The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Win Bear’s brooding is interrupted by a priority call:

“Five Charlie Nineteen, respond Code Three, possible homicide, southwest corner of Sixteenth and Gaylord.”

…I threw the papers on the backseat and started the engine. It coughed asthmatically and a surge of adrenalin washed through me as it caught.

…Four scuffed black-and-whites straddled the street, their lightbars blinking round and round by a littered curb fronting a crumbling neighborhood mosque that had seen previous duty as a Mexican Catholic church.

…A body lay half-propped against the wall, blood streaming across cracked cement into the gutter. “What do we have here?” I asked the patrol sergeant. “Another VN-Arab rumble?” He shook his head and I remembered with embarrassment that he was an Arab himself. “Sorry, Moghrabi – just a bad day today.”

This is the kind of interesting small detail that, alas, never gets any followup. Are we supposed to view this in a positive light, that society has become more diverse and multicultural despite government oppression? Or are we meant to infer – as many Christian nationalists and white supremacists fear – that one reason for this dystopian world is that Christianity has faded away and Muslim immigrants have “taken over” the country?

Win’s courteous treatment of an Arab officer suggests that Smith wasn’t trying to portray non-white cultures negatively. Then again, every racist boasts about having a minority friend who’s one of the good ones.

Police technicians are examining the body of the victim, who was killed in a drive-by shooting:

The victim – late twenties – lay clutching his middle, as if to keep his guts from falling out. He had good reason to try, stitched from hip to shoulder the way he was. A gap in the closely grouped pockmarks on the wall above said he had fallen where he’d been shot. In one outstretched hand was a stainless-steel snubbie. No punk’s gun, anyway. A Bianchi holster identical to mine was exposed by his blood-soaked jacket.

Win inspects the gun in the dead man’s hand. He shot back at whoever attacked him, but doesn’t seem to have killed anyone:

I got an okay from the video techs, bent over the body, and gently pried the revolver from its stiffening fingers. Ruger Security Six, like I’d figured. I opened the cylinder; dimples in four of the primers twinkled up at me. Four shots fired, Norma .357 hollowpoints. If any had connected, we’d be finding another corpse, possibly in worse shape than this one.

However, he notices broken glass in the street, and some of the shards have blood on them. He tells the officers that whatever car the fatal shots were fired from, it will have broken windows and the shooter will be injured.

As for the victim:

His travel permit said he was one Meiss, Vaughn L., from Fort Collins, sixty miles to the north. His work assignment: Colorado State University. As a Ph.D. on the Physics faculty, he rated his own wheels and the fuel to roll them.

Travel permits are standard dystopian stuff. What I find interesting is the implication is that scientists are given privileges not available to the rest of the population.

What kind of dystopia is this, anyway? Is it a plain military dictatorship where the government rules by force, with no aim beyond perpetuating itself? Or is it an elitist technocracy run by intellectuals and academics?

Yet again, Smith spends very little time answering these questions. We’re soon to be whisked out of this world, never to return. I don’t think it’s a leap to guess that, because he was opposed to all government on principle, he was uninterested in the distinctions among them and how one kind might be better or worse than another.

As Win is inspecting the crime scene, he hears a familiar – and unwelcome – voice:

I turned resignedly to confront Oscar Burgess, several years my senior and small-arms instructor during my academy days. While I had slogged from rookie to patrolman, from investigator to homicide lieutenant, he’d left CLETA for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms during its heyday in the early eighties, and now was Denver station chief for the Federal Security Police.

The years had only refined our mutual distaste. Where I was… let’s say “heavy set,” he was gray and lean, cat-fast, with a frightening moon-map of a face, the hideous legacy of minipox. Behind him, his crew in fresh-creased jumpsuits brandished automatic shotguns. Their unit crest was emblazoned on the side of a black and scarlet van: a mailed fist grasping the naked edges of a dagger, blood creeping out between the fingers.

No prize is awarded for guessing that Burgess is a villain. What’s more worthy of note is Smith’s offhand mention of his scarred face and a disease called minipox. (Does he think socialism creates disease?)

When this book was written, novel pandemics were a distant memory. Ideologues of all kinds could proclaim what they’d do in case of a deadly new disease, safe in the confidence that their theories would never be put to the test. Unfortunately, all of us who lived through 2020 now have hard-won experience of what works and what doesn’t.

At the beginning of COVID-19, our only weapon against the virus was lockdowns. Governments around the world told citizens to stay at home; to close nonessential businesses; to restrict visitors at hospitals and nursing homes; to skip travel, wear masks, practice social distancing, and meet outdoors. All these measures were intended to slow the spread of the virus so that scientists would have time to create treatments.

As unpopular as the lockdowns were, they worked. They didn’t stop the virus entirely – COVID was too contagious for that – but they saved thousands of vulnerable people. They bought precious time for us to figure out how to treat the sick and, ultimately, to create vaccines. (A strong line of evidence for lockdowns is that one strain of flu virus went extinct because of them.)

The alternative was letting the virus rip, which would’ve resulted in a tsunami of infection where everyone got sick all at once. That would have been a much bigger catastrophe. It would have overwhelmed hospitals, leading to the collapse of health systems and the deaths of many people who could have been saved if they’d gotten medical attention.

How would an anarcho-libertarian world respond to a pandemic? The only option open to them would be the let-it-rip scenario. That would remain true even in case of a novel virus that was even deadlier or more debilitating than COVID. Are millions of deaths, widespread chaos and economies disintegrating just the price of freedom?

Pandemics are the essence of a collective-action problem. Viruses ignore the social constructs we invent to divide people; they cross property and class lines with impunity. We can only protect ourselves against collective threats by admitting that, sometimes, we have to accept temporary restrictions on liberty for the greater good. That may be quarantines to fight disease, or blackout orders in wartime, or mandatory evacuations in case of natural disaster. Either way, it’s a lesson that libertarians don’t want to learn.