Hidden Variables

by Charles Sheffield

  The other man uncapped a bottle and handed it across without speaking. Their eyes turned again to the quiet road.

  "That's one thing they drill into us early." Greer's tone was reflective, abstracted. "Don't run. An army gets cut up worse running than standing firm. Face the enemy and hold your front." There was a curious smile on his tanned face. "So. This week you decided you'd had enough running. Too old to run any more. Right?"

  Wenziger swung around. Beer splashed from the bottle onto the thick rug. "Why do you say that?"

  Greer's gaze was still on the world outside the window. "I told you. I know you. I've seen men like you and watched your ways for forty years. Sometime last week you decided you'd had it, you couldn't take this thing any longer. You made up your mind that the only answer was to come here and kill me. Nissom didn't have to be right, it was the principle of the thing." He laughed. "Like to see the sales slip for the gun you bought down on Fourteenth Street? It's in my desk over there."

  "You know about that? Why didn't you have me arrested then, instead of getting me here to taunt me with it?"

  "No law against buying a gun." Greer shrugged."I own five or six of them. And I have to have Nissom. You're my key to him. But you've changed, haven't you? A couple of weeks ago you were convinced that his ideas were wrong—even one week ago you thought that."

  "I think it still."

  "You don't convince me. You changed your mind, a few days ago, and decided that Nissom had to go free. I want to know what changed you."

  He leaned over and picked up Wenziger's briefcase. "I'll lay you any odds you like that you don't have the gun in here. See, I know you too well. No matter what you think of Nissom—or of me—there's no way you could pull out a gun and shoot me cold. 'Ambition should be made of sterner stuff', don't you think?"

  He opened the case and looked casually at the jumble of papers and books inside. "Did you ever fire a thirty-eight in your whole life? Any handgun at all?"

  Wenziger had settled back in his seat. After an instinctive gesture when Greer picked up his case, he had relaxed. "Never in anger. At fairground shows a few times."

  "So I'm still looking for an answer. What made you change your mind, even if you don't have the guts to follow through with it? Something that Nissom told you?"

  "Nothing from my meeting with Nissom. I learned from a dead man." Wenziger flicked a glance at his watch, then back to the road. "Do you remember that I quoted Eddington to you, as evidence that genius is no protection against a wrong theory? I ought to have quoted something else that he wrote, but it only came back to me a few days ago—just before I bought a gun. Eddington said, 'The world that we observe is the world of our theories'. That changed my mind about Nissom. You understand the significance of what he was saying?"

  "No." Greer put down the briefcase without looking into it further. Like Wenziger, he had become obsessed with the thin ribbon of the road leading to the farm. "What does Eddington have to do with Nissom?"

  "He meant that scientists become married to their theories. We look only for the things that our theories lead us to expect. Unless we think we'll find a result, why perform the experiment? Especially today, when experiments are very expensive. Let me ask you something, General. Did you ever look into Laurance Nissom's personal finances?"

  "Sure I did, early on. I wanted to see if somebody could buy him."

  "They could not. He is a rich man, right?"

  "He's loaded. He inherited millions from his father."

  "So why did he work for the government at all? Especially when he had his own theory to develop."

  Greer lowered the bottle from his lips without drinking. He looked puzzled. "You've got me. Strange, I've asked every question about him except that one. He didn't need money, not the way that you do. Do you have an answer?"

  "Equipment. He needed access to equipment that millions of dollars can't buy, but billions can. You see, he wanted to test his theory fully, in every branch. That would be hugely expensive—take huge resources. The world that his ideas describe is so different from the one we see that he had to build a whole new structure."

  "But he's wrong." Greer moved uneasily in his chair, sensing that somehow the control was moving to the other man. "You said he's wrong, and you still think so."

  "I do. All of me believes that, as strongly as I believe anything." Wenziger looked again at his watch and grimaced with concern.

  Greer could see the tension building on the other's face. "He ought to be here by now. You're not trying to cross me? I hope not, for your sake."

