Analog SFF, March 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Right, then,” Dave said. “I assume you mean the Shower Heads."

  I nodded, but my head didn't move. “Shit,” I muttered, then louder, “that was me nodding yes. Everybody ready to vote?” Of course they were. It was no big secret who was voting which way.

  We went around the table with alternating yeas and nays, six: five, to me.

  "I vote nay, which knots us up, and I'm invoking executive privilege to break the tie. The Shower Heads are off the table. Next order of business."

  Negelein and Christopher looked stunned; they were squarely with Dunnster on this one, the prime movers to break me and send our horrific weapon to friendly governments all over the world. Negelein stood. “But you always said no one's vote should count more than anyone else's, Troy. That we're a democracy here."

  "I lied. Next order of business.” I looked over at Dave, who was tapping at his mobile.

  "I, uh ... under regulation sixteen, I request a recount."

  I rolled my eyes skyward, one of the few facial expressions I was still capable of. Whose mind you gonna change? I said, but what came out of my synthesizer was “Of course, Dave."

  I looked over at Tanner, who was staring in disbelief.

  "Go ahead, Dave. Convince me,” my synthesizer said. What the hell's going on! I screamed in silence.

  As Dave started to talk, I wheeled back and to the left. Thank God I still had control of my chair. I pushed ahead six feet, then turned right, to face the picture window.

  "Troy?” Tanner said. “You all right, Troy?"

  Hell, no. I pushed the accelerator in my mind, pedal to the metal, and headed straight for the glass with my footrest aimed at the spider web crack in the lower right of the middle pane.

  The Monster was fast. I struck with the full force and considerable weight of the beast, following the shards of glass as they shot out from the 103rd floor window, arcing to the street below. I watched the surreal image unfold before me, strapped securely into my chair that now dangled precariously from the end of a robotic arm clasped to the steel frame of the missing window.

  "Troy!"

  I could hear the simultaneous cacophony of yells behind me. You all right? Are you nuts? My God, he's slipping! What do we do? Then a solitary Don't fall, Troy!

  Now there was some good advice.

  The lone voice of reason came from Judi Cee. “Hold on, we'll pull you in ... Somebody get something ... the fire hose, wrap it around the back of his chair."

  They had me safely on the floor of the boardroom within minutes, still strapped into my chair. I wasn't about to hang around to see what else they'd have me say. I made a beeline for my office, with a trail of harried men in suits close behind.

  The door slid open and I rolled in, then spun toward the pack of suits. “Tanner, stay. Everybody else, out.” The synthesizer was obeying me once again.

  The jumble of commotion ceased and a roomful of blank faces stared back at me.

  I said, “Sooner would be better than later."

  A few of them nodded respectfully, others avoided my gaze altogether as they turned and shuffled out. I couldn't tell which ones the offended grunts came from. Dunnster's stare lingered, but he soon followed, and the door slid shut behind him.

  Tanner stood in front of me with his arms crossed. “What the hell was that all about? Have you totally lost it?"

  "In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Dunnster bugged the board room. He figured out a way to hijack my synthesizer; must have rigged up some sort of Wi-Fi hack. Those were his words you were hearing in there, not mine."

  "Well, that's a relief."

  "Not to me. I'm used to being the puppet-master, not the friggin’ marionette."

  "Saw what it was like to have the shoe on the other foot, huh?"

  "Damn right. It sucks."

  "I suppose that kind of thing can change a man."

  "I suppose."

  As Tanner studied my expressionless face, a subtle grin crept across his lips. “But not you."

  "Hell no."

  "So what do we do now? If anyone finds out your synthesizer can be hacked, they'll try and pull you off the board."

  "We keep it between us. I doubt Dunnster was dumb enough to let anyone else in on his plan."

  "Probably right, but even if they don't give you the boot for that, they're liable to try and get rid of you for going suicidal. What the hell were you thinking in there?"

  "It was the only way I could stop the vote. I couldn't just leave."

  "Right. We were already underway. You'd have just counted as an abstention."

  "And if I stayed, Dunnster was in control. I had to find a way to stop the vote and make sure we could move it to another venue, one where I can speak for myself."

  "You think they're going to just forget what happened in there?"

  "I'll tell them The Monster malfunctioned; the drive control went haywire. I've already hacked into the software and put a bug in the drive program. I'll activate it when we're done here. Just shut down my drive battery before you leave, then tell everyone what happened and call them in here for the vote. Pull in Clifford from IT; he'll confirm the malfunction, you'll pronounce me mentally fit, and we'll get this done today."

  "What about Dunnster?"

  "He's toast. I can tap into the mainframe now; it's easy to become a computer expert when your brain is part of the computer. With a few well-placed thoughts tied into Dunnster's personnel file, I'll make sure he's got his hands full just trying to stay out of jail. In fact, I think I'll tip him off before letting anyone discover his newly created transgressions just so I can watch him squirm."

  "You're a scary guy, Troy."

  I smiled inside. “Start preparing a short list for Dunnster's replacement."

  Tanner fixed on the picture hanging on the wall behind me, the aftermath at Hiroshima. Perspective. His eyes narrowed and tracked toward my desktop monitor, then without diverting his gaze he made his way slowly around behind me to see the image that had been reflecting in the glass in front of Hiroshima, the tenth anniversary picture his wife had taken of me and Linda at the Starlight Grill.

  He smiled and put a hand on my shoulder, then walked out the door without saying a word.

  And for the first time in years I looked into Linda's eyes, thankful for the strength I could once again find there; more thankful yet that she would never see me like this.

  Copyright © 2010 Brad Aiken

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  READERS: If you are having problems finding Analog Science Fiction and Fact at your favorite retailer, we want to help. First let the store manager know that you want the store to carry Analog. Then send us a letter or postcard telling us the full name and address of the store (with street name and number, if possible). Write to us at: Analog Science Fiction, Dept. NS, 6 Prowitt St., Norwalk, CT 06855-1220. Thank you!

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  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE NICE WAY TO MAKE A SOLAR SYSTEM by John G. Cramer

  Our Solar System seems well planned, with a neat set of four little inner planets fenced in by the Sun and the asteroid belt, with an outer region populated by a stately progression of four gas giants and bounded on the outside by the Kuiper Belt. The largest gas giant, Jupiter, with a mass of 318 Earth masses, is 5.2 AU from the Sun (where 1 AU is Earth's average orbital radius). Next comes Saturn with a mass of 95 Earth masses, which orbits at 9.5 AU. Uranus, the lightweight of the gas giants with a mass of 14 Earth masses, orbits at 19.6 AU. The outermost gas giant Neptune, with a mass of 17 Earth masses, orbits at 30 AU.

  The regularity of the Solar System's planetary orbits was noted as early as 1715, and in 1768 Johann Bode proposed a “law” stating that the orbits of the planets in AU could be predicted by a mathematical relation, which we can now write as Rn = [4 + (3/2) 2n]/10, where n = 1, 2, 3, ... for the planets from Venus to Neptune, with n = 4 corresponding to a “missing planet” at roughly the orbital radius of the asteroid belt. The orbit of Mercury
(n = 0) doesn't quite fit the systematics of the model and has a value of R0 = 4/10. But is this regularity an accident or an indication of some systematic natural process? It now looks like an accident, in that a new model of planetary orbits suggests that a chaotic catastrophe in the early Solar System produced the present orbits of the outer planets.

  Planetary astrophysical models that assume the planets formed by the accretion of proto-planetary material in their present orbits are beset with great difficulties in explaining the origin of the great quantity of matter far from the Sun that was needed to form Uranus and Neptune and why Uranus is less massive than Neptune. There are also problems in explaining the origins of the asteroid belt, the Trojan satellites of Jupiter, the irregular satellites of the outer planets, and the formation of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. Further, the many large craters of the Moon, along with similar evidence of significant cratering on Mercury, Earth, Mars, and the large asteroid Vesta, tell a story of interplanetary violence that occurred about 900 million years after the formation of the Solar System. Planetary astronomers call this the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period, a succession of collision events that up to now has lacked a plausible explanation.

