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Analog SFF, June 2011
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2011 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover art by Vincent DiFate
Cover design by Victoria Green
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CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Stanley Schmidt
Serial: ENERGIZED: PART I OF IV by Edward M. Lerner
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Science Fact: NANOPARTICLES FOR DRUG DELIVERY by Carol Wuenschell
Novelette: CITIZEN-ASTRONAUT by David D. Levine
Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE GREAT MISSILE MYSTERY OF 2010 by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Department: BIOLOG: DAVID LEVINE by Richard A. Lovett
Short Story: TAKE ONE FOR THE ROAD by Jamie Todd Rubin
Short Story: STONE AGE by Alastair Mayer
Novelette: KAWATARO by Alec Nevala-Lee
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXXI No. 6 June 2011
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS
by Stanley Schmidt
As Thanksgiving 2010 approached, travelers bound for Grandmother's house (or wherever) anticipated their journey with more than the traditional holiday trepidation, for two reasons. The agonies of autumnal holiday travel may seem irrelevant in midsummer, but they're anything but. The same problems seem more than likely to recur, quite possibly in more severe form, the next time around; and now is the time to do something about them—if anybody really wants to. In any case, the actions and reactions of both sides—government and protesters—provide an instructive illustration of a larger and more general danger.
And it just may be relevant to another holiday that does occur in summer.
The first concern facing travelers on the day before Thanksgiving was the array of unprecedentedly intrusive security procedures that had been recently instituted at airports, which many travelers would be experiencing for the first time. The second was the threat—much heralded and advocated on the internet, though not much happened in reality—of massive protests against those security measures.
The new antiterrorist procedures, in case you've been hanging out with Rip Van Winkle and missed hearing about them, involve (a) full-body scanners, which use one of two types of low-level radiation to show inspectors a detailed image of a passenger's body unobscured by clothing, and (b) full-body patdowns, at a level previously regarded as appropriate only for medical exams or couples who know each other very well, as an alternative for passengers who object strongly to (a).
No third alternative was offered, except, “If you don't like it, don't fly.”
Not surprisingly, many people did object strongly to both (a) and (b), saying that the Transportation Security Administration had gone too far—especially after watching widely circulated online video clips of things like TSA agents tormenting three-year-olds lest their teddy bears turn out to be bombs. At least one columnist, Al Lewis (of Dow Jones Newswires), suggested that the TSA itself had in effect turned into a terrorist organization. And a movement grew on the internet urging travelers to insist en masse on having detailed patdowns rather than detailed body imaging—which, since they take longer, would have resulted in a massive clogging and disruption of air travel on the busiest day of the year.
That didn't happen, but John S. Pistole, head of the TSA, was concerned enough about the prospect to call Joe Sharkey, who writes a travel column for The New York Times, to try to justify his agency's position and head off the threat. His concerns sounded admirable: he did not want some people's holidays ruined by other people's protests. He acknowledged that the new procedures were invasive, but also reminded everyone that “the threats are real.”
Indeed they are. Anyone who remembers 9/11—and that means pretty much everyone—knows that. But is it possible to protect against every threat? Or does there come a point at which the protective measures are worse than what they purport to protect against? In other words, is there a point at which “enough is enough"? If so, does that point still lie ahead of us, or have we already passed it?
We've all heard, so often that it has become a cliché, the argument that, “If x saves even one life, it's worthwhile and we should do it.” But is that always true? Let's think this through to its logical conclusion.
The more a security inspection can detect, the more chances it has of finding a weapon that might be missed by some less thorough technique. Therefore, clearly, either a full-body scan or a full-body patdown is better than the quaint approaches of bygone days, because they can reveal more kinds of objects than those more timid methods. But why stop there? When the currently new methods were announced we heard cries of, “What's next? Cavity searches? Requiring everybody to fly naked, with no luggage?”
Well, why not? Those would certainly reduce the uncertainty even more. And if it saves even one life . . .
