The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Deejay and Ooloorie, the human and dolphin (respectively) scientists who built the Probability Broach, fill in the details that Win Bear was seeking about how they came to be in contact with Vaughn Meiss, the murdered scientist from his own universe.

They explain that they wanted to establish contact with Win’s world. They needed help from someone on the other side to do it, because (obligatory technobabble!) “power consumption would fall ten thousandfold if we could establish a resonant field”.

However, they had some misgivings about this. From their perspective, Win’s world was populated by “primitives [who] will gladly murder anyone desiring independence from a coercive state”. Worse, as Oolorie says, “Your culture is ahead of ours only in its ability to wage nuclear war”.

The only exceptions they came across were Vaughn Meiss and his allies in the Propertarian Party, whom Win met early on in the book. Recognizing Meiss as a kindred spirit, they sent him a manuscript explaining the basics of the Probability Broach. Meiss, who’s a libertarian and therefore a supergenius, began constructing his own version.

There was one other thing that Deejay and Ooloorie worried about: namely, what happens if “the field collaps[es] on an occlusion”. To show Win and his friends what they mean, they demonstrate with a desktop-sized classroom model:

POP! A blue flash at the center of the contraption reminded me of high-school tricks with hydrogen. “What you saw,” Ooloorie lectured, “was a few air molecules interpenetrating the theoretical junction between two worlds. When the interface ceases to exist so do they—or try to.”

In other words, if the portal closes while something is halfway through, you don’t get a portal cut, as is common in sci-fi. You get an explosion. And the more mass there is in the portal, the bigger the bang. (Obligatory foreshadowing!)

But, again, they set safety considerations aside and continued their work. Meiss progressed with his experiments, and they were expecting to hear from him—until their side of the portal unexpectedly blew up.

That was due to Win’s interference, as they figure out. While he was examining Meiss’ lab as part of investigating his murder, the (obligatory!) jackbooted government thugs burst in with guns blazing. In the struggle, Win accidentally switched on the machine and stumbled through the portal. But when the goons tried to come after him, the field overloaded and collapsed.

That was the explosion that flung Win into the North American Confederacy, bloody and concussed. But Deejay and Oolorie have unwelcome news for him:

“And recall, my brilliant colleague,” said the fishbowl in the wheelchair, “that the effect is not symmetrical!”

Deejay paled. “Ooloorie, I hadn’t thought of that at all!”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded…

“Oh, Win, you were afraid your world might not still exist. Ooloorie’s saying that the force of the explosion isn’t symmetrical, it depends on the distribution of the interrupting mass… the little bang that tossed you over the hedge was part of a much bigger bang on the other side!”

Win, reasonably, demands to know just how much bigger. They do the math on what would happen if the Broach closed while a person was midway through. They say it depends on how much of his body was on which side of the portal:

“Suppose… it was just his feet?”

“About the same as our explosion here, one to five microtons—about two ounces of pistol powder,” Ooloorie estimated.

“And—uh—if only his head made it through?”

“A thousand megatons, possibly more.” Perhaps her thrashing was a sign that she was upset, too. If the original explosion hadn’t done the job, certainly NORAD would have interpreted it as an attack: World War III, the end of the Earth I knew.

A thousand megatons. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated, had a yield of fifty megatons.

The Probability Broach isn’t a bridge for traveling between worlds. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.

The Manhattan Project to enrich uranium for the first atomic bomb was the biggest industrial operation in human history up till that point. It cost billions of dollars and required the labor of over 100,000 people. Even today, coordinated industrial effort on this scale is beyond the capabilities of most countries.

For purposes of his fiction, L. Neil Smith is postulating a far more destructive weapon. And not only is it one that a single individual can build by himself, it’s one that’s easily set off by accident.

This begs a question which Smith never considers: Shouldn’t there be someone whose job it is to be concerned about stuff like this?

Deejay and Ooloorie have built a civilization-ending doomsday device in their lab with zero oversight. Whoever’s funding their research either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. No one asks any questions about what they’re doing, no one raises any concerns, no one tries to stop them. No board of ethics is convened to decide what should or shouldn’t be done with this technology. No safety inspector checks if they’re being appropriately cautious, or if they’re cutting corners. (The only thing that does concern the higher-ups, apparently, is how much it costs to run.)

In our world, if you try to build a homebrew nuclear reactor in your backyard, very serious people are going to show up and ask some questions. In the NAC, there’s no government, so there’s no federal agency that can swoop in to shut you down if you’re doing an unacceptably dangerous experiment. Nor are there any laws dictating how something so destructive should be handled.

Apparently, the Broach is considered the property of the scientists who built it, and they can dispose of it how they see fit. If they want to sell it to the highest bidder, they can. If they want to hand out the blueprints to hobbyists and dilettantes who may or may not be able to copy it safely (which is essentially what they did), they can do that too.

I suspect L. Neil Smith just didn’t think through the implications of this, but it’s unintentionally fitting for his anarcho-capitalist world. In the North American Confederacy, anyone can build a WMD and do whatever they please with it. You can cook up chemical weapons, brew biological warfare agents, assemble pocket nukes, or cobble together mad-science superweapons.

Because there’s no oversight and no law enforcement, you just have to trust that everyone has only good intentions, knows what they’re doing, won’t compromise their ethics, and won’t make any serious mistakes. To which I say, have you met humans? It’s only by the grace of the author that this society hasn’t blown itself back to the stone age.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach