I gather) been implicitly known to all the great spiritual and ethical teachers since time began. The basis of it is the "Law of Attraction", which says that good things like success are drawn to those who have certain good habits of mind, such as clear focus, optimism, patience, integrity, etc. This affinity is supposed to be built into the laws of the universe -- not simply in the game-theoretic sense that such-and-such behaviors might be "good strategies" for achieving success in a complex multiperson world, but in a more direct way, like gravitation.

Lyn is specifically trying to evaluate these ideas within a Christian context. He makes the case that the practical lessons involved can be valuable and that they resemble some distinctly Christian teachings. He is worried, however, about the theoretical foundations, and thinks that something may be badly amiss there. Rather than comment on Lyn's comments directly, I think I'd rather give my own (necessarily brief) take on the subject.

The "Law of Attraction", such as it is, does represent an enduring human intuition about how the world works. Certain kinds of good things do seem to come more easily to people with certain virtues, and certain kinds of evils seem to cluster around people with certain vices. But as soon as you go beyond a limited empirical observation and a bit of practical encouragement for virtue, it seems to me that the thing begins to stink. I will give three objections that occur to me.

Moral objection. The Law of Attraction appears to have a rather appalling corollary: If somehow you do not succeed, if evil rather than good befalls you, then this is to some extent Your Fault. You may still be a nice person in many ways, but if you had possessed the right qualities than perhaps things would have worked out better. Can a person of good conscience, much less a Christian, contemplate the plagues and atrocities of human history in this way? This strikes me as the kind of casual heresy that could only catch on among people who are comfortable and largely thoughtless, and who imagine that their own middling existence is the full extent of the moral universe. The evils they know are not too horribly black and the goods, frankly, are not too heroically white. But the literature of the Holocaust, the writings of Milosz and Solzhenitsyn and the rest, the testimonies of the great saints, and Holy Scripture itself, all tell us that the world is both better and worse than we comfortable and thoughtless people conceive.

Spiritual objection. Christ on the cross, himself sinless and yet carrying the sins of the world, must be the foundation for all Christian moral teaching. The connection between what we are and what happens to us is shaped by grace, by sacrifice and exchange and substitution (see Charles Williams), by the relations between selves -- in short, by Love. The Law of Attraction seems rather out of step with this Eternal Dance, and on that basis alone it is suspect as a guide to Christian behavior.

Scientific objection. Now I get to the part that Lyn wanted me to say something about. Here is a summary idea under discussion: Everything (including thought) is energy, and (because of the quantum) energy is associated with vibration. One could imagine therefore a kind of "resonance" between thought-energy and other things in the world. This is suggested as a deep mechanism behind the Law Of Attraction. (Lyn may object that I've oversimplified. Fair enough. Go read what he really said.)

The only trouble is that I disagree with the premise. Is thought energy? I think that people have the idea that the mind is a kind of powerful energy "field", pictured as a glowing numinous aura. (Any number of old Star Trek episodes have reinforced this image. After all, a glowing numinous aura was one of the few special effects that 1960's TV could really do.) But the physical energy associated with brain impulses is pretty small, which is why it is easier to lose weight by jogging than by mathematics. This reminds me of those natural philosophers of a past age who carefully weighed dying people just before and after they died, trying to detect the soul's departure. Indeed, given Einstein's famous relation between energy and mass, it may amount to the same thing. "Thought" is energy in much the same way that "baseball" is energy. There is clearly energy involved there somewhere, but a thermodynamic description of yesterday's Cardinals-Padres game leaves out something -- or almost everything -- important.

I think what we have here is a complex unexamined metaphor, of a kind that often occurs when physics concepts are invoked to explain something in a quite different field. The same term "energy" is used to refer both to a physical quantity and to a kind of vital quality shared by sentient beings. But that is essentially metaphorical. Just because we use the handy word "energy" to describe the restless liveliness of an active mind does not mean that this quality is properly measured in Joules. All of which brings to mind the marvelous remark made by another physicist correspondent of Lyn's. He wrote

To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for a connection between subnuclear or quark physics and the metaphysical sort of attraction that makes our lives more or less worth living. And, I know no basis for a scientific theory along these lines.

My experience is that people who push such things are usually interested in attracting money out of your wallet. Watch out, please.

And really, this cannot be improved upon.

Hair on fire

2006-10-04T19:22:00.000-04:00

This evening, as I was ransacking a hard disk for some old files (all vanished now into the bit beyond, I fear), I ran across a hasty essay that I had written for myself some years ago -- in effect, a blog entry before this blog was ever dreamt of. I will give you a short sample here. The piece is unmeasured, screedy and downright unfair; but it captured my state of mind and made me laugh to read it again years afterward. Hope you enjoy.

Today I attended an "interfaith" worship service. It was held in the College chapel, presided over by our interim rector, but it could not really be called Christian. There was some stuff about God, true, and a couple of elements of a Christian worship service. We chanted part of a Psalm. A reading from James (in Russian). A hymn -- "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" -- bowdlerized (even from poor Henry Emerson Fosdick’s lyrics) so that Christ was not mentioned. ("Thou our Father, Christ our Brother" became "Thou our Father and our Mother".) In the readings there were mentions of the Tao, of Buddha, of some American Indian version of the deity.

OK, I understand the point, maybe. The idea was to invoke the blessings of many "spiritual traditions" on the installation of our College’s new president. But the exclusion of Jesus was remarkable. Especially at a College founded by a bishop, especially under a chapel ceiling bearing the arching words "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever."

Well, I felt like the turd in the punchbowl, sitting there not getting a whole lot out of it all, or really thinking much of it. It did not help that some of the readings (like a couple of the passages from some speech by a previous president) seemed idiotic. One of them essentially said that our College had lots of people with leadership potential and we developed this by providing lots of extracurricular activities. Pretty feeble stuff. Oh, yeah, and there was a strong undercurrent of "knowledge and wisdom leads to peace" with "peace" equaling about what you’d expect if you saw the word on a sign at a leftist political rally. In short, the whole thing seemed a mishmash, a fuzzy cloud, whose sole guiding principle was a strict exclusion of the most basic beliefs of those who had founded the College, built the chapel, etc.

One musical piece -- really lovely music that I’ve heard before -- had a line like "We are the breath of the ancestors / We are the Spirit of God." And I thought to myself, No we aren’t. First of all, the ancestors who brought us here would probably think we had lost our minds. I can imagine my grandmother (the one who was the daughter of the Civil War hero, who was the county president of the WCTU and played the piano for the church for about forty years, raised five children on the farm and lost one when he was only sixteen) listening to that "worship" service in a kind of despair. And the Spirit of God would blow away all our pretentions and our comfortable syncretistic sentimental smoke, and we'd be left naked in the cold sharp light.

At the end there was a sort of candle ritual where we all light our tapers from the flame that signified knowledge. And then my daughter's hair caught on fire and her mom had to beat it out. The Spirit of God would be like having your hair catch on fire -- alarming, dangerous, but really really real.

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course . . .

2006-09-25T08:48:00.000-04:00

Some of you will recognize the title of this post as the beginning of a handy mnemonic for memorizing the first few digits of pi. Counting the letters in each word, you get 31415926... The whole thing is "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." This gives pi to fifteen significant figures, which is good enough for all everyday occasions and can impress small children (of a certain sort).

It turns out that Wikipedia -- amazing, maddening Wikipedia -- has a cool page devoted to a list of mnemonics. And on that page I found a link to the most amazing pi-mnemonic that I have ever heard of. Not only does it encode pi, it is also a parody of Poe's "The Raven". It begins

Poe, E.
Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

And on and on for 740 places. I am simply in awe. Why isn't this -- surely a work of staggering genius (of a certain sort) -- much better known? Or maybe it is, and I just haven't been paying attention.

Also on the Wikipedia page are a number of other scientific mnemonics, including a couple for the sequence of stellar spectral types: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. The most well-known one is "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!" (Ladies may change "Girl" to "Guy" if they wish.) Another one that I like much better was invented by a student in one of our astronomy classes, and is not mentioned by Wikipedia. It runs, "Only Bad Astronomers Forget Generally Known Mnemonics."

Meanwhile, all such efforts, however witty, shrink to nothing beside this ditty:

So he sitteth, observing always, perching ominously on these doorways.
Squatting on the stony bust so untroubled, O therefore.
Suffering stark raven's conversings, so I am condemned, subserving,
To a nightmare cursed, containing miseries galore.
Thus henceforth, I'll rise (from a darkness, a grave) -- nevermore!

Bloga longa, vita brevis

2006-08-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

Why no new entries? There's been very little here since March, and here it is August already. Have I given up on this whole blogging project?

No. But blogging is, by necessity, among the first things tossed overboard when a busy life gets a lot busier. And I have not been the sort of blogger that can just post a quick note in a spare moment. I prefer long essays with some thought and research behind them. To use a common blogosphere taxonomy, I'm less of a linker and more a thinker.

Among the reasons that I've been absent from the 'sphere (at least as a writer) is a new and exciting writing project. My friend Mike and I have signed a contract with a publisher to write a new quantum mechanics textbook, along very non-traditional lines. Essentially all quantum books to date have as their organizing principle spectroscopy, taking as fundamental the calculation of energy levels and transition probabilities. But quantum information science -- my own cup of tea -- has a different set of central ideas. Is it possible to lay out a different presentation of quantum physics that puts the concept of information at the center? Could such a new approach actually make everything clearer? Hope so. That's our plan, anyway.

Anyway, that's an exciting professional project, though it demands a lot of time and attention -- particularly since I'm planning to use the first part of the manuscript for my quantum mechanics class this fall. Thus I hope to harness fear and panic to get the project moving along. Two and a half weeks before classes begin, the fear and panic part, at least, is working beautifully. Stay tuned for the rest.

There have, of course, been plenty of other things to occupy time that might otherwise be spent blogging. My wife is (after more than a decade of labor) finishing her second mathematics textbook. I'm teaching my older daughter to drive. My younger daughter and I are building a tree house. I've done a lot of traveling, some of it connected to physics research and some of it for other kinds of fun. I'm serving as senior warden for my parish church, the rector of which is about to have a baby. Et cetera, et cetera.

Then there are all the other projects, in various stages of creation, that I'm ignoring -- like the great idea I have for writing a Broadway musical based on Bede's Eccesiastical History of the English People. Don't think that's going to get written this year, despite my daughter's enthusiasm for the concept. Ditto the comic book series whose heroes have superpowers based on food allergies. (They were subjects of an experimental particle-beam treatment for the various allergies, see, but the procedure went wrong and instead gave them amazing powers over the things they could not tolerate. The cool thing is that they still have their original allergies, intensified -- peanuts, if eaten by Peanut Boy, might be like kryptonite.) Unfortunately, this sort of project requires an artistic dimension in me -- as musical composer or graphic artist -- that I do not possess. Even if I were to discover some hidden talent along those lines, it requires an inconveniently large number of years to get really good at something.

Anglo-Saxon showtunes and the adventures of Gluten Girl aside, I always seem to have more things to think about and write than I can possibly get around to. Ah, well. Life is short, and then you die. In heaven, I suppose, one must be prepared to lay all such leftover trivialities aside. Or maybe it will turn out that there will be an extra century or two, a spare moment in eternity, to take care of a few of the worthier things on the list. Meanwhile, on this side of the veil, I hope I'll find time soon to write a few things here.

Coming up for air

2006-05-22T21:53:00.000-04:00

The last exam is scored and the last semester average is computed. This morning I entered the last of my grades on our registrar's special website, two full hours before the deadline. The senior grades, of course, were due a week ago, since graduation was on Saturday. Now the campus has gotten quiet, as it always does at this time. We do not have summer classes around here, and except for a few science research students and so forth, the place gets pretty empty. The next few months will be lush and peaceful, punctuated by the occasional summer program (the cheerleaders, the barbershoppers, the AFL/CIO, the writing institute, the Red Cross, the school of mimes, the church conference, each in its due season). Colleges estivate.

But the sleep of the college should leave me with more time for the blog, so look for several new posts over the coming weeks. I am well and I hope you all are the same. I have a number of interesting new projects which I will tell you about later on, and there are plenty of things in the world and beyond it about which to opinionate. Meanwhile, the skies around here have been oh so blue and the trees oh so green, and it may take me a few days to stop staring at them. Till then.

VDH on the Iranian bomb

2006-04-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

I am still officially on hiatus for a couple of more weeks, but a short post seems in order. This evening I attended a lecture by Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist and historian who also writes about current affairs. I've been reading articles and books by Hanson for three or four years now, and he has become one of my favorite writers on national security, war, and politics. He's both an idealist and a realist, which means he can be both inspirational and intellectually bracing. (I found him to be as interesting and worthwhile in person as he is in print.)

This evening his realist side was much in evidence. He was talking about preemptive war and whether such a thing can ever be justified to protect a free society. Much of the evening was spent discussing Iran. From the Iranian side, pursuing nuclear weapons has lots of advantages, if they can avoid getting the stuffing bombed out of them by the US and/or Israel (the only folks who can in fact do anything about it). The Europeans and the Arab League -- people who could actually be threatened by Iranian nukes on intermediate-range missiles -- would love to have the Iranian nuclear program stopped, but are unable to make any credible threat of force on their own. So they privately hope the Americans and the Israelis will take care of things, after which they will dutifully condemn yet another example of disgraceful Yankee/Zionist warmongering. Because of this and a lot of other foreseeable fallout, the costs of bombing Iran to cripple or destroy the nuclear program would be extremely high. The Iranians know this, and so they think they can play the game (intimidate now, concilliate now, delay and confuse, all the time telling the scientists to hurry it up) until Bush is out of office and the Iranian bomb is a fait accompli. And once that happens the rules change, and Iran is in a much more favorable position in a hundred ways.

Here's Hanson's forecast, as I heard him: Maybe the whole multilateral / EU / Russia / China / UN / talk-talk approach might work, or an internal peaceful political change could take place in Iran, but don't bet on it. Eventually, it will probably be necessary to bomb the Iranians to prevent them from going nuclear. But the political costs of that would be very, very high. (Some of these costs would be imposed by people who would privately be delighted by an attack. Life is not fair.) In the end, the US and Israel may not be able to muster the political will to proceed. (Hanson said the Bush probably had the will to do it, but not the ability to articulate and persuade that would be necessary.) So Iran will in the end likely get the Bomb. People will say, "Dang. Now we'll have to deal with Iran like we deal with Pakistan." Only it will turn out that Iran is not Pakistan, and the situation will be very bad indeed.

It was a depressing picture, in part because I found it very plausible.

Afterward I was chatting with a political scientist I know. I said that in some ways, Pakistan is more of a worry to me than Iran. I made an analogy (which I am sure is not original with me, though I've forgotten where I heard it). When I was a kid, I read science fiction books like the Barsoombooks by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which portrayed societies that had shining cities of super-science, with hordes of barbarians with swords roaming outside the gates. In other words, you had the weird combination of advanced technology and primitive barbarism, cheek-by-jowl. Pakistan is like that -- a country with missiles and nukes, yet which has large districts that are essentially lawless, not at all under the control of the central government. I find that combination particularly scary.

And my poli-sci friend said, "Well, in Iran the barbarians with swords are actually running the cities. Now that's scary."

Public (Lack of) Service Announcement

2006-04-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

If you want to be a real first-magnitude blogger with zillions of visits, then you need to blog very regularly. New content all the time -- every day, or many times a day if you can manage it -- is the key to blogging fame and fortune. This is easier if your blog has mulitple authors, or if you tend to write short and punchy posts with one point to make and maybe a couple of links. On the other hand, if there is just one of you, and you like to write long wandering essays with interesting twists and connections, and if you also have an intellectually demanding day-job and several other important hobbies, then it's hard to keep up a high posting rate. I'm lucky to post two solid pieces in the same week.

All of which is by way of announcing a brief hiatus in blogging here at Zeroth Order Approximation. I have one or two other projects that are demanding more than routine attention, and of course there are always classes to be taught and papers to grade and all that sort of thing. My plan is to take about three weeks off and return toward the end of April.

Please do not imagine that I am tired of this business! I have lots of stuff yet to say, about global warming and the ethics of rhetoric and how I was once mistaken for a devil worshiper, just to mention three random unfinished pieces on my hard drive. For all my friends who are regular readers, my apologies, and I'll meet you back here soon. For those of you who have just dropped by and don't know what might be worth reading, I've prepared a list of not-entirely-stinky posts from the last couple of months:

The pieces on "Well-tempered numbers" and "Cultural wisdom" -- the first about music and mental arithmetic, the second about the philosophy of engineering -- have attracted more readers than most. (I had occasion to reflect on the first piece the day before yesterday, when I happened to be playing with a Russian slide rule. I have occasion to reflect on the second one every single blessed day.)
Two posts (here and here) inspired by the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings pretty well express my present views on the judiciary, abortion and American politics.
My essay entitled "Enigma" (which was one of my all-time favorites to research and to write) is holding up pretty well, especially in light of the information in (and reactions to) the many captured documents and recordings from Iraq that are now being released.
I thought my recent post on "Fear" said something worthwhile about our "litigious society".
The sermon on prayer that I posted here did not, perhaps, entirely miss the point.

And of course the archives are available over to the right, including a few "favorite posts".

Back after Easter. Take care.

Old-time science boys

2006-03-27T12:58:00.000-05:00

My brother Will, the Lutheran theologian, sent a letter to me and to my other brothers with a photocopy of the review essay by Joseph Bottum in the latest First Things. (Bottum's piece is not available online yet, when it is I will add a link here.) Bottum writes about The Mad Scientists' Club series by Bertrand R. Brinley, which admittedly does not sound like the most promising basis for a serious essay. He nevertheless manages to be quite insightful and evocative, and to say something important about the life of the mind and heart and imagination that many of us led while we were growing up. Here is the letter Will sent along with the essay. It's a better commentary on the matter than any words of mine.

My dear brothers all,

I just now read the enclosed article by Joseph Bottum (his real name!) in the latest First Things, and it moved me with such happy and deep memories that I had to sit down and write you a note to send along with it.

We were all old-time science boys, weren't we? The stuff we built, or wanted to build, or could have built but for the lack of a few crucial components -- why should magnesium be so hard to come by? and is it really necessary to have laws about selling radioactive isotopes to minors? -- or a few dollars. Honestly, I think we'd had even $10 to spend, we would have killed ourselves and burned the house down.

Bottum's review essay captures the secret we shared, the secret of what we might have called science but was really something a little different, more like engineering, or inventing. I don't think I remember the Mad Scientists' Club books, but didn't Dub have a copy of Brinley's Rocket Manual for Amateurs? I'm sure I remember that. Do you still have it?

I believe there were a lot of us back then. Maybe it was the romance and the hardball, cold-war competition of the Space Race that bred us, and that has surely changed. I guess we humans will go to Mars, maybe in my lifetime. I hope so (but I wonder now if there aren't more interesting places in the solar system to go first... have you seen the pictures from Enceladus?). But it's not the same, is it? Do you suppose our kids will ever spend a long, dark night in the Montana backcountry oohing and aahing as they watch satellites flare and fade as they twist in the orbital sunlight?

In my experience, you can recognize a fellow "science boy" pretty quick when you meet him. Some are engineers, building real stuff now, for a living. My brother-in-law Dan is one us. Of course, he grew up with some breathtaking advantages over us: his father had a welding machine (and taught Dan how to use it), and they had firearms (and ammunition) around the house. It's a miracle he made it to adulthood, but no wonder at all that he's an engineer.

But not all of us followed that first love of gee-whiz gadgets, technical jargon, and model rockets. I am an example of a convert to the other of C. P. Snow's two cultures, a bona fide liberal arts guy, and no looking back. No matter: we know each other as kindred spirits, all of us who have shared the wonder and sheer delight of free invention. We have tinkered with the technology of our firecracker cannons to improve both accuracy and range. We have shaved match-heads and stuffed tiny tubes of foil and puzzled out guidance mechanisms for the little beasties. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire."

The Justice was talking about the Civil War (he was shot through the neck at Antietam); but it still rings true for us, lesser sons of greater sires though we be. We were touched with the fire of rockets and of creation; we are (so far) survivors in this long war against the barely-possible and the not-yet-workable. I am proud to have served with you all, my brothers, and will be happy to spend another night under some dark sky filled with wonders.

Will

Storyblogging Carnival XLI

2006-03-27T08:10:00.000-05:00

The Forty-First Storyblogging Carnival is now open for your reading pleasure! Nine posts by seven writers, for over 20,000 words of the coolest fiction in the blogosphere! Here goes:

Brandon at Julius Speaks gives us our briefest entry, titled Beginning of a Story (230 words). An interesting and evocative vignette.

Mark A. Rayner at the skwib presents Thag not like politics! (500 words, rated PG). Mark provides no blurb, but if you've followed Thag's adventures so far, you'll know what to expect!

KG at Cagey Mind presents Fast Fiction 1 (789 words, rated PG). KG writes:

This story is part of something I'm trying where I'm writing for 30 minutes at a time. This particular story is just a scene where a man meets a woman who had asked him for help.

Andrew Ian Dodge at Dodgeblogium presents Tentacled Past (2,356 words). Andrew says:

The Sage of Wales explains in a lecture how he got into the Cthulhu harassing game in the first place. Was written with an eye to turning the SoW series of tales into a radio series.

Rory at What not to do in Australia presents More Important Things (2977 words plus a short foreword). In the foreword, Rory writes,

I came home the other night at midnight and thought I would start on an assignment not due for a few months - a three thousand word short story. I had been playing the scenario out in my head for a while but this was the first attempt at writing it down. The hours ticked away and I found I couldn't stop writing until it had left my system.

Reading this one is the same -- once you get on, there's nowhere to get off till the end.

From Sheya Joie of Tales by Sheya, we have the next two chapters (Chapter 22 and Chapter 23) of the child (3614 words, rated roughly PG). Sheya says:

No one ever said it was easy to get out of the deepest dungeon. In fact, they always said it was very very hard. (Were they right!)

(A confession. Since I joined the Storyblogging Carnival only fairly recently, I've been reluctant to get involved in long serials already in progress. Sheya's posted 137,568 words so far of her trilogy-in-progress, so hers certainly qualifies! After reading these installments, though, I'm hooked. I've clearly got a lot of catching up to do, starting with Chapter 1.)

And finally, right here at Zeroth Order Approximation, I'm pleased to present both Part III and Part IV of The Pasadena Rule (10,900 words, for a total of about 25,000, rated PG). This is an old-fashioned "hard" science fiction novella about the human exploration of Venus -- with, I hope, enough twists and thrills to keep you interested. (If you've been waiting till the whole story's posted to begin reading it, now's your chance. Here's Part I.)

That does it this time around. Thanks to everyone who submitted work. See you all at the next Storyblogging Carnival!

Coming attraction

2006-03-20T13:29:00.000-05:00

The next Storyblogging Carnival -- number XLI, as I understand -- will be right here at Zeroth Order Approximation one week from today. Now is the time to submit your work to be included!

Pretty much any piece that you've written and posted on your blog that is (1) a story and (2) not outrageously offensive, qualifies. Stories of any length are welcome, and you may also post installments of works-in-progress. Official detailed rules should be here. (At the moment, though, the official rules link comes up with a blank page for me. For details, you might check instead one of the previous announcement posts on Donald Crankshaw's page, such as this one.)

Each entry should include the following data:

Title of story
URL of story
Name of author (optional)
Name of blog
URLof blog
Word count
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I'll be collecting entries through midnight (EST) on Saturday/Sunday night, 25/26 March 2006. Send yours to schumacherb(at)kenyon.edu with "Storyblogging" in the subject line. After I sort the various entries out, the Carnival itself will be posted here on Monday, 27 March 2006. See you then!

Colleges and carnivals

2006-03-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

David, a high school friend of mine, went to the same small college that I did. He and I had different reasons for going to there. In my case, I'd attended four high schools in four states in four years, and I wasn't much interested in going to yet another new town. Luckily, there was an excellent liberal arts college near my home, and so that's where I went. David's father had actually been a religion professor at the college, before he left (at the same time that David graduated from high school) to pursue a second career in architecture. So this college was, for David, already home. I didn't want to move; David's parents moved out from under him.

It didn't work out very well for David. It turns out that there are some disadvantages in taking college classes from people who knew you when you were four years old. And every time he visited his academic advisor -- a prince of a guy, actually -- the first words out of his mouth were, "Hi, David! How are your folks?" After a couple of years of this, David transfered to a state university to study journalism, a happy change for him and the beginning of a fine career.

(Note: I've told this story often enough over the years that it probably qualifies under the Obsolete Anecdote Retirement Project. See here for details and background on this benevolent program.)

So my wife and I have been advising my daughter -- now a junior in high school, just at the beginning of the college-selection game -- to consider other schools besides the one where we teach. For the last week, my daughter and I have been traveling around to various other small colleges in the Midwest, taking the college tour at each and chatting with students and admissions people. My daughter also got to sit in on a few classes. This has served to help her get used to the whole idea of college -- a big step -- and let her "try on" a few possible academic futures. Also, it let me take a look at the competition.

After six days and 1400 miles on the road, I have a few observations. I note that some schools want to be a cool global international school, so they put lots of money and effort into bringing foreign students to campus and sending their students to other countries. (These are the schools that always show you a world map with lots of pins stuck in it.) Do the foreign students study off-campus too, or would that be cheating? Other schools have other emphases -- career-boosting internships, undergraduate research, etc. My favorite question to ask admissions counselors was, "What makes a student thrive at X College? Or better yet, if a student does not thrive here, why not?" The answers ranged from clueless to thoughtful, but in all cases were revealing.

Also, I am irritated by schools with a "Peace and Justice Institute" or some such. This irritates me because, first, you can with 100% reliability tell the ideological orientation of such a program, which to my mind explodes any claim to academic objectivity. What are the chances that any scholar affiliated with such a program will ever argue that the goals of peace and justice are best served by a strong US military and expanding free markets? (And is such a hypothesis substantially more ridiculous than other theories that certainly will be argued?) The other reason that these programs irritate me is that their titles are blatant attempts to steal rhetorical ground. After all, who can be against peace and justice? At least "History" or "Biochemistry" or "International Relations" do not implicitly assert that the goals of their practitioners are especially moral.

The practice of having campus tours led by students is a good one, not least because the students are quite candid and informative. I don't mean that they badmouth their alma mater. On the contrary, they are almost always very happy with their colleges. But if you listen closely, what they choose to say reveals a lot about the general attitudes on campus, and who they are reveals a lot about what sort of students are very happy at that college. The sample size is small, of course, but I think that the tours and their guides are real sources of insight.

Finally, I came back with an increased appreciation for my own college, which I think has a more beautiful campus, a sharper and more academically engaged student population, and a more interesting faculty than any of those other places. Oh, those folks are all right in their way, and sometimes they have a nice facility or some stand-out feature, but in most things I like us better.

Hmmmm. My wife and I may have to rethink our advice to my daughter.

All of which is to preface an apology. Because I've been on this college tour trip, I haven't yet pointed you in the direction of Storyblogging Carnival XL, which is being hosted by Trudy over at Desert Light Journal. It's a small carnival this time, but it does include Part II of The Pasadena Rule from me and several fine stories by storyblogging regulars. Also, the current plan is that the whole crazy Carnival will be right here on Zeroth Order Approximation, parked on my front lawn as it were, in about ten days' time. I guess I'd better stock up on the sawdust and the cotton candy!

(Another) sermon for Lent

2006-03-09T21:52:00.000-05:00

As I have written before, I sometimes have had the opportunity to preach sermons at my church. I posted a sermon for Lent here last year, and before that I gave one for Christmas Eve. Here is a fairly short one about prayer. I hope some of you may find it useful as a Lenten meditation for this year.

The inexplicable promise
(sermon preached at Harcourt Parish, April 28, 2002)

Jesus said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." (John 14:1-14, Gospel lectionary reading for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A)

The disciples are with Jesus, that last Passover at Jerusalem. And they know that something is up. Jesus has washed their feet, which they didn't understand, and told them that he is about to be betrayed. He tells them that he is leaving.

Thomas and Philip just want something to hold on to, I think. They want a doctrine, or a vision, or something. "How can we know the way? Show us the Father." And this is what Jesus answers them: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."

Do you think this helped? Do you think that Thomas and Philip and the others were comforted by our Lord's words? Do you think they felt that their questions had been answered? Or do you think that they found the answers strange and disturbing and inexplicable?

I myself favor the "strange, disturbing and inexplicable" view. And I think that Jesus knew his followers wouldn't "get it" right away. But he was preparing them for the time ahead. He knew that his words would be planted in them; and later, by the grace of God, those words would begin to unlock themselves in the disciples' understanding, and they would begin to see and to know.

When God speaks to us today, he does not always intend for us to understand today. And I find that reassuring. For it happens often enough that I read something in Scripture that I just don't get at all. I find it strange, disturbing and inexplicable. God knows this, and he is not surprised. My job for now may only be to take it in. Real understanding will come on God's schedule.

If you want an example of a passage of Scripture that I find a bit strange, disturbing and inexplicable, you have no further to look than the last verses of today's Gospel lesson. There we find the promise, made and repeated to the disciples, that whatever they ask in the Lord's name he will do. And of course, this passage is not just addressed to the disciples who were there. Whatever we ask, he will do. It's a promise made in plain language, and repeated one way or another in every gospel. "Ask, and you will receive." If you have faith, you can say to a mountain, "Go jump in a lake," and it will do it. (I paraphrase, but only slightly.)

I must confess that I find this bald promise of prayer granted difficult to accept. I find myself looking for the fine print, the clause that says, "Some restrictions may apply" or "Void where prohibited." Various logical objections occur to my mind. What if I pray for rain and you pray for sunshine – which of us does God renege on? What if I ask for something evil – will God do it anyway?

More serious objections, I think, are based on fear. What if I ask, and God doesn't do it? For I have to admit that as a possibility. It sounds cruel to say it, but it is the truth: hospitals and nursing homes are full of Christian folk, all praying, along with their family and friends, to get well. And some of them won't.

As I examine myself about this, I find that this wild and inexplicable promise from today's Gospel has affected my own prayers in a rather perverse way. It has made me more timid about what I ask of God, and how I ask it. Rather than pray for God to heal my mother's eye infection, I will pray instead for God to grant her strength and patience in this difficult time. Or else, I will pray, "Dear God, please heal my mother's eye, but of course your will be done." (As if to say, "So just in case you want her to go blind instead, that's okay too.") You see what is happening? I am taking it upon myself to leave God a loophole, so that he will be able to grant the prayer on a technicality without actually healing my mother's eye infection. The things that I pray for are not bad in themselves – strength and patience are great gifts, and it is always right to submit oneself to God's will. But it's pretty clear that there is something in this business of asking God for things that I have not understood, and I need to go back and straighten it out.

When I was in college, I knew this guy whom I will call Peter. (This is a pseudonym.) He wasn't exactly a friend, though I spent a good deal of time talking with him. He studied chemistry and philosophy, and he loved nothing better than to get me involved in some endless discussion or argument. Some of my actual friends didn't like Peter very much. He did have a nasty tendency to turn into The Guy You Couldn't Get Rid Of.

Eventually I went off to grad school in Texas; and when Peter graduated he went out to California. He had a lab job out there and I think he was working on his masters degree. Every few months I would get a long-distance phone call from him, and we would talk for an hour or so about science or philosophy or something. Not terribly memorable conversations -- at least not until the last one.

