Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Analog SFF, April 2009

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.com

  Copyright ©2009 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 Bob Eggleton

  Cover design by Victoria Green

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  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RESEARCH I by Stanley Schmidt

  Novella: GUNFIGHT ON FARSIDE by Adam-Troy Castro

  Science Fact: RIBBONLAND by Kevin Walsh

  Short Story: THE FINAL ELEMENT by Eric James Stone

  Reader's Department: BIOLOG: ERIC JAMES STONE by Richard A. Lovett

  Short Story: A JUG OF WINE AND THOU by Jerry Oltion

  Probability Zero: ARMCHAIR SCIENTIST by David Bartell

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: COLD FUSION TURNS 20 by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  Short Story: THE INVASION by H. G. Stratmann

  Novelette: STEAK TARTARE AND THE CATS OF GARI BABAKIN STATION by Mary Turzillo

  Novelette: FOE by Mark Rich

  Reader's Department: GUEST REFERENCE LIBRARY by Richard Foss

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXIX, No. 4, April 2009

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

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  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

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  Published since 1930

  First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

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  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RESEARCH I

  by Stanley Schmidt

  The lead article in a mid-September issue of the weekly science section in The New York Times brought back some fond memories and reminded me of a general principle of scientific research that's too easily forgotten—and a common human trait that can get in the way of that principle's full application.

  The article ("Weather History,” by Anthony DePalma, September 16, 2008) described a remarkable bit of scientific research that's been going on for more than a century at Mohonk Mountain House, the last surviving example of the nineteenth-century “Catskill resorts” (though it's really in the Shawangunks, a less widely known range south of the Catskills). That may seem an odd setting for scientific research, and in fact the hotel is not turning out revolutionary theories. What it is doing is the no less important task of collecting—on a scale and with a consistency seldom matched elsewhere—the raw data that theories seek to explain and use for predictions.

  Since the beginning of 1896, the hotel has maintained a weather station at which, every day, without fail, a trusted someone has recorded such variables as air temperature, pressure, precipitation, and water temperature and pH. The job has always been considered an important and respected one, and in 112 years, only five people have done it, always in the same way and at a station that has never been moved.

  That makes the results especially meaningful and valuable. If you're constantly changing from one location or method to another, the results become tricky and suspect. Are you really seeing a climatic trend, or just the result of using a thermometer now that consistently reads higher than the one somebody else used last year? With the extreme consistency of personnel, methods, location, and instrumentation at Mohonk, most of those variables are removed. If their data show what looks like a climatic trend, it probably is a climatic trend.

  And that, as we all know, is a subject very much on many people's minds these days.

  Moreover, we're not just interested in how temperatures and precipitation are changing for their own sake, but for what effect, if any, they have on other variables such as ecosystems and growing seasons. Mohonk is making large contributions there, too, because their handful of dedicated weather-watchers have also kept painstaking phenological records—such things as when the first frost occurs in fall, or the mountain laurel begins blooming, or the first orioles arrive in spring. So by poring over the data the Mohonk people have already gathered, other researchers can identify patterns in weather, biological phenomena, and how the two are related. Some of them, like meteorologist Raymond G. O'Keefe and climatologists Benjamin I. and Edward R. Cook, are doing just that.

  At present, the man in charge of the observations at Mohonk is Paul C. Huth, who has been there for 34 years. The weather station has grown into the Daniel Smiley Research Center, named for Daniel Smiley Jr., a descendant of the Quaker brothers who started Mohonk and a self-taught naturalist who did this work himself for more than fifty years, until he died in 1989.

  I met Dan Smiley in 1986, one of three winters in the mid-'80s when I helped Isaac Asimov run science fiction weekends at Mohonk. As you might expect, those weekends were a lot of fun and intellectually stimulating, with a variety of both formal programming and informal conversation with participants (and lots of convivial meals with Isaac and Janet). But there was also free time to explore the extensive and ruggedly scenic grounds surrounding the hotel, either independently or on organized tours. Joyce and I went on one hike enthusiastically led by the 79-year-old but still very vigorous Dan Smiley, who spent much of his time describing both tiny details and large-scale trends gleaned from his decades of observations of what went on there.

  Those observations were not made with the idea of collecting data to bolster a theory or prove or disprove a point. They were, quite simply and deliberately, observations, as accurate and complete as he could make them, but not trying to be—indeed, specifically trying not to be—anything more or less. Dan's idea was to accumulate, over the long haul, a comprehensive record of what was happening, without regard for anybody's preconceived notions of what should be happening. If he heard a spring peeper or saw a rhododendron flower just opened, he recorded it, with careful notation of such variables as when and where, even if the when and where were not what he would have expected.

  Since he started this in the early twentieth century, he didn't do it the way you or I probably would now. He kept his records on index cards—some 14,500 of them, by the time he died. If he got a hunch that he was starting to see a pattern, like newts laying their eggs earlier and water pH falling in certain ponds, he could pull up all the cards referring to newts and/or pH and star
t comparing and graphing their data, looking for patterns and connections.

  The trouble with that system, from the viewpoint of somebody accustomed to our present methods, is the difficulty of finding the relevant records when you're looking for them—and deciding how to store them in the first place to make that as easy as possible. After all, you may not know, when you make your original observations, which data will seem important in 20 or 30 years. As it happens, Dan did record anomalously low pH levels back in the 1930s, long before anyone had the concept of acid rain. Those records were later valuable in studying that problem, but when he wrote them down they were just numbers whose significance, if any, was completely unknown.

  So if you're in the field and you stop by a pond and record the pH and the absence, presence, and number of newt eggs on index cards, how do you file them? Do you put newt numbers on one card and acidity on another? Do you put both numbers on one card, so you can immediately see correlations if you look at a stack of such cards? If so, do you file them under “newt” or “pH"? Or do you make duplicate cards so you can file them in both places, much as librarians used to make title, author, and subject cards for each book in their collections?

  My example is artificially simple. In the real world, an observer might record half a dozen or more variables at each checkpoint. Even if she makes a separate file card for alphabetization under every variable she thinks might later be important, it may turn out that what's really important 20 years later is an item she thought was just an incidental curiosity and so didn't treat as a key word for indexing. How will she find all the cards that mention that?

  It won't be easy—but it would if, instead of using index cards, she had recorded everything in a relational database or a hypermedia file. There, for example, it's easy to simply dump all of a day's observations into one entry, with no thought at all about which ones to consider “key words” or how to alphabetize anything. As long as it's all in there, the computer program can look for whatever combination of search items you want, and sort them according to your present needs and wishes—and far more quickly than a person could search for even primary key words on well-sorted index cards.

  By the mid-'80s, such applications were readily available. They were nowhere near as powerful as the ones we have now (which are nowhere near as powerful as the ones we'll have in ten years), but quite adequate to greatly facilitate the kind of work that Dan Smiley was already doing with index cards. So I asked him whether he'd ever considered switching to them.

  He didn't have to think about it. He did know about the possibility, but had no interest at all in switching over. Initially I found that a little surprising. Having worked with such things myself, and been impressed by how much I could do with them, I felt sure that if he tried the new tools, he'd love them. But, I told myself, it was hardly surprising that somebody who was already 79 wouldn't want to switch to such a radically new way of doing things. After all, we've been conditioned to take it as almost an article of faith that as people get older, they routinely become set in their ways and reluctant to try new ones....

  But it didn't seem to me that Dan Smiley was that kind of guy. Even at 79, he seemed very sharp and adventurous, and quite actively interested in learning new things. It later occurred to me that he may well have had a better reason for not wanting to make the switch, one that I could easily empathize with (though it occurred to me too much later to confirm my guess by asking him). It's the old bugaboo that I've occasionally called the “continuity problem": the difficulty of preserving old information in a form that can easily be utilized with new tools.

  The value of Dan's treasure trove of data was that it spanned decades, in great detail. Having it stored in some form of searchable database would have made it far easier to mine and manipulate—but for his old observations to be incorporated into that new and improved resource, the contents of all those old index cards would have had to be manually converted to a new electronic format. I know from experience that that's a huge job, and Dan may well have thought that wouldn't be the best use of what were likely his few remaining years. And if he had left the old data on cards and just started storing new ones electronically, he would have had two separate sets of data, not easy to compare directly—and the newer ones, though stored in a nifty form, would have been too young and small to be very useful. So, I surmise, he preferred to keep it all in the form that most of it already used.