  The orbital dynamics of the Solar System seem deceptively simple. There is a massive central body, the Sun, and the other objects, being much smaller in mass and widely separated in space, have regular roughly circular orbits that are easily described by applying Newton's Laws of gravitation and mechanics. The Newtonian two-body problem is easily solved, allowing us to understand these orbits. However, the complications are in the details. One cannot really neglect the gravitational interactions between the planets, and particularly those between Jupiter and its neighbors. These interactions perturb planetary orbits and cause them to be unstable over large periods of time. While one can solve the gravitational two-body problem analytically, the three-body problem—for example, involving the Sun and two planets—has no analytic solutions. When it is solved numerically on a computer, the results are often chaotic, with small differences in starting conditions leading to dramatically different orbital outcomes, including planets ejected from the system. Thus, the present calm stability of our Solar System is an illusion, with chaos lurking in the past and possibly in the future.

  Recently a radical new departure from previous models of Solar System formation, the Nice model, offers to provide an explanation for the mysteries of planet and moon formation and bombardment. The Nice model is the work of an international team consisting of Alessandro Morbidelli (France), Rodney Gomes (Brazil), Kleomenis Tsiganis (Greece), and Hal Levinson (USA), and is named for the French city of Nice where their ideas came together.

  Basically, the Nice model starts with the four major planets ordered as Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, with Jupiter in more or less its present orbit and the other planets in concentric orbits with radii increasing outward in steps of about 4.3 AU, with Neptune and Uranus inverted from their present ordering. In orbit outside Uranus initially are a cloud of thousands of “planetesimals,” icy bodies comparable in mass to the present asteroids but much more numerous. Roughly speaking, in the Nice model the primitive Solar System looks like a “bull's eye” target board with four concentric rings (the gas giants) surrounded by a dense outer cloud of dots.

  This initial system is somewhat unstable, and as time progresses the major planets interact and alter their orbits a bit, while the outer cloud squeezes together a bit and develops gaps like the Kirkwood zones of the present asteroid belt. However, despite such movements, nothing much happens for millions of years, and the system gives the appearance of relative stability.

  Then, at about 878 million years after formation of the system, all hell breaks loose. This occurs because the wanderings of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter have temporarily come into a 2:1 orbital resonance. This exerts cumulative forces on the other planets, disrupting the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, and flinging them outward into the cloud of planetesimals, which scatter in all directions. It takes about another 100 million years for the system to calm down and reach a new state of equilibrium, which is very different from the previous one.

  Because Neptune was closer to the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, its orbit has been disrupted the most, and its orbital radius has increased by about a factor of two. Uranus has also moved to a larger orbit, which is now inside the orbit of Neptune but further from Saturn than before. But the biggest effect has been on the outer cloud of planetesimals. They appear to be gone. They have been largely dispersed. There are a few planetesimals now in stable orbits outside the orbit of Neptune, and these form the present Kuiper Belt. However, most of them have either collided with the major bodies of the Solar System or have been ejected from the System altogether. Their disruption has sent many high-velocity objects into the inner Solar System, accounting for the Late Heavy Bombardment described above. Thus, the Nice model explains the Kuiper Belt, the formation of Uranus and Neptune, the low mass of Uranus, the late Heavy Bombardment of the inner planets, and the origins of the Trojans, the irregular moons, and the asteroid belt.

  A 7-megabyte QuickTime movie spanning 1.2 billion years of Solar System evolution according to the Nice model has been posted by Sky & Telescope on the Web at media. skytonight.com/video/SolarSystemSim.mov (in this URL, note that there are underscores between Solar, System, and Sim). The movie has been purposely slowed down at 878 million years so that the violent disruptions of the system, which happen fast, can be viewed more closely. It's fun to watch and to try to imagine the planetary violence that must have occurred when the planetesimals start flying off in all directions.