Of course, if we really want to eliminate every possible risk and save every possible life, we'll have to insist that these thing
s be done for everybody. Never mind bleeding hearts who fear that that three-year-old will be too traumatized ever to fly again. Somebody could plant a bomb in a teddy bear, so we'll have to check every one of those. And we can't draw a line at three-year-olds—not even the youngest babies can be trusted. True, they're not likely to concoct diabolical plots on their own, but diabolical adults could plant something on them. So they, too, must be searched thoroughly. (I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to figure out the exact logistics if there are no exemptions for diapers.)
And why stop with physical searches? Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) can already tell us something about what specific parts of a brain are active at a given moment, and better neurological scanning technologies are being developed all the time. When they improve to the point where we can tell specifically what a person is thinking or feeling, don't we owe it to ourselves to take full advantage of that, to detect malevolent intent before it can be translated into action? If it means that people have to get to the airport days instead of mere hours before their flights, and if fares have to rise astronomically to pay for all this, surely those are just minor inconveniences, if even one life is saved.
All this may sound too farfetched even for discussion, and I'll grant you that hardly anyone would accept these extreme measures if somebody proposed implementing them all at once, right now. But as I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions, people will accept astonishingly huge changes if they're imposed not all at once, but as a series of little steps, each of which seems innocuous or even desirable in and of itself—and people's idea of “innocuous” and “desirable” can change radically when they're operating in a state of induced panic. To many people now, suggestions of cavity searches and nude travel without luggage seem unthinkable—but they thought the same thing five or six years ago about the measures now in use. Twenty-five years ago they thought the same thing about much milder measures that we now take for granted, like the “liquid limits” and the requirement to put shoes and coats on the conveyor instead of wearing them. (Don't believe me? Go digging in your archives and reread my editorials “Acid Raindrops” [February 1985] and “Softening Us Up” [September 2005].)
So when a TSA spokesman tells us that they don't plan to do anything more intrusive than they're doing now, I consider that meaningless. They may be telling the truth, in that they have no such plans now; but that doesn't mean that they won't in another four years, after somebody finds a new way to scare them.
If and when that happens, I consider it highly likely that people will protest, just as a few did last Thanksgiving—but then they'll go along with the latest round of “unthinkable” measures, just as they have in the past. Pistole told the Times, “When somebody gets on a plane, they want to know that everybody else—O.K., maybe not themselves but everyone else—has been thoroughly screened.” I haven't seen any hard numbers to convince me that he's right about most people thinking that way, but I do know that some do. I've seen enough human behavior to believe that the same individuals are quite capable of demanding maximal screening for everybody else, even as they grumble about it when they're on the receiving end—while blissfully unaware of the inconsistency of their position.
So on my more cynical days, I suspect that not only are full-body scans and patdowns here to stay, but cavity searches, “check your clothes at the door,” and brain scans are only a matter of time. But on less cynical days, I sometimes dream that eventually a more balanced view will prevail—that significant numbers of people will realize that if they want absolute safety for themselves, they must be prepared to accept the same indignities they wish on others.
And that even those will never be enough, because no matter how many dangers you anticipate and guard against, nature or your fellow creatures will always manage to come up with another one. Flying, even with the present level of terrorism, is one of the safest things we do; but any sane person who boards a plane must accept the reality that freak weather or mechanical failure could bring the plane down. The probability is small, but it's always there; so you do what you reasonably can to minimize it, expect airlines and governments to do the same, and simply live with the slight residual risk.
Maybe, in the last analysis, terrorism is just another risk like those others. Certainly we want to take reasonable precautions against it; but we may have to realize at some point that not all precautions are reasonable, and that if we insist on fanatical and unrealistic pursuit of freedom from the slightest imaginable risk, we may have to give up far too many other freedoms.
The cumulative effect of large numbers of small steps can be hard to undo, and periodically along any such path it's a good idea to ask, “Is this trip necessary?” and “How far do I need, or want, to go?” I realize this is a complicated problem—and it's just one of many. But in this or any other, seizing on any one thing as The Answer, without thinking through where it would really lead, is asking for trouble on the grandest scale.
Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Serial: ENERGIZED: PART I OF IV
by Edward M. Lerner
Even—maybe especially—when problems have become overwhelming, don't expect agreement on what to do about them. . . .
PROLOGUE
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Earth hovered, almost at full phase, breathtakingly magnificent. Distance concealed the works—and blights—of man, and the globe seemed pristine. Its oceans sparkled. Its cloud tops and icecaps glistened. And it was huge: The natural moon, had it been visible, would have appeared only about one-hundredth as wide.
Earth seemed close enough to touch through the exercise room's tinted dome, but Gabriel Campbell held firmly to the handles of the stationary bicycle. Not that he relied on the strength of his grip: He wore a seatbelt, too, and straps bound his feet to the pedals. This world had too little gravity to notice.
His eyes alternated between the vista overhead and the image of Jillian, his fiancée, which he had taped to the bike's digital readout. Strawberry-blond hair cascaded down her neck and shoulders. Freckles lay scattered across that most adorable, pert little nose. Her clear green eyes—and more so, her smile—all but outshone the Earth.
He was here, on Phoebe, to make a future for both: the Earth and the love of his life. In just one more month, he would go home. Then he and Jillian would marry and they would never be apart again.
Basking in earthlight, his legs pumping furiously on the bike, Gabe was pleasantly tired, professionally fulfilled, emotionally satisfied—unaware that before two hours had passed, he would be dead.
Phoebe completed an orbit around the Earth in just less than six hours, and as Gabe pedaled, darkness crept across the face of the world. The changing phase of the Earth told him he had been working out for almost two hours.
Sweat soaked his Minnesota Twins T-shirt, and still ahead of him was a stint on the not-quite weight machine: the resistive exercise device. Without exercise, muscles atrophied and bones lost mass in Phoebe's minuscule gravity. Four hours of daily workout were mandated, but he would have worked out anyway. He patted Jillian's picture. “I'll be plenty fit for you when I come home.” Fit, and horny as the devil.
And with no way up here to spend a dime, he would have banked six months’ salary with which to build their future. The pay was damned good, too, much higher than anything he could get on the ground. He tried not to think of the premium as hazardous-duty pay.
The bike whirred. A damper rattled in the ventilation system. Voices, indistinct, blended with dueling music players. And then, from the comm unit clipped to his sleeve, soft chimes. Gabe tapped the unit. “Campbell.”
“We've got a bot in trouble,” Tina Lundgren said, her voice throaty. She was deputy station chief of Phoebe base and in command on the night shift. Not that day or night had any meaning here. The station followed Eastern time for the convenience of folks
on the ground. “In sector twelve.”
“And it's my turn to go outside.” Hell, Gabe was happy to go out. Only a handful of geologists had ever left Earth, and he was one of them. Had there been any way to get Jillian up here, he would want to stay forever. “What's the problem?”
“Stupid bot tangled itself up in a rock jumble. Otherwise, it's healthy.”
Likely a thirty-second task, after an hour or so to suit up and trek halfway across the moonlet. Good deal.
Tina contacting him meant that he was in charge of the excursion. But no one went outside alone—too many things could go wrong. Gabe asked, “Who else is on call tonight?”
“Thaddeus and Bryce. Shall I give one of them a holler for you?”
“I'll take Thad. Newbie could use the practice.” Gabe eased off his pedaling. “And no, don't call. I'm in the gym. I need to cool off first.” Outside was not the place to get stiff and inflexible.
After winding down for a few minutes, Gabe unstrapped his slippers from the pedals, unbelted, and, carefully dismounting, firmly planted a slipper on one of the deck's Velcro strips. Trailing damp footprints, he crossed the exercise room, the Velcro pads on the soles of his slippers zip-zipping with each step.
At the hatchway he took hold of the handrail that ran along the corridor ceiling. The Tarzan swing was the quickest way through the station. Many of his crewmates would be asleep, and he kept a Tarzan yell to himself.
Thaddeus Stankiewicz was not in his quarters, the tiny common room, or the even tinier sanitary facilities. When Gabe tried the machine shop, the hatch squeaked on its hinges.
Thad was new to Phoebe and micro-gee; his surprised twitch launched him from his stool and scattered whatever he was working on. Gabe saw cordless soldering pistols, metal tubes, metal rods, wire coils—and, writhing free at the end of its oxygen and acetylene hoses, a cutting torch tipped with blue flame.
Analog SFF, June 2011 Page 1