Peter told me that he had become interested in, and then active in, the practice of Wicca – that's witchcraft. He was learning to do magic rituals, cast spells, the whole bit. I was shocked and horrified. So we talked a long time. And after a while, he finally said, "Well, you know, this isn't really all that different from Christianity. Magic, for example, is basically the same thing as prayer."

"How do you figure?" said I.

"Well, in each case, you're trying to use your mind to make a change in the world around you. In magic, you're working the spell, and in prayer, you're cajoling a deity. What's the real difference?"

The conversation went on for a while longer and eventually ended; and in the years since then I've never again had a conversation with him. So I can't tell you how his story has turned out. But I can tell you that I have spent a good piece of the last seventeen or eighteen years pondering what I should have answered him.

I think it boils down to this. God can never be used just as a means to an end. He won't permit it. And anyway, I don't even think that it is possible.

In our dealings with each other, we treat each other as "means to an end" all the time. We talk and maneuver to get what we want. We are so good at it; and much of the time, admittedly, it's about small stuff and it seems pretty harmless. But whenever we deal with someone in this way, we no longer see that person entirely as a person. Other people become for us mere instruments to be used.

God may be more than a person, but he is surely not less. If we were to try this sort of approach with God – if we turn to prayer and begin to try to maneuver God into doing what we want – then in our mind God has become a mere thing. And when that happens, I think we will find that we have been praying to a figment of our imagination. You have to meet the real God as a person, or not at all.

And yet -- if, when I meet God in prayer, I never bring to him my real needs and desires; if I never ask anything of him, or I always hedge my requests with plenty of escape clauses; am I really doing much better? To treat prayer as a magic spell hides God from us; but to play it safe in prayer hides myself from God.

I can tell that this is going to be one of those things that can only be understood fully by jumping in and swimming in it. I will understand much more about how God answers prayer when I am readier to ask him things. This is not trying to use God as a means to an end. Our Lord commands us to pray, and to pray boldly, and make our requests, so that there will be no barrier between us.

For that is the real point of prayer, and the real aim of the Christian life: to be in him as he is in us. That is what Thomas and Philip heard, but did not at first understand. If we want to know the way, our Lord does not offer us a set of directions. He offers us himself. And if we want to know what God is like, he does not offer us a vision. He offers us himself. Strangely, disturbingly, inexplicably, he offers us himself. Nothing less.

Fear

2006-03-06T21:17:00.000-05:00

My friend Michael is looking for a job as a faculty member at a small college. He's already had an offer of a tenure-track position at Alpha College back east. On Friday he heard from St. Beta College out west, who also made him a tenure-track offer. He liked Alpha College all right, but he more or less "fell in love" with the people and environment out at St. Beta. Michael wasn't quite prepared to accept St. Beta's offer on the spot (he is interviewing at Gamma University and at one of the campuses of an eastern state university system this week); but he would certainly choose St. Beta over Alpha. The question was whether to call Alpha immediately and decline their offer.

Michael is under no obligation to do this right away, since he has two weeks to decide on Alpha's offer. On the other hand, it would be the nice and thoughtful thing to do, since it would allow the good folks at Alpha to make their offer to someone else as soon as possible. Yet my friend had a nagging doubt. Sure, he'd talked to the folks at St. Beta. He'd even spoken to the dean. But what if something happened and the St. Beta offer somehow evaporated? If he'd already said "no" to Alpha, he could be stuck without a job.

I hasten to add that there are no indications that St. Beta might do this. It is a financially sound college with apparently trustworthy people running things. Michael got no "bad vibes" at all during his visit there, which is one reason he is so excited by the job offer. He was just wanting to be sure to guard his interests. I thought his question over and told him that I had never known of a faculty job offer being withdrawn in similar circumstances. Because this had such a low probability, I advised him to call Alpha right away and turn them down. I added, "One of the benefits of living in a litigation-crazed society is that a college like St. Beta would not do that. They know that it would expose them to a lawsuit."

I had occasion to remember this on Saturday morning. My daughter was going with the high school orchestra down to the city (an hour's drive) to participate in an orchestra contest. The week had been a busy one and we had not really made any weekend plans; but when the time came we thought it would be fun to pick my daughter up after her contest, go someplace nice to eat, maybe take in a movie or do some shopping, and come back home. My daughter did not think this would be allowed. Pish-posh, said I, or words to that effect. I wrote a note making a request to let her come home with us, and took her on Saturday morning to meet the bus at the high school, so that I could speak to her director.

Sure enough, my daughter was right. The orchestra director was apologetic, but she told me that, without the signature of a school administrator (which we could have gotten if we'd made our plans earlier in the week), they could not allow my daughter to be picked up by anyone else. Instead, she would have to return on the bus with the other students.

"Told ya," said my daughter.

"You mean," I said to the director, "that you can't even let her own parents bring her home?"

"That's right," the director said. (You could tell that she didn't like saying this.)

"Since when?"

"Since about a week ago. It's a new policy."

The students who were sitting and standing around had fallen silent and were watching us. Watching me, in fact. I am usually a jovial and mild-mannered sort of fellow in public, but I was clearly a bit irritated, and they were all obviously wondering if they would be treated to a rare glimpse of a Grown-up In Full Wrath. "Well," I said. "I do hope you convey to the administration that I think they are being a bit ..." I hunted for the right word. "... a bit rigid about this."

"Actually," she explained, "it was the insurance company. They insisted."

Of course. "I know it isn't your fault," I said. The family outing in the city was canceled, and the orchestra director and I parted on amicable terms. Nobody was particularly happy, except perhaps the insurance company; but there it is.

We live in a remarkably litigious society, and this affects us in ways that we don't always recognize. The main result of it, I think, is fear.

Fear is not all bad. Because my friend knows that St. Beta College would fear a lawsuit if they did him wrong, he can be more confident in their good behavior. But fear is not all good, either. Because the local school district and its liability insurance provider fear a lawsuit, a responsible teacher cannot agree to a reasonable request. She did not have the authority to do so, because if something went wrong -- however remote that possibility in this particular case -- the school district might be liable.

Defenders of our system of civil law, of torts and personal injury law and liability and all that, like to point out the undeniable benefits that spring, as in the first instance, from the ability of individuals to challenge institutions in court and make them pay for their misdeeds. It's a vital tool for ensuring justice for the little guy. And my complaint about the school administration was really only about a minor inconvenience. Would I rather that they were careless about my daughter's safety?

But that isn't the whole story, is it? Compare this to the criminal law. It is a good thing that there are laws against theft. But how does this law affect me? Because the police do their best to enforce this law and punish those who violate it, I am to some extent protected from thieves. I am also not a thief myself. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that I avoid robbery because of the law against it. It is better to say that I agree with that law, that I think it is reasonable and just. In addition, the law is enforced in a pretty fair and sensible way. So the effect of the law against theft is liberating, not confining. I live my life in the most carefree way you can imagine, just doing things that I want to do all day long and never worrying for a second that somebody will throw me in jail for stealing. It's a wonderful thing. And it is all because that law is so very easy to understand and to follow, and that the legal system is so uncapricious in its enforcement of the law.

But what if the law about theft was so complicated and unpredictable that almost any simple daily transaction might go wrong and land you in jail for theft? What if there were no real guidelines for the punishment for theft, so that the sentence might be anything from one month to life? Suppose that just living your life and acting like a reasonable citizen was not always enough to keep you out of criminal court on theft charges? Even if the probability of an actual prison term was pretty small, that possibility would affect everything you did. You would keep signed receipts for everything, even bubblegum from the store. You'd avoid some kinds of transactions altogether, because you just never know. Shopkeepers would have to have expensive insurance to pay for potential legal costs. And a huge amount of common everyday informal stuff -- including many generous and happy relationships -- would simply come to an end. Why? Because people would be afraid.

My point is that such a situation would be, not only less desirable, but also less lawful. In a free society built on the idea of ordered liberty, the law exists so that we can go about our lives without fear. Yet my story is only a slight exaggeration of the real situation in which we have gotten ourselves with regard to liability and lawsuits.

Lawsuits are, in a curious way, an essentially libertarian approach to maintaining civil order. They are a mechanism whereby individuals enforce good behavior, in institutions and each other, via market forces. Let the market do its magic and behold! Companies make safer products, doctors provide more conscientious care, neighbors are more reluctant to do you harm, all through personal choice and market incentives. Some of this analysis is quite accurate. In the actual event, though, the libertarian approach seems to promote, not liberty, but fear. This is as compact -- and compelling -- an argument against libertarianism as I have ever come across.

The edge of war

2006-03-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

I usually miss the Sunday news-discussion shows, because I'm usually in church. But this Sunday, I was at the airport waiting to catch a plane, so I caught almost the whole of CNN's Reliable Sources on the TV monitor at the gate. This is a weekly show hosted by Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media reporter, that is supposed to take a critical look at how the news of the week has been reported.

I read Kurtz from time to time -- smart guy, sometimes with intersting things to say -- but I've seldom seen his show. This time I watched it with some interest. The focus of the first half was a panel of network reporters (CNN, CBS, ABC) discussing news coverage of, among other things, the port-management controversy and the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Iraq and the subsequent troubles there. Gradually it began to dawn on me: All of these people agree. About everything. They all believe that the press has done a bang-up job covering just about anything you can name. The only criticism seemed to be that, because Iraq is so violent and dangerous, reporters have not been able to go to the dangerous areas and report how dangerous it is. In other words, Iraq is much worse than it has been portrayed. They agreed that the press has been too reluctant to talk about "civil war" in Iraq -- that this should have been the story six months ago. Here's Frank Sesno of CNN, who also teaches at George Mason University:

I think that there's a problem here, is that the media didn't talk more about civil war, a lot more, a lot more vocally earlier. This is an issue that has been put on the table in the last Gulf war, when Brent Scowcroft and others said we go there, we break it, we own it. And one of the reasons that they've talked about and they've talked about publicly since that they didn't go in is that they saw these centrifugal forces that could pull Iraq apart and destabilize the region.

And I thought, oh my gosh, the situation must have really deteriorated in the last couple of days. See, I had been at a physics conference, and I'd been thinking a lot more about quantum entanglements than foreign ones. So when I got home, I read some news stories. Sure enough, there had been some terrible violence in Iraq. Scores had died -- not nearly as many as the Washington Post reported, maybe, but still a grim tally. Yet there had also been some amazing displays of unity from all three corners of the Iraqi equation -- Shia, Sunni and Kurd. It did not appear that the violence was escalating, or that events were driving wedges into the political system. Trouble? Terrible trouble. Crisis? Yes indeed. Civil war? At the moment, that seems to be an exaggeration. But on Sunday morning, the conventional wisdom of a respected panel of broadcast journalists was that "civil war" has been the story in Iraq for months.

Among the bloggers I read regularly is Dr. Sanity, who comments on current affairs and other things from a psychiatric perspective. She is sometimes passionate and intemperate, but she is always smart and always worth reading. Yesterday I read a post in which she commented on a Ralph Peters column about press coverage in Iraq. (Got that? Peters to Sanity to me, a triple play.) Peters says, in so many words, that we're being lied to by the mainstream media. Sanity highlights this and delves further. And then she proposes a rather startling point of view: We have already won in Iraq. Things aren't rosy there, but what we are seeing is an aftermath of war, not a continuation of it. Yes, Iraq may yet descend into chaos. But that does not change the fact that we liberated Iraq, that we toppled Saddam, that he's on trial for his wicked deeds, that there have been three amazing elections in a part of the world that doesn't see them very often, that Zarqawi has been driven to more and more outrageous acts leading to an erosion of Al Qaeda's general political support. However future events turn out, Dr. Sanity says, that picture looks a whole lot like victory.

Did we really win the First World War, I wonder? The shooting stopped, our boys came home, the Boche went marching back to Germany, there was a peace treaty, etc. But history did not stop at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Things continued to happen. And if you wanted to make a case that the war was not really won by the Allies, there are plenty of points available. The human cost of the War was horrific, with an entire generation decimated in Britain and France. Russia, in even worse shape, had succumbed to the Bolsheviks, who held onto power despite the efforts of domestic opposition and foreign intervention. The peace treaty did not so much solve problems as kick them down the road, and within a generation Europe was in the grip of an even bloodier war. The German republic lasted less than a decade and a half, after which it was replaced by a regime immeasurably worse than the Kaiser ever was. The League of Nations proved to be impotent to secure the peace.

It seems to me that the Allies did indeed win in 1918, but the events of history kept happening -- as events tend to do, including events that later prove disastrous. The Armistice simply marked a pause, a period when the power configurations of Europe shifted, after which war erupted again in an even bloodier form. Was that a new war, or the same one?

I think it quite possible that an historian, looking back on our era from a hundred years hence, will actually draw the line sometime in the last year or so and say, "This was the end of the Iraq war, though terrorism and civil unrest continued for some time." Inasmuch as the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were wars against nation-states, they have certainly come to an end, for the enemy was defeated in battle, driven from power and replaced by friendly regimes. The fact that those new regimes face dangers and troubles does not detract from the central fact.

It is also possible that our future historian will say that we are still in the middle of the real war, for which we have no name. Call it the Long War. It began in 2001 or 1991 or 1979 or 1948, and we might not see its end in our lifetime. This is probably closest to my own view, on most days. Nevertheless, there are individual campaigns in the Long War, and these may have definite beginnings, middles, and ends. Iraq is one such campaign.

How do we draw the boundaries of war in space and time? How do we say when the war begins, when it comes to an end, and what events are part of it? This is a semantic issue, of course, but we have to think about semantics when we judge the merits of this or that point of view. For instance, there are people who claim that the Iraq war has nothing to do with the War on Terror. The Bush administration, in their view, simply seized on post-9/11 jingoism to support their bid to remove Saddam from power. I do not altogether agree, but let's stipulate it for the moment. This is a point about the origin of the war. Yet the same people claim that continuing terrorism in Iraq is a sign that the war is still going on, that we haven't won, maybe that we can't win. Isn't this trying to have it both ways? To put it another way, whatever disagreements there are about the connection between Iraq and the War onTerror at the outset, is it not clear that the conflicts are inseparable now?

Then again, many want to connect the violence of this last week with the US invasion of three years ago, and say that they are part of the same conflict. They did occur in the same place, yes, and one set of events did lay the historical conditions for the other. But the players have changed. Saddam did not bomb the Golden Mosque. The US has not participated in much of the fighting that has ensued.

And when did the Iraq war begin? The US invasion? Why not Saddam's invasion of Kuwait? After all, we have more or less been in a state of armed hostility ever since. We signed a "cease fire" in 1991, not a peace treaty, and Saddam did not live up to its terms. For twelve years, scarcely a week went by when Iraqi air defenses did not fire on US or British aircraft. Saddam tried to assassinate Bush pere. More than once we lobbed cruise missiles into Iraq. Should we therefore count 2003 as just a new and more decisive campaign in a war that really began in 1990, and continued under three different Presidents?

This sort of question does not affect events, perhaps, but it does affect how we think about events. It affects what we say.

Wars blend into each other. They divide and merge and affect one another. It has always been so. Official "start" and "end" dates are useful handles for the mind, but they are artificial. The key question for most of us is when our boys (and girls now) come back from those dangerous foreign parts. Wars end when the warriors go home. By that measure, the Second World War never did come to a definitive end. So it will be, I fear, with the Long War.

At my physics conference over the weekend, I had dinner with my former student Jada, whose husband Tim is a Marine captain in Iraq. (I posted a letter from Tim last October.) Jada tells me that Tim is scheduled to be rotated home in a couple of weeks. This has been Tim's second tour in Iraq; it has lasted most of their married life. It appears that Tim will be taking up duties stateside for some time to come, which makes Jada very happy. One warrior, at least, is coming home.

The Pasadena Rule (Part IV of IV)

2006-02-18T09:48:00.000-05:00

Here is the fourth and final installment of our science fiction novella. Here are links to the previous episodes: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

10.

Now it was time to see about the main problem, the big ducted fans. Both of them were blocked by several wheelbarrow loads of rock fragments that had spilled over the landing zone from the edge of the landslide. The portside job actually looked a little easier than the pictures had suggested, but the starboard propellor, on the uphill side of the lander, was jammed tight. I started portside.

Rocks are rocks, and on Venus they are almost as heavy as they are on Earth. It was a hell of a job to move them without even so much as a crowbar to help. Some of the rocks were awkwardly placed. I fetched a piece of the broken high-gain antenna to try to pry up a fifty kilo monster, but, predictably, it snapped on the first good shove. The good news was that I didn't have to cart the rocks very far. Just heaving them out of the way of the fan was enough. I made slow progress. I was vaguely aware of conversations going on between Katya and people aloft and in orbit, making plans for steps two through twelve while I labored on step one.

"Uh-oh," I said.

"What is it, Jack?" Katya asked.

I had finally uncovered the outer rim of one of the fan blades and found to my horror that it was badly damaged. A rock twenty centimeters across had broken off part of the blade and put visible cracks in the rest of it. If the portside fan were spun up, this blade would shatter and shower the rest of the propellor assembly with high-speed fragments. I briefly reported what I'd found, trying to keep my voice even.

Everyone took the news a lot better than I expected. "Which blade is it?" asked an engineer from the Aphrodite. (I recognized the voice, but could not recall her name.)

"Number two," I said, glancing at the hub to be sure.

"Well, of course we'll have to remove it," Katya said.

"And you'll need to take out number eight as well," the engineer said. "Otherwise the turbine will be unbalanced."

"Oh." It seemed that this contingency had been discussed. "How am I supposed to take the blades off? I don't have any tools."

"Relax, Jack," Katya said. "The airlock is cycling now. You should be able to open the outside door in about two minutes. The EVA toolbox is in there."

I thought about it for a second or two. "Copy that," I said. "Going to six." On the private channel I said, "Katya, the starboard side may be even worse. This is going to cut our lift."

"I know," she said calmly. "We just have make it work somehow."

The airlock held the toolbox and a lot of loose equipment that Katya had dumped to lighten the ship. The whole load didn't amount to two percent of Virgil's gross weight, but every bit would help. I tossed the surplus stuff out the door, grabbed the tools, and headed back to the portside fan.

Moving rocks had been a bad job. Trying to remove an aerofan blade with a collection of miscellaneous hand tools, not all of which were working properly under the conditions, was a nightmare. The variable-pitch widget that held the blade to the hub was pretty well secured – it had to be, to take the revs of the fan at high speed.

On the other hand, I knew the lift system as well as anyone in the solar system. I had helped to design it, and could probably have drawn a fair diagram of the innards of the motor from memory. These blades were designed to be replaced in a maintenance bay on one of the dirigible platforms. The trick was adapting the procedure to "field conditions" including an ambient temperature in the low five hundreds. Metals and ceramics expand with temperature, but they don't all expand the same amount. Things that would have moved easily in a cool maintenance bay were wedged tight down here in the oven.

In the end, we did manage. But it took five times longer than anyone expected.

On to the starboard fan, which was worse. There was more rock to move, and I was getting tired. Nothing that the suit could do to my bloodstream could mask that. Dr. Martinez recommended a rest period, preferably involving some sleep, but he was overruled. Delta was on its way, pulled along with the Venerian jet stream at a kilometer every ten seconds, and it was our only ride. If we missed it, there wouldn't be another chance for forty-eight hours, till the Alpha platform came round again. The engineers were sure that Virgil could not last that long. Carlos Ruzhany, the skipper of Delta, was driving his ship at full throttle against the wind, but that would only add a couple of hours to our timeline.

Practice helped, and I did move the rock a lot more efficiently this time around. The broken pieces from the other fan made dandy crowbars. As we expected, there were bad propellor blades on the starboard fan too. Both blades eleven and three had to come off – but the good news was that we could restore balance by removing only one additional blade, number seven. I cast a worried eye on blade number twelve, which had sustained some superficial scratches. If there were cracks in it that I could not see, it would probably fail catastrophically in flight. If we removed too many blades, we'd never get off the ground. I might exchange it for the undamaged blade from the portside fan, but replacing a blade would take far longer than removing one. I reported number twelve as "good to go."

A warning light in the edge of my helmet display began to flash between yellow and red, so I stopped working for a second to check it out. "Arkasha," I called, "I've got a thermal max warning in my suit."

Dr. Martinez himself came on the line. "Jack, you've been working pretty hard. You passed the four hour mark some time ago."

Four hours was the recommended maximum stay at high temperature in a hotsuit. There was a safety margin built in, but I was coming to the edge of the margin as well. The problem was thermal, as usual. In the middle of this inferno, the hotsuit had no place to dump the waste heat that I generated by working. So it did what Virgil did, storing the waste heat in an ultra-high capacity heat sink in the life support pack. But that small heat sink was limited, and I was approaching its limit. The harder I worked, the worse it would get.

"I could plug the heat exchanger into Virgil's system," I said. "That would help."

"Yes it would," said Dr. Martinez. "But I'll tell you, boy, I don't think you have the time. You need to be nose up in less than thirty minutes."

I looked up at the starboard fan. The first blade was about half done; two more to go after that. Oh crap. "I get the picture," I said. "What can I expect?"

"Uncharted territory. Give me some readings and I'll suggest some adjustments that might help." We spent a minute or two on that, and then I went back to work, unscrewing the bushing on the number three blade like a maniac.

The yellow flashing stopped presently and was replaced by a steady red warning light. The approach of heatstroke at ninety atmospheres was not altogether unpleasant – rather like spending too long in a really hot bath. If it weren't for the frantic pace of my work on the propellor, it might even have been relaxing. I felt sleepy and weak.

The first two starboard blades were off. Now I was working on number seven, the "good" one. It was easier than the others, but I felt myself slowing down even as I watched the seconds tick away. I fumbled with my wrench and tried to recall which way to turn it to loosen the nut.

Katya was watching my work over Virgil's cameras, talking me through it over our private channel. "Almost there, Jack. Just disconnect the pitch actuator cable next."

"Hot," I said, yanking the cable awkwardly out of its socket.

"I know it's hot. Just finish that one and you can come inside. We'll get out of here. Okay?"

That was okay with me. I concentrated on removing the actuator assembly for the number seven blade. That done, I could see underneath, where the blade was actually attached to the hub. Two more screws, hard to get at. I picked up a screwdriver, but it slipped from my fingers. Oh, it had been the wrong driver anyway. I got the right one and went to work.

"Jack, they're telling us we need to be going now." Katya said. "No margin left. How much longer?"

"Not long." Sweat was in my eyes, or else my face plate was fogging, but I knew this job well enough by now that I didn't need to use my eyes. "One screw out," I told Katya. Jesus, I was hot. My body temperature had been elevated for a while, another little yellow warning light in the periphery of my vision. Actually, there was a whole constellation of yellow and red over there in the biomedical corner.

"Got it!" I shouted. The last screw came and the blade slipped out of its socket. I helped it out and pushed it away from the fan. It fell funny in the dense air.

"Head for the airlock," Katya said.

"Just a second." I scraped the last few tools and fragments from the blades and stumbled back around the nose of Virgil to the airlock on the portside. I'd had the good sense to leave the door open.

Even as I reached the door, Katya had started the big blades turning. The current from the propwash – you could not really call it a wind in air this thick – sprayed gravel on me. I heaved myself into the airlock and pulled the door inward. My hands remembered how to work the latch mechanism. The whine of the motors got louder and changed pitch, and I felt Virgil move. It tilted to one side, and I fell against a locker. "Sorry!" Katya shouted. A shudder, a rattle of small rocks sliding off the outer skin, and suddenly we heaved up into the air. We circled a moment, but then the nose pitched upward and the prop sound changed again, and we began to climb. It was all I could do to plug my suit into the ship's systems before I passed out.

11.

Unlike Katya, I had not disabled my biomedical data line, so the others had a pretty good picture of my condition. The heat exchanger of Virgil brought my suit environment to normal in a few minutes, and my body temperature came down rapidly after that. Dr. Martinez suggested letting me sleep while I could. Katya left the ship on autopilot long enough to drag herself to the airlock window and make sure that I was not about to roll over and foul my lines. After that they just let me lie there for almost the whole ascent.

As I learned later, it was an exciting couple of hours. Katya had to fire the explosive bolts to jettison the landing gear, as I'd figured. The fans did work, though she could not use full thrust on the portside fan without flipping over. She somehow managed to open up the secondary jets several kilometers below the nominal altitude, which gave Virgil a badly needed extra boost. Parts of the electrical system died, and there were other failures as well. But I spent the trip snoring on the airlock floor.

The 1812 Overture, horns and cannons blazing, poured into my ears. It would not have been so bad, except that the cannons were aimed more or less at my head. I had been down so deep, though, that it took me a long time to swim to the surface. "What the hell?" I finally managed to get out.

The music cut off and, somewhat surprisingly, Madeline Whitten's voice came on. She was too loud. "Wake up, Jack. You're about to make rendezvous."

"No need to shout, Maddie." I sat up, tried to stand up, rediscovered my injured ankle, and slumped against a bulkhead. There was a lot of vibration. I took in a bleary view of the airlock. "Where are you?"

"Back on Aphrodite – our shuttle docked about an hour ago. Arkady's talking Katya in. You're still in the clouds, but you'll catch up with Delta in a few minutes."

"Can I go on inside? No, wait, I see the indicator. I'm still at three thousand millibars."

"You won't get down to one atmosphere in time. Just stay there in the airlock. Unplug the suit from the panel and find yourself a comfortable spot."

I began to unlock my umbilical. "What's the big rush? Let's cruise around till I can take the co-pilot's chair."

"You've chased Delta almost to the terminator. We need daylight for the docking."

"Aren't there docking lights on Delta?"

"You aren't heading for the docking cradle," Maddie explained. "Here's the situation, Jack. Your maximum thrust on the fans is way down, so you can't hover at your present altitude. The docking cradle is no good."

I disconnected the suit from the airlock panel and folded a seat down from the wall. There seemed to be an awful lot of warning lights on the indicator board in the airlock. It looked like one of the nastier simulation problems from training. "So what's the plan?" I asked, as nonchalantly as I could. "Do they snag us with a tether?"

"Nothing to snag safely. Katya is putting Virgil down on top."

"On top?" There was nothing on top of Delta except ten big hydrogen cells and some rigging. "Let me talk to Katya." I started to chin over to our private channel.

"Jack, she's real damn busy this minute."

"At least let me listen in on the channel, Maddie."

"I'll see what I can do. Meanwhile, there's some cargo webbing in the lower sample locker in the airlock. Try to improvise a crash restraint. Do you copy? We expect the landing to be pretty rough. Call me when you're ready."

What the hell were they planning? "Roger," I said.

I pressed my helmet to the airlock door and tried peering into the cockpit through the small window, but it was not placed to give me a view of the piloting stations. After a minute I gave it up and got to work. The webbing was right where Maddie had said. Some support rings on the walls would do as hard points to attach it. I chose the rear-facing seat and began to fold the webbing into a broad band that would go around my midsection. As I wrestled with it, I started to hear the audio from the pilot-to-control channel. I assumed that the first voice was from someone aboard Delta.

Delta: We're tracking you near the cloud tops. Turn on your lights and let us see you.

Virgil: Lights, da. (Katya sounded very, very tired. She wasn't wasting syllables.)

Delta: When you come up, we'll be almost straight north of you, about ten o'clock from your present heading. Let us know when you spot us.

I wished there were a window on the outer airlock door, or a video display, or something to let me watch what was happening. I felt the vibrations from the engines – low and smooth from the jets, high-pitched and much too rough from the props. Virgil was bouncing around enough that I had a hard time securing my impromptu seatbelt. I finally managed to clip onto a pair of rings on each side. It wasn't as tight as I'd like, but it would do. "This is Jack. I'm all set," I said into my helmet mike. I did not hear any acknowledgment.

Delta: We see you, Virgil.

Virgil: Clearing the cloud tops. Yes, I see you also.

Delta: Start your S-turn. Make your approach from the west, with the sun behind you. We'll give you the steadiest target we can. Aim for the center lifting cell.

Aphrodite: Aphrodite here. Maddie says that Jack is awake and fully secured. He sends his love and says good luck.

Virgil: OK. Starting the turn.

Virgil tilted and began a slow turn to port. There was something strange about the way it moved – sluggish, even though I could hear the fans turning near maximum. That would be the reduced thrust; but it also might be Katya's condition. She was a competent pilot, but now she was exhausted and badly injured, struggling to fly a damaged ship. The situation was not ideal in several respects.

I was trying to visualize what was going on. Aim for the center lifting cell? That sounded like a very bad idea. They were, after all, the lifting cells, the things that were holding Delta up. If we smacked into them, probably ripping a few open, we'd spill a million cubic meters of warm hydrogen. What in God's name did they have in mind? I told myself that this wasn't my problem. Now it was their turn to rescue me.

Delta: Your target is the number six cell – center cell on our port side. Go as slow as you can, but control is more important than speed. Come straight out of the sun, so you can put your shadow on the center and follow it in."

Virgil: Cell number six, dead center. Yes, I have it.

Delta: Hit the middle cells, five and six, so that we can maintain trim.

Virgil: OK.

Delta: After you're in, just hang on and we'll have someone with you right away.

Aphrodite: Arkasha here. Our people want to make sure that the fire-safety procedures are complete. We don't need an explosion.

Fire safety? That didn't make much sense either. True, the dirigibles were full of hydrogen – but there couldn't be any Hindenberg-style explosion on Venus. With no free oxygen in the atmosphere, no fire was possible. Then I figured it out. We were bringing the oxygen.

Virgil: I'm back in my helmet, and I've taken the oxygen out of the cabin air. Almost all of the O-two in the lander tanks is vented. The heat sink is stable at five-fifty degrees.

Aphrodite: Copy and thanks.

I checked my suit instruments, and realized that the airlock was filled with nothing but argon and fluorocarbon, pressure still at two and a half atmospheres and falling. Just in case I was tempted to take off my helmet.

We were going to try to use the lifting cells as crash balloons? Nineteen objections to that idea popped into my head. The impact might kill us. Virgil might just snap through all of the rigging cables and come out the other side, plunging out of control into the clouds beneath. It was not impossible that a bad crash-landing could destabilize Delta and roll it over, spilling everything and everybody into the abyss. Even if everything worked, Delta, deprived of the lift from the cells we ripped, would start losing altitude very quickly. I felt Virgil level out and fly straight.

Delta: Make your starboard turn when you're ready.

Virgil: I'll run another kilometer to get some room.

Delta: Twelve minutes of sun left. Do you want to try a practice pass?

Virgil: No.

Delta: Copy that. We're ready for you.

The turn to the right was much tighter than the first turn had been, and it felt like we lost some altitude in it. The jets throttled up to help us regain the height, but we were laboring. In my mind's eye, Delta was broadside to us, nose to the north, the port side illuminated by the orange rays of the sunset. Our shadow would be a small dark smudge on the side of Delta's spherical lifting cells.

Virgil jinked to the right, then right again. I grabbed onto the cargo webbing and gave it a final tug to check it. "Thirty seconds. Here we go," somebody said. I could feel Virgil stumble and sway as Katya tweaked up our approach vector. Only a few hundred meters left. I held my breath. Suddenly, the roar of the jets cut off, and the whine of the fans jumped an octave, until it was way too high. The fans pivoted on their mountings. Virgil slowed and began to drop. There was a half-second of tearing and whipping noises from the cell fabric and rigging cables that we snapped; and then we jerked right, spun around, smashed to a stop. I was twisted, yanked and flung backward. I felt my helmet strike the bulkhead with an impact that broke it open. Several somethings ripped through the walls of the airlock, and the air rushed out with a whoomp. The lights went out. My suit deflated.