  "He's on his way. I think he's wrong—but suppose he were right. I had to admit that possibility, even if I didn't believe it. Suppose that Nissom is right, that he is seeing a different and more valid world picture. Could there be a chance—one in ten thousand, even—that he's right?"

  "I've assumed all along that there is." Greer had stood up and leaned closer to the window. "That's why I can't let him run free. That thousand-to-one shot is too dangerous. Our balance of power analyses wouldn't mean a thing if Nissom's defense screen could be built."

  "Too dangerous to you." Wenziger was perspiring again. "To me and my kind, it might mean an end to running. That's why I bought the gun."

  "That you'll never use. It takes training to face death, you know. I wondered for a while if you'd find the idea of killing both of us easier to take. Then I decided you couldn't even manage that. You can't face certain death, a hundred percent guaranteed. You're not unusual. When we send men on a suicide mission, we always try and build a long shot that they could get out alive. Otherwise some of them can't take it."

  "I thought of a double killing, you, then myself. It was no good." Wenziger's breath was fast and shallow. He seemed hypnotized by the moving sweep of his watch. "I called Nissom. I asked him if a certain kind of test of his theory were possible—a crude one. He confirmed it."

  "You mean you could do a test? Damn it, a minute ago you were telling me that tests would cost billions. Are you saying that's not true?"

  There was a long silence. When Wenziger'spoke at last his voice was so soft that Greer could hardly make out the words. "You make me over-simplify, then you are angry at the result. A real test—a full test—of Nissom's ideas, with all their subtleties, would cost billions. But a test at the grossest level, one that was qualitative more than quantitative, that could be done cheaply. Nissom confirmed it, but he was not interested."

  "You mean you could prove if Nissom's right or wrong cheaply?" Greer had seized Wenziger by the arm, straightening him up in his chair. "Why the hell didn't you tell me that? If you're trying to cross me it's all over for you."

  "I'm not crossing you. It would be a crude test. Let me give you an analogy. The atomic bomb could be thought of as a test of Einstein's theory of special relativity, but it would give no detailed measurements, nothing for exact confirmation." Wenziger sighed. "You saw through me, General. I could never pull the trigger on final doom, for you or for me. But I would accept a statistical risk. We live with those every day, when we cross the street or leave our apartment. Do you understand the process of radioactive decay?"

  "Of course I do." Greer shook him. "Wenziger, don't change the subject. What in God's name have you been up to?"

  "In a group of a trillion radioactive atoms"—Wenziger's voice had become calm and professorial again—"some will disintegrate in the next twenty minutes. But which ones? We cannot say. That depends on fate—or on Laurance Nissom's hidden variables. You see, for certain situations—Nissom can specify some of them—his theory predicts radioactive breakdown of certain atoms faster than conventional theory." He stared at his watch face. "I have been here now for twenty-eight minutes. The odds are getting worse. You see, General, I could never have dreamed up Nissom's theory. Never. But I am not stupid. From that theory, I can certainly calculate probabilities."

  He smiled, a thin-lipped crack in the old, grey face. "So I decided that we ought to let the statistics make the decision.
I have primed a bomb—a small one, as these bombs go—to explode if decay from a radioactive source that has been subjected to certain resonances reaches a certain level. According to conventional theory, that level will be reached with fifty percent probability in one hour. According to Nissom's theory, fifty percent probability was reached eight minutes ago. When he drives over that hill"—he nodded at the road outside the window—"I will disarm it."

  "Damn you, Wenziger, you've gone mad." Greer's face was white. He rushed to the briefcase and turned it upside down. A torrent of books and papers poured out onto the rug. "The bomb. Where's the fucking bomb? Wenziger, tell me, I'll keep you out of trouble. I swear it."

  Wenziger was laughing, the tic under his eye distorting his face. "General, General. You have too much faith in technology. Be reasonable. Not even the best scientists have been able to make a zeta small enough to fit in a briefcase—and we know the best, don't we?"

