The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (28 page)

RISK ASSESSMENT

This one was written for Jack Williamson.

Jack was probably the most beloved writer in the science-fiction field, the dean of us all, whose first short story was published in 1928. He was a truly gentle man and a fine writer.

To celebrate his more than sixty years as a published writer, Jack’s friends put together an anthology of stories, all written on themes that Jack himself has used in his long and productive career.

I was asked to contribute a story to the anthology, and “Risk Assessment” is the result. If you are unfortunate enough to be unfamiliar with Jack Williamson’s work, all I can say (aside from urging you to read his fiction) is that he was among the very earliest writers to deal with antimatter, which he called “contraterrene” matter, or seetee. This was at a time when the concept of antimatter was a new and startling idea to theoretical physicists such as P.A.M. Dirac, Fermi, Einstein, and that crowd.

Two stories about Jack:

For many years, Jack was a professor of English at the University of Eastern New Mexico, in Portales. When he reached retirement age, he retired. Not surprising, you might think. But I received a nearly frantic phone call from a group of his students (I was editing
Analog
magazine in New York then) who told me that they thought the university’s administration was “forcing” Professor Williamson into retirement, and they wanted me to do something about it!

The first thing I did was to call Jack. “Forcing me?” Jack laughed. “Goodness, no. I’m very happy to retire from teaching. Now I can write full-time.”

How many professors have been so revered by their students that the students don’t want them to retire?

Second story:

I visited Jack in Portales one year during the time for the spring calf roundup. We drove out to the ranch where the roundup was taking place that weekend, and watched the local cowhands and teenagers at work. It was a hot, bloody, dusty scene. The calves were separated from their mothers, dehorned, the males deballed, all of the calves branded and shot with about a quart of penicillin apiece. There was bleating and mooing and horses and roping and the stench of burnt hides and lots of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

As we leaned against the corral railing, watching all this hard work and suffering, Jack nudged me in the ribs. “See why I became a writer?” he asked softly.

I nodded. I’d much rather sweat over a keyboard than rope a calf, any day.

* * *

They are little more than children, thought Alpha One, self-centered, emotional children sent by their elders to take the responsibilities that the elders themselves do not want to bother with.

Sitting at Alpha One’s right was Cordelia Thomasina Shockley, whom the human male called Delia. Red-haired and impetuous, brilliant and driven, her decisions seemed to be based as much on emotional tides as logical calculation.

The third entity in the conference chamber was Martin Flagg, deeply solemn, intensely grave. He behaved as if he truly believed his decisions were rational, and not at all influenced by the hormonal cascades surging through his endocrine system.

“This experiment must be stopped,” Martin Flagg said firmly.

Delia thought he was handsome, in a rugged sort of way. Not terribly tall, but broad in the shoulder and flat in the middle. Nicely muscular. Big dimple in the middle of his stubborn chin. Heavenly deep blue eyes. When he smiled his whole face lit up, and somehow that lit up Delia’s heart. But it had been a long time since she’d seen him smile.

“Why must the experiment be stopped?” asked the robot avatar of Alpha One.

It folded its mechanical arms over its cermet chest, in imitation of the human gesture. Its humanform face was incapable of showing any emotion, however. It merely stared at Martin Flagg out of its optical sensors, waiting for him to go on.

“What Delia’s doing is not only foolish, it’s wasteful. And dangerous.”

“How so?” asked Alpha One, with the patience that only a computer possessed.

The human male was almost trembling with agitation. “You don’t think a few hundred megatons of energy is dangerous?”

Delia said coolly, “Not when it’s properly contained, Marty. And it is properly contained, of course.”

Alpha One knew that Delia had two interlinked personality flaws: a difficulty in taking criticism seriously and an absolute refusal to accept anyone else’s point of view. Like her auburn hair and opalescent eyes, she had inherited those flaws from her mother. From her father she had inherited one of the largest fortunes in the inner solar system. He had also bequeathed her his incredibly dogged stubbornness, the total inability to back away from a challenge. And the antimatter project.

