Worlds Apart (16 page)

“Anyhow, your ideal-case analysis would rank those people in terms of desirability. I suppose the practical way would be to take a consensus. Grind out a number for each one that reflects how indispensable each skill is from our aggregate point of view. You see where I’m going?” There was a general murmur of assent.

“Then you take and ask the computer for an actuarial analysis on each individual case: what is the probability that each person will live for ten years? Someone’s gonna die, you want to move him up the list. So you divide the rank factor by this actuarial fraction, which gives you a
new rank number. Kapeesh?”

John Ogelby laughed. “You just bought yourself a cabinetmaker, Eliot. You’re treating it as if age and probable, desirability were stochastically independent. That’s not the case.”

“Christ, Ogelby.” He tapped a plastic hand against a plastic leg. “If you weren’t so pretty you’d be dangerous.”

Marcus sighed in exasperation. “Will someone please translate that into some human language?”

“My pleasure,” O’Hara said, trying to repress an evil grin. “Most of the old-time professions, the ones that would be most useful in a planetary environment naturally would belong to people who were born on Earth. There were almost no tourists in New New at the time of the war, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Trade sanctions.”

“Well, then. There are only two classes of groundhogs left in New New: renegades like Quasimodo there, who had become Worlds citizens, and old folks or sick ones who were stuck; couldn’t risk the trip back. Cabinetmakers among them.

“Now Eliot proposes a situation where people will more or less be taken in reverse order of life expectancy. So you’re going to get a disproportionate number of old coots who know how to repair gasoline engines and chip flint into arrowheads. That’s what you mean, John?”

The hunchback blew her a kiss. “Not bad for a history major.”

“Right,” Eliot said. “So now you’ve got this new ranking. Buggy-whip sharpeners and all. What we’re looking for is a sense of the cost-effectiveness associated with each number of machines—but keeping in mind the mortality factor. Too few machines and we’re gonna lose data; how much are those data worth?

“Now this is what I’d like O’Hara to do. I wouldn’t mind taking out a couple of hours looking over her list and ranking these professions. Anybody too pressed for
time to do that?” He looked around the room. “Good. O’Hara can route it to us and give us a deadline. Say we just assign a number from zero to a hundred to each job. Then she takes and normalizes?” He looked at O’Hara.

“Sure,” she said. “Divide each number by the contributor’s average response, mean response, and then apply the actuarial factor.”

“Zeros, dear,” Ogelby said, “Divide zero all day and it still comes out zero.”

“I’ll work it out somehow.”

“Okay,” Eliot said. “Now what we want to have before the next meeting is a three-dimensional matrix that integrates these weighted, normalized numbers with the data up here on the screen. I don’t mean integrates, not in the calculus sense.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. Marcus was leaning on his elbows, eyes covered with both hands.

“Now I’m no theorist,” Eliot said, “but I’ve been crunching numbers all my life. I’d be real surprised if you didn’t come up with more of a stepwise relationship than a continuous one, pseudo-continuous.” He pronounced the “p.” “This’ll give us break points in terms of cost effectiveness, see?”

“I think so. What you’re calling a three-dimensional matrix would boil down to a set of tentative schedules for one machine, two machines, and so forth. What you want to find is, say, a small difference between seven and eight machines but a big difference between eight and nine. So the real choice is between eight and nine.”

“Right.” Eliot sat down.

“Sandra,” Marcus said from behind his hands, “don’t you people ever just
decide
on anything?”

She gave him a sweet smile. “Never prematurely.”

Charlie’s Will

“Christ and Charlie,” Tad said, almost reverently. “That must have been one hell of a bang.”

Jeff kicked at the fused sand with the heel of his boot It crunched and made little dents. “Air burst,” he said, staring at the dents. “Maybe a G-bomb, gigaton.”

“What’s that?”

“Big. The biggest… it’s a matter/antimatter bomb. They claimed they didn’t have one and we claimed we didn’t.” He squinted out over the sea. “I think I saw the flash, what, four hundred kilometers north. So bright I thought it was a second hit on the Cape.”

“What the hell they want Miami for? Nothin’ but pedros.”

“You tell me.” Jeff had once heard a rumor that some conservatives in the military were in favor of targeting Miami in case of war: America for Americans. “Who gives a shit now? See if we can get the mules up here.”

For several hours they rolled along the hard granular surface of the crater’s edge. The rim was apparently an arc of a perfect circle some thirty or forty kilometers in diameter. From their perspective it seemed to be almost a straight line, barely curving away at either horizon. They started out dead south, though, and by evening were going southeast. The tide started coming in, pushing them toward the mangrove scrub. There was no sign of a road.

About sundown a large wave crashed and splashed foam around the mules’ hooves. They panicked, dancing, and Jeff had to get out and calm them down. “Guess we ought to move inland and make camp. Don’t want to be caught out here.”

“Yeah. I’m dead anyhow.” Jeff was pushed to his limit, too, but they got out and hacked a pathway through the bush. Jeff went back and piled up brush to conceal their hiding place, which might have saved their lives.