There was a sharp pain in my ears and I felt my chest heaving for breath. I'm screwed, I thought. I've busted my helmet. I'm a fish out of water. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the world to fade away.

Seconds went by and the world hadn't faded yet. I reached my hand back to my helmet to see whether there had been some mistake. No mistake. The blow had split the helmet wide right over the top of my head. I could stick my fingers in the crack and scratch my scalp. I opened my eyes. All my helmet displays had gone dark, but I could tell from the feeling in my ears and the painful heaving of my chest and diaphragm that I'd lost my pressure. Blood pounded in my ears. My eyes were stinging and kept blurring over. But somehow I was still alive.

So what the hell, I unlatched my helmet and took it off. I squirmed out of the webbing and got to my feet as best I could, given my damn ankle and the tilt of the deck. I still wasn't dead. There were several jagged holes in the outer wall of the airlock, from fragments of the disintegrating fan blades I guessed. I could stick my fingers through those holes, too, and look through them at the last orange embers of daylight outside. I was breathing Venus air.

Well, who needs breathing, anyway? At the moment I did not, not with the hotsuit gas exchanger doing its best to keep my blood oxygen at the right level. For a time – but maybe not for long – the suit would keep me going, with or without breathable air. My reflexive gasps were distracting, though, so I took a deep breath and just held it.

There was no opening the outer door, but I was more interested in the inner one anyway. It had been half sprung off of its hinges, so it only took a couple of heaves to force it open. I pulled myself inside the main compartment. This had also been perforated and vented to the outside atmosphere. Up front, the windows were covered by the folds of a lifting cell envelope. I saw Katya, strapped into the pilot's seat, slumped motionless against the maneuvering controls.

I scrambled forward. Her inner suit was still holding pressure. She was bruised and unresponsive, and a trickle of blood ran down from her nose, but from the outside it looked possible that she was still alive.

No one had told me exactly what was planned at this point, and my suit communicator had died. It was clear that we needed to get out of there. I found the locker where Katya had stored her life-support pack and, dragging it across the cabin, transferred her umbilical from the dead ship to the live pack. The indicator lights came on green. Now which way was that exit?

I heard a noise on the top of Virgil's hull. Of course. The docking hatch up there was our escape route. Someone banged on the outside of the hatch, so I made a fist and banged back. The manual latch turned from the outside, retracted, and the hatch lifted up.

I stared into the mustached face of Carlos Ruzhany. He smiled behind his faceplate. Then, when he got a good look at me, his jaw dropped.

I shouted, "My suit is keeping me alive. Come down and give me a hand with Katya. Watch out for her leg – burned pretty bad." And I held my breath again.

Carlos stared at me for a few more seconds before he swallowed and nodded. He said something into his helmet mike, then swung down feet-first into the cabin. Danny Kyemba, my opposite number on Delta, goggled at me through the hatchway. Together Carlos and I extricated Katya from the pilot's seat while Danny slipped a line down through the hatch. We sent Katya out first, then her life-support pack. Carlos himself went up, telling me by signs that he was going to help get Katya's pack onto her shoulders. That left me standing in the empty cockpit for about minute. I heard creaking sounds outside and felt the dirigible move beneath my feet. There were more footsteps and scuffling sounds on the roof. At last a couple of hands came down and lifted me out.

And there I was, bare-faced on Venus. The sun was setting, and the wind was chilly. Virgil had shredded both of the center lifting cells, port and starboard, and the torn fabric lay flapping around us. The cells forward and aft of us appeared undamaged. We had been caught in a net of cables that the Delta crew had jury-rigged for us. I took a look downward, between the struts of Delta's central spine. The clouds down there were awfully close and they were getting closer awfully fast. It occurred to me that a sulfuric acid fog would not be kind to my complexion.

The other two bent over Katya, slipping a safety harness onto her. Carlos suddenly looked up at me and shouted something; from his gestures, I could tell that he was telling me to brace myself. I grabbed a cable that lay draped across Virgil's silvery roof. There were two flat cracks, like the sounds explosive charges make, and the whole dirigible shuddered fore to aft. I saw something up ahead swing down and then fall away. Delta began to lift its nose. Then there was another pair of bangs, one on top of the other, and something came loose and fell behind us. The dirigible's descent to the clouds slowed almost to a stop. Danny shouted something to me that included the word "gondola". They had dropped the front and rear sections as ballast, leaving only the center section, where the orbit shuttle was docked. That might give us the minutes we needed.

Carlos leaned his helmet close to me. "Time to go!" he said. I nodded that I understood. He and Danny took up Katya between them and scooted down the side of Virgil. I followed more slowly. We were on the bent wreckage of an access walkway, tricky footing, but I gripped the safety line and limped after the others. Some kind of cable slide was rigged at the starboard side. We put Danny and Katya into the first harness and watched them slide, faster than looked quite safe, out and down and back under our feet and out of our view.

"We're next!" Carlos yelled. We slipped into the other harness, which was little more than a couple of loops around the main cable. I had a last look around at all the damage we'd caused.

Ready to go, Carlos signed. I stood for a second at the edge, gazing down at the mist, ruddy and shadowed in the last scraps of daylight. My stomach went queasy. "Oh boy," I said.

"Scared of falling?" Carlos asked, his teeth showing beneath the mustache. We stepped off together.

They strapped me into the seat next to Katya, who was still unconscious. Unconscious, not dead. They'd pulled off her helmet and her gloves, so I reached out and touched her hand. It was warm. Her fingers twitched and seemed to curl around mine, but she gave no other sign. Then the acceleration warning sounded, and we dropped from Delta, banking left as we fell. The main engine kicked in. The shuttle rocketed ahead, outward and upward, faster and higher, till Venus had no more hold on us.

Much later, I told Katya about the Pasadena Rule.

She listened to me and said, "There is no such rule. That's a stupid rule."

"Nobody talks about it, but it's there. Don't tell me you weren't thinking about it, when you were down on the surface."

She looked away for a second. She was still cocooned in burn dressings, floating free in her berth in Aphrodite's infirmary. "I was in a bad way," she said quietly. "But I was still making up my mind. I hope I would have been strong enough to face what was coming. God does not approve of suicide, Jack."

"I don't know what God has to do with it."

"Now you are being obtuse," she said. "Anyway, if there were a rule like that, then why did you come after me?"

Now it was my turn to look away. I did it because it was the best option. I did it because I had to, because there was nothing else to do. I did it because, once you think of an idea like that, you have to go through with it or you can't live with yourself. I did it because I love you and I couldn't let you die.

She smiled. These days she couldn't go more than five minutes without smiling. "I tell you what is wrong with your special space-disaster rule, Jack." She reached out a bandaged hand and laid it on my chest. "One little thing. You."

I kissed her. There is only one rule that matters, in Earth or heaven.

Another visit to the carnival

2006-02-13T08:47:00.000-05:00

Storyblogging Carnival XXXVIII is now in business. I'm participating this time with Part I of The Pasadena Rule, the science fiction novella appearing here. But there are lots of other stories in the Carnival as well, ranging from short pieces to new installments of novels-in-progress. I haven't explored the latest offerings yet, but I have enjoyed many of the stories from past Carnivals. So drop on by SC-XXXVIII yourself and browse the various entries. (Acts? Exhibits? Specimens?) Many thanks to Sheya Joie of Tales by Sheya for hosting things this time around.

Anecdotal obsolescence

2006-02-11T23:54:00.000-05:00

We all, I suppose, have our little inventories of "set-piece" stories, the anecdotes that we trot out from time to time when the conversation and the company call for us to be amusing or interesting or witty. (I mean here the true stories, or at least the ones we tell as true. Mere jokes do not count.) These tales we tell are worn smooth by being told and retold; indeed, we often say them in almost the same words on each occasion. We tell these stories because we like them -- because they are good stories, with a beginning, a middle and an end; or because they are funny; or because we have found a way of telling them that pleases us. The truth is that an ordinary life with its complex threads only seldom produces a neat little package of a story, with a plot or a point suitable for general audiences. So we hang on to our classics, and look for opportunities to perform them.

Our friends and our loved ones must hear them many times over the years. (How kind to us our friends are! How much they tolerate in us for friendship's sake!) But surely they grow no wearier of our re-runs than we do ourselves. When I find myself putting in tape #137 and spinning up the old "Teaching-nuclear-fission-to-premeds" story, something down inside me shudders. Why? I am not altogether sure. It is a brief story, completely true and rather funny in that Reader's Digest "Do you have an amusing anecdote?" sort of way. It is even, now and then, germane to the actual line of the discussion into which I insert it. I think that my qualm comes from a feeling that I have, for a few moments, changed the nature of the conversation. I have seized the role of raconteur, and I am determined to practice that role upon an audience that, though possibly willing, has not exactly volunteered for the honor.

Or maybe the thing is even simpler. Maybe I just hate the feeling of becoming, for a minute or two, a kind of performing automaton. A friend, a fellow teacher, once told me that he had to change up the syllabus of his courses every time he taught them -- new arrangement, new readings, new themes every single time. Otherwise, he would find himself repeating exactly the same words in class, even the same jokes, year after year -- a thought that filled him with inexpressible horror.

But I am unwilling to give up my story. Indeed, when the subject of teaching physics to premedical students comes up, and my prospective audience has not already heard the story (or I have forgotten for the moment that they have), I find it almost impossible to resist launching into the nuclear fission anecdote. And I've been telling that same story, almost the same words, for more than a dozen years.

Don't worry, though. I'm not going to tell it here.

It is probably harmless enough to have such a repertoire, as long as it isn't inflicted too often or too implacably upon one's acquaintances. Still, I am looking for ways to freshen up the act a bit. One way would be to have plenty of new adventures all the time, so that you would have lots of interesting new material to work with. But daily life, as I mentioned, seldom gives you a tale that is neat in the telling, or that would make sense as a story to someone else. The really important things that happen in our lives are often impossible to make into anecdotes. "I saw the sunlight streaming from behind a cloud over some ruins in Sicily, and I thought about Zeus, and for the first time I really understood what the Greek myths must have been like for the Greeks." Such a moment may be of supreme intellectual and imaginative significance. It might make a poem. But it is not an anecdote, and it cannot be tossed into a casual conversation. People would just stare at you.

It occurs to me that the hard thing is to prune the catalog, to get rid of old stories that have become worn out over the years. How is this done, exactly? If it is not possible to forget these tales, how do you retire them? How do you remove the urge to launch into them whenever the opportunity arises?

So here's my idea. You can do this by writing them down and publishing them. And the easiest way to do that is via a blog. This blog, for instance.

The theory is simple. First, when you write a story down you give it a definitive form, fixed it in place, which takes it outside of your head and gives it an independent existence. So the memory on which the story is based might stop scratching at the door like a cat who wants to be let out. Second, one thing that discourages you from bringing out a story is the thought that your audience may have heard it before. It is better to pass up the tale rather than become a bore. But if you publish a story, you can never be quite certain that someone has not already heard that one. I bet that James Thurber, after he wrote his stuff, stopped telling all his friends and neighbors the one about the night the bed fell on his father.

You may, if you wish, consider this note as a warning. Over the next weeks and months, I may use this space to "archive" some of my anecdotes, to put them into permanent and honorable retirement. They are good stories, and for the most part they are also true. But they are also old, and it makes me feel old to tell them. Enjoy them or skip them as you wish. For that is the best advantage of my brilliant plan -- how easily you my friends may simply avoid them, without the least hint of discourtesy.

Enigma

2006-02-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

My favorite museum in the Washington DC area is . . . well, okay, that would be the National Air and Space Museum. And my second favorite would have to be the National Gallery of Art. But aside from those two, my favorite Washington museum is actually located some distance away from the city, out the Balto-Wash Parkway. I am talking, of course, about the National Cryptologic Museum.

I visited there a few years ago when I gave a talk at the University of Maryland. The museum building was once the Colony 7 Motel, located at the freeway interchange just beside the National Security Agency's headquarters at Fort Meade. As I heard the story, the NSA found that several motel rooms were more or less permanently occupied by folks from the Soviet Embassy. They therefore bought the motel and closed it down. But then what could they do with the building? So they made a museum out of it. (This story may not be exactly true, of course, but it is too good not to tell.)

The museum is not particularly large, but despite its size it has some of the most remarkable exhibits I have ever seen. There are collections of Renaissance texts on cryptography, Civil War signal flags and code wheels, early model telephone scramblers (the size of whole desks) and so on. The most wonderful display when I was there was the Enigma machine.

Everyone has heard of Enigma, I suppose. It was the electromechanical cipher system used by Nazi Germany, hideously complex, supposedly undecipherable. Only it wasn't, quite. Thanks to early work by the Poles, the mathematical genius of the British (led by Alan Turing himself) and American technological wizardry, the Allies broke Enigma. In so doing, they built the foundations of modern information theory and computer science.

They also, just possibly, won the War. The Enigma breakthrough, code-named "Ultra", was extremely secret and was not generally revealed until almost thirty years after the War ended. So the conventional accounts of the War, like Churchill's own multivolume history, necessarily left out one enormous element. Consider the Battle of the Atlantic, which depended on finding U-boats before they could destroy supply convoys heading for Britain. A complete account of that could not be given without the crucial fact that in February, 1942, the German Navy upgraded to new, more sophisticated Enigma machines, thereby "blacking out" the Allies from their communications for most of that year. This happened at a period when the Germans were sinking nearly a million tons of shipping a month.

There is some dispute about the impact of Enigma/Ultra on the outcome of the War. Richard Overy's splendid study Why the Allies Won, for example, mentions it only in passing. But there can be no denying that the ability to read the enemy's radio traffic -- to look over the shoulder of the German generals and admirals -- was a dramatic advantage. And cracking the Enigma system was not the only achievement of Allied cryptanalysis during the War, and not the only signals intelligence coup that arguably changed the course of history. There was also the elegant unlocking of the German Lorenz teleprinter system and the remarkable solution of the Japanese Purple code. There was the U.S. Navy's "Magic" group, which broke the Japanese naval ciphers. There are exhibits about all these at the National Cryptologic Museum, but of course Enigma is the name to conjure with, the one that stands for all.

My own field of science is quantum information, which makes me a peculiar hybrid of information theorist and quantum physicist. One set of my intellectual forebears spent the War in shabby temporary buildings in Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall, penetrating the secrets of the enemy. The other set toiled in equally ramshackle laboratories in Chicago and Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford, penetrating the secrets of the nucleus. So for me, to touch a real Enigma machine at the National Cryptologic Museum -- to set its rotors and actually use it to encrypt my own name -- was like messing with the controls of Fermi's reactor under the squash court at Stagg Field.

And then there was Venona.

Venona started in 1943 as an attempt to read encrypted cables between Moscow and various Soviet diplomatic missions, which had been intercepted and copied since 1939. It took a long time for the Americans to begin to break into the traffic. Even when they did, they were only able to read a small fraction of the messages, years after they were sent. But the messages were astounding. Many of the cables were in fact KGB and GRU communications dealing with Soviet agents in the United States and elsewhere. The agents were discussed by code name, so that many of them remain unidentified today. But it was often possible to use circumstantial detail to identify the referents of the code names.

At about the same time, several Soviet agents defected and told their stories to the FBI. Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley were American former Communists who had done secret work for Soviet intelligence. Igor Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the GRU at the Soviet embassy in Canada. The information they provided supported and filled out the data gleaned from the decrypted cable traffic. Piece by piece, a fragmentary picture was built up of Soviet clandestine activities in the West. That picture was, by necessity, only known to a few.

The Venona project was only made public about ten years ago, after the end of the Cold War. Nowadays, you can read the decrypted and translated Venona messages online. But for decades it was among the darkest secrets in the secret world. And so the conventional narratives about the Cold War that people told each other for years were inevitably incomplete.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was a bad fellow -- nothing but a demagogue by the end (and probably in the beginning as well), ignorant of and utterly indifferent to the truth -- a man who carelessly inflicted great harm on the body politic. He is justly infamous. But I think that the greatest harm he did may have been to make the idea of Communist spies ridiculous in the eyes of enlightened Americans. This was bad because the Communist spies really did exist. We know this from Venona.

Consider the notorious Rosenberg case. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, accused of stealing atomic bomb secrets, and tried for espionage. In 1953 they were executed. For decades afterward, it was an article of faith among the enlightened Left that the Rosenbergs were innocent. Only we now know that this was not the case. Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet agent code-named LIBERAL, mentioned many times in the Venona messages, who was part of a ring that passed atomic secrets on to Moscow. (While Ethel is not herself mentioned in the decrypted messages as a spy, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she knew of her husband's activities.) U.S. counter-espionage officials knew this for a fact well before the Rosenbergs were arrested.

But this secret certainty could not affect the conventional narrative -- i.e., that the Rosenbergs were railroaded simply because they were Jews who espoused progressive politics. And this narrative, though exploded by the Venona revelations, still exerts influence today, still colors the conventional thinking among cultural elites about the meaning of the Cold War and the history of the 1950's. (Don't believe me? Check this out.)

Or take the case of Alger Hiss. (Was ever a man more unfortunately named?) Hiss was a noted diplomat, a member of the U.S. delegation to Yalta, a key figure in the founding of the U.N. and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was pure Establishment, of the best and most liberal sort, the sort that had made the New Deal and guided the War. He attended the best schools (Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law) and moved in the best circles. Then, in 1948, he was accused by Whittaker Chambers of having been a Communist spy. Sensational hearings and trials followed, in which Hiss unsuccessfully sued Chambers for libel and then was convicted himself of perjury.

Hiss, too, was widely regarded to be a guiltless victim of anti-Communist hysteria. California congressman Richard Nixon, the prime mover against Hiss in the Congressional hearings, was villified by the liberal intelligensia. (This, perhaps, was one source of Nixon's well-known distrust of intellectuals.) Chambers's own memoir of the case, Witness, was dismissed as a pack of lies. Hiss always stoutly proclaimed his own innocence; and in return, in some circles, he became something of an icon of the horrible "McCarthy era".

He was also a genuine Communist spy, who appears under the codename ALES in the Venona messages. Chambers and Nixon turn out to have been right after all.

We therefore know that accepted accounts of historical events are not necessarily correct, because some things remain concealed even years after the fact. The accounts can be incomplete, like the histories of the Second World War before the Enigma/Ultra story came out. Or they can be just wrong, like the widespread belief in the innocence of Hiss and the Rosenbergs. When those historical narratives get mixed up in political or ideological debate, they can persist even when later evidence should make them untenable. The Left in this country -- growing a bit gray these days but still influential in cultural and academic circles -- has long defined itself by its opposition to "McCarthyism". To say now that the anti-Communists may have known a thing or two, would be to attack the very legitimacy of the Left. Such a reassessment will be strongly resisted or (more likely) simply ignored.

(As an aside, I believe that the self-image of the elite Left in the United States involves three historical factors from the 1950s and 1960s. The Left opposed the anti-Communist "witch hunts", supported the civil rights movement, and opposed the war in Vietnam. All three of these elements have proved to be remarkably durable. For instance, the grim consequences of American withdrawl from Southeast Asia had little or no effect on the Left's self-image.)

All of which raises disturbing questions. Given that the revelation of secret information can alter our view of history, what secrets remain concealed even now? Which of our accepted stories will someday be known to be incomplete, or just plain wrong? What heroes are really villains, and vice versa? Which myths have become so entangled with political identities that they will still persist, even if later proven false?

These are disturbing questions because, once you depart from the officially accepted standard stories about things, you enter a country without borders. The nearer parts of that country can be intriguing and thought-provoking, but the territories farther out are inhabited only by lunatics. Beware. This way madness lies.

In our post-X-Files era, when the wackiest conspiracy theories have diffused into mainstream culture, we all understand the idea of hidden history. The ostensible history of the last century, we are told, has been just a facade, behind which a secret story has unfolded. Shadowy groups -- be they Jews, Freemasons, Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, CIA, KGB, Majestic-12, the Trilateral Commission, or what have you -- plot and vie for power over the decades and the centuries. We only see the faint, visible traces of a gigantic subterranean struggle.

Some of these ideas are pernicious and lead to murder and worse. (How many have died because of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?) But viewed purely as imaginative games, they can sometimes be great fun. (Think National Treasure -- which, no kidding, my daughter recently watched in history class.) And most of us know that it is mostly nonsense. (In my view, nobody can take The DaVinci Code seriously who has first read Foucault's Pendulum.) Yet the notion of a hidden history, of secret causes behind public events, is far from nonsense. Enigma and Venona teach us this much. It is probable that there are other secrets, unknown to us, that are even today shaping the world we see.

I am a person with a definite taste for this sort of modern mythology, at least in some of its flavors. It has long been a hobby of mine. I happily read about the Knights Templar, the Roswell flying saucer crash, and the latest cryptozoological developments. This predilection of mine does call for a bit of caution, though. These are very dodgy epistemological neighborhoods, and when you visit such places it is a good idea to keep a firm grip on your mental balance. Yet you cannot honestly do this simply by asserting that "Such things are all tommyrot." History does tell us that such theories mostly are tommyrot. But history also tells us that important real parts of history may be concealed from view.

Where exactly is the edge of paranoia? Here is my own working rule: Doubt is not paranoia, but some kinds of belief are. It is not paranoia to believe that your picture of the world is likely incomplete. It is not paranoia to believe that some of the visible history of the world may be driven by hidden forces and secret events. In short, it is not crazy to suspect that some conspiracies may exist. It is crazy to be convinced that the Bilderbergers are tapping your IPod.

We have certainly been living, as the (apocryphal) Chinese proverb has it, in interesting times. Over the past few years, there have been any number of strange and terrifying incidents. The obvious example is the attacks of September 11, 2001. But 9/11 was embedded in a wider web of events, some of them still without a really satisfactory explanation. I have lost track of the number of news stories, initially pregnant with significance, that have led nowhere. Of course, first news reports are often not accurate, so that later on you find out the real shape of things. But what about those stories whose true shape is never made clear at all?

Many of these loose ends have involved Iraq. At the risk of venturing into conspiracy land, let me mention six questions that either have never been answered, or whose accepted answers are not as solid as I would like:

Who is Ramzi Yousef? Yousef, you'll recall, was the key man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, who managed to skip the country and evade capture for several years afterward, participating in several other terrorist plots, until he was finally nabbed in 1995 in Pakistan. He's now in the SuperMax slammer in Colorado, along with the Unabomber and Terry Nichols. But the biography we have been given of Ramzi Yousef may be nothing more than a "legend". There seems to be some reason to suspect that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent.

Did Nichols and McVeigh have foreign terror connections? Terry Nichols, one of the two men convicted of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, spent a great deal of time in the Philippines in the time leading up to the attack. There are coincidences in place and time between these visits (for the ostensible purpose of obtaining a young Philippine bride) and the activities of Ramzi Yousef and other members of terrorists groups there. A number of people (including Tim McVeigh's court-appointed attorney) have become convinced that the Oklahoma City plot had foreign connections. Why did this not come up in the trials? U.S. investigators and prosecutors were intent on creating an airtight and uncomplicated case against McVeigh and Nichols. In other words, the investigation was pursued as a criminal case (where the important thing is to secure convictions of the bad guys) rather than an intelligence operation (where the important thing is to make all the connections and assess the threat).

Did Mohammed Atta meet with an Iraqi spy in Czechoslovakia? Czech intelligence officials claim that the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks met more than once with an Iraqi intelligence official who operated under diplomatic cover in Prague. U.S. intelligence officials said that they were not convinced this ever happened. If Atta did have such a meeting, why does the U.S. government dismiss the story? (Surely a bona fide link between 9/11 and Iraq would be a political philosopher's stone for the Bush administration!) If Atta did not have such a meeting, why do the Czechs stick to the story to this day?

Who was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks? A few weeks after 9/11, letters were sent to media organizations and congressional offices containing very effectively weaponized anthrax spores. Though the attacks were small in scale, they were the most sophisticated biological terrorist attacks ever conducted. Several people got sick, and some died. A massive investigation ensued. Many people speculated at the time that Iraq might be behind the letters, since the Iraqis were known to be experimenting with anthrax as a weapon before the mid-1990s. After a while, though, the anthrax story sort of disappeared. The attacks stopped. No one was arrested. The attacks remain, at least in the public view, a mystery.

Who was being trained at Salman Pak? One of the creepiest places in Saddam's Iraq was the apparent terrorist training facility at Salman Pak. It included, among other things, an entire parked airliner, evidently for use in practicing operations on planes. The camp evidently trained some hundreds or thousands of people over the years. Salman Pak was unarguably real -- you could see it in the satellite images -- but as far as I know, nobody has given a trustworthy account of just what was going on there.

What really happened to Iraq's WMDs? Saddam Hussein certainly acted like he was concealing weapons of mass destruction before March, 2003. He seemed to be willing to risk his regime to hide . . . what? The widespread conclusion that Saddam still possessed WMDs was made more plausible by Saddam's previous extraordinary efforts to acquire and conceal them. The Americans and British clearly expected to face such weapons in the war and find stocks of them afterward. But instead . . . almost nothing. (True, the ISG did conclude that Saddam had never abandoned his interest in WMDs and had worked to maintain core capabilities in secret. But almost no actual weapons have come to light.)

Here is the accepted wisdom about these six questions, as near as I can judge. Ramzi Yousef was an Islamist terrorist born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait, probably with family ties to al Qaeda's Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He had nothing to do with Iraq. Nichols and McVeigh had no foreign contacts or assistance, so Oklahoma City is unconnected to everything else. The story of Atta meeting the Iraqi spy in Prague is spurious, mere bad data. The anthrax attacks were the work of a lone resourceful weirdo, probably an American, but of course nobody knows for sure. Salman Pak was . . . well, there were lots of odd things in Iraq. Saddam was a bad guy, so who knows? But the UN inspections and Bill Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign had shut down the Iraqi WMD programs for good. So by 2003, either Saddam was bluffing on a massive scale and trying to make his neighbors think he was armed with WMDs even when he wasn't, or else the pre-war intelligence reports of Iraqi WMDs were just flat wrong and likely distorted by American political goals. Or perhaps both.

Here are the central points of the conventional story: Saddam never attacked the United States. There were no connections between Saddam and al Qaeda. And there were no WMDs in Iraq.

In 1939, Winston Churchill famously described Stalin's Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." In an open society, it is really hard to keep a big secret for a long time. (The cryptographical victories of the mid-20th Century, secret for so many years, are a striking exception to this. There were serious leaks, even so.) In a totalitarian dictatorship, almost everything of importance is a secret, forever. As Churchill noted, that makes the behavior of such a regime extremely difficult to understand from the outside. This was true for Josef Stalin; and it was also true for Stalin's great admirer, Saddam Hussein.

But after the dictators are gone, we sometimes have the opportunity to turn the enigma inside-out, to see the evidence and read the archives and understand what happened. The archives, especially, can be crucial, because totalitarian states have a passion for record-keeping. We were able to do put Nazi Germany under the microscope after 1945 and do the same, to a far lesser extent, with Soviet Russia after 1989. I expected that this would happen with Saddam's Iraq, that once Baghdad fell we would begin to unwrap the riddles of his regime. But have we?

No -- or at least not in public. There are some formidable difficulties, of course. The main one seems to be language. The fighting in Iraq and the larger War on Terror continue, so there is an accute shortage of Arabic speakers to wade through the millions of pages of seized documents that could illuminate the workings of Saddam's regime. There may also be political reasons not to expose things too much, too soon. To take a wholly hypothetical example, suppose Russia assisted Iraq in its WMD programs after 1991, in violation of about a zillion treaties and UN resolutions. In 2006, we very much want Russian cooperation in dealing with Iran's nuclear program and in fighting various Islamist groups in Asia. So we may not be all that anxious just now to advertise the extent of Russia's aid to Saddam.

I'm amazed, though, by the lack of apparent curiosity on the part of journalists. They have for the most part accepted the conventional story about Iraq and run with it. The conventional story -- Saddam contained, no link with al Qaeda, no WMDs -- is the basis for interpreting all of the events associated with the Iraq War. It is also a defining doctrine of the anti-war Left. But is that story really as well established as most people seem to believe?

It is not hard to construct an alternative narrative. Here is one. Ramzi Yousef was trained and supported by the Iraqis as part of an unconventional attack on the US in the wake of the Gulf War. The 1993 WTC attack was therefore an Iraqi attack on U.S. soil. The Oklahoma City bombing, on the other hand, was not -- although Nichols may have gained some technical expertise from contacts with Islamists in the Philippines. The story of the Atta visit to Prague is indeed spurious, a case either of mistaken identity or of an unreliable informant. Saddam played no role in 9/11 The anthrax for the 2001 letter attacks did come from the Iraqi biological weapons program, although the actual agents in the U.S. may not even have known that they were working for Saddam (as Yousef's accomplices did not). Salman Pak was part of the larger Iraqi plan for unconventional operations against the coalition that had defeated them in 1991 and imposed such harsh sanctions. We are to this day fighting Iraqis trained there. Stocks of WMDs, certainly chemical and possibly biological, did exist in Iraq until early 2003. Some of these were moved to Syria in the months leading up to the invasion; others were hidden within Iraq, in places that have yet to be discovered. Saddam did not use WMDs in the Iraq war because (a) he was counting on external political pressures to constrain the Americans and the British, and (b) events during the invasion moved too fast for him to change plan. Finally, a fair amount of this is known to the U.S. government. Indeed, Saddam's continuing unconventional warfare was a major impetus for American and British action against him.

True? I have no idea. It seems about as plausible to me as the conventional story. Spin the tumblers and create your own version of hidden history.

I anticipate objections. For some, I must appear to have "drunk the kool-aid" utterly and lost my reason. I am evidently so anxious to defend the Bush administration that I am willing to spin fantasies about terrorist plots and secret undiscovered caches of WMDs. (Actually, if there really are WMDs still hidden somewhere in Iraq, or if we did let them slip away into Syria, I do not see how this fact would be much to the credit of the present administration. But I digress.)

To which I respond, that isn't my point at all. The "alternative narrative" above is not my theory about what happened. The standard story about Iraq, in fact, may be pretty near the truth. I am even willing to stipulate that it is the most likely story. But we must also consider three things.

First, the conventional story is not problem-free. We do not yet know how some pieces of data fit into it. The story looks shaky on a few points. Why should we not be very curious about the loose joints and the rough edges?

Second, because our country is still in the midst of a wider war, we can be pretty sure that the general public has not been told all of the important facts about events and how they fit together. Countries at war keep secrets. (Even if you pooh-pooh the idea of a genuine "War on Terror", there are lots of people in the Bush administration who take it pretty literally, and are acting accordingly. That suffices for my point.) We must accept that information not yet in our possession may change our picture considerably.

Third, we should be wary of the circumstance that the conventional Iraq narrative is woven so firmly into our political and ideological debates. This distorts our ability to complicate the story as we learn more. Let me be concrete. There is good evidence for long-standing links between Iraq and al Qaeda, although these links may never have included cooperation on actual terrorist operations. But in the rhetoric of the present day, this complicated truth disappears behind the simple slogan that "Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda". Why? Because that slogan is a stouter stick with which to beat up George W. Bush.

The opponents of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq find themselves in a situation like the one that, maybe, the FBI and the US Attorney faced when prosecuting Nichols and McVeigh. There are lots of strange leads, odd circumstances, suggestive details. On the other hand, the defendent is, as they believe, a wicked man. The thing to do is to try to present the simplest possible case to the jury, because complications may lead them to doubts, and then the wicked man might not be convicted. Since any complicating evidence discovered must eventually become part of the trial, it is best not to dig into the side-issues in the first place. Keep it simple. Don't turn over any unnecessary stones. Only a naive person thinks that the point of a trial, or of a political debate, is to arrive at the whole truth.

A final thought-experiment. It is possible that within the next few months we will learn a great deal more about, say, the disposition of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Suppose we learn that six tons of VX nerve agent was moved with Syrian help to the Bekaa Valley in late 2002, where it remains in the custody of Hezbollah. Suppose also that a couple of dozen enhanced-range Scud missiles with warheads designed for biological weapons are found buried in concealed bunkers within Iraq. Would that information really change the conventional narrative? Or, like the innocence of Julius Rosenberg, is that story too firmly entrenched to be altered by mere evidence?

The Pasadena Rule (Part III of IV)

2006-02-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

Next to last thrilling installment of our science fiction novella. Part I is here. Part II is here.

"Are you OK, Jack?" It was Max. Everyone else was out of the link.

"Uh, sure. Jesus, you should try this," I said, trying to sound light-hearted. Adrenaline and free-fall were playing havoc with my stomach.

"No thanks."

"Tell Bill and Dieter I owe them one."

"I'll tell them. Jack, you are running a bit above the curve. Can you speed up your descent for a while?"

"Copy that. Going head-down."

Max was telling me that I had jumped late. The ground speed of Gamma was fast, so even a minute's delay in jumping might land me kilometers downrange of Virgil. We would try to compensate by going faster through the upper-level winds, to bring me back to Max's precomputed flight path. I windmilled my arms and did my best to orient myself vertically, diving head-first down through the clouds. I could feel the rushing air tug at the puffy suit.

"Head-down. Tracking me?" I asked.

"You're a nice big radar target."

"How am I doing?"

"I'll let you know," Max said.

Now, maybe twenty seconds into the dive, I was already deep within the clouds. I was surrounded by a featureless yellow-grey mist, growing gloomier by the second. My suit was noticeably less ballooned, since the air pressure had more than doubled since I'd jumped. The exterior temperature had risen several degrees. My heart rate and blood pressure indicators were outlined in flashing yellow, but I didn't bother to check the numbers. Everything was normal. Yeah. Sort of.

"Max, how about Katya?"

"Ballistic. Madeline's talking her down on another channel."

"While you talk me down. That's teamwork."

"You're starting to catch up to the curve, Jack. Passing sixty-five now. You doing OK?"

"OK."

Those first five kilometers had passed damn quickly. It was not a very comfortable position, plummeting head-first through the clouds. Logic told me that the surface was over an hour away; but my skydiving instincts were telling me that the hard, rocky ground would come sweeping up at me any moment now. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small voice was insisting that it was high time to pull the chute release -- now, right now, this second. No chute, of course, but that didn't help.

I glanced at my hand and saw that I was still clutching the nylon bag that Dieter had put over my helmet. With an effort, I forced my fingers open and watched the bag flutter away past my feet and vanish into the fog.

"How long do I have to do this toes-up?" I asked.

"A little longer," said Max. "You're doing beautifully."

"OK."

One minute is a pretty long free-fall. My helmet was fogging up as I fell through the clouds. It wasn't water, of course. It occurred to me that the outer layer of the suit was probably not designed for contact with liquid droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid. On the other hand, it was designed to withstand the conditions far below, which were even more corrosive. Still ....

"You're coming up on sixty kilometers," Max said. "Your drop rate is down to eighty meters per second. I'd say you were hitting some real air."

"Affirmative," I answered. My suit was no longer ballooning. The display said that the life-support system was now adjusting the mixture, adding argon to match the outside pressure. I checked the outside sensors. "Temperature is now above freezing."

"I have you near the curve. You can slow down some."

"Thank you." I let myself pivot around and went into a normal skydiver's position, face down, arms out, knees bent. It felt good to stop hanging upside-down. My stomach began to complain less urgently. The rush of the air told me I was still dropping, but otherwise I seemed to hang suspended in a dim void.

It took me less than two minutes to fall the first ten kilometers. The next ten took me almost four minutes. The diffuse light around me drained away as I penetrated deeper and deeper into the clouds. The yellowish color of the cloud-tops faded to a gloomy gray. The wind that rushed past me was discernibly slower, but the denser air pushed up on me with a force as great as before. My life-support system was adjusting my breathing mixture, pumping in argon and fluorocarbons to keep my chest inflated without raising the partial pressure of oxygen. Outside my suit, my sensors told me that it was already hot -- the zone of human comfort had passed by in seconds.

Max kept up a stream of conversation to keep my mind occupied. There was little for me to do. A few experiments proved that I could control my rate of fall enough to keep me "on the curve". We postponed tests of lateral maneuvering until I had descended further, to levels where the horizontal winds were nearly zero. I read Max some data from my life-support monitors.

"Thanks, Jack," he said. "There are some folks up on Aphrodite who want to keep a close eye on things."

"I appreciate that." I could use all the help I could get.

"Captain Bell sends his complements, and says to tell you that the beer is on him when you come back."

"Copy that. I could use one now."

"Can you speed up slightly?"

I pulled my arms in slightly. "How's that?"

"Let me see the doppler .... Fine. That'll do nicely."

I switched on my suit's navigational display, and a grid superimposed itself on my grey surroundings. The luminous coordinates were somehow reassuring. I turned myself around until I was facing eastward. Invisible, somewhere above and in front of me, Gamma was drawing away as it rode the jet stream above the clouds.

"Coming up on one thousand millibars," Max said.

In less than six minutes I had fallen twenty kilometers, from blinding sunshine into grey obscurity, and my eyes had not really had time to adjust. But now I could make out a darker gloom below, a mottled shadow that grew swiftly as I plunged deeper. The mists beside me seemed to thin out.

"I may be near the base of the cloud deck," I reported. Almost before the words were out of my mouth, a vast gulf opened up under me, and I dropped into it. I caught a glimpse of great filaments of mist trailing down from the clouds like the tentacles of a ghostly jellyfish. The scene flashed upward in a couple of seconds. I dove through a last island of fog and then emerged into the endless emptiness beneath.

"Hoo," I said a little breathlessly. "I am definitely below the clouds. Repeat, I am falling in clear air."

"Right on time," said Max. "How's the view?"

"Can't see a damn thing. Just darkness below me."

"Copy that. Keep looking."

After leaving the clouds I fell ever more slowly through the empty air, dropping between a lighter obscurity above and a darker one beneath. I surveyed the suit's displays. The air pressure was increasing at five millibars per second – one standard atmosphere every three minutes – and my suit was adjusting beautifully. The rush of the wind past me had become a familiar thing, a constant background to my other sensations. The flow was quieter now but more forceful, and it felt almost like a tremendous hand restraining my fall. It occurred to me that I had be the first person in history to skydive through air this dense. On Earth, I would have hit the surface long ago.

I yawned.

That was slightly alarming. Yawning might be an early sign of carbon dioxide build-up, which might signal a suit malfunction. But the carbon dioxide levels in my suit and in my bloodstream looked nominal, and were unchanged in the last few minutes. I frowned and instructed the suit computer to do a rapid diagnostic of the sensors. Everything was working normally.

Of course, I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours, and I was coming down off a huge adrenaline high. The dim blankness of my surroundings and the whooshing of the air amounted to sensory deprivation. No wonder I was sleepy.

"How are you doing, Jack?"

"A bit groggy, but otherwise OK."

"Want to take a nap?"

I blinked. "You're kidding."

"It's an option in the flight plan, believe it or not. Dr. Martinez worked it out. He says that you could take as much as a thirty minute nap, if you need to. We'll wake you up." Dr. Martinez was the chief medical officer on the Aphrodite and one of the designers of the hotsuit. I had not realized it, but of course he had been helping to work the problem, checking up on my condition, designing solutions, planning contingencies. I had almost imagined myself pitting my own wits and strength against the universe, but that was all nonsense. Real life didn't work that way.

I could not help but smile. With my crewmates behind me, the long odds I faced looked a lot shorter.

Still, the middle of a skydive did not seem like the perfect occasion for a sleep period. "Thanks anyway," I said. "And thank Dr. Martinez, and everybody who worked on this. I just don't think I could make myself go to sleep right now."

"You're the pilot," he said.

The air pressure was approaching three times that of Earth's sea level, and the temperature outside my suit was as high as a medium-hot oven; and both were rising swiftly as I fell. No, I said to myself. This is not the time to doze off.

If you fall and fall and never hit the ground, pretty soon you don't feel like you're falling at all. I flew, dreamlike, through a dim emptiness, buoyed upward on a fountain of thick rising air. I could zoom this way and that by shifting my body and diverting its flow. Only the steadily decreasing altitude figures on my suit display told me that I was still descending.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I began to see the dark shapes of the surface below. It was difficult to get my bearings. Refraction effects made the surface seem to curve upward, as if I were hanging above an enormous bowl-shaped depression. From above, the topography was hard to figure out. Overhead, the sun might be low in the western sky, but down below everything was lit by a uniform glow from the clouds. There were no shadows; the shapes of light and dark that I could see were probably patches of different colored minerals, fresh lava flows versus old ones, and so on. I was not expert enough in the geology of the Maat Mons region to make any sense of them.

"Jack," Max said. "You have a call."

"Who from?"

"Your wife."

"Oh." I looked down below me, but of course I far too high to see the lander. I wished I could see Katya. "How is she?"

"Madeline has settled her down a bit."

That was good, anyway. "Put her on," I said.

"Hello, Jack," Katya said, her tone neutral. Her voice was a little hoarse. I wondered whether she had spent the last thirty minutes yelling at Maddie Whitten.

With my wife, the direct approach is always best. "Hi, Katya. Are you still angry with me?"

"I'm furious," she said. It was not a joke. "But what good does that do? Now we have to try and make your plan work, whatever I think of it. You give me no choice."

I breathed a sigh of relief. Katya had a rational mind, but she was also stubborn. It was never a complete certainty in a given situation which quality would win out. "I'm sorry," I said. "There wasn't time to persuade you."

"I understand." And I knew that she did, too, even though she still objected. "But this is past now. What needs to be done?"

I glanced at my instrument displays. "I'm twenty-five kilometers above you, falling at twelve meters per second. I'm slowing down as the air gets thick. Max, what is my estimated landing time?"

"17.35," Max said.

"An hour from now. I want to land as close to Virgil as I can. Max can guide me by radar, but a landing beacon would be helpful. Are your docking lights working?"

"Let me check. It seems so."

"Can you turn them on? Maybe I can see you."

"I'm switching them on now."

I watched carefully, but there was no bright spark visible in the gloomy landscape below. "I don't see you yet," I said. "Try blinking them."

"Flashing the lights."

There was still nothing to see. But it was a long way down, and maybe I wasn't looking in exactly the right place. "No luck," I reported. "But that's OK. We'll try again when I'm closer. Am I still on track, Max?"

"You're on the curve."

"I'm switching off the docking lights," Katya said. "Jack, how fast will you hit the ground?"

"About like a regular parachute jump, I think," I said. "I should be able to manage it without a problem."

"Then what?"

"I'll need to clear the fans. I should have several hours to do the job. You need to have Virgil warmed up and ready to launch for a rendezvous with Delta."

"I will go over the systems again." Katya paused, and added, "I have not really had a take-off in mind until now."

I wondered whether she was smiling. "OK. Start your checklist," I told her.

"You just get down in one piece."

The hotsuit was designed to adjust the human body to changes in pressure at rates up to one atmosphere per minute. Even in a suit, the lander airlock cycle lasted a couple of hours. On the other hand, I did not have that much control on my rate of fall. I reached the thousand-millibar-per-minute mark at around twenty kilometers altitude, and after that I was pushing the suit systems further and further beyond their specs. Dr. Martinez had OK'd the flight plan, though, so I decided not to worry about it. Outside, it was three hundred degrees Celsius with a pressure like the deep ocean. I was already feeling the strange effects of too-rapid pressure change. I felt a little dizzy, and my vision was slightly blurred. There were dull aches in my joints and in my head. My breathing seemed wrong, as if I were breathing out less than I breathed in – and given the rate at which the air density increased, that must have been exactly what was happening.

By now the oxygen in my breathing mix was only one percent, and falling – just a trace component in a gas that was ninety-nine percent argon and fluorocarbon. In theory I could do without any breathing oxygen at all, for the hotsuit's gas exchanger would add oxygen directly to my blood if the level dropped below normal. In theory. I did not intend to abandon use of my lungs anytime soon.

I could see more detail in the terrain below. The surface on the slopes of Maat Mons was fractured and pitted, marked with swaths of smoother gray lava flows. I glimpsed streaks of brown and orange and even blue. There were great downhill slides of loose material. It was a strange, dreamlike landscape, and the distortions of the refracting air only made it queerer. I was sinking ever more slowly toward the bottom of an alien sea.

Fourteen kilometers. "Let's try the docking lights again, Katya," Max suggested. He sounded a little worried. Gamma, carried by the jet stream, was now hundreds of kilometers away, and Max's radar fixes were becoming less and less useful for navigation. I had tried to guide myself by landmarks on the surface, without much success – my view of the landscape was just too confusing. Not only did I have to land within walking distance of Virgil, but I also had to know which way to walk when I got there. I needed a target beacon.

Katya acknowledged. "I begin now, blinking every two seconds."

"Keep it up for a bit, Katya," I said. I peered straight down and tried to spot the beacon. Where was it? The docking lights were bright and should be visible at this distance in the clear air beneath the clouds. Yet all I could see was the warped mountainside, rough and mottled, with no telltale beacon to steer toward.

"Any luck?"

I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. My headache had grown worse, and now there was a sharp stab every time I moved my head suddenly. My left leg was aching. The dizziness was bad enough that I was worried about nausea. On the timeline I was just over halfway down, and things should get worse as I descended. Though I hadn't mentioned my symptoms to the folks upstairs, I was beginning to wonder whether I could last all the way to the surface. But that was a stupid thought. I couldn't exactly turn back, could I?

"Jack, are you still with us?"

I forced my eyes back into focus and said, "Still scanning."

"I'm still blinking," Katya said.

I was looking for a slope with a flat area big enough to set down the lander, right next to a landslide. A recent landslide, I thought, might be distinguishable by color. So if I looked for a landslide that was lighter or darker, and checked along its edge ....

"I see you," I said. "There you are. On, off, on, off, on off. You're about kilometer and a half to the, um, north of me. I can see the track of the slide. I'm going to angle over closer as I approach."

"Copy that, Jack," Max said.

"Do you need the beacon?" Katya asked. "I'm about to wear out the switch."

"No, that's fine for now," I said. "Show it to me again in a few kilometers, and then again when I get really close."

"Yes, OK." The little flashing star winked out. I squinted, but could not see Virgil itself at the spot.

"Nice to see you, Katya," I said. "It helps somehow."

"Yes, it does," she admitted. "I wish you had a light also, so that I could see you."

"Be there soon."

The last ten kilometers took thirty minutes. The landscape expanded with an agonizing slowness. I stopped keeping track of how many hundreds of degrees and how many thousands of millibars. I was suspended in time and space, as the altitude display slowly unwound toward zero.

I hurt. I had toggled a dose of a pain med from the suit, but it wasn't working worth a damn. The pain in my head and in my limbs seemed to be interfering with my vision, too, for I found it increasingly difficult to get a clear view of the terrain below me. When Katya gave me another blink at around eight kilometers, I saw that I had edged closer, but not far enough. I concentrated on flying, on angling my body so that my trajectory bent over in her direction. Control was a problem, and I yawed around quite a bit. Every time I had to move or adjust my position, another hot nail got hammered in somewhere. It went on and on and on.

There was a three-way conference going on between Katya, Max, and Carlos Ruzhany, the skipper of the Delta airship. They were discussing the recovery operation, assuming that I survived and could clear the fans. I could not really follow the conversation. Damn, I was hurting. I knew that there were things I needed to be thinking about, but I was too slow-witted to figure out what they were. My brain is gelling in the pressure, I thought. For some reason, that phrase rolled round and round in my head. My brain is gelling. My brain is gelling.

When Max checked up on me, I was still able to answer coherently, though once or twice he had me repeat something when my speech was slurred. The pressure was rising at two atmospheres per minute. Several of my helmet indicators had turned yellow, but I couldn't tell which ones. What the hell, I thought. Can't fix it now. As long as nothing goes red I'm OK, right?

I could see Virgil itself now, a little silver bug on the reddish mountainside, shining dully under the overcast sky. Too bad it wasn't sunny. I was growing impatient with my slow descent, and I wondered whether I should try to speed things up by swimming downwards. No, that was no good; my muscles were too shaky for effort, and my joints hurt like a son of a bitch. If I went swimming now, I'd get a cramp and drown. I felt like I was drowning in this sluggish air anyway. I shook my head to clear it, and a white-hot spike drove through it just above the back of my neck.

I might have blacked out for a moment. All at once I was falling head-down, something that took me a minute to realize and another minute of flailing around to fix. Max was speaking in my ear, but it was impossible to understand him. "Speak up, Max" I tried to say. Katya said something, too, but she didn't make any more sense than Max had. They seemed to be shouting, so I ignored them. I must have been in the last kilometer. I could see my motion, saw Virgil (lights flashing) get closer and closer, slowly drifting to one side of me. With the tilt of the slope, it was hard to work out exactly which direction was down, but whatever it was, that was the way I was heading. I knew I should pick a safe place to land. I squinted and tried to forget the chisel in my brain, just behind my eyes. A safe place to set down would be flat and smooth and free of loose rock. A big "X" to mark my touchdown point would also be nice. But it all looked the same from here. There was one more thing I ought to remember, something that might be related to all the shouting that Max was doing, and I racked my gelled brains to recall it. It was some maneuver we had discussed, a way to slow down a little right at the end and still land on my feet. There were drag coefficients and air speeds swirling in my mind. I could not for the life of me work it out. I kept my eyes on the approaching rocks. They were coming slowly. There was plenty of time. Well, actually, they were coming up faster than I had thought. In fact, they were really pretty quick. Five meters per second! Whoa! I suddenly realized that I was still in a horizontal position, face downward, which seemed like a bad way to meet the ground. I windmilled my arms around to get my feet under me, over-corrected, then flailed them the other way. I hit hard, and all the pains in my body shot down to my left ankle. There was an instant of agonizing clarity, and then I lost consciousness.

"Talk to me, Jack!"

It has been conclusively established from my suit data record that I was unconscious for no more than two minutes. You couldn't prove that by me. When Katya's urgent voice dragged me back to awareness, it might have been two hours or two weeks later. At first I did not even know where I was. (Remembering that datum a few seconds later did not exactly cheer me up.)

"You bastard, you stinking bastard, you will not do this to me! Do you hear me? Jack, acknowledge this transmission!" The radio reception was fuzzy and had echoes.

"Katya," came another static-distorted voice. "Katya, please –"

"Shut up, Max. Jack, I will not take this. Do you understand? Answer me, Jack!" Katya's voice was hard and angry and more than a little hysterical.

I groaned and tried to move.

The communications channel got very quiet all of a sudden. Katya said softly, "Jack? Is that you?"

"Yeah," I croaked. "Still with you. Stand by."

I moved again and groaned again. I felt like I had been kicked to a bloody pulp by six bad-tempered rhinos, then run over by a train. Actually, weirdly, in some ways I felt better than I had before touchdown. My system had done some catching up with the pressure, and I was no longer dizzy. Come to think of it, there had only been three rhinos in the kicking squad, and the train had only run over my left ankle.

"We are standing by," Katya said.

I opened my eyes and frowned, trying to focus. I was sprawled on some flat, broken stones that lay on the mountainside. The eagle had definitely landed, and I was on terra firma, or whatever you called it. I knew that Virgil was someplace nearby, over that way perhaps, but the landing had been confusing and I wasn't sure. No matter. That would sort itself out soon enough.

I tried to read my suit status display. "Jack here," I said. "I'm on the surface. Sorry about the blackout; I had a rough landing. My suit seems to OK."

"Thank God," Katya said.

Max came on and added, "That's great, Jack! We thought we'd lost you there." I could hear some happy noises behind him on the flight deck of Gamma.

"I'm glad to report otherwise," I said. There was a burst of static, and I added, "Say again, Max?"

"What's your condition?"

"I've hurt my left foot. I'll get up and try it out."

"Negative on getting up, Jack," Max said. "Dr. Martinez says to stay put for a few minutes and let your suit systems catch up."

"OK," I said. I wasn't too eager to stand up, anyway. "Listen, Max, you and Katya are coming in rather broken up. Let me check my suit communicator."

There was another distorted message: "... kilometers ... this circuit. We suggest ... relay through Virgil. Over."

Of course. I was still routing my suit communications through Gamma, which was now hundreds of kilometers to the east. The local terrain was probably bouncing things around a bit. "Confirm that, I will switch over to relay through the lander."

Katya came on. "Jack, switch your .... one toggle six, repeat, one toggle."

"Copy that. Switching my comm to one toggle six." When I'd reset the helmet control, the static in my headphones died away and Katya's voice came loud and clear.

"Check communications. Do you hear me, Jack?"

"I read you fine on mode one. I'm toggling to alternate." I bumped the switch with my chin. "Mode six is the private surface channel, right?"

"Just you and me, on vox," she said. "Mode one gets relayed on up to the satellite."

"Good idea."

"How are you? We were worried."

"I'm beat up, but I'll live," I said. "The landing knocked me out."

"Your landing almost killed me."

"Sorry about that. I'll do it better next time."

"Arkasha is beeping us. Back over to mode one."

"OK. Love you." I chinned the toggle.

With the touchdown, we were handed over from Max (my "flight controller") to Aphrodite, where Arkady Rudin was doing the sky-to-ground comms. Arkasha came on the line with a cheerful voice. "Jack! This is Arkasha. Very well done. I was betting on you."

"Did you win much?"

"Not a dime. No one would bet against you."

I'm not sure I believed that. "You should have asked me," I said. "I might have taken your bet, just to cover the bases."

For the next few minutes, Arkasha had me relay various readings on my suit status, my biomeds, and the environmental conditions. My suit was in great shape, my biomeds could have been better, and outside the conditions were extremely nasty. In short, everything was as good as could be expected. While we went through this I sat myself up and got my bearings with the suit's navigational display. The lander was two hundred meters away, above me and around the curve of the mountainside. From seventy kilometers up, that counted as a bullseye.

My suit was feeding me pain-killer, and it was finally doing its job. Only my ankle continued throbbing. A blurry head and a slight muscle tremor were ordinary fatigue, so I instructed the suit to add a dose of a stimulant to my system. I might pay the price later, but the stim would keep me going for now.

I tested my left ankle before getting up. It was sprained but not broken, or at any rate not seriously. The suit was doing something to keep the swelling down. With a little caution, I could probably hobble around on it. That was good enough. I had some ground to cover to get to Virgil, and I didn't care to do the whole distance on hands and knees. My head swam when I finally managed to get to my feet.

"OK to go, Jack?" Katya asked.

"OK enough," I grunted. "It may take me a while to reach you."

It did take me a while. The slope had once been covered by a broad sheet of smooth lava, which had broken up into pieces about the size of a lunch tray. The footing was treacherous, and the pain shooting up my left leg forced me to stop every couple of minutes and stand on the other foot. As Katya directed, I slowly worked my way up the slope and over toward where Virgil lay, out of my sight. The air had the odd thick feeling of really high pressures. My diaphragm had to work harder to draw breath in and push it out again. I waved my arms as I walked, paddling the air to help keep my balance. Even more than before, I felt as if I were moving along the ocean floor.

The landscape, red and gray rocks heaped on a desolate mountain, was as lifeless as the Moon. In fact, the Moon was less forbidding, with the Earth and the Sun and the stars above you for companionship. Here was only a featureless ceiling, immensely far away. Distant parts of the vista seemed tilted upwards by refraction.

The rocks were worth looking at. Much of the surface material around was a smooth, dark lava rock with a very fine texture, not quite like anything I'd seen. "Hey, Katya," I said, when I'd paused to give my ankle a rest. "You were right. These rocks are interesting. Did you get some samples?"

"I must have left them outside," she said.

"Perhaps I should collect a few."

"Jack, if you are interested in rocks, we have more than we need right here.."

"Right." For a moment, I'd almost forgotten why I was there. I hobbled a few more meters up the hill.

I came to a short stretch of steeper slope that angled up to my right, and I awkwardly scrambled up it – taking care of the shiny outer layer of my hotsuit, the one that was keeping the outside inferno pleasantly outside. At the top I came to the flat area of the landing zone. There was the long chaotic track of the landslide, demolishing the far side of the LZ. And there, at the edge of the slide, less than a hundred meters away, was the silvery shape of Virgil.

I climbed onto the edge and waved my arms. "I'm here. I see Virgil." Even better, I could see into the cockpit, where a small figure was waving back at me. I grinned and limped toward her.

Arkady was relaying the congratulations of practically everybody, but I wasn't listening. My eye was running over Virgil, taking in the situation. The images Katya had sent up had shown the main details, but this was the first time anyone aside from her had gotten a look at the overall picture. It was amazing that the lander had survived. Twenty meters further over and it would have been smashed; forty meters, and the wreckage would have been dragged down the mountain.

I came to the nose of Virgil. The cockpit windows were a meter above my head, but I managed to get my good foot on the knee of the front landing skid and hoist myself up.

"Zdravstvuytye," I said.

"Hello," Katya said. She looked drawn and haggard, but she was right there and she was smiling at me. Whatever happens next, I told myself, this is worth it. She raised up six fingers. I nodded and toggled to the private comm channel.

"You don't look so good," she said.

"I had a rough trip. How are you?"

She shrugged and waved an hand to indicate her own body. She was sitting in the pilot's seat. I could see that she had shed her outer thermal garment but was still wearing both inner layers of the hotsuit, her life-support umbilical plugged into Virgil's own system. Over her right leg and much of the right side of her body, the second layer of her suit was blackened and discolored. Heat damage, I realized; the damage to her insulation must have been on her right leg. My eyes widened. "How bad is it?"

"Bad enough. I don't walk even as well as you do. I had to crawl most of the way. The suit computer kept telling me to lie down and wait for help."

What would that be like, to drag yourself along with your right leg roasting, the heat of it – and maybe the smell of it – filling your suit? I could not imagine. Without the hotsuit systems to maintain her, she would have gone into shock and died. Even with them, she would not last forever down here. "Well, help has arrived."

"I know. Thank you." She kissed her fingers and pressed them to the window. I put my own glove on the outside of the window, our fingers about four centimeters apart. That was as close as we could get..

The call light flashed on channel one. "Back to work," I said. I hit the toggle with my chin.

For the next few minutes, I made a verbal report to the engineers up on the Aphrodite. The aerodynamic surfaces were battered but intact. The landing skids were bent, but those could be dropped away once we took off. I saw why the directional antenna wasn't working: a rock the size of a cantaloupe has sheared it clean off. The secondary propulsion jets, used at high altitude, were closed up, but there was no visible damage to the vents. I could only hope that they'd deploy when the time came.

Beside the airlock outer door I spotted something shiny on the ground. I stooped over and picked it up. It was a ragged strip of a silvery material, about five centimeters by twenty. I rubbed it between my fingers.

"Jack?" Arkasha said after a moment. "Are you still there? Have you found something?"

I realized that this was a piece of Jules Bertillame's hotsuit, the fragment that Katya had found after the landslide. Poor J. B. "It's nothing," I said, dropping the strip on the ground. "Continuing down the port side...."

Update: Part IV is now here.

The Pasadena Rule (Part II of IV)

2006-02-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

Got bored, so I posted this a day or two early. To read Part I of this novella, click here.

Once Katya was inside the cockpit of Virgil, she managed to send a few still images of the exterior of the ship over the low-bandwidth data channel. Virgil had been turned and tilted by the rockslide, and some of the aerodynamic surfaces showed damage. This was not too serious. But both of the ducted propellers, port and starboard, were blocked by several hundred kilograms of loose rock. If the fans were started, they would not move, or else they would break.

It was maddening. Katya confirmed that the propulsion and power systems were workable – minor failures only, with sufficient backups to cope. Katya dutifully talked these over with the Aphrodite. Yet everyone knew that there was only one problem that mattered: the rocky debris blocking the propellers, just a few meters away from where Katya sat, but as unreachable as the surface of the Sun.

Eight hours after the accident I pretended to take a cat-nap in the wardroom, mostly to prove to my shipmates that I did not need a sleeping pill. There was no chance that I would sleep. I reclined with my eyes closed, listening to the wind moan softly through the rigging outside the gondola. The vibration and slight sway of the dirigible were usually comfortable sensations, but not now. Outside the air was thin and freezing, not much different from the conditions aboard the High Jump, in the stratosphere over the Pacific. But far below, instead of a warm tropical sea, there was a waterless desert of unimaginable heat and pressure. Katya and I had both dreamed of going there. Katya had gained her dream, while I had lost it.

Through the open door I heard a voice from the cockpit. Madeline was talking over the link with someone aboard the Aphrodite. I couldn't hear other half of the conversation.

". . . . bearing up well enough, I think," she was saying. "He's catching some sleep." She waited a while, then said, "What did you expect? God damn it . . . . Yes, we're standing by. Still here. No, nothing like that. Just asleep – I can wake him up any time he's needed. Well, I think he would, don't you? I wouldn't want to be the one to tell him later if . . . . Damn it, Frank, I don't think you can make decisions like that. They're married, for Christ's sake. Certainly, we have to respect her wishes. But do you really think that she . . . . OK, I'll hold." The "Frank" told me that she was talking to Captain Bell, the mission commander, and it did not take a genius to guess the subject of their discussion. A minute or two later, and Madeline said, "Roger that. I'll have him on in five minutes."

I heard Madeline come into the wardroom, so I sat up and rubbed my eyes. "Awake, Jack?" she asked.

"More or less."

"Are you up to talking on the link?"

"Who with?"

"Katya," she said, and I felt my heart accelerate and sink at more or less the same moment. It was not a pleasant sensation. "She's about to go into a sleep period," she went on. "We thought you might want to talk to her before she does. Can you do it?"

I sucked in a couple of deep breaths, but they didn't steady me. "Yeah," I said. "I can manage it, I think."

"Because if you're not sure, it's OK. You can talk to her later. When she wakes up."

What Madeline did not say, because she knew we were both thinking it, was that Katya might not wake up. She knew the Pasadena Rule. Sometimes you're screwed. And when you're screwed, you don't add to the sufferings of other people by spinning it out. Shutting down for a "sleep period" could be a graceful way to sign off for the last time.

"No, no. I'm all right for it."

She looked at me with a skeptical eye. Was I the sort to break down on the radio, to make Katya's ordeal worse? Maddie would have no way of knowing, really. At last she nodded. "OK," she said. "Grab some coffee and come down to the control pod. You're on the air in three minutes."

The others were filing out of the control pod when I came in, leaving only Madeline to stay with me while I talked to Katya. It was a generous gesture, but they spoiled it by avoiding my eyes, as if they were afraid to look at me. I sat at the co-pilot's station next to Madeline, who was speaking into her headset to set up the conversation. I heard her say the word "private" about three times. She looked inquiringly at me and I nodded. I felt calm – way too calm, and cold. At a signal from Madeline, I picked up my own headset and put it on.

I could hear nothing. Finally I said, "Hello?"

Katya said, "Jack? Is that you?" She sounded more tired than I could remember.

"It's me," I said. "How are you?" I could have kicked myself as soon as I'd asked it; the answer was horribly clear to us both. But if I tried to stay away from painful subjects, then there would be nothing to talk about.

"I've been better," she answered, trying to make light of it. "And you?"

"Not bad. Aside from the obvious."

"That is good," she said. Her voice seemed to relax a bit. I realized that mentioning the obvious, even obliquely, was a relief to her. We would not have to dwell on it, but we would not have to ignore it, either.

"We're, um, following things pretty closely up here."

"Yes, I know. Thank you."

"And we're all very sorry about J. B. He was a good friend."

"Yes. But for him it was over very quickly, I think."

"That's right," I agreed. "We can be thankful for that much, at least."

There was a very long pause, until I wondered whether she had closed the connection. But then she surprised me. "You know, Jack, I seem to remember telling you once that we were lucky to live on a geologically active planet."

I smiled in spite of myself. "As I recall, things went to hell pretty much right after you said that."

"It turned out well, though," she said. "But I tell you what. Now that I am on another geologically active planet, I take it back."

We shared a strained laugh. "I have been lucky to have you, Katya," I said, instantly aghast at the verb tense I'd chosen.

"Jack, it has been so good between us. I remember when I took you home with me, just before we left Earth. It was all so perfect."

We had been married in a restored Orthodox church in Katya's home town in western Siberia, a month before our departure from Earth orbit. "That was a good time," I said. "It makes me happy to think of it now." I didn't sound happy.

There was an awkward moment, and I cast around in my mind for something to keep the conversation going. It seemed to me that each word was a precious thing, but they kept slipping away.

"Jack," Katya said presently. "I am very tired. It has been a hard day. I think I will go to sleep now."

"Wait."

"I'm sorry, but I have to sign off now."

"No, please, wait a moment. I want to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it truthfully."

She seemed to consider. "What is the question?"

"Katya, are you in much pain right now?" I asked, working to keep my voice even.

I heard her let out a deep breath. "Not much, Jack," she replied, matching my tone. "But I am medicated."

"OK," I said. "Listen, I want you to do me a favor. Will you do it?"

"That depends on the favor. I will try."

"Katya, I am not finished talking with you yet. But you're tired – hell, I'm tired too. So I want you to go to sleep. But here's the favor. I want you to call me back when you wake up."

"Ah."

"You understand? Go to sleep, but then wake up and call me back. Will you do that for me?"

"Yes, Jack, I will do that. For you."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you, Katya. Goodnight then."

"Goodnight, Jack. I love you."

"I love you too. Talk to you in the morning." I took off the headset and slumped back in my chair. I wiped my sweaty palms on the seat fabric. Madeline was frowning at the bright cloudscape beyond the window. She would not look at me. I could tell she disapproved. As far as she was concerned, I had just persuaded my wife to prolong her suffering for another day – and for no better reason than that I was not yet ready to say goodbye. God damn it, I wanted to say to her, I'm not ready to say goodbye. Not now. Not ever. But I stood up and left the control pod.

Later I wandered into the ready room to take care of my high altitude gear. I sat in front of the locker, smoothing and folding the heated suit and squaring away the breathing equipment.

My eyes kept straying to my hotsuit, hanging in the next compartment over. The mirror-finish of its outer layer reflected distorted images of the room, and of me. I didn't look so good. This was my own personal hotsuit, tailored perfectly to me – the life-support couplings on the inside of it exactly matching the fittings implanted in my skin, the suit's brain precisely tuned to my individual metabolic responses. The hotsuit was a marvel of engineering, as expensive as a small spacecraft. Since backup lander pilots were surface-qualified (barely), I had been fitted for one. A hotsuit could keep a human being alive and safe on the surface of Venus for hours on end. Katya's had managed to get her back to the lander after being damaged in the landslide. But it could not take her back out to free the fans and bring her home safely.

That was the worst of it. The lander itself, as far as we could tell, was serviceable. Katya was hurt but could probably fly it. We would pass over the landing site for a rendezvous in a few hours, and the Delta ship would be along a half-day later. We had a lot of things going for us. But the debris blocking the aerofans made it all pointless.

It would be so easy to fix, if only someone were around to move some rocks out of the way. Damn it, a trained chimp could do it, if it were on the scene and had a hotsuit. (Were there hotsuits for chimps, I wondered, in the early days of their development?)

A chimp could do the job – if the chimp were on the scene. I had a hotsuit, but I wasn't on the scene, and there wasn't any way to get there. There was only one landing craft, Virgil, and it lay stranded on the surface. No other piloted spacecraft ever built could stand the heat and pressure of the lower atmosphere of Venus.

That left exactly nothing. I couldn't very well fly down there, or jump, could I?

Could I?

I stood up suddenly. "I'll be damned," I said aloud. I stared at my hotsuit, trying to think it through rationally. My pulse pounded in my ears, and I forced myself to take some long breaths and settle down. Hold on, I said to myself, leaning against a locker. It would not do to have a heart attack right this minute.

"Dieter! Wake up!"

He came awake quickly and sat up, confused. I had closed the door behind me, and there was barely room in his cubicle to kneel by the bunk. "What's wrong? What's happened?"

"I need you to tell me whether I am crazy."

"OK, you're crazy." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand.

"No, listen to me. I think I know how we can save Katya!"

"Oh, Jack." Dieter shook his head with a pained expression. "Jack, give it a rest. Take something and get some sleep. You look like crap."

"Pay attention, damn it. I have a hotsuit up here. You and I could get it ready in a couple of hours. If I went down and cleared the fans on Virgil, then Katya would be able to fly it. Right?"

"Maybe she could, if you did that. But aren't you forgetting a little something? You aren't down there. You're seventy kilometers up."

"So I jump."

Dieter opened his eyes a fraction wider. "A parachute jump? That is crazy. You would have to make a chute – the fabric, the lines, all that crap. You'd need to be able to deploy it without fouling everything. And it would have to hold up in the lower atmosphere. We don't have anything that would work. I'm sure we don't. For God's sake, Jack, we're talking five hundred degrees."

I nodded. "A chute is impractical, you're right. But I don't need one."

"You don't need one? We're seventy kilometers --"

"What is the terminal velocity of a falling human body?"

"I don't know. Forty, fifty meters per second. Depends on your orientation."

"On Earth," I said. Suddenly Dieter's eyes were open very wide indeed. He'd seen it. "On Earth," I repeated, softly. "But what about on Venus?"

His mouth hung open and his eyes were distant for a quarter of a minute. "Mein Gott," he said at last. "That might work. You crazy bastard. That just might work."

"It's a question of air density," I told Madeline in the wardroom. Everyone was there – Max at the door so that he could keep one eye on the control pod, but the rest crowded around the table. "If you double the density, you slow the terminal velocity by a factor of root two. The air density at the surface is more than fifty times the sea-level density on Earth. So the terminal velocity will be seven or eight times slower."

"The lower gravity helps, too, a few percent," Dieter said.

"That's right," I said. "And there is another few percent from buoyancy, in air that dense. With a bit of luck, I might be falling only four or five meters per second when I hit."

Madeline blinked. "About like jumping off a house," she said. "You can break a leg doing that. Then what would you do?"

"You hit almost that fast with a regular parachute, and I've done a good number of parachute jumps. I can manage it."

"Four or five meters per second, for seventy kilometers? How long would it take to fall the whole distance?"

I hadn't thought of that. "Most of the way I'll be going through thinner air, so I'll be falling faster. Twenty minutes, maybe?"

"More," Dieter said positively. "Bound to be more."

"If you don't know it exactly, you're in trouble," Madeline said. "Our ground speed is three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Make a five-minute mistake in your drop time, and you'll wind up thirty kilometers downrange, in mountainous terrain. Even if you land OK, your suit will go bad before you can walk to Virgil."

"No it won't," Bill said. "His forward airspeed will be nearly zero all the way. Once he gets below the jet stream – which won't take very long – he will fall almost straight down. We could probably predict his landing point pretty closely."

Max put in, "And we can track him by radar, so that he knows which direction to walk after touchdown."

"I should be able to control my fall," I said. "Vertical speed for sure, and maybe some lateral control. I might be able to land right on top of Virgil."

Madeline looked straight at me. "OK, Jack. If you can get the suit ready in time, and if we can figure your flight path, and if you survive all the way down, and if you aren't injured by the impact, and if you're close enough to walk to Virgil, and if you can clear the aerofans, and if the ship can take off, and if it holds together – and if you can manage all of this in time to make rendezvous with Delta – then you might have a chance. Give me your best engineering assessment, Jack. On the first try, with no simulations or test runs. What are the chances of success? Less than fifty-fifty?"

"Maybe," I admitted.

"So. If you don't go, we lose one person for certain. By your own admission, if you do go, we have a better than even chance of losing two people. Does that seem like a good bet?"

"Hell, yes!"

She shook her head. "You're too close to the problem. Katya is your wife – Jesus, no wonder you're ready to try anything. But we have to use our heads."

"Maddie," I said desperately. "You can't make a calculation like that. This isn't some academic exercise in risk assessment. Yes, we are talking about Katya. She is your friend too, for God's sake! If I try this, then there is a chance, a reasonable chance, that we can fix Virgil and come back home safe. There is no chance at all if I don't." She pressed her lips together and said nothing. I kept on. "Suppose we don't try this. Then Katya dies. But I will know – all of us will know – that there was something that we might have tried, something that might have saved her, and we didn't do it. I don't know about you, Maddie, but I couldn't live with that."

Madeline fixed her gaze on the table and shook her head. I realized, with surprise, that there were tears in her eyes. "Damn you, Jack," she said quietly. No one spoke for a long moment, and then she sighed. She said, "This is not going to be easy."

Everyone began to talk at once. "Wait a second!" she shouted. "We can't do this alone. I'm calling Frank in an hour. We need to have a lot of answers for him by then. Max, Bill, you work out the flight plan, or the fall plan, or whatever the hell it is. Jack and Dieter start warming up the suit. We need to know if it will do the job."

"It will."

"Find out for sure. I'll look over all the data we have on Virgil's situation, to make sure the thing really is possible if you do get there. Hold on. This is still only an option, fellas. If we hit a snag that we can't work out, we'll have to scrap it. Is that clear? Now get moving."

Dieter and I spread the hotsuit over half the ready room, giving it as thorough a check-out as we could manage. Dieter used a magnifier to go over every square centimeter of the suit's shiny exterior, checking for damage or flaws in the thermal insulation. I had the outer cover off the life-support pack and several lines connected to it, replenishing the liquid gas reservoirs and recharging the energy cells. I would have preferred to do a full diagnostic test sequence, but our maintenance shop did not have the equipment. I relied instead on the suit's own internal sensors. With the helmet on my head I could use the computer display in the faceplate. Data on the life-support system flowed before my eyes.

The earphones in the helmet came to life. Max said, "We have a flight profile for you, Jack."

"Let me hear it."

"This is still rough. Bill is working on a better aerodynamic model, but I think these figures will be good to within ten percent or so. You're in free fall for only a few seconds after you jump. By J plus thirty seconds, you're essentially at terminal velocity, and you stay that way clear down to the surface. We figure that you can control that speed by as much as fifty percent, which might help you fine-tune your trajectory.

"It's a hell of a long trip, Jack. In fact, it is going to take a good hour and a half to go the whole way. You fall quite fast at first. Your speed tops out at around Mach 0.6, but then you slow down a lot further down. Most of your time will be drifting down that last twenty klicks."

"That's good. That means I won't hit too fast."

"Close to what you figured. Also, there might be ways to slow that down at the last second. It might help to flap your arms, for instance."

I could not quite tell whether he was kidding. "How far downrange will I go?"

"Only a few kilometers. The high winds are only up at altitude, where you won't be spending much time. The lower wind speeds are almost nil – a few centimeters per second. And if you can steer, you might be able to compensate."

I thanked him and took the helmet off. We had perhaps four hours before we flew over Virgil's position. I tried to think of things we were forgetting. "Dieter," I said suddenly. "Remind me to take a nasal decongestant before I suit up. I'll need the strongest one we can find."

"OK," he said, squinting at the reflection of his eye in the mirrored surface of the suit. "Why? Have a cold?"

"No, but we don't have the special stuff that the lander teams use before they go outside. We'll have to make do with whatever we have in the medicine cabinet up here."

"But what is it for?"

"By the time I get close to the ground, the air pressure around me is going to be changing pretty fast. I don't want to pop something because my sinuses get plugged." He looked horrified as he understood. "I'll probably be fine. But in any case," I added in a lower voice, "don't tell Madeline that we aren't using the right drugs. She'd just worry about it."

"Yeah. Right."

"The hotsuit is ready to go," I said to Madeline. "I need to start getting into it soon, though, because that will take a while."

She nodded and looked at Max. "We make it eighty-six minutes to the surface, depending on body attitude. Head-first, it could be considerably less. He will hit the ground at around five meters per second. The visibility should be good, so he can prepare for impact."

"Tape your ankles and wrists," Madeline said. "That could save you a sprain."

"Good idea," I said. Dieter made a note. "What about Virgil?"

"The main problem there is the possibility of damage that we don't know about, that won't show up until the fans are cleared and we start them up. The bearings might be cracked. Something might be bent. But that ship is as rugged as hell, all systems overdesigned by about two hundred percent. It might work. It might." She shook her head.

"So?"

"So we call the Captain. But I doubt if he’ll like it."

Captain Bell had been awakened in the middle of a sleep cycle. "OK, I'm here, Maddie," he said. "What is so urgent that it can't wait a couple of hours?"

"We have an idea about the situation," she said. "It requires rather prompt action."

"Go on."

So she went on, describing the entire plan in cold, technical detail. It took her three minutes to say it all, and Captain Bell did not say a word for the whole three minutes. The rest of us, listening in, held our breaths.

"Commander Whitten," he said when she'd finished. "What in hell have you been drinking? That is the most insane idea I've ever heard. Of course I can't approve it!"

"We think that the plan is feasible, Frank. We've done the analysis. Ask your own engineering people on the Aphrodite to check our data."

"This is pretty damn far beyond the parameters of the mission."

"So is the situation," Madeline shot back.

"And just what chance do you think this has of working?"

"We estimate a seventy-five percent chance of success," Madeline said evenly. I looked at her with surprise. This was the first I'd heard of odds that good.

"That is a load of crap," Captain Bell said. "Maddie, we are all very upset about what's happened to Katya, and I'm sure that Jack is worse off than any of the rest of us. But that's no reason for him to throw his life away on some damn-fool stunt."

"If this emergency is not a good enough reason to try something crazy, I don't know what would be."

"Damn it, I can't approve something like this. I'd have to consult with Command."

"It's a ten-minute round-trip for communication with Earth. The back-and-forth will take hours. We do not have all day here, Frank. We'll be over Katya's position shortly after 16.00, and it's almost 12.30 now. You're the man on the spot. You have to make a decision."

"Then you know what my decision is. I will not endanger another member of the crew. That's final. I'm sorry."

Something inside me collapsed. Bill and Dieter shook their heads. But Max was watching Maddie closely. I looked too, and I saw that she still had a card to play.

"Frank," she said quietly, after a pause. "I don't quite know how to put this. But when all is said and done -- I don't see what you can do to stop us."

I could have kissed her!

"What I want to know," she went on, "is where you stand. We have some decisions to make down here, too, and I want to know whether or not you're going to back us up."

Across the table, I saw Dieter's mouth hanging open. "God damn," muttered Bill. We waited for Captain Bell's reply.

"You're not serious."

"You know me. Do I sound serious?"

"Maddie," Captain Bell said conversationally, after about a ten-second silence, "I'm getting a bit rusty on the mission rules. Do you remember the definition of mutiny?"

"Haven't given it much thought," she replied. "Didn't think it would ever come up."

"Yeah," he said. We waited while he digested this. "This will not look good," he said, almost to himself. "Not with Katya's husband making the jump. That makes it seem like an act of desperation. Why does the jumper have to be Jack Ross?"

"Because Jack Ross is the only one with a suit," said Madeline. "It's him or nobody. Otherwise I'd do it myself."

"I suppose that's right," he said, sighing. "But there is one thing that you haven't mentioned."

"What's that?"

"Has anyone talked to Katya lately?"

"Not as far as I know," Madeline replied. "Not since Jack spoke with her a few hours ago. She's getting some sleep."

"Sleep, yes." I could tell from his tone of voice that the captain had his doubts. "In any case, I cannot approve taking action to rescue Katya until we hear from her again."

Madeline was nodding. "Yes, that makes sense."

"I want your promise, Maddie. No go till we make contact with Katya."

"You have my word, Frank. Nobody jumps till she's on the air. I swear."

"In that case," the captain said, "I will tentatively go along with your plan. Send us your data so that we can check it, and start getting ready. We will try to raise Katya on the comm link."

"Call Carlos on Delta," she added. "He needs to be brought up to speed."

"You just pay attention to your part of this," Captain Bell replied. "And so help me, Maddie, if you let that son of a bitch take a dive before we hear from Virgil, I will take you all back to Earth in irons. Do you copy?"

"Understood," Madeline answered. "I will keep him here if I have to sit on him. Gamma out." She cut the link and pulled off her headset, rocking back in her seat and running her fingers through her hair.

"Thanks, Maddie," I said.

She looked sharply at me. "Jack, do you realize how this will probably end up?"

"I have to take that chance."

"Then shut up. If you thank me again, I am going to break your nose."

The Aphrodite signaled Virgil, but there was no answer. The telemetry link was good, and it told us that the landing ship was still intact. Katya was simply not answering the phone.

"She's getting some rest," I said. "She turned down the comm link alarm. And she may be doped up with something to help her sleep."

"She may have taken more than that," Madeline said.

I shook my head. "No way. You heard her. She promised to talk to me later."

"I know what she said. Jack, Katya is a good scout. She would do what she thought was right." And what Madeline believed, clearly, was that Katya had most likely signed off permanently, promise or no promise. It was the Pasadena Rule again. Part of the reason you sign off is to keep other people from making fools of themselves.

Not Katya, I wanted to say. That wasn't her way. She never shaded the truth, never lied to save my feelings or anyone else's. The truth about things was her passion. "You'll see," I said confidently.

"Maybe," Madeline said. "Now go put on that damn suit."

You don't put on your hotsuit; you mate with it. This is a more descriptive term than you might think. An ordinary spacesuit is an intimate affair, but a hotsuit invades your personal space in ways that you've never imagined. The mating process can take half a day.

The worst part is not the thermal protection, but the hyperbaric life-support system. To cope with the ninety-atmosphere pressure on the ground, and to allow pressurization and depressurization in hours instead of days or weeks, the suit systems link up directly with your body's systems. Gases must be exchanged with your bodily fluids, and the dodges dreamed up to accomplish this are various and uncomfortable. The bloodstream is directly linked to the suit's system at a dozen points over the body. The arrangements for the GI tract, the inner ear, the spinal fluid, and so forth I will not describe.

Taking a hotsuit off -- demating with it -- is even worse. Katya once suggested that the correct technical phrase should be surgical removal.

Dieter and I worked quickly, skipping whatever we thought we could on the checklist. Mating with a suit could take two people half a day, but we were trying to do it in about two hours. The inner layer of the hotsuit was the life-support interface, which enveloped my entire body except for hands and head. After this came a sturdy protective layer, with the silvery thermal insulation garment on the outside over everything. Since there would be no pressure difference between inside and outside, the suit lacked the constant-volume joints you found on vacuum-rated spacesuits.

This brought up an interesting question, which didn't occur to us until I was partway into the inner layer of the suit. The pressure at seventy kilometers altitude was around 25 millibars – one-fortieth of normal atmospheric pressure. Even at the lowest setting, breathing pure oxygen, the inside suit pressure would be four times this value. But the hotsuit was not designed for any overpressure at all. Would the fabric rupture when I stepped outside?

Max did a quick search of the hotsuit technical database and found that it had indeed been tested down to zero pressure without damage. The only problem would be a decrease in mobility, because the suit tended to balloon out. I figured that I could cope with that until the pressures matched at lower altitude.

I was mated with the inner suit up to my waist, and Dieter was attaching the next set of life-support connections on my lower back. I stood with my arms on top of my head, trying to follow his progress on a video monitor that we'd rigged up. Max walked in from the control pod, stopped still, and stared at what Dieter was doing.

"How do you take it off?" he asked. Max had worked on the dirigible side of things from the first, and had little acquaintance with the hotsuits.

"Ever skinned a live animal?" I asked.

Max shook his head, then held up a printout with some graphs. "The Aphrodite team agrees with our arithmetic. You'll jump at 16.10." Both of us involuntarily glanced at the clock. An hour and a half to go. "Here is the flight path. That's the best model RMS tube around the optimal trajectory. But don't worry; just watch your suit's coordinate display and we'll talk you down."

"All right." I hesitated. "Any word from the surface?"

Max shook his head. He hung around to watch us attach the next fitting. A little blood squirted out as the connection was made, so Dieter paused to mop it up.

"That looks like it hurts," Max said.

"We use a local anaesthetic," I said. "It will itch like hell later on." I watched on the monitor as Dieter twisted the valve to make sure it was on securely. He drew out any residual air bubbles with a syringe through a side fitting. This one finished, he moved to the next. Max, looking a little queasy, left the ready room a minute later.

After we finished connecting the life-support system, the second layer went on quickly, and then the mirror-like outer suit. Dieter locked my helmet down and sealed me up. While I ran through the next steps in the checklist, he and Bill began to don their heated pressure suits. It was hard to concentrate on the job at hand. Each of us was checking the clock about twice per minute.

Madeline walked in at 15.45. "Any word?" I asked her.

"Nothing."

Dieter and Bill exchanged a look. I said, "She's still down there, Maddie."

"Possibly. But I meant what I told Frank. If we don't hear from Katya by jump-time, you don't make the jump. Do you read me, fellas?" She glared at the other two, who nodded.

"We need to go out and get ready," I said.

She studied me. "OK," she said. "I want a safety line on you until the moment I give you clearance to take it off. Got it?"

"I hear you."

"Not good enough. I want your promise." Maddie fixed me with a basilisk stare. "No ambiguity here, Jack. If we have to call this off and I tell you to come back inside, then you sure as hell had better do it. Understand?"

"And if Katya wakes up and calls us an hour from now?"

"Jack."

"OK, OK," I said. "We'll do it your way." In a polished metal panel across the room I could see myself: a mirror man, bouncing back distorted reflections of everything from my silvered skin, only my head visible through the transparent helmet. My face was haggard and grim-looking. I remembered what Maddie had said to Captain Bell just a couple of hours before. I don't see what you can do to stop me.

Maddie read my mind. "Frank had to go along with this because he's up in orbit. He can't do anything about it. But I'm right here, and I'm sending Dieter and Bill out with you to make damn well sure we'll do it my way."

As expected, the suit ballooned as we cycled the airlock, but the outer skin seemed to hold up fine. To be on the safe side Bill ran the cycle manually at about a quarter the usual speed. It took a real effort to keep my arms at my side, and I was damned awkward as I struggled through the outer hatch. The internal pressure of the suit tried to straighten everything out. It was probably comical to watch, but nobody was laughing. I had to jump within fifteen minutes or not at all, and no one had heard from Katya.

As soon as I stepped out on the experiment deck, I realized that I'd forgotten something: sun goggles. The full sun hammered me in the face. I squeezed my eyes shut. In a few more hours Gamma, following the upper atmosphere on its circulation around the planet, would cross over into night. The experiment deck was located on the aft end of the gondola and was no longer in shade. The evening sun hung in the western sky.

(Or perhaps I should call it the morning sun. Since Venus rotated from east to west, down on the surface it was just a few days past dawn.)

Dieter grabbed my arm to steady me. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yes," I answered, experimentally cracking an eyelid and squinting out. Even then the sunlight was too much. "Forgot my goggles."

"Oh, hell."

"It's OK," I said. "I won't want them on the underside of the clouds, and I can't take them off inside the helmet."

Maddie cut into the circuit. "Are you protected from UV in that thing?"

"The suit reflects everything this side of X-rays," I said. "Still, this is damn bright. Dieter, can you put something over my head?"

"Sure. Hang on." A moment later, Dieter came up with a nylon cover from an air-sampling module. "This ought to be about right," he said, slipping it over my helmet.

The cool darkness felt good. I opened my eyes. The sunspots in my eyes slowly faded till I could read the helmet display. "Everything OK," I said. I held my arms out. (They wanted to stick out anyway.) "You'll have to lead me, though."

Dieter and Bill guided me close to the edge of the experiment deck and attached a safety line around my waist. They backed me up until my backside was against the rail.

Max's voice came in my ears. "Should we have Jack climb to the outside of rail? That would make it easier to jump."

"No," Madeline said instantly. "He stays on this side of the rail until I give the go-ahead."

"I may need to go quick," I said.

"Stay on this side. Understood, everybody?"

"Affirmative," Dieter and Bill answered at once. I could feel their hands lightly but firmly gripping my upper arms.

The chronometer display in my helmet flicked over from 15.59 to 16.00. I toggled the suit communicator to monitor the orbit-to-ground channel.

Arkady Rudin was the capcom once again. "– is Aphrodite calling Virgil. Please come in. Katya, if you can hear me, please respond at once. This is Arkasha. We need a report on your status right away." And so on, repeated over and over. I listened for a couple of minutes.

"Seven minutes to drop," Max announced.

"Not much time," Bill said under his breath.

"Maddie," I began. "What if –"

"Jack, you know the rules."

"Katya doesn't know the rules. How could she?"

I could almost hear her shake her head. "Not another word, Jack, or I'll order you to abort now. You can't jump unless we know there is someone down there for you to rescue."

I bit my lip. Arkasha's voice kept on, patient, pleading. The blackness under my hood seemed to press in on me from all around. That awful, sick feeling, the one that had grown so familiar lately, rushed back. This wasn't going to happen. The last, desperate hope had been a cheat. Suddenly it occurred to me that, standing here at the edge of the abyss with a hood over my head and two men gripping my arms, I must look like a man about to be hanged.

"Four minutes," Max said evenly.

And then, a miracle!

"Virgil here," said a weary voice. "What could possibly be so urgent, Arkasha?"

"What is your situation, Katya?"

"Unchanged," she said.

"Max, cut us in," I said. He had worked out a direct link to Virgil, which was almost directly below us.

"You got it."

I saw the indicator blink green. "Katya! This is Jack. Just sit tight. We're going to attempt a rescue."

"What? Are you mad, Jack? What the hell is going on up there?"

"We're overhead in Gamma. I have my hotsuit on. In about three minutes, I'm going to jump over the side. I'll fall, but by the time I reach the ground the air will have slowed me down enough to make a safe landing. I will clear out the fans on Virgil, Katya, and then you can fly us both back up to rendezvous with Delta."

"No, no, no," she said. "Is someone else on the circuit? Has my husband completely lost his mind?"

Madeline broke in. "This is Maddie. He's giving it to you straight, Katya. That's the plan. It's the only option we have."

"How can you let him do this?"

"Katya," I answered for her, "she's right. It's the only option."

"It's no option at all. What kind of chance do you think you have?"

I wanted to say, "Pretty good," but the words stuck in my throat. She wouldn't stand for a false optimism. "It's a long shot," I said finally. "But we might pull it off."

"My God," she said, and her voice was more desperate than I had ever heard it. "You can't do this. You mustn't do this."

"Two minutes," said Max.

"Katya, we've gone over everything as best as we can, and it looks worth a try. Do you think I want to sit up here and wait for you to die?"

"So instead you're going to make sure that I die a widow. This is so intelligent."

"God damn it, wife, I'm trying to rescue you."

She fought to control her voice. "I know. I do understand. It isn't easy to give up, Jack." She sighed. "But you cannot throw your own life away."

"It's my life."

"While I'm still here, it's half mine, remember?"

"And while you're there, yours is half mine."

"One minute to go," said Max.

"Jack," said Katya, her voice suddenly angry. "This has got to be the most selfish thing you've ever done."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Suicide is selfish. If you die trying this, Jack, I will be the one who has to face the consequences. Not you. Do you think that losing you now will make it easier when it's time for me to pull the plug? If you're still alive up there, Jack, then at least I leave behind me something of myself. Now you're taking that away from me. Damn you, you self-centered fat-head, you bastard, say goodbye and let me die in peace!"

I couldn't answer for a moment. "Selfishness cuts both ways," I said. "If I don't jump, then I have to face the consequences of that, and for a hell of a lot longer. So sit still and get rescued."

"You are an insensitive pig. I forbid it. I will not cooperate. Do you hear that? I will not help you kill yourself."

"Drop window opening," Max said. "We're moving fast, so it's a short one. Jack, you have to go now."

"Jack, you asshole!" Katya sounded almost hysterical. "Do you understand me? I refuse to go along with this!"

"Well, Jack?" Maddie said, her voice coming to me over a private link.

There was silence, and after a second I realized that they were all waiting for me. "We can argue about this later, Katya," I said, as firmly as I could. "I have something to do right now."

I ignored the burst of profanity, English and Russian mixed. Clumsily, I tried to turn around to climb over the rail, but to my surprise I heard Maddie say, "Dieter, Bill – get him." All of a sudden my two companions grabbed me by the arms and legs. I struggled against them until I realized what they were doing. I heard the snap of the safety line release. "Godspeed, Jack," Bill said, and Dieter added, "Good luck." Then my friends picked me up bodily and heaved me overboard.

I was so startled that it was a moment before I could yank the nylon hood from my helmet. I rolled over and, just for a moment in the bright glare, caught a last glimpse of the double row of gigantic hydrogen lifting cells, the web of rigging cables, the gondola, the blunt arrowhead of the docked orbit shuttle – and at the edge of the rear deck, two small figures peering down at me, swiftly drawing away now, until they were lost to sight. A yellow-white mist rushed up past me, and the bright daylight began to diminish. All I could think was, My God, I really did it.

Update: Part III is here. Part IV is here.

State of the Union

2006-02-01T09:28:00.000-05:00

We watched President Bush give his State of the Union address last night. Well, I watched it; Carol dozed a bit. (Past her bedtime.) It was a middlin' effort, even by the standards of this President. Bush is not a great orator, though he has given a few very good speeches; this wasn't one of his best. Among much weightier issues, I did note that the President wants to increase support for basic research in the physical sciences, which of course will be good news to many of my colleagues.

We did not watch the "Democratic response" to the address, given by Gov. Tim Kaine, who has been governor of Virginia for a little less than three weeks. I really dislike these opposition response speeches. In this dislike I am heartily bipartisan. I disliked the Republican responses to BIll Clinton's SOTU addresses. I disliked the Democratic responses to the Reagan and Bush pere addresses. Wikipedia informs me that these opposition responses began in 1966, when LBJ was President. I'm sure I would have disliked the practice then.

Why? Two reasons. One, it's lame. The responses are uniformly awful speeches. Since they are typically given immediately after the President speaks, they cannot really be "responses" in the sense that they engage what the President actually said. Usually, the speech consists of an opposition politician -- these days, often a relatively obscure one -- sitting in a studio speaking in platitudes. The motive, obviously, is to make sure that the President does not completely dominate the news cycle after the address. It's a rhetorical version of the old Fairness Doctrine for TV and radio stations. (You remember that. The idea was that broadcasters had to provide "equal time" for all points of view. Well, not all, really. The Loony Anarchist Flat-Earth Marijuana Party did not get hours of air time to rebut the Republicans and Democrats.)