  In any case, the real value of what he did lay in the content he collected, not in the tools he used to do it—and that value is large and often undervalued. The Nobels go to the folks who figure out elegant theoretical models to explain observations—but the first stage in any kind of research will always be to collect enough data to begin looking for meaningful patterns. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton couldn't have done what they did without Tycho Brahe's painstaking observations of what happened in the heavens. My brother Dennis, a physicist and programmer with a strong interest in psychology, long ago remarked that what psychology needed was its own Newton—but later he said, “I was wrong. Psychology isn't ready for a Newton. First it needs a Tycho Brahe.”

  So it will be with any field of scientific endeavor. The glamour may go to the grand theorists, but let's never forget the respect we owe the guys and gals who toil in the scientific trenches—the Tycho Brahes, Dan Smileys, and all the others who collect the vast amounts of raw data that we must have before we can begin to make sense of it all.

  Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 4, April 2009. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2009 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Novella: GUNFIGHT ON FARSIDE

  by Adam-Troy Castro

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  Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

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  When is sacrifice not a sacrifice?

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  The first thing you learn about the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is that it was not fought at the O.K. Corral.

  No. I'm sorry. That's not quite accurate. I mean, it's quite true that the gunfight was only near the O.K. Corral, and not actually in it. That's a simple fact of history.

  But that's not the first thing you learn.

  The first thing you learn about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the canonized bullshit with no bearing on what actually happened.

  You learn about it from old movies, or holos, or, in my case, that big-budget stage musical that played the Shepardville Dome for years: the silly one where Doc Holliday was a woman, the Clantons spoke in blank verse, and the badges worn by the Earps, just below what would have been their belts, were the only item of clothing that stood between them and full frontal nudity. (Someday, if I ever feel conversational again, y
ou can probably start me off on a two-hour rant by asking me to hold forth on past trends in popular entertainment.)

  The story may fade into obscurity for up to thirty or forty years at a time, but something about it keeps exerting a powerful tug, and it keeps coming back, each time twisted out of all recognition for the prejudices of a new generation. I even remember one popular holo, from a season more cynical than most, where the Clantons were peace-loving, unarmed settlers, who wanted only to be left alone, and the Earps were evil corporate types who slaughtered them just to show that they could. I took a perverse pleasure in scrambling that one before I tossed it into the recycle bin.

  Peel away all the layers of absolute invention and you find that the gunfight between the Earps and Clantons took place in Tombstone, Arizona, on 26 October, 1881. It was a down and dirty shootout, nominally an act of law enforcement, but one so mired in past grudges that it's just as easily explained as a street fight between two gangs that hated each other on general principle. If it hadn't happened that day it would have happened the next day, or the day after that. Little fancy marksmanship was involved, as the two groups started blasting away at each other when they were standing face-to-face, with thirty rounds of ammunition fired in about as many seconds. Far from dashing, heroic, and romantic, it was up-close, ugly, and downright sordid, much more a street execution than a battle between the forces of law and lawlessness.

  If Wyatt Earp is still remembered as a hero today, a century into the era of space colonization, it's at least partially because he survived these events for decades, and therefore got to hang around Hollywood telling his story to the people who made their living deciding what bits and pieces of historical ephemera could be inflated to legend with the help of clever angles and matinee-idol faces.

  Since then, the story has been twisted every which way by anybody who wanted to appropriate it for his or her own purposes. The historical facts are available, and far more interesting than anything the holos or movies or even nudie musicals have come up with. But their very malleability is what makes the story immortal. Someday, when mankind cracks the interstellar travel problem—and one of the lesser points of this story is that I know for a fact we will—there'll be versions with the Earps in spacesuits and the Clanton/McLaury gang as any alien race we don't happen to like that week. By then, it may no longer be recognizable as an event based on historical fact. Earp himself may be considered no more than myth, like whatever inspired the similar myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Hell, he's halfway there already.