After midnight, a quarter moon low on the horizon, they woke to the sound of voices and footsteps. Jeff unsafed the Uzi and motioned for Tad to stay back, and crawled silently up to the edge of the beach.

Naked savages whispering Spanish. Nine or ten of them in a tight group, talking quietly, the leader with a bright torch. They were armed, two with guns and the rest all with stainless-steel axes. They came close enough for Jeff to read the brand “Sears” on the axes’ heads. Some of the axes were crusted with blood. They were creeping along, evidently looking for sign. Jeff and Tad alternated standing watch for the rest of the night. The group came back just before dawn, grumbling, and missed them again.

They took off at first light, and before noon the mangrove gave way to scorched concrete and tumbled buildings. A post office said Perrine. They found Main Street, US 1, and turned south.

Perrine was uninhabited but people had been through. They checked the ruins of several supermarkets and couldn’t find a scrap of food.

“What if it’s like this all the way south?” Tad said. “We have maybe two weeks’ food.”

“Two weeks should get us to Key West. Maybe part-way back, if there’s nothing down there. We’ll pick up something along the way,” he said without conviction. “Catch some fish.”

“You know anything about fishin’?”

Jeff shook his head. “City boy.”

“Me neither. We had a pond fulla catfish, but we just trapped ’em.”

“Guess it’s time to learn.”

They found a sporting-goods store that had been completely ransacked for weapons and ammunition, but still had a bewildering array of fishing gear. And a book, fortunately—
Fishing in the Florida Keys
—that gave them some idea of what a wellequipped sportsman would take where they were going.

It would have given that sportsman pain to see the two of them sitting on a bridge over shallow water, fishing with stiff deep-sea rods and heavy tackle. But it worked, in these waters that had hardly seen a hook in the past seven years. After a day of unraveling mistakes, their main problem was not one of catching fish, but deciding which ones to keep.

1 O’Hara

So we wound up getting ten machines. We should be able to store at least fifteen hundred profiles before we go. I went through the donor procedure myself, to be able to tell people what to expect, though Demerest talked me into not trying the receiver end. Well, that’s something I could do anytime, if it turns out not to be as dangerous as he thinks.

It took eight days for me. Uncomfortable at first, especially the eye probes, but then it got interesting, then less interesting, and finally just tiring, boring.

I remember most of it, even though they did have to give me some sort of drug for the hypnosis. It’s like being interrogated for hours at a time by a friendly questioner who has an inexhaustible appetite for the details of your life. It felt like most of the ninety-six hours I was hooked up we spent recalling trivial nonsense (though it was fascinating how much you can remember under hypnosis). Demerest assures me that the machine knows best.

I talked to myself, to my profile, afterwards, and so did John and Dan. They were more impressed than I was. It didn’t seem like me at all (even if it could remember I hated turnips at the age of seven and loved them at ten). Dan suggested that’s nothing more profound than what happens when you meet someone everybody says looks
just like you. The resemblance seems superficial because it doesn’t match your self-image; you’ve never seen yourself through another person’s eyes. Here’s the first part of our conversation:

TRANSCRIPT 2 JANUARY 2093

And so forth. At: any rate, I didn’t erase the profile, though it’s unlikely ever to be of use. The one thing S-2 will have plenty of is memory space. Be interesting to talk to it twenty years from now, like looking up an old diary.

Demerest has been going along with me for most of the donor interviews. He claims that the best subject is not necessarily the one who’s most competent in a profession. Attitude is more important than ability. If you wanted to motivate someone to be a playwright, Shakespeare would have been a so-so donor, since he evidently started out as an actor and would just as soon have been a country squire as write. Better to use some poor soul who scribbles junk all his life in spite of the fact that no one likes his work enough to put it on the stage.

In a way that’s reassuring. The only bricklayer we could find is not someone I would trust with a trowel. He proudly showed us a wall he’d built in the park, the only brick wall in New New. Back in ’74 I walked by that wall every school day for a semester, and I remember wondering how the hell it got there, mortar dripping all over, lines not square. This fellow was a groundhog who immigrated to be with his only child (he was accepted not as a bricklayer but because he paid his own way and was willing to do general agricultural labor), and when she died in a shuttle accident, he understandably fell apart. The therapists found out that he loved bricklaying, and actually managed to have some bricks and mortar made up for him, and found a place where he could do relatively little harm. I checked with Park Maintenance and found that the wall was scheduled to be demolished and recycled after he died.

This work is endlessly fascinating. The other end of it will probably be rather frustrating; I don’t envy whoever my successor is going to be. We’ll have all these dandy occupations on file, but how are you going to talk people into taking advantage of them? Will you take your surplus of astrophysicists and tell one of them he has to become a blacksmith? I’m working on ways the economy might be manipulated to provide incentives. “Economy” in quotes—pioneers swapping trinkets and antiques with one another.