Marty was getting red in the face. “Suppose you lose containment?” he asked Delia. “What then?”

“I won’t.”

Turning to the robot, Marty repeated, “What if she loses containment?”

Alpha One’s prime responsibility was risk assessment. Here on the Moon it was incredibly easy for a mistake to kill humans. So the computer quickly ran through all the assessments it had made to date of C. T. Shockley’s antimatter project, a task that took four microseconds, then had its robot avatar reply to Flagg.

Calmly, Alpha One replied, “If the apparatus loses containment, then our seismologists will obtain interesting new data on the Moon’s deep structure.” Its voice was a smooth computer synthesis issuing from the horizontal grill where a human’s mouth would be.

Martin Flagg was far from pleased. “Is that all that your germanium brain cares about? What about the loss of human life?”

Alpha One was totally unperturbed. Its brain was composed mainly of optical filaments, not germanium. “The nearest human settlement is at Clavius,” it said. “There is no danger to human life.”

“Her life!”

Alpha One turned to see Delia’s reaction. A warm flush colored her cheeks, an involuntary physical reaction to her realization that Flagg was worried about her safety.

The human form of the robot was a concession to human needs. The robot was merely one of thousands of avatars of Alpha One, the master computer that monitored every city, every habitat, every vehicle, factory and mining outpost on the Moon. Almost a century ago the pioneer lunar settlers had learned, through bitter experience, that the computer’s rational and incorruptible decisions were far sounder—and safer—than the emotionally biased decisions made by men and women.

But the humans were unwilling to allow a computer, no matter how wise and rational, to have complete control over them. The Lunar Council, therefore, was founded as a triumvirate: the Moon was ruled by one man, one woman, and Alpha One. Yet, over the years, the lunar citizens did their best to avoid the duty of serving on the Council. The task was handed to the young, those who had enough idealism to serve, or those who did not have enough experience to evade the responsibility.

Children, Alpha One repeated to itself. As human life spans extend toward the two-century mark, their childhoods lengthen also. Physically they are mature adults, yet emotionally they are still spoiled children.

Martin Flagg was the human male member of the triumvirate. C. T. Shockley was the female. Marty was the youngest human ever elected to the triumvirate. Except for Delia.

The three of them were sitting in the plush high-backed chairs of the Council’s private conference room, in the city of Selene, dug into the ringwall mountains of the giant crater Alphonsus. Flagg glared at Delia from his side of the triangular table. Delia smiled saucily at him. She knew she shouldn’t antagonize him, but she couldn’t help it. Delia did not want to be here; she wanted to be at her remote laboratory in the crater Newton, near the lunar south pole. But Marty had insisted on her physical appearance at this meeting: no holographic presence, no virtual-reality attendance.

“This experiment must be stopped,” Flagg repeated. He was stubborn, too.

“Why?” asked the robot, in its maddeningly calm manner.

Obviously struggling to control his temper, Flagg leaned forward in his chair and ticked off on his fingers: “One, she is using valuable resources—”

“That I’m paying for out of my own pocket.” But the pocket was becoming threadbare, she knew. The Shockley family fortune, big as it might have been, was running low. Delia knew she’d have to succeed tomorrow or give it all up.

Flagg scowled at her, then turned back to the robot. “Two, she is endangering human life.”

“Only my own,” Delia said sweetly.

The robot checked its risk assessments again and said, “She is entirely within her legal rights.”

“Three, her crazy experiment hasn’t been sanctioned by the Science Committee.”

“I don’t need the approval of those nine old farts,” Delia snapped.

The robot seemed to incline its head briefly, as if nodding. “Under ordinary circumstances it would be necessary to obtain the Science Committee’s permission for such an experiment, that is true.”

“Ah-hah!” Flagg grinned maliciously.

“But that is because researchers seek to obtain funding grants from the Committee. Shockley is using her own money. She needs neither funding nor permission, so long as she does not present an undue risk to other humans.”

Flagg closed his eyes briefly. Delia thought he was about to admit defeat. But then he played his trump.