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  Thus, the Nice model provides a neat explanation of the present configuration and violent past of the Solar System. It also suggests that the Solar System is “special,” like many other aspects of our present environment. When we are able to explore the planetary systems of other stars, we are not likely to find any twins of the Solar System, since its origins are the chaotic result of a particular set of circumstances. We might, however, find a system like the early Solar System, where a Late Heavy Bombardment is about to begin and the inner planets are about to be subjected to a cosmic 100-million-year rock concert. Space travelers take note. That would be a system to avoid.n

  Copyright © 2010 John G. Cramer

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  AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of about 150 “The Alternate View” columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: www. npl.washington.edu/av.

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  The Nice Model:

  R. Gomes, H. F. Levison, K. Tsiganis, and A. Morbidelli, Nature 435, 466 (2005).

  A. Morbidelli, K. Tsiganis, A. Crida, H. F. Levison, and R. Gomes, Astronomical Journal 134 1790-1798 (2007), arXiv preprint 0706.1713 [astro-ph].

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  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Given that our issues actually appear several weeks before the nominal date on the cover, we face a perennial dilemma in scheduling “seasonal” stories and articles: Do they belong in the issue named for the month containing the relevant holiday, or the issue appearing closest to the actual date? Next month we face this question twice, with a linked story and article. You've probably read brief reports elsewhere of recent research on the biological and social significance of kissing; Richard A. Lovett has written an article exploring the topic in more depth, and, with collaborator Holly Hight, a story about where such research might lead. It doesn't take much of a stretch to conclude that those ought to go in the “Valentine” issue; but since “January/February” actually went on sale in November—before Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years'—this time we decided to put them in the issue that will actually appear closest to Valentine's Day. That, oddly enough, means “April."

  Our April issue will also include, by another kind of appropriateness, funny stories by Carl Frederick and Stephen L. Burns, as well as a unique novella by
John G. Hemry and stories by Brenda Cooper and Jerry Oltion.

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  Department: BIOLOG: CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT by Richard A. Lovett

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  Isaac Asimov famously wanted to be a mathematician before a bad experience with calculus forced him to do something else. Christopher L. Bennett didn't have quite that bad an experience with calculus, managing to “squeak through” to a major in physics. But he'd sympathize with Asimov. “I'm good at math through algebra,” he says. “When I hit calculus my brain freezes up."

  Asimov went on to get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, initially only writing science fiction on the side. Bennett always wanted to write science fiction—and not just on the side. When the physics proved problematic, he got a second bachelor's, this time in history. “Partly, I was curious,” he says. “I wanted to study history other than the very Western-biased stuff I'd gotten before.” But the history major may have been at least as helpful to his science fiction as the physics. “I figured it would be a good thing to learn about different cultures and how they interact and evolve."

  Bennett is a rare breed: a writer who always knew what he wanted to do and managed to make a full-time career out of it.

  Star Trek was the key. When he was five years old, growing up in Cincinnati, he saw an ad for reruns of the original Trek. “I saw what looked like a funny—looking aircraft flying around in the night sky,” he says. “I discovered outer space, and after that, I was hooked."

  Later, he had a set of building blocks that let him construct futuristic cities. “I would make up stories of what was going on in the cities,” he says. “I realized I was pretty good at this [and] realized it was what I wanted to do."

  His first science fiction sale was to Analog ("Aggravated Vehicular Genocide,” November 1998), but many of his building-block-city stories were about Star Trek. For his day job, he still plays in the Star Trek universe. “Pocket Books has kept me rather busy writing Star Trek novels and stories [fifteen since 2003]. I'm one of the busiest people in their stable.” (There's also been an X-Men novel and a Spider-Man novel.) His next book will be one of the first set in the new movie's version of the Star Trek future.