But this point of view takes the State of the Union address to be simply another move in the endless back-and-forth political quarrel. Which brings up my second reason for disliking such opposition responses. It's cynical. The State of the Union (which has sometimes been a written report to Congress rather than a speech) is actually an exercise of a duty enjoined upon the President in Article II Section 3 of the U. S. Constitution. So this practice is a bit like giving the opposition some time to rebut a new President's Inaugural Address. Seems unseemly somehow.

The hard-eyed political realists will respond that everything is politics anyway, and why should the President get a "free shot" at getting his message out? Because he is the President, that's why. This is a Constitutional function of his office. Respecting the function, treating it as something a little beyond the daily squabble, simply shows respect for the sovreignty of the people of the United States, who elected him. (And the whole people did elect him, even if, as has been the case in three out of the last four elections, the majority of people voted for somebody else.)

I do not believe that government decision-making should be "above poltics", and I am deeply suspicious of attempts to make it so. My friend Ron, in a comment to a previous post, posited that idealistic people see politics as morally tainted by compromise, so they naturally seek other, purer means (e.g., the courts) to pursue lofty goals on issues involving basic right and wrong. Ron has a charitable attitude here, and he may be right about some people. But I find it more likely that those who seek a "non-political" route to reach their policy ends are covertly hoping to trump the messy and inconclusive electoral/legislative system -- to achieve by fiat what the voters would never endorse.

This is why I think "campaign finance reform" has been such a wrong-headed mess. It is a fool's errand to try to make political campaigns less political. No idealistic system of contribution limits and spending restrictions can be both (1) consistent with the First Amendment, and (2) effective at improving the moral tone of our political life. Quite the contrary. Efforts to date have only redirected political passions (and money) into other, less accountable avenues of influence.

However, despite my belief in political decision-making (which is really a belief in democracy), I do think that it is a healthy thing to keep certain institutions slightly apart from the fray. I think that the courts should be as apolitical as practical, which is why I believe in judicial restraint. And I think that certain great occasions should be treated as actions of the whole nation, not one faction or another. They should have an aura about them. They should be reminders of the solemn duties of democratic self-government. Thus, we should have loud, vigorous, free-wheeling campaigns, but the elections themselves should have more of an atmosphere of unity, even of a kind of sanctity. And -- is it too much to ask? -- perhaps when the President meets his obligation to report to Congress on the State of the Union and suggest "such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient" --perhaps it would not hurt us, all of us, for that one evening, just to hear what he says.

Postscript: I just read this to my wife, who disagrees with me on most things political, and especially about this President. But she pretty much agrees with what I have written here -- which, I think, strengthens my point.

The Pasadena Rule (Part I of IV)

2006-01-30T13:44:00.000-05:00

I have posted short fiction before, here and here. This time, I offer Part I of a science fiction novella called The Pasadena Rule, which I wrote a while back but was never able to place with a publisher. Parts II through IV will be posted at roughly one-week intervals. Enjoy.

The Pasadena Rule, Part I

"Hell of a long way down," I said.

"Stop worrying, Jack," Dieter said. "I have to make sure that the cable doesn't snag again." He was standing on the rail of Gamma's experiment deck, holding on to the boom of the big winch, leaning out over the white abyss below. The winch motor hummed as the long black cable slowly wound its way back onto the drum, reeling in the instrument probe. In the training program we had done things more dangerous than what Dieter was doing now, but back then we had always worn parachutes. Dieter only had one thin safety line – and of course, a parachute was out of the question. I shook my head and looked away.

Without sun goggles, the panorama would have been too bright to look at. Beneath us and as far as the eye could see in every direction – and the distance to the horizon seemed pretty near infinity – a vast sea of clouds spread out, dazzling white with just a hint of yellow. The sky was a breathtaking blue, made deeper by the goggle lenses. The sun was hidden by the airship's double row of lifting cells over our heads. We were cruising in the jet-stream, engines at slow, so there was not much breeze on the experiment deck, even though our ground speed was over three hundred kilometers per hour.

"It looks good," Dieter announced. "Speed her up." At the winch controls, I carefully raised the cable speed to about two meters per second. At the same time the control computer sent signals down ten kilometers of cable, telling the probe to pitch its fins to increase its lift. The cable itself stretched and flexed to smooth out the changes. Dieter jumped down on the right side of the safety rail. He looked out at the cloudscape, then at me. "Nice sunny day," he said. "But maybe you would rather be down below?" I could see his grin through his faceplate.

"Possibly," I said. "But this will do."

"You're a little jealous of your wife, maybe?"

"Not at all. I'm happy for her."

"Bullshit."

"No bullshit," I said. I gave the controls another tap and nudged the cable speed up. "Yes, sure, I'd like to be on the surface. Not many people are ever going to walk on Venus, after all. But I'm basically an airship guy, like you. I've never been more than a backup lander pilot. Katya is the one on the prime crew."

"You're pretty cool about it."

"I've had time to think it over." Dieter did not say anything, which I took to be a sign of skepticism. "Look, she deserves to be there. I just wish that the Virgil were docking with us on the way back up. It would be nice to see the smile on her face."

"Oh, they might run late."

"Last I heard they were right on the EVA timeline," I said. "That gives them plenty of margin to rendezvous with Beta." The Beta dirigible, twelve hours ahead of us, was the prime recovery ship for this descent of the lander. Gamma, like the Delta twelve hours behind us, was like me: just a backup, really.

"Jack? What is your status?" It was Madeline Whitten, our skipper, calling from inside the gondola.

"Dieter freed the snag," I said. "The probe should be inboard within the hour."

"Yes, good," said Madeline shortly. "You need to come inside."

"We've just started pulling the probe back in. That's going to take a little while."

"Let Dieter finish the job. Bill is getting his suit on and can help him. But you have to come back inside now."

There was a funny edge in her voice. She was obviously worried about something, but something kept me from asking what it was. "Roger that," I said simply. "I'll come in right away." I let Dieter step up to the control console, and he clapped a gloved hand on my shoulder as he went by. A queer feeling brushed past me and was gone, like the touch of a passing shadow.

The airlock cycle seemed to take forever. I peeled off the outer shell of my pressure suit, the one that protected me from the sulfuric acid of the clouds, then unzipped the heated coveralls. The surface of Venus might be as hot as a flash oven, but this high up it was sixty degrees below zero. I shivered in my long johns until warm oxygen and nitrogen replaced the chilly carbon dioxide of the outside air. When the pressure came up to normal I slipped off my helmet and breathing mask and gathered up my gear in a bundle in my arms.

Bill was standing in the ready room in his pressure suit, looking as if he'd been roused from a sleep period. He made a nod in my direction, nothing more, before disappearing into the airlock. What is wrong with him? I wondered. I sat down on the bench and began to stow the high altitude gear in my locker next to the bulkier, silvery surface suit.

Madeline appeared at the door of the ready room. "Just stuff that out of the way," she said. "You can sort it out later."

I shoved the rest inside and shut the locker door. "What's up?" I asked. "Problems with the props?" Gamma's engines were my specialty.

Madeline turned and led me into the control pod. Scattered sunshine streamed in the wide windows, making the cabin seem gloomy by comparison. Max was sitting at the copilot's station in his sleepers, sipping a mug of something hot. Everybody on board is awake, I realized. They all know something I don't. "What has happened?" I asked, suddenly afraid to hear the answer.

Madeline hesitated. When she spoke, her voice was flat. "Something has happened on the surface. There's been an accident."

There's been an accident. It was like stepping into free fall. I felt sick. Some detached part of my mind said: This is exactly what you've always imagined death would be like, a dizzy slide into confusion before the darkness. Except that you've always imagined that it would be your own death, not hers.

Madeline grabbed my arm and steered me into a chair before I fell down. Far away, I heard myself saying, "What about Katya?"

Her answer came with a terrible slowness. "We don't know many details yet. There was a quake on the mountain and then a rockslide at the landing site. The lifesystem on Virgil is still intact, but there was some damage to the ship. The landing team was outside in hotsuits when it happened. Contact was lost."

"How far from the ship? When it happened?" My own voice sounded disjoint, peculiar. Was it my voice?

"Several hundred meters, I gather," Madeline said. "There just wasn't time to do anything, Jack. It happened without any warning at all."

Max said, "Aphrodite has taken the telemetry feed from Virgil off the relay satellite." Orbiting overhead, the Aphrodite was our mission control.

"Get it back," Madeline snapped.

I wasn't listening. I had my elbows on my knees and my head down. Something was wrong with my breathing.

"My God, Jack, I'm so sorry," Madeline said. I just nodded, unable to answer. Max was barking something into his mike, but I couldn't concentrate on the words. I stared at the deck plates between my shoes. An accident. On the surface. An accident in a place where, even in the best of times, it took a hundred technical miracles to keep you alive at all.

So Katya was . . . dead? But they hadn't said it, not quite. Everyone believed that she was dead, but they hadn't put it into words. I knew too much about the landing mission and the surface conditions to entertain any hope. In the place inside me where hope would have been, I just had this nagging question: If she's dead, why don't they say so?

It was impossible to think about it. My inner voice chattered to fill up the void. Yes, it said, this is definitely the shock phase. Sense of unreality, sense of detachment. Unbelief. What comes next: Anger? Denial? Human reflexes are so constant. Just look at Max over there, squinting at the computer display and cupping his earphone with his hand. You can't improve the resolution of a display by squinting, you can't help the reception in a headset by cupping your hand over it, but you do those things anyway.

Shut up, I told myself as firmly as I could.

"Take this," Madeline said. A small pink capsule rested in the palm of her hand. "This will help."

I shook my head. "No."

"I think you should. You have to be able to function. We'll need you."

"I won't take it," I said, through gritted teeth. "Put it away."

"Jack, come on." she said. "There's no point."

I looked up and met her eyes. "Please, Maddie. I can't. I have to be wide awake and all here. No shortcuts, no soft landings. She would do as much for me."

After a moment she nodded. "OK," she said, closing the pill into her fist. "If that's the way it has to be."

"That's the way." I knew that Katya would approve. She believed in facing life, the good and the bad, with clear eyes and no chemical comfort. But she would never find out, would she? She would never know that I was drinking this hour in without covering up the terrible bitter taste of it. And it struck me that there were going to be a lot more things like that, a lot of things that Katya would never know.

"Stand by," Max said. His voice made my head snap up. He was halfway out of his seat, crouched very still over the panel, his hands gripping arms of the chair. "Telemetry from Virgil," he said. "The outer airlock hatch is being opened. Go ahead, Aphrodite."

I stopped breathing while Max listened to his contact. "Just one person entering the lock," he said at last. "They should be plugging the hotsuit systems into the ship. We'll know in a second."

A second. A long second, followed by another, and another.

Eventually, I would have to start breathing again.

"It's Katya!" Max shouted. "The hotsuit is hers. She's alive! She's back inside the ship!"

"Oh thank God," I whispered. I leaned back in my chair and sucked in the air and clapped my hands on the top of my head as if holding it on. Relief poured through me. I let my breath out in a whistle and took in another. I grinned like an idiot. Katya was back in the ship! Alive! Safe! The universe rolled over and turned back right-side-up again.

But when I looked over at Madeline and saw the expression on her face, reality kicked me in the stomach. Better to be dead now, quick and clean, Maddie was thinking. Better that than to be alive in Hell with a broken ship, beyond any hope of a rescue.

I felt my moron grin turn to stone.

I had met Katya during the run-up to the mission, back on Earth. Our acquaintance at first was alphabetical: Jack Ross, airship engineer, meet Ekaterina Rudenko, the pretty geologist in the next seat over. I had just spent six months in Earth orbit, flying engineering test prototypes at the ends of long tethers, learning to deorbit and deploy the hydrogen dirigibles that we needed for the exploration of Venus. The major problems with the airship systems were ironed out, and we'd finished the program by establishing the High Jump, our training platform, thirty kilometers above the tropics. I was still getting my "ground legs" and preparing to move to another job.

Katya had also just returned to Earth, but from much further away. She was a volcanologist who had spent most of four years on Mars, hopping all over Olympus Mons and Tharsis in one of those little peroxide rocket jumpers, trying to piece together the queer geological history of the planet. The Russians had summoned her home to be part of their contingent for the Venus mission, to extend her volcanic expertise to yet another world.

We liked each other from the first, even though – or maybe because – we were such opposites. She was a scientist who learned engineering to get along in space; I was an engineer who had boned up on planetology to qualify for the Venus mission. She was slim and dark-haired; I was square-built and red-headed. We were both on the descent planning group, where we spent long hours together marrying the abilities of the landing flier with the goals of the landings. I enjoyed Katya's company, admired her competence, appreciated her sharp Russian irony. But that was as far as it went until later, when we were training in Hawaii.

We spent two weeks offshore in an deep habitat under the Pacific, learning to use the high-pressure breathing gear. Our special life-support systems linked directly into our bloodstreams, through surgically implanted fittings in our skins. The good news was that the system made us almost immune to the problems of changing pressures. The bad news was that it made our lives miserable while we used it. The apparatus itself was uncomfortable and awkward. Even worse was the stress on the half-dozen members of the dive team, crammed into a tiny living space without privacy, helping one another cope with the equipment and its unpleasant side-effects. A fortnight at the habitat was about all that a group could take and still be on speaking terms by the end of it.

When our training rotation was over, we boarded the submarine taxi for the ascent to the surface. Our life-support units scrubbed the dissolved gases from our tissues, decompressing us in just a couple of hours. When the top hatch opened, the sunlight and sea air came pouring in, and we climbed out into the most beautiful morning I have ever seen. The docs on the support ship fussed over us for a while, then pronounced us fit. A hydrofoil whisked us over to Hilo and put us ashore for a couple of days' R&R.

Katya found me on the quay as we collected our gear. "What are your plans?"

I shrugged. "A bath maybe, and then a long walk on a beach. Nothing definite."

"I am driving inshore for some sight-seeing. Does that interest you?"

I did not really care what I did – almost anything outdoors sounded good right then. So I agreed to tag along with Katya for the day, not quite realizing what she had in mind. We rented a car and headed for the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Kilauea was a vast caldera several kilometers across, dug out of the southeast side of Mauna Loa, and within its walls was the strangest and most menacing landscape I'd ever seen on Earth. It was a wilderness of jumbled lava flows and steaming vents, like a Doré engraving of the Inferno. The ground underfoot was solidified lava, sometimes smooth and almost polished, sometimes extremely rough and jagged. I took great care on the rough areas, because a fall on the sharp rocks would mean nasty cuts, even through the fabric of my clothing. But Katya, whose legs were bare below her hiking shorts, strode along sure-footed. Every so often she had to stop and wait for me to catch up.

The whole trek increasingly seemed like a bad idea. For one thing, the park rangers had temporarily barred all of the ordinary tourists from driving down into the caldera. The eminent Dr. Rudenko, of course, had used connections to get us in. The folks at the volcano observatory loaned us impact helmets, radios and other gear, and we hitched a ride with a field team down the road into Kilauea itself. The parking area at the bottom was empty except for three or four vehicles used by the geologists. We parked next to them and continued on foot. The people who had driven us down hiked off toward the east; Katya had other ideas for the two of us. She headed toward the edge of Halemaumau, the kilometer-wide crater-within-the-crater, the active heart of the volcano.

Except today it didn't seem very active.

"Take a look at that, Jack," Katya was saying, pointing.

I took a look at that. From where we stood, Halemaumau was a deep funnel leading down into the bowels of Mauna Loa, its bottom hidden by steam and the curve of the slope. The pit was evil-looking and utterly lifeless. "Lovely."

"There is usually a lava lake there," she said. "Sometimes it is a hundred meters across, sometimes much larger. But now the lava level has gone down quite far."

"Good," I said. "Sounds safer."

"But not as pretty. Kilauea produces plenty of lava but very little explosive activity. It is usually pretty safe." She paused for effect. "Of course, volcanoes can surprise you. The most famous violent eruption here in the last two centuries was preceded by a very quiet period. The lava level in Halemaumau had dropped considerably. Then, suddenly, ka-boom!"

"Oh." Oh damn, I meant to say.

"You begin to see. That is why they are keeping visitors away from the caldera. Whenever a volcano does something unexpected, it becomes dangerous."

"Then what are we doing here?"

"Satisfying our thirst for experience," Katya said, with a breathtaking sort of gaiety. Then, seeing that I was not as happy as she with the prospect of being blown to smithereens, she added, "Relax. You will see that I am right. Volcanoes are the most magnificent things in Nature. Active ones are best of all. This is where the crust of the planet is made, Jack." She added, in a philosophical tone, "We are fortunate to live on such a geologically active planet."

That was the very moment, I swear, when the first earthquake hit us.

And that is how we happened to be in the bottom of Kilauea at the start of the worst eruption in a hundred years. To tell the truth, I do not clearly remember everything that happened. A shrill emergency signal screamed on the radios, a sequence of very strong shocks knocked us on our backsides, and we made a frantic scramble to the vehicles. Teams were converging on the parking lot from every direction. We had almost made it when the first explosion came. From a dozen places but from Halemaumau most of all, huge blasts of fire and smoke billowed high into the air. We stared around us in awe; but our appreciation was diminished by the urgent business of getting the hell out of there. The survey teams jumped into the vehicles and powered them up.

About that time, it started raining rocks.

"Bombs" of all sizes came hurtling down from the sky and smacked the ground around us. The driver of our jeep torqued the wheels and zoomed up along the access road. But one of the rocks hit the road just ahead of us, too near to avoid. We skidded, crashed, rolled, went flying in every direction. I remember lying on the ground, holding my chest, thinking, Now this is a hell of a thing. The others turned around came back for us, God bless them, picked us up and threw us into the remaining jeeps. The motors whined and we were on our way once more.

At the observatory, under cover, Katya and I sat in a corner and waited for the ranger medic to finish with the more serious injuries. Out of a small slit of a window next to us, we could see enormous fire-fountains spurting up into the air, and great clouds of smoke and ash roiling upwards. It was terrifying and magnificent. I would not have minded looking at it from an even more distant vantage point.

Katya said quietly, "Christ, that was stupid."

"Was it?" I asked. "I thought you volcano people did this sort of crap all the time."

"Not really. Maybe once, in Kamchatka, when I was a student. But I was much more of an idiot today." She shook her head. "I have been working on Mars too long, Jack. The big volcanoes there have been dead for half a billion years. I have lost my respect."

"Respect?"

"For Nature. If you are careless, volcanoes are not forgiving."

I looked at the fire-fountain through the window. "Are we far enough away?"

She eyed the eruption. "I think so. This observatory has been here for a long time."

We inspected each other's injuries as we waited. We were pretty banged up. Katya's right ankle looked bad, probably broken, and she also had a number of cuts and gashes on her legs. I had bruises everywhere. My hands were a mess, and I'd probably broken one or two ribs in the back when we'd crashed the jeep. It hurt to breathe deeply. My hard-hat had an impressive crack that almost split it in two.

At length she said, "You know what will happen when we go back."

I had been thinking about the same thing. "The docs are going to go nuts. They'll put us on the injured list – two or three weeks, if my ribs are broken and your ankle is as bad as it looks."

"The final crew selection is in twelve days."

I nodded grimly. "Too many people, too few places on the crew. The committee will be looking for ways to shorten the roster. If we aren't on the ready list when they meet . . . ."

"Oh damn," said Katya, leaning into me on the bench. "Jack, I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."

There wasn't much to say. Katya and I leaned back against the wall for a time. We weren't going to Venus. But I could not just accept that, and my mind kept running in circles. If we had gotten banged up a month ago, or a month from now, it might be a different matter. Our injuries were not that severe. We could be fully operational in a week, though the project's medical people would add their usual massive safety margin. Our problem, therefore, was simply one of timing.

"You know," I said, "there is an alternative."

Katya looked at me blankly. "What are you talking about?"

Instead of answering, I asked, "Do you have any leave time coming to you?"

"A couple of weeks, I think."

"About the same for me. What if you and I took about ten days' leave?"

Her eyes grew wide. "You mean right now? Don't even go back, just call in and – "

"– and tell them that we're taking ten days' leave here in Hawaii. We have the time coming, and all that we will miss will be a few boring meetings on the mainland. No sweat. Meanwhile, we find someplace where nobody will drop in on us. We hide out. We eat, sleep, put your ankle on ice, and just heal up. In ten days we can be functioning pretty normally, so we go back and report in before the crew selection. And we stay on the ready list the whole time."

Katya nodded thoughtfully. "What happens when they find out?"

"We won't tell them. And after the crew is selected, it won't matter."

She smiled a wicked smile. "Jack," she said, with feeling, "that is a beautiful idea!" Her eyes glinted with amusement. "Naturally you realize what people will think. Everyone will assume that we are lovers, that we are shacked up together somewhere. And we will be shacked up together, of course."

"Oh," I said. "We don't have to, uh, go to the same place. I was assuming that –"

"Americans," Katya said, sighing. "You are definitely inferior to Russians in conspiracy. You lack historical experience. Trust me, the plan is perfect."

Our eyes met. I returned her smile.

The ranger doctor took us together into the small dispensary at the observatory. We explained the situation to her. Finally the doc said, "I will have to file a medical report eventually. The two of you need complete histories on file if you go on your mission. But your injuries are not serious, and there is no reason why that has to be done immediately. Would three or four months be long enough?"

She dismissed our thanks with a shrug. In fact, she was far more interested in the skin-embedded fittings for our high-pressure respiration gear, something she had never seen. We chatted about life-support technology while the doc wrapped our injuries, sealed our cuts, and stimulated bone repair for Katya's ankle and my ribs. Eight days, she estimated, and we'd be presentable. She dug up some antibiotics and pain-killers, and loaned Katya a crutch. We thanked her again and quietly slipped out of the observatory.

The rest of the arrangements were made from the car. We called the duty officer at the training center, who recorded our change of plan with a shrug and an off-hand "OK". Next we punched up a tourist agency to find a place to stay. We settled on a small bungalow a couple of kilometers from the water, on a hill with a mediocre view of Kailua Bay – not a high-class resort property, but just right for the purpose. Could arrangements be made to stock the kitchen before we arrived? Yes, for an added fee. We fed our account codes into the phone.

Last of all, we called a florist and sent a dozen roses to the doctor.

I sensed even then, I think, that our deception would soon become something else, that by the end of our ten days together we would be lovers in fact as well as reputation. Katya claimed afterwards that she had known from the first – and that it took considerable patience on her part to get me to lower my guard and let it happen.

Maybe her version is correct. I was nervous, and strangely shy. I say "strangely" because we had just spent weeks on the dive team together in the deep habitat. Privacy down there had been nonexistent. How could you be bashful after that? But I remember, on that soft night above Kailua when Katya and I first came together, how astonishing it was that she, whom I thought I knew so well, could be so full of mystery and surprise.

Dieter and Bill were back inside, the probe reeled in and stowed in its cradle. There was a pretense of a meal. Max and Madeline were taking turns at the communicator panel, coaxing information in dribbles from the Aphrodite. Eventually, the satellite feed was restored and we could monitor everything ourselves.

Virgil was damaged, no one knew how badly. The high-gain antenna had been hurt, so all communications were routing through the low-bandwidth omnidirectional system. This was good enough for telemetry and voice – or would be, when the on-board computer figured out that it should switch the voice circuit over – but the omni channel was too narrow for video. The environment inside the crew space remained nominal. This last was the best news, since even a small breach of the lifesystem would quickly make the ship uninhabitable.

The lander airlock was proceeding through its long depressurization. There was one occupant, wearing Katya's suit, who had linked the suit to the umbilicus inside the airlock and initiated the cycle. The link with the suit was strange, though. She was hooked up to the oxygen system, the electrical power, and the heat exchanger, but the data link with the suit's biomed system appeared to be disconnected. The chief theories were that the suit connector had been damaged, or else Katya had simply forgotten to plug it in properly. Knowing Katya, I could imagine other reasons.

Of the second suit, the one worn by Jules Bertillame, there was no sign.

Everyone expected some sort of verbal communication almost immediately, but it was twenty-five minutes before anything came. Max put it on the speaker at once.

Virgil: Aphrodite, this is Virgil. Please acknowledge.

It was her voice, businesslike enough, but a little shaky. Bill gave a hoot of relief until Madeline's sharp look shut him up.

Aphrodite: This is Aphrodite. (The voice from orbit was Arkady Rudin, one of the other lander pilots.) Katya, this is Arkasha speaking. We're glad to hear from you.

Virgil: Yes. I am also glad. (Deep breath.) The situation here is very bad.

Aphrodite: What is your situation?

Virgil: There was a ground tremor, followed by substantial slides of material down the slope. This area is not as stable as we thought. The slide included about one-third of the LZ. The lander was at the edge of this and sustained damage.

Aphrodite: Where is J. B.?

Virgil: Jules is dead.

Aphrodite: Can you confirm, Virgil? Jules is dead?

Virgil: I am sure of this. I saw it happen. He was in the path of the slide, and it swept him away. I found a piece of his suit cladding. I think the rest of him was buried.

Aphrodite: Understood.

We all understood. If the thermal integrity of J. B.'s suit had been damaged, he would be dead in minutes, even if the landslide had not crushed him.

Aphrodite: Virgil, Aphrodite. What is your personal condition?

Virgil: I was out of the main path of the slide, in the shelter of an outcropping. My suit was damaged, but I was able to make it back.

Aphrodite: What is your physical condition? We aren't getting your biomed telemetry.

Virgil: I've disconnected the system.

Aphrodite: Say again, Virgil?

Virgil: Don't make me say everything twice, Arkasha. I said I've disconnected the biomedical readouts. I am sorry. But don't worry about me. I am OK. I can function.

Madeline's eyebrows went up. "Does that mean what I think it means?"

I nodded. "She's hurt, maybe badly, but she doesn't want us to know the details. So she's pulled the data line."

"Why would she do that?" Dieter asked, bewildered.

Because she doesn't think it matters, I answered silently.

Aphrodite: Understood, Virgil. How do you read the condition of your craft?

Virgil: I can't tell everything from here. I'm still in the lock, pumping down. The inner cabin environment reads normal on the panel, so ECS and thermal shielding are holding. I've lost the high-bandwidth DCU, so I've switched over to the omni. The computers seem to have cycled through a soft crash. I can't find out about main power or propulsion from here.

Aphrodite: Can you take off?

Virgil: Nyet. Both of the aerofans are partly buried in loose rock from the slide. Even if I have the power, I cannot start them. Either the fans won't move or the blades will shatter.

I heard someone whisper, "Sweet Jesus." I had been expecting bad news, but that did not make it any easier to take. The two steerable ducted fans, Virgil's propulsion system in the dense lower atmosphere of Venus, were wedged tight under however many kilograms of rock. Without the propellers, Virgil could not even leave the ground, much less reach a rendezvous seventy kilometers up.

Katya was trapped. Her lifesystem was intact for now, but it would not last forever. The only question was when, and how, she would die. I knew the lander inside and out, so I could make a pretty good guess. Unless there was more damage than we knew, her electrical power could last for weeks. Virgil was too small for a full recycling setup, so oxygen supply and carbon dioxide removal would fail earlier than that, even with only one occupant. And despite almost perfect shielding, the ferocious heat and pressure would eventually have their way, squeezing the hull until its seams parted and then crushing, and roasting, its contents.

But long before that, I knew, Katya would be dead from her own waste heat. The foil-thin thermal insulation layer that covered both Virgil and the hotsuits was as efficient at keeping waste heat inside as it was in shielding against the outside conditions. Waste heat from machinery and crew was drained by a heat pump and stored in a special heat sink built into the airframe of the craft. The cabin stayed cool, but the heat sink grew hotter by the hour. As it did, the heat pump required more and more of the ship's power to keep up, adding its own increasing contribution to the waste heat budget. It was an exponential process. While the ship operated, the heat sink's absolute temperature would double every twenty-four hours. In a week, it would in theory be as hot as a star – but sooner than that, its own insulation would burn through and the ship would become a holocaust. If you shut down the heat pump, the heat build-up in the cabin would be no less deadly. By sudden fire or by slow suffocation, death would be inexorable.

But Katya, I suspected, would not die that way, either.

There is an unwritten, almost unspoken code among those who travel in space, a code about catastrophe and how to face it. The code does not have a name, but if it did, it might be called the Pasadena Rule.

The Pasadena disaster occurred in the "good old days" of liquid-fueled chemical rocket motors, finicky things with high thrust and low specific impulse, so that a spacecraft had to operate pretty close to its fuel margin. The Pasadena was a shuttle that made the rounds between low Earth orbit and the lunar surface, two or three days each way. It was returning to Earth, sliding down the geopotential gradient with a complement of light cargo and four human beings, two crew and two passengers. About twenty hours out, the Pasadena started a fifteen-second engine burn designed to trim up its approach for the aerobraking maneuver; but something went badly wrong and the engine did not shut down on time. It was a triple failure: a control system glitch, a stuck relay, a jammed manual cut-off switch. The engine fired for one hundred and seventy-one seconds, until the fuel tanks were empty.

It did not take the crew long to discover their predicament. No matter what they did, they would miss the Earth's atmosphere entirely, swinging in a hyperbolic arc past the planet and out into deep space. No ship on Earth, in orbit, or on the Moon could possibly catch them and rendezvous for a rescue.

First part of the Pasadena Rule: Sometimes you're screwed. Period.

Those aboard the ship were as good as dead. Still, it might take them a long time actually to die. The Pasadena had power from an auxiliary array of photovoltaics, and it could scrub CO₂ and recycle water as long as there was power. In its cargo was a tank of liquid oxygen extracted from lunar rock that could support the crew for years. The only constraint was food, and the ship's food supply, if rationed, might last as much a sixty days. Two months to starvation – and in all that time, they would remain in full communication with Earth.

For two solid weeks, the Pasadena was at the top of every news package. The biographies of the crew and passengers. The shocking accident. The grim arithmetic that made rescue impossible. Interviews with the doomed men. Excerpts from supposedly private conversations with the ground. Rumors of a bidding war for the viddie rights.

At first the four men held up well, but after a week their morale began to break down. The pilot retreated to his five-cubic-meter cabin and refused to use the communication link, even to talk to his family. The co-pilot launched into rambling accounts of paranoid fantasies, possibly fueled by drugs from the ship's pharmacy stores. One passenger, a radio astronomer returning from Farside, sent endless self-pitying messages to his wives and children back in Teheran. Only the second passenger, an engineer named Macallister, seemed to keep his cool. "I guess we know what's coming," he said in his soft Texas drawl, as the Earth dwindled behind them. "Meanwhile, we're taking this thing one day at a time."

On the fifteenth day after the Pasadena's fly-by of Earth, after ninety minutes of weeping and breast-beating from the Iranian astronomer followed by two hours of psychotic ravings from the co-pilot, Macallister appeared on the link. "This has gone on long enough," he said. "We're all real grateful for what you down there have done for us, but it's high time we went off the air. I'm about to disable the comm link. God bless you all. Pasadena out." There was a shout in the background, and then the transmission ended abruptly. The Pasadena was never heard from again.

Ten years later, a microprobe made a fly-by of the Pasadena as it pursued its orbit around the Sun. A blurry infrared image showed the ship, all systems except the radar transponder shut down, the airlock door open wide.