“And what about her plans to use all the power capacity of all the solar collector systems on the Moon? Plus all the sunsats in cislunar space?”

“I only need their output for one minute,” Delia said.

“What happens if there’s an emergency during that one minute?” Flagg demanded, almost angrily. “What happens if the backups fail at Clavius, or Copernicus, or even here in Selene? Do you have any idea of how much the emergency backup capacity has lagged behind actual power demand?”

“I have those figures,” Alpha One said. “There is a point-zero-four probability that the backup system at Selene will be unable to meet all the demands made on it during that one minute that the solar generators are taken off-line. There is a point-zero-two probability that the backup system at Copernicus—”

“All right, all right,” Flagg interrupted impatiently. “What do we do if there’s a failure of the backup system while the main power grid is off-line?”

“Put the solar generators back on-line immediately. The switching can be accomplished in six to ten milliseconds.”

Delia felt suddenly alarmed. “But that would ruin the experiment! It could blow up!”

“That would be unfortunate, but unavoidable. It is a risk that you must assume.”

Delia thought it over for all of half a second, then gritted her teeth and nodded. “Okay, I accept the risk.”

“Wait a minute,” Flagg said to the robot. “You’re missing the point. Why does she need all that power?”

“To generate antiprotons, of course,” Delia answered. Marty knew that, she told herself. Why is he asking the obvious?

“But you already have the energy equivalent of more than a hundred megatons worth of antiprotons, don’t you?”

“Sure, but I need thirty tons of them.”

“Thirty tons?” Marty’s voice jumped an octave. “Of antiprotons? Thirty tons by mass?”

Delia nodded nonchalantly while Alpha One restarted its risk assessment calculations. Thirty tons of antiprotons was a new data point, never revealed to the Council before.

“Why do you need thirty tons of antiprotons?” Alpha One asked, even while its new risk assessment was proceeding.

“To drive the starship to Alpha Centauri and back,” Delia replied, as if it were the most obvious fact in the universe.

“You intend to fly to Alpha Centauri on a ship that has never been tested?” Alpha One asked. “The antimatter propulsion system alone—”

“We’ve done all the calculations,” Delia interrupted, annoyance knitting her brows. “The simulations all check out fine.”

If Alpha One could have felt dismay or irritation at its own limitations, it would have at that moment. Shockley intended to fly her father’s ship to Alpha Centauri. This was new data, but it should have been anticipated. Why else would she have been amassing antimatter? A subroutine in its intricate programming pointed out that it was reasonable to assume that she would want to test the antimatter-propulsion system first, to see that it actually performed as calculated before risking the flight. After all, no one had operated an antimatter drive as yet. No one has tried for the stars.

“What’s thirty tons of antiprotons equal to in energy potential?” Flagg asked.

Instantly, Alpha One calculated, “Approximately one million megatons of energy.”

“And if that much energy explodes?”

Alpha One was incapable of showing emotion, of course. But it hesitated, just for a fraction of a second. The silence was awesome. Then the robot’s head swivelled slowly toward Delia, levelling its dark glassy optical sensors at her.

“An explosion of that magnitude could perturb the orbit of the Moon.”

“It could cause a moonquake that would destroy Clavius, at the very least,” Flagg said. “Smash Selene and even Copernicus, wouldn’t it?”

“Indeed,” said Alpha One. The single word stung Delia like a whip.

“Now do you see why she’s got to be stopped?”

“Indeed,” the robot repeated.

Delia shook her head, as if to clear away the pain. “But there won’t be any explosion,” she insisted. “I know what I’m doing. All the calculations show—”

“The risk is not allowable,” Alpha One said firmly. “You must stop your experiment.”

“I will not!” Delia snapped.

It took Alpha One less than three milliseconds to check this new data once again, and then compare it against the safety regulations that ruled every decision-making tree, and still again check it against the consequences of Delia’s project if it should be successful. Yet although it weighed the probabilities and made its decision that swiftly, it did not speak.

Alpha One had learned one thing in its years of dealing with humans: the less they are told, the less they have to argue about.

And the two humans already had plenty to argue over.