  He picked up the bottle from the window sill. His tension suddenly seemed to drain from him. "Sit down. Have another beer, and have faith in the hidden variables. They will make the decision for us, if Nissom is right or if he is wrong. He should be here any minute now. I predicted that he would arrive thirty minutes after I did. That is twenty seconds from now—but of course, traffic is another hidden variable, is it not?"

  Greer was still on his knees on the floor, rummaging desperately through the briefcase. His face was sweaty. "The car. If it won't fit in here, it has to be in the car. You bastard, you armed it before you got out and came up here." His eyes glared with sudden triumph. "You missed one thing, Wenziger, something you didn't count on. I don't need you to disarm that bomb. I had three years with disposal and security. I can take it apart in ten seconds."

  He threw the briefcase to the floor, jumped to his feet and rushed from the room.

  "And you know, General, you missed one thing, too." Wenziger's tone was quiet and conversational, as though the other man were still in the room with him. "I couldn't shoot you, but you confused ruthlessness and courage. I have read Clausewitz—yes, and Machiavelli, too, in the original languages. You and I differ in the uses that we would make of power, that's all."

  He lifted the bottle and took a leisurely sip of beer.

  * * *

  It was hot in the car, eighty-five degrees or more. Normally a long drive was pleasant, it gave plenty of time for unhurried thought and calculation, but this time there was too much else to think about.

  How much had Wenziger been keeping to himself? There had been disturbing undertones in their last conversation, a suggestion that crude tests were the way to go.

  He peered ahead at the long incline, shimmering in the heat. Not more than a mile to go, if the sketch map were right. Laurance Nissom was almost at the brow of the hill when the valley ahead of him lit with a glow that eclipsed the sun.

  AFTERWORD: HIDDEN VARIABLE.

  "I was having dinner with the Astronomer Royal, and he said that Eddington . . ."

  It's a nice way to begin the conversation but it needs to be put in context. I was a summer student at the Royal Observatory, one of a dozen or more, and he invited all of us to dinner—once each. "He" at the time was Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Woolley, later Sir Richard Woolley, and it is my secret opinion that he tolerated summer students not for their value as workers, which was marginal, but for their usefulness as country dancers.

  That too needs to be put in context. When the Royal Greenwich Observatory moved from Greenwich, where it had been since 1675, to Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, there were far more women workers than men, mostly doing calculations for the production of the Nautical Almanac. Actually, there were a fair number of males, but they tended to be senior astronomers and were not the types to be readily persuaded by the AR to leap about in country dancing. Whereas the women, thanks to sexual discrimination or what-have-you, had duller jobs and were ready for evening frivolity. But they had to have male partners, and that's where students came in useful. Once a week we all had a rousing session of dancing. I have long since forgotten the wavelength of the Lyman Alpha line, but if pressed I might well be able to dance a round of Gathering Peascods or Sir Roger de Coverley.

  And between dances, before and after dances, and on non-dancing evenings, we would hear personal anecdotes from Woolley's youth about the distant stars of twentieth century astronomy, of Hubble and Baade, Oort, Milne, Hoyle and Struve . And we would hear first-hand accounts of the arguments between Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington at the monthly meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society. Eddington was a superb mathematician, and he had an unmatched and almost infallible physical intuition about the way that a star or galaxy would behave. But Jeans was a superb mathematician, too, perhaps even a better one—and in debate he was quicker and more persuasive than Eddington. So as we heard it, Eddington was usually right, but it was Jeans who mostly won the verbal arguments.

  I feel much more at home writing than giving speeches, so I have had a soft spot for Eddington ever since those days at the Royal Observatory. It is unfortunate that this story happens to quote a case—a very rare case—where his theories were wrong.

  A CERTAIN PLACE IN HISTORY

  "This is really rather nasty. Why did you let it go so long without attention? You should have come in for treatment weeks ago."

  The dentist who was working on my ripely abscessed upper molar had a habit, common to his profession, of trying to conduct a conversation with a patient whose mouth was wedged open like a yawning hippopotamus. An accurate answer to his question would take twenty minutes and involve—at a minimum—mushrooms, space warps, high finance, aliens, the asteroid belt and my personal reputation. I rolled my eyes and said "Aa-gn-hng-aa," or words to that effect. The answer seemed to satisfy him and he turned the conversation to local politics.

  It really isn't easy to know where to begin. With the aliens? According to common myth, it isn't really possible to hate an alien. If and when we meet up with some, the argument goes, we should get on with them very well. Our hatred is reserved for our own kind. I happen to know that idea is wrong. No human has ever met a Kaneelian, we don't know where or how they live, or even what size and shape they are. But they cost me a million credits, they gave me the worst three days of my life, and they may make the name 'Henry Carver' go down in history as a big joke. I have a strong and personal hatred of Kaneelians, the whole wretched species.

  That's obviously the wrong place to begin. I get carried away. Let me begin, objectively, with the tooth.

  It was a left upper molar that had been filled a couple of times already, and it was beginning to give me trouble again. Two hundred years ago, in the bad old days before medical science was perfected, a tooth was pulled out when it gave trouble. It is now possible, thanks to partially effective nerve-regeneration techniques, for the same tooth to cause periodic anguish for a good fifty years, with enormous associated cost. The ache was getting bad enough for me to consider and put off a visit to the dentist when I had a videophone call from Izzy Roberson.

  Izzy was always worth talking to. An old friend of my partner, Waldo Burmeister, he had suggested some profitable deals for us in the past, and wasn't a man to waste your time with small stuff.

  "Got something good for you, Henry," Izzy's cheerful image began. "Know what agaricus campestris is?" He was a tiny, bouncy man, hopping up and down as usual in front of the screen. He had a great fondness for tall women, who loomed high above him and always made me think of the old story of the midget and the showgirl.

  I groped vaguely after law-school Latin. "Campestris. Something-or-other of the fields?"

  "Not bad, Henry, not bad at all. Agaricus campestris—it's mushrooms, meadow mushrooms. Hold on a second, I'm going to put the scrambler on."

  The screen became random color for a second, then cleared again as the unit on my phone picked up the coded unscrambler.

  "Safe to talk now," he went on. "Henry, we want you to be a front man. We're all s
et to develop a mushroom monopoly. If we pull this off, you'll get all the commissions."

  A mushroom monopoly sounded about as valuable as a corner in yak-wool hats. Cut off the supply of meadow mushrooms, and it seemed to me that people would happily eat something else. I mentioned this to Izzy.

  "Henry, don't you ever look at the science sections? They don't grow the damn things for eating, they use them to extract the transplant catalysts. There are only three companies in the business, and my clients now control two of them. We want the third, but we have to work through an intermediary."

  I understood that easily enough. Laws on monopolies were getting stricter all the time. It was a situation I'd been involved in before and I knew the main limiting factors.

  "How much of the stock do you need, Izzy? Where's it traded, and what do I use for money?"

  "It trades right here, on the Tycho City Board. If we can get twenty-seven percent of the voting stock, we'll have clear control. We already bought eight percent through a holding company and we've been promised votes on another eleven percent on a trade-for-favors base. We want you to get the other eight percent any way you can."

  "Expenses?"

  "Sure. But you only get the commissions if you buy us all we need. Finish with seven percent and you get nothing. Here are the credit number and stockholder positions you'll need to do the buying."

  I pressed 'Record' and he flashed me a stock I.D. list and a fourteen-digit code on the Tycho City Central Bank.

  "One other thing, Henry. We've got a deadline. Midnight, U.T., twelve days from now. Think you can make it?"

  It would be tight, maybe, but it should be possible. I thought for a moment, then nodded just as the door behind Izzy opened and a tall blonde walked in. He glanced around, waved a quick farewell to me and cut the connection on the tableau of Snow White and Happy. I was glad to see him go so I could get started at once. I forgot my nagging tooth and began to check the stock prices.