From the fire-storm in the newsies after Macallister pulled the plug, you might have supposed that he had murdered the other three for their rations and tossed them naked out into space. But real space-faring people knew better. To them, Macallister was a hero. They told each other, "It wasn't doing anybody any good, the way it was going. He did the right thing."

And that became the second part of the Pasadena Rule: When you're screwed, you do your job and then you sign off. After that, if you like, you can find your own way out, take a pill or slice your wrists or vent your cabin. Whatever seems easy, and quick.

Arkady Rudin was back on the line, talking with Katya about the obstructed lifting fans on Virgil. I'd missed the first part of the conversation.

Aphrodite: . . . . wants to know if you can go back outside and clear the fans manually.

Virgil: Nyet, Aphrodite. I saw the problems with the fans and tried to unblock them, but I couldn't stay outside long enough. My suit suffered some damage in the avalanche. Parts of the cladding are . . . compromised. I had to get into the airlock.

Aphrodite: Could you make another EVA later on?

Virgil: My suit is damaged.

Aphrodite: Can you make repairs to the suit and continue clearing the fans?

Virgil: (Pause.) No.

Aphrodite: (Captain Bell's voice.) Please detail your suit damage, Virgil. We have some people up here who may be able to suggest some temporary repairs.

Virgil: It isn't just the suit. I also am damaged. I cannot make another EVA.

Aphrodite: (Long pause, then Rudin's voice again.) Understood, Virgil. Stand by.

Time passed. The airlock in Virgil lowered the pressure toward the one-atmosphere level. It seemed like a slow process, but in truth it was amazingly fast. A century ago, decompression from ninety atmospheres would have taken days, not hours, or else bubbles would form in the bloodstream. They called this "the bends"; it was excruciating and sometimes fatal. But the life support system in Katya's backpack was linked directly into her bloodstream, so that blood gases were continuously removed by a the gas exchange unit. Other blood chemistry was also monitored and controlled. The suit helped the wearer combat thirst, fatigue, and shock. If needed, a pain killer could be added to the stream. I wondered what dosage Katya was using.

Virgil: Is Jack listening?

Aphrodite: I'm sure he is. We are passing our signal down to platform Gamma in real time. Would you like to talk with him?

Virgil: No, not now. There will be time enough for that.

Aphrodite: We can set up a link right away. Just say the word.

Virgil: Um. That's OK. Just tell him that I'm sorry about all of this. I'll talk to him later.

Aphrodite: All right.

*****

Update: Part II can now be read here. Part III is here. Part IV is here.

Medical report

2006-01-25T08:03:00.000-05:00

It is important, I think, to retain the capacity to be astonished by the obvious. For instance, I find it amazing to think that the buoyant force lifting up a balloon is simply due to the tiny difference in the ambient air pressure on the top and bottom. When I mention this fact to other physicists, they fall into two groups. One group says, "Yes, of course. So what?" The other group smiles and says, "Yes, I know. Isn't that weird?"

May I ever be counted among the second group. Still, I do understand the other point of view, and so I do anticipate that computer sophisticates will have a similar spectrum of reactions to this post. If you are in the "So what?" group, sorry to bother you. You may consider yourself free to entertain yourself elsewhere.

My Norton AntiVirus software just completed a system scan on my laptop last night. I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, a couple of years old, running Windows XP Pro. Norton found nothing amiss, which was good. But what impressed me was the fact that Norton had to scan 371,477 files to give me my clean bill of health.

371,477 files!? Yes, I have installed many pieces of software. Yes, I keep several backup copies of various "works in progress", some of which have dozens of files in each. Yes, I've used my laptop to run some computer programs that produce reams of data. (For instance, take the N-body tree code that some students and I wrote to do simulations of galaxy collisions. It generates "frame" images that are later put together into animations. Way cool. A single run of this baby makes hundreds of frames, and I have saved the full output for a dozen or so different simulations.) I have installed security-related updates and Service Pack 2, so that probably adds a few files. And by golly, almost every time I need a driver, the system seems to have it already. Fonts? Too many, really. I have to scroll through an arm-length list to locate the handful that I actually use. I do have a couple of thousand digital photos, and something less than a thousand mp3 files, music and such. Also, I haven't cleared out the "temp" directory in a long time. So I do expect that I should have a lot of files.

Still, 371,477 distinct files does seem like an awfully big number. It isn't a problem, of course. My hard drive has a 40 GB capacity and I have well under 30 GB stored on it. The disk is nicely defragmented and (as we've seen) virus-free. Nevertheless, that number does strike me as ... excessive.

The most profound thing I've read in a while on the human use of computers is Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, a thin but wise book that can be read online here. Stephenson believes that the Windows operating system is plagued by cruft, a kind of irreversible accumulation of patches and fixes and old code and work-arounds that make the final product immensely complex and disturbingly unreliable. He would not be surprised that I am carrying around a dizzying menagerie of obscure files whose meaning and function I can scarcely guess at. Par for the course. What did I expect? If it bothers me, I should switch to Linux or something.

Stephenson's entire argument is too subtle to go into here, and I'm not sure I agree with all of it anyway. But we have crossed a line where the systems are too complicated to be fully understood, and therefore too complicated to be fully predicted. Somewhere, as you read this, several million computers are doing things that their users do not quite intend or expect. Over a million of these cases, by my personal estimate, involve users struggling with the various automatic features of Microsoft Word. This is an obvious fact that is nevertheless faintly disturbing to me.

Probably I am being too much of a reductionist in my thinking about computers. Things aren't so bad, in fact. My laptop is in good shape. My "Start" menu and my desktop are populated with icons and programs that I recognize and can mostly use. My own user files are in pretty good order -- I can usually find what I need without much fuss. The operating system, bless it, is able to handle nearly anything I can throw at it, without complaint. At the human level, the immense complexity is mostly hidden from view, becoming visible only in the flexibility of the system to do so many different kinds of tasks. And if this wonderful flexibility comes at the cost of an occasional unpredictability or a few (hundred) (thousand) mysterious extra files, maybe that's not so awful. My computer is still considerably less complicated than either of my cats, and I have a very satisfactory relationship with them, in part because I am not driving myself crazy trying to figure exactly why they do what they do. (How many files, I wonder, are on their "hard drives"?)

Which reminds me to mention that one of my cats just spent the night at the vet's. She has become diabetic, and we are attempting to figure out how to control this with insulin. We've been giving her twice-daily shots for the last couple of weeks, and this has improved things. She's put back on more than a pound and half of weight in that time. But when we've gone in to have her blood sugar checked, it is still way too high, many times normal. So we left her there yesterday morning, poor thing, so that her blood sugar could be measured hour by hour, to help us figure out just what is going on. (It appears to my physicist's eye that we may have been driving her system in a period two orbit, so that the blood sugar level is low in the evening and high in the morning, even though we inject her twice per day. From this I conclude that my cat is a nonlinear dynamical system near the threshold of chaos. Well, duh.)

I'm happy to do what's needed to help my cat, who is very dear to me, and of course I know that medical conditions are occasionally complex. Our vet (who is a bit of a nerd, and loves to explain everything, especially when he explains it to some fellow nerds) says that diabetes is one of the trickiest diseases they learned about in vet school. You manage it rather than cure it, and some of the responses of the body's systems are idiosyncratic and unpredictable. So we're trying things and gathering data and doing our best to find out how to make the cat as healthy and comfortable as possible.

How long, I wonder, before computer problems are no longer comprehensible at the fundamental level, but are simply diagnosed with high-level abstractions like "digital diabetes"? How long before I'm nursing along my laptop with twice-daily injections of digital insulin, adjusting the timing and the dose, fiddling with diet and so forth, trying to figure out how to stabilize its operations, not really comprehending (or even expecting to comprehend, ever) the details of the problem? Poor thing, I'll say. It isn't feeling well at all, no it isn't.

Well-tempered numbers

2006-01-18T23:47:00.000-05:00

The idea that musical harmonies are related to numerical ratios goes back at least to Pythagoras; Galileo also discusses it, in pretty modern terms, in one of his books. Two musical notes are an octave apart if their frequencies are in a ratio 2:1. They are a major fifth apart if the ratio is 3:2. And so forth; the combinations that sound "nice" have frequency ratios that are small integers.

When I was a kid, our family had an old baby grand piano that we bought when I was in first grade. (We also bought a nice house along with it, but that is another story.) This piano figured greatly in my childhood. We dragged it around the country when we moved, and more recently my wife and I were custodians of it for about a dozen years. Great piano. I never took any piano lessons, but I loved to mess around with the thing. And because I was a science-nerdy kid rather than a musical one, I did experiments on it.

One cool experiement to do is to strike one key while holding down a higher one. If the frequency ratios are right, you can excite resonant vibrations in the higher string without actually hitting it. For example, suppose you hit middle C while holding the G (a fifth higher) open. You can hear the G string echo one octave up. That is because the n=3 harmonic of the C had the same frequency as the n=2 harmonic of the G.

Or almost the same. To make a long story short, in the West we have found it handy to use a system of notes in which the intervals are uniform. That is, if notes X1 and X2 are separated by the same number of keys on the piano as Y1 and Y2, then the frequency ratios X1:X2 and Y1:Y2 should be the same. Such a uniform scale is called a "well-tempered" scale. The problem is, when you do this the frequency ratios, except for the octaves, become irrational. So you can't get exactly a major fifth.

But you can get close! There are twelve "half-step" intervals in the octave, each one of which corresponds to a frequency ratio of 2^(1/12). It happens that 2^(7/12) = 1.4983..., which is dang close to 3/2. So if you go up seven half-steps, you get an interval dang close to a pure Pythagorean frequency ratio. And there are other good approximations too. Five half-steps yields 2^(5/12) = 1.3348... (nearly 4/3) and four half-steps yields 1.2599... (tolerably close to 5/4). In this way, you can pretty easily make ratios involving multiples of 2, 3 and 5, which give you a pretty rich set of harmonies.

It's the existence of these numerical coincidences -- fractional powers of 2 that approximate rational numbers -- that makes the choice of twelve "half-steps" per octave so nice. You can fiddle around with other scales to try to get more coincidences. For instance, a nineteen-note octave does really well.

2^(5/19) = 1.2001... (near 6/5)
2^(6/19) = 1.2446... (near 5/4)
2^(8/19) = 1.3389... (near 4/3)
2^(11/19) = 1.4937... (near 3/2)
2^(13/19) = 1.6068... (near 8/5)
2^(14/19) = 1.6665... (near 5/3)

Obviously, these are not all independent, but the nineteen note octave seems to have a lot of harmonic possibilities. (I tried to create music with a nineteen-note scale, but it sounded awful. But, as has already been stipulated, I'm not a musician. Or perhaps there were simply too many notes.)

Exercise for the student: If you make a piano with a nineteen-note octave, how should the white and black keys be arranged?

Such harmonious thoughts often occur to me when I'm teaching my physics laboratory students how to use significant figures in scientific calculations. If you measure that your air track glider went 1.00 meters in 2.35 seconds, your calculator will report that the velocity was something like 0.42553191489 m/s. And what does the "...191489" that you wrote down really signify about the physical velocity of the cart? Nothing, that's what. You'd have to know the distance to the nearest Angstrom and the time to the nearest nanosecond for those last digits to have any meaning whatsoever. So the honest thing to do is to round off to a result with fewer "significant" digits, generally the same number that the input data has: 0.426 m/s.

The problem is, almost any hard-and-fast rule you make up about significant figures leads you into awkward spots. If you decide to keep two significant figures, say, you'll round 9.843 off to 9.8 and you'll round off 1.143 to 1.1. The problem is that 9.8 is much less than one percent away from 9.843, while 1.1 is almost four percent away from 1.143. You do much more "violence" to the numbers in the second case, even though you are trying to be consistent.

Put another way: the difference between 1.1 and 1.2 is a heck of a lot more important (relatively speaking) than the difference between 9.7 and 9.8.

Scientists and engineers in the generation before mine knew this intuitively, because it's perfectly obvious from looking at a slide rule. Slide rules have logarithmic scales, so that equal intervals of length correspond to equal numerical ratios all along the rule. Over on the left side, the space between 1 and 2 is wide, while at the other end the numbers 8 and 9 are much closer together. When you read and interpolate your answer on a slide rule, you can squeeze out almost one extra digit on the left-hand side than you can see on the right.

We try to correct for this in the introductory lab by supplementing our significant figure rules with a special codicil: If your answer begins with a "1" or a "2", keep an extra digit. This smooths out some, but not all, of the perversity in the rules. (We also do stuff with real uncertainty estimates and propogating those uncertainties through the calculations. But how many figures are you supposed to keep in the uncertainties?)

The point is that our numbering system is not "well-tempered". The increase from 1.1 to 1.2 is not the same relative size as the increase from 9.7 to 9.8, even though both of them correspond to "one step in the second digit". I believe this is because our numbering system is optimized for addition and subtraction, in which absolute differences are more important than relative ones. To the Europeans, the "killer app" for Arabic numerals in the late Middle Ages was accounting. Who cared, really, about the ratio of income to expense? It was the difference that you got to spend on English wool, Italian glass and Russian fur.

Teaching, as Professor R told me lo these many years ago, is theatre. And when I teach introductory physics, one of the theatrical bits I always include is doing the math in my head. Nothing impresses a room full of first-year students quite like a quick approximate calculation without the aid of a calculator. You set up the problem (using input data suggested by the audience -- nothing up my sleeve, folks), make a few judicious approximations, and announce, "It should be about 800 meters." Up in the back row, somebody has been furiously tapping keys on his TI-83. "821.3 meters," he says. A soft murmur of admiration runs through the class. This guy is amazing!

The point, of course, is not to impress them -- an effect which passes quickly in any case. Even less are you aiming to perform a mysterious "magic trick". The whole point is to demystify the arithmetic. Students do know that you can do it all by hand -- or rather, by brain -- but that is very laborious. That's why God and TI invented calculators, after all. The students do not appreciate how much you can do with how little effort. You want to show them how it's done, and help them sharpen their own skills.

In doing quick approximate calculations, you certainly do not want to do actual multiplication or long division. Heavens! So you take short-cuts and round things off pretty severely. But you want to round things off in a uniform and consistent way, to keep your errors under control. To do this, I find that I naturally begin using a well-tempered set of numbers.

The idea is to choose a set of numbers that are separated by equal ratios -- like the notes in the well-tempered scale. Instead of filling the space between 1 and 2 (one octave), though, you fill up the space between 1 and 10 (one decade). Basically, the numbers you pick are evenly spaced on the slide rule scale. How many "notes" should you have in your scale? Not too many, or the system will be cumbersome; not too few, or your calculations will be too approximate to be useful. The exact number of notes in a decade will be chosen so that the individual steps have very convenient, easy-to-remember values -- even if you have to cheat a little to get the right "harmonies".

I find that a ten-note scale works pretty well. Here are my notes:

X0 = 1
X1 = 1.25
X2 = 1.6
X3 = 2
X4 = 2.5
X5 = Pi
X6 = 4
X7 = 5
X8 = 2 Pi
X9 = 8
X10 = 10

You multiply and divide these numbers by just shifting a certain interval on the scale. Thus, to find 1.6 * Pi, you start from Pi (X5) and move up two steps (Since X2 = 1.6) and arrive at 5. This isn't exact, but it's pretty close. Shifting ten places is like multiplying by 10, so X17 would be 50.

To give you an idea of how this works, let's calculate the surface area of the Earth. The area formula for a sphere is A = 4*Pi*R^2, where R is the radius of the Earth. I seem to recall that R is a bit more than 6000 km. I'll write that as 2 Pi * 1000 km, which would be X38 (X8 shifted upward by three decades). So

A = 4 * Pi * (2 Pi * 1000) * (2 * Pi * 1000)
= X6 * X5 * X38 * X38
= X11 * X76
= X87 = 5 * 100,000,000

So we get 500 million square kilometers. It's more like 509.6 million square km in actual fact, so we are pretty close. And we never did anything but add smallish integers -- that is, we shifted by definite intervals on the "number piano".

It turns out that, by a happy coincidence, the values of many physical constants are close to numbers on the well-tempered scale. You can do even better if you are willing to interpolate "half steps" between the ten "whole steps", but as a practical matter I find that I don't need to do this much; and when I do, I can usually do the interpolation in my head as needed. (The half-step number is a bit closer to the lower step in absolute terms. Between X1=1.25 and X2=1.60, you get X1.5 to be about 1.4 -- which is close to the square root of X3=2.0, just as you'd expect.)

This is also related to Benford's Law about the distribution of first digits in large sets of data. Benford noticed that in many numerical lists -- the popultions of towns in a state, for instance -- the first digits of the numbers were not uniformly distributed over 1 through 9. In fact, 1 is the most common first digit, while 9 is the least common. If you have a bunch of data that ranges over a few decades in value, you'll find that the values are usually distributed fairly evenly along a slide rule scale. So the well-tempered numbers are well-suited to Benfordian data sets. The data points in a set are "binned" according to what well-tempered approximate value you use, and if the data are distributed via Benford's Law, the bins are about equally populated.

People often say that there are deep affinities between music and mathematics. They seldom venture to give specifics. Myself, I'm not altogether convinced. Both music and math are abstract and do have rational structures -- traits they share with, for example, double-entry bookkeeping -- and many mathematicians are also talented musicians. Beyond these ambiguous observations, though, what "affinities" are really there?

But I do find it amusing and satisfying to take a musical inspiration for a mathematical diversion, especially when I wind up with a useful tool. The world is full of innocent pleasures. How much nicer when one of them turns out to be worth something.

The judiciary and the Big A

2006-01-13T11:38:00.000-05:00

Note: This was originally part of the previous post on the Alito nomination, but it seemed better to separate it out.

For both sides of American politics, abortion is the key issue. In fact, a usable zeroth-order theory of politics in the US is that abortion is the only domestic issue. (In this, it resembles nothing so much as slavery circa 1850.) One reason for this central role is that abortion is emblematic of a much wider struggle over government.

Those on the left seem to believe that the Supreme Court is a kind of "trump card" in the political game. If you can get the Supreme Court to rule on an issue, then you don't have to go through the bother of persuading a majority of the voters, or getting a bill through Congress, or even really defending a position in the public arena. After all, the voters are often idiots, or worse. (That goes double for members of Congress.) This is why so many of the activist organizations on the left use the courts as the centerpiece of their efforts.

Some on the right no doubt think the same thing. But a lot more of them think that this use of the judiciary to trump the political process is harmful and wrong and fundamentally anti-Constitutional. The members of the Supreme Court are appointed for life and their decisions cannot be appealed. This is only consistent with democratic self-government if the Court is very limited in the scope of its legitimate powers.

So the left sees Roe v. Wade as the prototypical example of a very desirable result that would have been impossible to achieve by democratic means. The right sees the case as an anti-democratic excess that cannot be justified by any reasonable reading of the actual Constitution or the legal history of the US -- a striking example of judicial tyranny. This is a situation, in other words, in which the Republicans are the democrats.

Here is roughly what President Bush has said about abortion. I am against abortion. But the country does not now have the moral consensus to ban it. So I think that we should do two things. First, I think that we should find ways to encourage a culture of life, and seek to limit awful things like partial-birth abortion. Second, I think we need to rein in an out-of-control judiciary by appointing people to the bench who believe in interpreting the law rather than making new law.

His opponents say that this sort of moderate-sounding rhetoric is just a disguise for fundamentalist anti-abortion extremism. When he is talks about a philosophy of judicial restraint, that is just a code phrase for reversing Roe v. Wade at the earliest opportunity. When he says a culture of life, he means The Handmaid's Tale. And you can bet that every single Bush nominee to the federal bench, however neutral in appearance, knows the secret handshake of the anti-choice cabal. (They teach you this in the Federalist Society, I gather.)

But what if Bush really means it? What if, after years of reflection and experience in politics, this is really pretty much what he thinks about the subject? What if he really does think that the most serious danger to our democracy is judicial imperialism? Maybe he actually does believe that if we can get a handle on this basic Constitutional problem, then the normal political process and the good hearts of the American people will take care of the rest -- not neatly, not without lots of shouting, but tolerably well in the long run.

I think that the left is unable to accept Bush's sincerity on this because they no longer believe that the law is anything but power politics carried on by other means, and so they cannot conceive that anyone would really hold such a stupid opinion. Bush -- or those who pull his strings, like Cheney and Rove -- must therefore be dissembling. QED. Even if you don't go that far, it is true that the stances of politicians merit some skepticism. Politicians like to stake out popular positions, and they will cloak radical views with harmless-sounding language. And Bush is a first-class politician.

Yet the President's stated opinions on abortion pretty nearly match my own, which I know are held honestly and which are the result of much reflection. In fact, Bush has expressed these ideas and explained them with a care and a constancy that I find admirable. I see no evidence from his record of policy and judicial appointments that he is pursuing any hidden agenda. His decision about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, for instance, is about as moderate as you can get in such a sensitive subject. (He did not ban any research funded by non-federal sources, and he allowed money for non-embryonic stem cell work and for work on established cell lines. His policy is actually more permissive than the one prevailing during the Clinton administration. What would be more moderate than this? "Let 'er rip, and here's the cash"?) His judicial appointments have, as far as I can tell, all been people who have long expressed exactly the kind of judicial philosophy that he espouses.

So my conclusion is that President Bush means what he says about abortion, the culture of life and the role of the judiciary. It is a serious opinion that over the long run has a chance of actually persuading serious people. His opponents, if they hope to prevail in the great debate, would be well advised to engage Bush's actual ideas, rather than their own cartoon versions of what they think he really thinks. It is proverbially foolish to bring a knife to a gun-fight. And in the long run, it is equally foolish to bring an empty and alarmist rhetoric to a serious war of ideas.

The first time as tragedy, the hundredth time as farce

2006-01-13T11:26:00.000-05:00

I have been following the confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito, and do not have much original to add to the blogospherics. As I have written before, the Robert Bork hearings in 1987 were a significant step in the development of my own political thinking. There is the nominee -- very different from Bork in his appearance and demeanor, but much like him in philosophy of judging. And here are so many of the same Senators: Biden, Kennedy, Leahy, Specter, Hatch, Grassley.

And right on cue, the Democrats (this time in the minority) start twisting the record and blowing smoke about non-issues. Twenty years ago the nominee joined a conservative group of Princeton alumni, in whose magazine appeared articles that many find offensive. Yikes! Call a press conference! Go into executive session! Subpoena William Rusher's papers! Ditto the Vanguard business, the constant harping on a few sentences from the 1985 job application to the Reagan administration, etc. Ditto the distortions of Judge Alito's judicial record.

When I listen to people with whom I disagree, I usually assume that their statements are made in good faith, candidly and proportionately expressing their true opinions. But what to make of this sort of nonsense? To think that these lines of questioning are reasonable, you would have to view the confirmation hearing as something akin to a counter-espionage or counter-terrorism investigation. The nominee is not who he appears to be: a highly intelligent and broadly respected jurist with an exemplary life and a distinguished career. That is only a "legend", a carefully crafted cover-story put in place by decades of patient tradecraft. The job, therefore, is to penetrate the cover story and expose the sinister secret identity beneath.

(This process, applied to counter-espionage, was described in the interesting book Catching Spies by H. H. A. Cooper and Lawrence J. Redlinger.)

Of course, nowadays a judicial nominee is usually less forthcoming about his views on specific issues than Judge Bork was. Today he simply says, "I can't discuss issues that might come before the Court -- canons of judicial conduct and so forth." So Senators who would really like to know how he would rule on an issue don't get answers to their questions. They complain that the nominee is being uncooperative. What is he trying to hide? And this provides the excuse to pursue the questioning as if they were trying to catch some sort of subversive "mole" in the judicial system. (And this accusation of uncooperativeness is also a handy fig leaf for an eventual "no" vote, which may be necessary for political reasons.)

The game is played both directions; Clinton nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a pioneer of the "Can't discuss issues" approach. But the situation is not entirely "left-right" symmetric. First, recall that Ginsburg was probably the most politically activist person appointed to the Court in a generation, and her previously expressed views on many issues put her at least as far to the left as Bork was to the right. She was certainly much further to the left than Byron White, whom she replaced, and so made a real impact on the ideological "balance" of the Court. Yet she sailed through confirmation 96 to 3. The Republicans did not play the inquisitors in her case, or in Stephen Breyer's.

Second, the "Can't discuss" approach really makes more sense if your judicial philosophy is conservative -- that is, if you believe that judges interpret law rather than make policy. If you think that the Supreme Court should be an agent for social change, shifting US law in a particular direction based on an enlightened view of the Good, importing judicial opinions from other countries as precedents when suitable domestic precedents are lacking -- if you think that, then maybe your fellow citizens do deserve to be told in what direction you are going to take them. On the other hand, if you have a more limited idea of the scope of the Court's authority, and believe that a judge must decide cases based on fairly strict readings of the Constitution, actual legislation and established precedent, then it is reasonable not to shoot your mouth off about an issue on which you will likely have to rule. If a judge is obliged to uphold policies with which he disagrees -- the possibility of executing someone under the age of 18, to take a recent case -- simply because the law runs that way, then the judge's own exact opinion about the policy is of secondary importance.

So here we are in the same old game. But something has changed, hasn't it? In the Roberts hearings, and even more in the Alito hearings, there is a sense that the Democrats have finally jumped the shark. Joe Biden has never been more orally incontinent; Chuck Schumer has never been more annoying; Ted Kennedy has never been more repellent (and for him this is no small achievement). The left-wing interest groups have turned the knobs up to 11 and proclaimed that Judge Alito is the greatest single threat to our Republic. But this time, it does not seem to be having the desired effect, even in the mainstream press. Everybody knows that any Bush nominee would face the same barrage. Therefore, this barrage carries exactly zero information content, and everybody knows it.

Samuel Alito seems to be a good guy, and smart. He really does seem to believe that judging is something other than the exercise of mere political power. That makes him an idealist. But what does that make the self-important gasbags who fulminate behind the big table?

You've probably heard this one, but . . .

2006-01-12T19:51:00.000-05:00

"Dumb blonde" jokes are not my favorite genre, but this one is outstanding. Sort of sneaks up on you.

Bloggerel

2006-01-09T18:50:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, while ransacking my office for some old statistical mechanics notes, I came across some doggerel that I wrote a couple of decades ago, when I was in graduate school. This is, of course, the whole reason for being a packrat. It isn't that you'll actually need something a couple of decades hence -- but what fun when you come upon it by accident.

As I remember it, I recited this poem twice to very appreciative audiences, once at a social gathering of mathematicians and once at a retreat for Episcopal college students. (I was neither a mathematician nor an Episcopalian, but they had good parties.) Therefore, since (1) it seems to have wide appeal, and (2) a chief reason to have a blog is to have a "final resting place" for odd bits of writing, and also (3) I have now given you fair warning, I propose to put my poem here.

I like to think that I've grown as a poet since this was written, so I've taken the liberty of slightly improving a turn of phrase here or there. It is a bit of a performance piece: if you find yourself reciting it in public, don't hold back. (The exact level of blood alcohol required for its proper enjoyment is, of course, up to you.)

In Praise of Sneezing

In spring, when the pollen is thick in the air
From flowers and bushes and buds on the trees,
I like to go out when the weather is fair,
But a thing that I like even more is to sneeze.

You might call it strange, or completely absurd --
You may call it a Communist plot, if you please --
But the most welcome sound that ever I've heard
Is the sound of a wonderful, long-delayed sneeze.

For you wait
and you wait
and your nose starts to itch,
And you laugh
or you cry
or you can't decide which,
And you'd do
anything
for that tension to ease --
But the itch disappears and the sneeze never comes.

The student, professor, policeman and thief,
The people with money who do as they please --
There is nothing that brings them the same sweet relief
That they get when they get to the end of a sneeze.

For you wait
and you wait
and your nose starts to itch,
And you laugh
or you cry
or you can't decide which,
And you'd do
anything
for that tension to ease,
Then finally,
finally --
the urge goes away.

There are some thing on earth that a person can buy.
Some things can be sold for appropriate fees.
Some things can be planned. Now, don't ask me why,
But in none of those classes of things is a sneeze.

For you wait
and you wait
and your nose starts to itch,
And you laugh
or you cry
or you can't decide which,
And you'd do
anything
for that tension to ease,
Then finally,
finally,
at long last -- it's gone.

When you want to, and don't, then it's torture, at least.
When you need to, and can't, then it's death by degrees.
But at last when it comes, when it's finally released,
When it's over and done with, the panic has ceased,
When you feel like a human and not like a beast,
There is nothing in life that compares to a sneeze.

For you wait
and you wait
and your nose starts to itch,
And you laugh
or you cry
or you can't decide which,
And you'd do
anything
for that tension to ease,
Then finally,
finally,
at long last you -- !

Hope

2006-01-05T08:19:00.000-05:00

In our family, when a new Harry Potter book comes out, we clear the weekend of all other appointments and read it out loud. This can be a challenge: HP and the Order of the Phoenix took us about thirty hours to complete, from 7 am to 10 pm on both Saturday and Sunday. (The latest volume was a bit shorter, and we polished it off by early Sunday afternoon.) This has become a tradition around our house for the simple reason that, if we didn't all read the book together at the same time, one of us would get to read it first. Can't have that, naturally.

I guess it is fair to say that we are fans. And why not? Rowling's books are some of the best stories around -- intelligent, exciting, hilarious, thought-provoking, and sometimes quite touching. The universe of wizards and muggles is a fascinating place, filled with delightful detail and peopled with dozens of superb characters.

Still, I must confess that, each time a new volume has appeared, I have felt a sense of dread. Not because the books are bad -- we each have our favorites but they have all been good -- but because this time, J. K. Rowling might screw it up.

She might! After all, who could possibly keep it up? All the invention, the wit, the wordplay, the complex storylines, the shocks and surprises, the sly erudition? (I will never forget the wonderful moment when I learned from an old book in a house in Cambridge that the 14th Century alchemist Nicholas Flammel really existed.) It would only be human for Rowling to lay an egg from time to time. The next book could well be a clunker. It is only to be expected. Things go bad, they do, and you shouldn't set your hopes too high. Yet you do, don't you? Even though you know that it will just make it worse when she finally blows it.

But she hasn't done that. Not yet. Not quite! Somehow, each book still breathes new life into the old enchantment, still makes you laugh and gasp at all the right places. Each book manages to find a way to astonish you, in spite of absurdly high expectations. But with each new book, I have worried a little more, because each book in a way puts all of the previous ones at risk. A bad book now would spoil the whole series. And what a catastrophe that would be!

And yet . . . by now, despite myself, I have begun to trust J. K. Rowling. My anxiety about the next (and last) book in the series is tempered by a strange confidence. She has given us the story so far; perhaps she has proven that she can be trusted with its ending.

We all know that writers and movie-makers can disappoint. Tom Clancy was great for about five or six books -- a damn long run, actually -- from The Hunt for Red October on. But by the time of Rainbow Six, if not well before, he was just boiling another pot, alas. The third book in Philip Pullman's trilogy, in my view, diminishes the first two. (Oh, is that all he was up to?) And movie sequels, despite their general profitability and popularity with Hollywood, are seldom worth seeing, even when the original was good. Was anybody out there excited and impressed by the Matrix sequels? Show of hands? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Don't get me started on George Lucas and Star Wars. Look, I'm a forgiving man. The original trilogy was magnificent, even admitting its few false notes, like the over-cute Ewoks. I also quite enjoyed The Phantom Menace, despite its more significant shortcomings. The next one, Send in the Clones or whatever it was, still had a few good things about it. Really it did. But then.

If we have living heroes who are still doing important work, we all know that they may screw it up. Somewhere inside us, I think we are all waiting for it to happen. We wonder whether the next episode will turn it all to rubbish. Trust not in the living, says an inner voice. Only the dead are sure not to disappoint. And the better our heroes have been, the worse it will be when they stumble.

So it was for me with Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring was so good, even with all the changes. The realization of place and mood was so fantastic, so overwhelming. The casting and the performances were brilliant. The script did so much to use and preserve Tolkien's language, and even his languages. And so I began to feel a real apprehension about The Two Towers. They just wouldn't be able to keep it up -- how could they? But that movie was excellent too. And I thought: How horrible it would be to get the first two so right and then screw up on The Return of the King!

Yet by that time, I had also begun to trust Jackson and his band of wizards, a little. And The Return of the King film did not disappoint me. They managed to do keep it up, imperfectly to be sure, but very very well, and all the way to the very end. In spite of all doubts and pressures and what must have been years of wearying toil; in spite of the compromises and deletions they were forced to make; in spite of flirting with horrible bad ideas (like having Aragorn face off with Sauron before the Black Gate); in spite of all, they kept the faith.

Imagine for a moment what it must have been like to read The Lord of the Rings as it was first published, volume by volume, between July, 1954 and October, 1955. Imagine the year-long wait for the third installment. You'd be thinking, This is too good. This can't last. The ending cannot be wonderful enough. And yet there would be a hope -- impossible, yes, but also impossible to refuse, like our hopeless hope for Heaven. And hope would whisper, Maybe it can.

Cultural wisdom

2006-01-04T12:31:00.000-05:00

Engineering is the real culture of our age. That, and maybe the movies. The movies play the role in our time that opera played in the 19th Century and drama in the 16th: a synthesis of many arts, both visual and otherwise, terribly expensive to create but economically viable because of its broad popularity. The movies form our high "culture" in the humanities sense; but our real culture in the anthropological sense is engineering.

We often forget this, because the engineering culture is usually expressed, not in words, but in things. We are surrounded by thousands upon thousands of artifacts whose forms, functions and materials are shaped by engineers, and these artifacts in turn shape our lives in ways beyond reckoning. Undergirding all of this stuff is a vast and ramified human system of engineering values and practice, and it is this system that I mean when I talk about "engineering culture". Much of the practical wisdom of our age is bound up in that culture of engineering. Like many forms of cultural knowledge, it often exists in implicit form, shared by the engineers themselves as an unspoken "common sense". But I'm always happy when someone discerns and formulates a part of this for the rest of us.

My brother -- the space engineer brother, not the computer guy brother or the Lutheran theologian brother -- has occasionally put some engineering culture into words. I particularly like two of his maxims. Call them PW's Rules of Optimization:

Sometimes it is not optimal to optimize.
You can only optimize one thing at a time.

Rule 1 means that it is not always worth the time and effort to figure out the "best" way to do something. You find something that works, do it, and stop worrying. Severe optimization is really only appropriate when you are conserving some hideously expensive resource. Thus, when designing a spacecraft, you really try to optimize the mass of your equipment, because it is so expensive right now to launch a kilogram into orbit. The same sort of careful husbanding of resources used to apply to computer programming. You'd take pains design your program to use the least memory and processor time, and you'd agonize over trade-offs. But nowadays, except in some very high-end applications, computer time and memory are too cheap not to waste.

I actually think that Rule 1 is a deep and generalizable insight into life. Rule 2 may be even deeper, because it is less obvious. Suppose I am designing a new computer, and I want to make it as fast as possible. Well, it turns out that there are several measures of "speed". I can optimize the clock speed of the processor, or the speed of floating-point operations, or the bus bandwidth, or the disk access time, yada yada yada. It is highly unlikely that I'll be able to optimize more than one of these with a single system. There are always trade-offs.

To cope with this, I can take one of two approaches. I can try to come up with a single "figure of merit" that captures what I really want. For instance, this is what the LINPACK benchmark does, for instance -- essentially, it is a single function of all the different sorts of computer speed. Many figures of merit are a bit hokey -- after all, my computer may not be intended to do LINPACK calculations all day long -- but (remember Rule 1) sometimes you just pick something reasonable and go with it.

The other approach is to adopt a reasonable constraint for all but one of the variables, and then optimize the unconstrained one. This is what we do everyday when we say things like, "I want to buy the largest-memory MP3 player that costs less than $200." Here you have constrained the price and wish to optimize memory. Note that you can have as many constraints as you like, so long as you don't over-constrain yourself out of existence. But in the end you can only optimize one thing. And life works best when you know what it is that you are optimizing.

Here is my zeroth-order theory of economics. Each of us makes choices, like an engineer, subject to the constraints of our own lives. Each of us therefore acts as if we were optimizing something. But of course, we can only be optimizing one variable. That variable is what we (individually) mean by "value". The reason that economics works at all is that, because of Rule 2, "value" can ultimately mean only one thing for each economic agent, despite the complexity of the trade-offs we make. The reason that economics does not work all that well is that we don't really act like idealized engineers, because none of us has a fully defined consistent universal concept of "value". Luckily, we can get along without it. That, of course, is Rule 1.

Like I said, I think this business runs very deep. I am half-convinced that Boethius's discussion of the nature of the Good in The Consolation of Philosophy could be recast in terms of Rule 2. (As an aside, I would rank this as one of my ten all-time favorite books Weird, but true.) But perhaps it would be going a bit far to try to connect modern engineering practice with the insights of a 6th Century philosopher and theologian. Especially here at the end of a post.

Then and now

2006-01-03T20:17:00.000-05:00

President George W. Bush, address to the joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001:

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.

Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Sunday, January 1, 2001 (quoted here)

There's a great irony here. Everybody has been asking of themselves for the last four years why haven't we had a second attack, which everybody expected within weeks or months, certainly years. It didn't happen.

And we knew about the external story. The war in Afghanistan obviously had an effect on Al Qaida. The war in Iraq has diverted terrorists and jihadists into Iraq as opposed to attacking America.

But what we've heard over the last six months with these revelations, these so-called scandals, of the secret prisons where high-level Al Qaida have been held, the coercive interrogation which is under attack in the McCain amendment, and now the NSA eavesdropping -- we have the untold story which the administration could not tell. It knew why we had been protected.

All these defensive measures of gathering intelligence -- we were always weak on human intelligence, and that's why we had 9/11. And we don't have good spies inside Al Qaida. But we had a means, technological, in the NSA eavesdropping, and also other means in capturing these terrorists, of getting information.

It's worked. It's held us safe. And that's why I think in the end the president's going to win the whole argument on presidential power.

I commend also to your reading Dr. Sanity's passionate (and even, perhaps, intemperate) commentary on the Krauthammer quotation.

Media bias and the predictive model

2006-01-03T10:44:00.000-05:00

Like many people with views in the right half of the American political spectrum, I have given some thought to the question of media bias. It does seem to exist. Most major media outlets are considerably to the left of the political center-of-gravity of the American electorate, and this significantly influences their coverage of events.

I'm not much interested in arguing this point in this post. For a pretty solid recent piece of social science research on the subject, you might read this. (Betsy Newmark comments cogently here.)

What interests me here is how this bias actually functions. Journalists, of course, publically place great value on even-handedness, and I believe they are mostly sincere in this. Yet they apparently do not practice this virtue in their journalism. How does this happen?

One factor, of course, is that the community of reporters is pretty uniformly liberal. This means that most of the people with whom a reporter discusses his work have biases that confirm his own. In such an "echo chamber", attitudes and approaches that from the outside seem slanted and unfair can pass muster as sensible and balanced.

We mentally locate assertions on a continuum from "undeniable fact" to "unsupported opinion", and we deal with them accordingly. What I am suggesting is that people who live and work among like-minded colleagues will naturally and unconsciously shift statements they like toward the "fact" end of the scale, and statements they dislike toward the "opinion" end of the scale. So if everyone around you agrees that "Bush is a moron," then this sentiment becomes more fact-like for you and so can easily creep in as a presupposition of your news article, despite your abstract commitment to journalistic fairness. (A similar effect, even stronger, can be seen in the faculties of institutions of higher learning.)

Nota bene -- I am not saying that everything is just someone's opinion, or that all opinions are equally arbitrary. Some things are facts. Some judgments based on the facts are more reasonable than others. The "Bush is a moron" meme strikes me as poorly supported by the available evidence. It seems rather to be a sort of playground taunt, like saying "You are fat and ugly" when what you really mean is "I dislike you and the things you do." The rhetorical purpose is to deny the enemy anything that might be considered a virtue. Nevertheless, there are otherwise smart people who take Bush's moronhood as a solid fact and use it as a way of understanding political events.

Lots of people think that unconscious bias in the news media functions in this way. I have a somewhat different theory. It is based on two observations. First, the practice of journalism involves making choices -- what story to cover, what facts to include, etc. Second, although journalists may (like anyone) wish to see their political side prevail, they are probably (like anyone) even more motivated by the desire for success. And what brings success to a reporter or an editor or a news organization? Journalistic success: providing the definitive coverage of an important event or development. But that is trickier than it sounds.

Look at it this way. You are an editor for a major news organization. On any given day there are maybe a hundred things that you might do a news story about, but you can only give prominent coverage to a dozen of them. You have to decide which of these events is likely to be most important. What criterion do you use? Well, the events do not occur in isolation. Each of them is a development in a larger story-line. Some of these larger story-lines will just peter out; others will prove to be crucial turning points in history. You'd like to identify early which story-lines will be most significant, and concentrate on them.

Similarly, within a given story, there are hundreds of facts that might be reported. You'd like to include the facts that will be most important in determining how the story turns out.

But of course, all of these decisions about what stories to tell and how to tell them must be made before things have turned out. You can't wait until next year to report on this year's economic news. You have to decide now how much attention to give to, say, rising fuel prices. If the economy is really strong next year, everyone will say, "Well, those fuel prices weren't such a big deal." But if the economy slides toward recession, everyone will say, "Fuel prices were a critical factor." Both would be reasonable valuations after the fact. But, dagnabbit, as an editor you have to make the "no big deal" versus "critical factor" choice today, before anyone actually knows how things will go. So you make an informed guess and go with it.

(There are other factors at work, of course. Saying that high fuel prices threaten to destroy the economy may be the more exciting option, regardless of the probabilities. Bad news sells newspapers and is, let's face it, more fun to tell. But most journalists are serious people who do not cynically slant their stories just to boost circulation, and to hell with the facts. I don't think they do that, anyway. Or not very much.)

Here is my thesis: the judgment that journalists and editors must make when choosing and assembling stories is essentially a prediction of the future. These people have a model in their heads about how things are likely to happen, and this influences how they cover present events.

Consider Iraq. News stories out of Iraq over the last couple of years have been pretty gloomy. On the other hand, most members of the US military who are actually in Iraq, or who have come back from Iraq, are optimistic about their mission. The news media sees a deteriorating situation. There are bombs all the time, and hundreds of people are killed each year. The political situation is fractious and teetering on the edge of civil war. US forces are showing the strain, over 2000 killed so far. Folks in the military reply something like this: The violence is mostly confined to a small part of the country. There are new local governments in place and three successful national elections in a year. There are new schools, new infrastructure, a tremendous revival of the Iraqi economy, etc. The bad guys have shifted their attacks from 'hard' targest (like US Marines, who shoot back) to 'soft' targets (like Iraqi schoolteachers, who don't) -- a definite sign of weakness, and a shift that is costing them dearly in popular support. The net result is that soldiers and marines are often astounded by the pessimistic cast of the coverage in the US media.

Of course, the real situation is complicated. Good and bad things are happening. Car bombs kill innocents, and new schools open at the same time. In a given week, suppose three car bombs go off and ten new schools open. The news media goes with the car bombs on page 1 and largely ignores the schools, because the reporters and editors generally believe that the bombs are more likely to be decisive to the long-term outcome of the Iraq war than the schools are. In other words, the media has guessed the end of the story already, and they are doing their best in their reporting to lay the groundwork for that ending, to better inform their readers.

If news judgments are made on the basis of a predictive model, an implicit forecast about the future course of events, then present events that do not conform to the model will appear to be "noise" and will to some extent be filtered out. This is done for the noble purpose of helping the reader "make sense" of events, but what it means in effect is that the news is automatically shaped to support the model. So the whole enterprise depends on the accuracy of the a priori model.

Where does the model come from? Some people think that it is just created out of personal biases, pure and simple. The predictive model is spun out of what the journalists want to happen, or fear will happen. I think that this view does disservice to the journalists. By and large, I think they try to base their predictive models on facts. And there's the rub. Because only a small fraction of the facts a reporter has comes from his own direct observation. The rest mostly comes from other media reports -- and these are shaped by the other predictive models of the other journalists.

Therefore, we would expect an arbitrage process at work among the models used by journalists who read one another. Reporter X believes that the economy will decline next year, and uses this judgment to select facts for a story about the weakening economy. This story is read by other journalists. They are more aware of the facts that X emphasizes and less aware of the facts that X filters out as "noise". This influences their own views. Pretty soon, the predictive models have a high level of agreement. Conventional wisdom is born -- not because anyone is consciously grinding an ideological axe, but because they have all developed the same conclusions from the reported facts. But of course, those facts have been selected for reportage precisely because they support a cluster of guesses about the future.

Ideology plays its role, of course, since it influences what future scenarios one finds plausible. The predictive models that the news media are using are not just facts or deductions from fact. And this is the place where the left-of-center politics of the journalists themselves can affect their coverage, in spite of their efforts to be fair-minded. They are not hypocrites with their thumbs on the scale, substituting partisan propoganda for unbiased reporting. They are just trying to help their readers understand and anticipate the world. They are as surprised as anybody when it doesn't work out the way they thought it would. But by that time, of course, it is no longer news.

The answer? Like most interesting problems, we can't fix it; we can only manage it better. The media should be more aware of, and skeptical of, its own set of predictive models. Journalists should say to themselves every morning, "I do not know how all this is going to come out." Because they don't, really. And they should be held accountable for their models. If a reporter spent early 2003 breathlessly reporting how the invasion of Iraq was going to lead to tens of thousands of US casualties in the first six months and a refugee crisis involving millions, then this should not be forgotten. (This is one of the best things that the blogosphere does -- and one of the things that the mainstream media finds most disconcerting.)

I want to conclude by mentioning two places where I think that the media are in fact a bit more culpable for bias. In the first place, I think that reporters have a less-than-defensible desire to fit the facts into a small number of pre-existing story templates. For instance, there are any number of reporters in Washington who are on the lookout for the Scandal That Brings Down Bush. After all, this is what happens to two-term presidents in the modern era. A huge scandal and cover-up in the second term always destroys or diminishes an administration: Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Iran-Contra, Clinton and Monica. It's a standard (and, for the news folks, highly profitable) format. So, like Californians feeling the start of a tremor, they look at each new story, however trivial, and wonder, "Is this the Big One?" The result is a lot of foolish hype of non-issues and, over time, the vague impression that the present administration is particularly scandal-ridden -- when, by historical standards, it is not.

Second, I think reporters are somewhat dishonest about what they are doing. On the one hand, they say that they want to "make a difference in the world" through their reporting. On the other hand, they also say that they stand apart and observe -- that their job is to cover events, not to influence them. The media loves its influence but cannot frankly admit to it, because its moral standing (such as it is) relies on being "outside the fray". Such doublethink can only promote other sorts of dishonesty and subterfuge, which opens another door to partisan bias.

This can get silly. A New York Times reporter recently stirred up controversy while working on a report about on-line child pornography. (Betsy Newmark notes, and comments, here.) The reporter met and spoke with a kid who was trapped in this world by predatory adults and a drug habit. The reporter went so far as to put the kid in touch with the authorities, which eventually led to the arrest of some pretty scummy people. The controversy was, of course, that the reporter had sacrificed his holy objectivity by intervening in the events he was covering. My naive reaction was, the better man he. And journalists are human beings (and, yes, citizens) before they are journalists.

Great moments in children's literature

2006-01-02T22:29:00.000-05:00

1. In Britain, the frequency of accidents involving children drops dramatically on the weekends when the latest Harry Potter books come out. J. K. Rowling actually has a significant effect on national health statistics.

2. Here is just what the world needs: a novelization of the movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (I saw this movie -- three times, in fact, which is once more than I saw King Kong. The Narnia movie really is quite amazingly well done. I can see why someone would think it could make a great book....)

3. And finally, there is a problem with certain copies of the talking book Potty Time with Elmo. Instead of asking, "Who wants to go to the potty?" (as in most copies), in these Elmo asks, "Who wants to die?" As a parent of two girls, thankfully long past potty training, I can't imagine that this helps.

("Hat tips", as they say, to Instapundit and to The Corner at NRO.)

BTW, sorry for my long absence. I've been using my writing time for other projects. But there will be many more posts here in 2006!

Announcements and experiments

2005-10-05T12:54:00.000-04:00

First, I have been getting some "blog spam" lately, probably attracted via the "atom" feed I've been experimenting with. My post this morning instantly attracted no fewer than four spammy comment messages. So for a while, until I get the whole thing straightened out, I'm disabling the comments on new posts (like this one). (But see Update below.)

Of course, you might want to send me a comment anyway. You can still do this at my "blog only" email account, which is "tewamu(AT)email(DOT)com". I will try to check this account every day or two. I will post here comments that I find particularly interesting, important or amusing. So here is the policy on the "tewamu" account: Unless you specify otherwise, I will feel free to post all or part of the content of your message (though not your email address) here.

Those of you who know my regular work-based email (which I will not post here, but which is pretty easy to find) can of course still use it to contact me, but I will not post the content of those messages without getting permission of the sender.

Now for the experiments. I have been investigating ways to include photos and other images on this blog. I'm starting out with an image (below) from our family vacation this August to Bolivia and Peru. This shows us at Machu Picchu. Left to right: yours truly, Carol, Glynis and Sarah. Machu Picchu is an amazing place, and no image can possibly hope to give more than a glimpse of its grandeur and strangeness.

The second image, shown here, is a beautiful shot that Glynis made just after dawn, when a bank of cloud blew over the ruins. If you click on the link, you can take a look at a higher-resolution version.

Hi-res (50 kB)

Our South American trip was quite an adventure, by the way. Along the way we ate llama, alpaca, guinea pig and quinoa; drank coca tea; met one of the guys who made the reed boats for Thor Heyerdahl; climbed around on many Inca and pre-Inca ruins; spent a while on Lake Titicaca; and generally had a grand ol' time. I intend to do some blogging about it when time and the muse permit.

Update: Commenter Aram has suggested that I use "word verification" on comments, which prevents automated systems from posting. I have done this. Thanks, Aram! This will add a step to posting a comment, but this should solve the problem. I am also maintaining the "tewamu" email address for a more private direct comment capability.

October is the cruelest month

2005-10-05T07:26:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again, alas. Yesterday I received the annual e-mail from my brother, the Lutheran theologian:

Dear Ben,

Well, here we go again. Our sad yearly ritual of commiseration. I have heard that you did not get that phone call from Sweden yet again, and I am, for lack of a better word, devastated.

Devastated and bitter. the Swedes were such staunch defenders of the Lutheran Reformation during the Thirty Years War (what some places in Bavaria still call "The Swedish War"). But since then it has been pretty bleak and paltry stuff, mostly. And their country looks like Minnesota. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I guess, but you can't expect terrain like that to breed heroes, or wise judges.

So the prize goes to, what, optics!? How lame. Dress it up and call it frequency combing if you must, but it still sounds like flashlights and laser tag to me. I am not impressed, and I believe the American people are not impressed, either. I'm not suggesting any military options at this point -- but all options for action are on the table. We probably won't go to war with Sweden over this (can you go to war with a country as passive and bland as modern Sweden? I doubt it.). But wrongs must be righted, and someday, somehow, this one will be.

I hope I get invited to the party!

Will

To which I answered:

Will:

Your condolences are, as always, no comfort whatsoever. It's all a racket you know. Oh yeah, Glauber may have invented the whole coherent state formalism for quantum optics. Sure, sure, we all have to study his papers in grad school. Let me tell you, it's just a fad, a momentary forty-year hiccup of quantum mechanics fashion. And of course the Nobel committee is always hung up on the newest new thing. Putzes.

And don't get me started on the other guys, Hall and whats-his-name. Who cares if you can make fundamental measurements to fifteen significant figures? Sheesh. My calculator doesn't even have that many digits.

Well, at least it wasn't as bad as last year. Quark confinement! As if anyone were interested in knowing why protons and neutrons hold together. At least this year the laureates were talking about photons and things. I've actually mentioned photons in some of my papers -- one or two, anyway. That makes me a photon guy too! So why not give some of the prize to me? I mean, I'm not bitter or anything, but when it comes right down to it, why not?

I do appreciate your tact, though. Just such a delicacy of feeling kept me from bringing up the shocking travesty that the Templeton Prize people perpetrated last March, when they passed you over and gave their lousy 1.5 million bucks to . . . well, to a physicist. Again. For the seventh time. (OK, eighth time if you count Stanley Jaki.) Creeps.

Better luck (to us both) next year,

Ben

And this morning comes his reply:

Thanks a lot for mentioning the Templeton thing. Sheesh. I was just getting over it.

Well, we must bear life's disappointments. At least the Cards are in the playoffs. For the rest of us, there is always next season.

Word from Al Anbar

2005-10-04T23:41:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer I drove down to Anapolis to see the wedding of one of my former students. She was marrying a Marine lieutenant, a graduate of the Naval Academy. The ceremony was held in the Academy Chapel and followed by a banquet over in Alumni Hall. All in all, a most impressive occasion.

When you're a teacher, you try not to have favorites, but of course you have them anyway. Jada is one of mine. She was a physics/philosophy double major here, graduated top in her class, after which she went off to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. Jada is a person of deep faith, sharp wits and a highly developed sense of fun -- a nice combination. And her husband Tim, who was also a Marshall Scholar, seems cast out of the same stuff, with plenty of Marine-grade steel added to the mix. I have only met him once, on the day of the wedding, but I guess I'd have to include him among my favorites as well.

Jada has now started her Ph.D. work at Princeton in philosophy of physics, and Tim has now deployed back to Iraq for a second tour there. A few days ago he sent an email to various friends and relatives with some news about how things are going. He reports some similarities and some differences from his last deployment eight months ago.

Similarities:

What has not changed is the experience of the five senses in this country. The potent stench of sewer and garbage continues to pervade the urban areas. The sight of the barren, endless desert that surrounds the villages certainly is the same here as it is near Falluja. The early morning song-chant of the call to prayer and the whistle from an incoming mortar or rocket continue to be all-too-familiar sounds. The feel of 50 pounds of gear on your shoulders at the end of a three-hour foot patrol in 100+ degree temperatures certainly has not changed. (If anything, that gear seems to be feeling even heavier!)

The insurgency continues to be active within the Al Anbar province. This area is still a dangerous place for both US and Iraqi Forces working to thwart the insurgency. The challenge is staying one step ahead of the insurgents so that they are kept off-balance in their attempts to intimidate the local populace and inflict harm on Coalition Forces.

A taxing tension persists for Iraqi citizens, hamstrung between ruthless insurgents and the daunting presence of US Marines. The long-term solution remains the same: increase the Iraqi security forces' responsibility in providing security for their own populace.

Differences:

The Iraqi Army has made significant progress over the last year. For the first three months of our last deployment, we did not train or work with indigenous forces. Now we are patrolling on a daily basis with proficient, capable Iraqi soldiers. Progress is certainly being made, but patience continues to be a virtue in the development of Iraqi security forces.

As Marines, we have learned much from our experiences in Iraq; so have the insurgents. The enemy we fight is smart and adaptive. The lethality of IEDs and VBIEDs (car bombs) has certainly increased in the past year.

A few years down the road, when tourism picks up in Iraq, I highly recommend visiting in the fall instead of the summer. Words cannot express how great it is to be avoiding June, July, and August this time around. I certainly do not miss temperatures in the 130s!

Today I hear from Jada that Tim is part of Operation River Gate, the new offensive to seize control of three Euphrates River towns from Al Qaeda. So for a while, he will be in some of the hottest fighting in that whole theater of war. God shield him.

You know, we are sending some of our best over to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight this war. That is a thought that fills me with admiration, pride, confidence, and (yes) a little apprehension. This is serious business. It's a good thing to keep people like Tim and Jada in mind -- and in your prayers, if you say any. And it is a good thing to remember how terribly important it is that we prevail.

Moments of truth

2005-09-22T10:25:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about the portrayal of scientists in movies. Sure, we all know the stereotypes:

Wise and gentle sage (e.g., Sam Jaffe in The Day the Earth Stood Still)
Nerdy magician who spouts technobabble and maybe comes up with the brilliant idea that saves the day (e.g., Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters)
Harmless absent-minded nebbish guy who lives in a fog (e.g., Ian McKellen in The Shadow)
Driven obsessed genius who, perhaps unwittingly, unleashes terrible forces (William Hurt in Altered States -- or almost anybody playing Dr. Frankenstein)
Evil ruthless madman intent on destroying/conquering/transforming the world (Lawrence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- or for that matter, Dr. Evil)

The stereotypes do not bother me. For heaven's sake, these are movies -- and most of the ones I've listed are pretty good movies, too. The Hollywood portrayal of soldiers or cops or doctors or housewives is doubtless no better. And when movies try to avoid the stereotypes, all too often they fail to convince us that the characters are scientists at all. (As an example, as I've mentioned before, this pretty much sums up my reaction to Darryl Hannah as an astrophysicist in Roxanne. Great movie, lovely actress, but . . . well, no. Just no.)

What intrigues me is when, somehow, the movie-makers seem to get it right. I may only be talking about a single moment -- a flash, only a few seconds -- which can make me think, "Yes. That's right. That is how they would act. That's how it would be."

In George Pal's 1953 version of War of the Worlds, the hero (played by Gene Barry) is a famous physicist from a thinly disguised Caltech. This is not a great film, but it is a better-than-average 1950's science fiction movie and quite watchable. (For the record, I also liked Spielberg's recent treatment of the story, which was in many ways closer to H. G. Wells's original story.) One of my favorite things in the movie is a quick moment near the beginning, when Gene Barry first examines the giant object that has fallen onto a remote area of California. He happens to have a geiger detector in his truck, and he learns that the "meteorite" is radioactive. And his reaction is to smile a little. "Difficult to account for a reaction like that," he remarks.

And to my mind, that reaction is exactly right. There is a sense of wonder and delight, a deep happiness that the Universe has produced something so wacky and interesting. Later, things become deadly serious, and the acting gets a bit ponderous. But just for a second, you get a glimpse of what makes this guy a scientist. Perfect.

The moment in Jurassic Park (1993) when the paleontologist Sam Neill (and the audience) first see the dinosaurs is, for me, one of the most magical moments in any film. And Neill's reaction is just wonderful, I think. First, he just stares with an open mouth at the giant brachiosaur munching on the trees. He babbles a little incoherently. Then he hears that the Park has a T. Rex, and this is just too much for him. He collapses on the ground and almost passes out. And then he sees some sauropods and hadrosaurs over by the lake. "They're moving in herds," he says. "They do move in herds." In that moment, you can glimpse the wonder and fulfillment he is feeling -- fulfillment because he has spent his whole life thinking of dinosaurs, dreaming of dinosaurs, trying to use bits of fossil bone to imagine them as the living creatures they were, and suddenly there they are in front of him.

I confess that this scene regularly brings tears to my eyes.

There are a handful of decent "biopics" about great scientists. An old classic is Madame Curie (1943), with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon as Marie and Pierre. I caught this on TV a few months ago, and was surprised by how good it was. (OK, sure, I do have a long-standing thing about Greer Garson; but seriously, it's quite a movie.) On the surface, Marie and Pierre try to be so cool and rational, but in fact they are driven by passion: an intellectual passion for scientific discovery, and finally something more romantic for each other. Their relationship is wonderfully drawn, and the science -- especially the dramatization of the experiments that led them to predict the existence of radium -- is not too bad, really.

There is a cool scene in the altogether fascinating movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) where Russell Crowe, playing John Nash, is in a bar with his friends, trying to hit up girls and get laid. And he analyzes the situation using game theory and comes up with an insight that foreshadows his great work in equilibria. I think that this is one of the best scenes in any movie depicting a character having a brilliant abstract idea. But that is a subject that is not much covered in movies.

(I do have a parallel case, though. Robert Harris's novel Enigma is about the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. It was made into a pretty good movie in 2001 with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. There is a scene in which the protagonist, a fictional mathematician and protege of Alan Turing, figures out how to "crack" the U-Boat Enigma cipher, which is terrific in the book and not bad in the movie. The key moment of insight is convincingly brilliant and is explained beautifully.)

One of my favorite movies is Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966). Paul Newman plays an American physicist working on missile defense who apparently defects and goes behind the Iron Curtain. But the defection is a ruse. The American project is stuck on a theoretical problem that, he believes, has been solved by an East German scientist. And my favorite scene in the movie is a scene between Newman and the East German professor in the professor's blackboard-lined office. Newman tries to get the information he needs by drawing the other man into a scientific argument. (The equations they write are either trivial or nonsensical, as usual, but it is a cool scene nonetheless.)

I'm not sure that this scene would really count as "Hollywood getting it right about what it's like to be a scientist", except for one personal experience. There is a Russian mathematician who was one of the pioneers in my field of quantum information theory, two decades before it became a recognized subject. I had first learned of his work in graduate school and based much of my Ph.D. thesis on it. For years, the Russian was a distant presence in the back of my mind. I read his papers with keen interest. When I heard through mutual acquaintances that he thought one of my ideas "very clever", I felt a frisson of pride and amazement that the great man even knew what I was up to. The Russian and I often wound up working on the same things -- indeed, we nearly simultaneously published independent solutions of one long-standing problem.

Yet the Russian and I never met till a summer workshop in Cambridge. By that time we were both again working on the same really hard problem (still unsolved today). So on the day we met, we went into an empty lecture hall -- the one in which Andrew Wiles had recently announced the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem -- and the two of us spent an hour or so alone exchanging information about our progress. I would explain something I'd discovered, he would describe some of his unpublished calculations, and so on, back and forth. And I suddenly thought, Oh my Lord, I am in that scene from Torn Curtain. Except that we weren't talking about miliary secrets, my colleague from Russia is a really nice and helpful fellow, neither of us was trying to deceive or outwit the other one, I'm nothing like Paul Newman, and Julie Andrews was not waiting downstairs to escape with me back to the West. But aside from those details, yeah, it was pretty much the same, exactly.

It seems to me, looking over this quick list, that what I am looking for is some portrayal of the inner passion that drives a scientist to do science -- what Einstein called "the holy curiosity" about the world, the intense excitement of discovery, the deep love of pattern, the exciting give and take with other sharp minds. Why else does someone become a scientist? And aren't those passions and experiences essential elements of a truly drawn character?

Not dead yet

2005-09-19T11:14:00.000-04:00

For various reasons -- other writing work, a really interesting summer research project with a student, a couple of trips to the Southern Hemisphere -- I have let ZOA languish for the summer. My apologies to friends and other readers. But my plan is to revive this project and start posting once more, beginning in the next few days. Watch this space.