A REASONABLE WORLD

by Damon Knight

  “Okay? Now close the cap, come back to the other table, close the cap on that one and press the button.”

  “What’s the cap for?”

  “A safety interlock. We don’t want you to lose any fingers.”

  Windom closed the cap, pressed the button.

  “Okay, open the cap.”

  The cylinder was empty. He crossed to the other one, took the paper out and read the words. He handed it to De Angelo, who barked with delight.

  “Can I try this once more, this time without the cap?”

  “Afraid not,” De Angelo said. “That interlock is supposed to be tamper-proof.”

  Windom shrugged. “Ms. Bondy,” he said, “how the hell does this thing work?”

  “Do you want the standard lecture? Okay. Every now and then in physics we have to realize that something we know isn’t true anymore. For instance, for many years we knew that matter can neither be created or destroyed. Then we had to admit that that wasn’t true. Matter can be created and destroyed, and in fact modern theory says that it happens spontaneously all the time—‘virtual particles’ pop in and out of existence all through the universe. Where do they go in between? Well, never mind.

  “Up till recently, one thing we have always known about physics is that you can’t get something for nothing. Perpetual motion machines don’t work—you can never get more out of a system than you put into it. But Torreson discovered a loophole in this theory—an elegant way to cheat, from which we are all benefiting now. His solution of Schrödinger’s wave equation shows, in effect, that a particle can be anywhere in the universe, and it doesn’t care where. When we transfer that particle to another location, the books still balance because the total mass of the universe hasn’t changed, but we can make money on the transfer and put it in our pockets. Lucky us.”

  “Are you a physicist, Ms. Bondy?”

  “No, I’m a PR person, but that spiel you just heard comes straight from Adrian Edelman, one of the inventors of this apparatus.”

  Windom looked at the two devices again. “I still don’t believe it,” he said.

  “Join the club.”

  13

  Windom read the patents. The device generated a “virtual field” which caused anything placed inside it to acquire a preferential location at another device tuned to the first. The claim was broad, including some aerospace applications; it also included the heating and cooling of buildings and entire cities, and the generation of energy.

  Next week he got to talk to Adrian Edelman, an exuberant bushy-haired Englishman who doodled incessantly on a scratchboard to illustrate his points. He appeared to think the Torreson process was funny—a great joke on Nature.

  “I notice the patents call for an evacuated system,” Windom said. “Is that because it would blow up if you zapped something into an occupied space?”

  “No, that’s not it. The process exchanges volumes and whatever happens to be inside them, not equivalent masses. There isn’t any question of two objects occupying the same space, or anything of that sort.”

  “What, then?”

  Edelman lost his grin for a moment. “Well, there are certain other dangers. Nothing to worry about.”

  Windom took a guess. “Did you ever try zapping something half in and half out of the cylinder?”

  “Yes, actually. It produced a small explosion.”

  “What do you mean by small?”

  “I’d rather not say. In fact, I expect I’ve said too much already.”

  That made sense to Windom. If you broke the bonds between atoms of a solid, energy would have to be released, probably a lot of energy.

  “Do you think there are military applications?”

  “Oh, well, you could make a bomb out of this, certainly, but it would be a pretty elaborate sort of bomb.”

  “Dr. Edelman, is this thing a matter transmitter?”

  “No, no. Something completely different.”

  “What’s the distinction?”

  “Well, look, let’s start with space. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place, all right? And time is what keeps everything from happening at once. So that’s very straightforward. But space and time had to be created in the Big Bang, you know, just like matter and energy, and you can’t create nothing, there wouldn’t be any point—nothing was there already. All right so far?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. So we have to make one little change in the postulates. Space is what keeps everything else from being in one place, and the same thing with time. Now, we know that space is something, because it can be warped by matter, and it can be charged by an electric or magnetic field. So like everything else, space has a structure. Time too, but that’s another matter. So Einstein got it wrong in one respect, there really is one inertial frame in which all motion takes place, and that’s why a Foucault pendulum works. Now it follows, you see, that you could specify a location anywhere in the universe numerically, and you could transfer a particle there, but then to transfer an object you’d have to have numbers for each individual particle, and to get those you’d have to destroy the object. So that’s why matter transmission is no good.”

  “All right.”

  “I used to watch those sci-fi films, you know, where the hero is broken down into atoms and beamed down to the planet to be reassembled, and I always thought, you poor sod, that isn’t you, it’s some other guy with your clothes on. Well, anyhow, this is an entirely different approach. The Torreson device sends out a virtual pulse to find a receiver tuned to a certain frequency. It sends this pulse out instantaneously in all directions, but as it’s a virtual pulse, unless it finds the receiver the pulse doesn’t go anywhere, so it doesn’t cost anything. All right? Now when the pulse reaches the receiver, it instantaneously sends back a virtual signal which arrives, of course, at the same instant as the original pulse, and we can load this signal with any information we want. Is the receiver empty or does it have solid objects in it? Do any of them overlap the boundaries of the field? If the answer to that one is yes, the transfer doesn’t happen. If the answer is no, the transfer takes place instantaneously. Then the receiver becomes a transmitter, sends out a pulse looking for the next receiver, and so on.”

  “Okay. So you need sensors in each receiver to locate solid objects that are partly in the field and partly out. Radar, I suppose. And maybe other information?”

  “Certainly. Temperature, for instance—we’d like to know the receiver isn’t in the middle of a fire. Barometric pressure would be good, just to make sure an explosion isn’t going on. And a systems check, perhaps, although if there’s anything wrong with the circuits, that’s fail-safe. I wouldn’t mind loading this with anything you can think of, because the information can be continuously available and the system is still instantaneous.”

  “Does this seem like magic to you?”

  “No, no. It’s demented, of course, but that’s the kind of universe we’re living in.”

  Windom turned over vehicle design problems to a team headed by one of his associates and concentrated on the network itself. After another week he invited De Angelo to come and look at his results. De Angelo looked with curiosity at the five computers, the drafting machines, the CAD sketches on the walls.

  “This is tentative, of course,” Windom said, “but I’ve got a map of the network. There it is on the screen; take a look. It isn’t as neat a system as I was expecting. Some places just aren’t very near the same meridian or parallel as other places.”

  “You’re using just meridians and parallels? Why?”

  “Simplicity. If you go in any other direction, you’re mixing two kinds of problems. North to south, what you have to deal with is a change in horizontal velocity and yaw. It isn’t severe for the first forty degrees from the equator—you can handle that in one jump. By the way, you get one more free ride—from any north latitude to the corresponding south latitude or vice versa, there’s no change in velocity, and you can use that to go fr
om Greenland to the South Pole for nothing. That’s lucky, because you’re going to need the polar route.”

  “South Pole? How come?”

  “I’ll show you that in a minute. Now, for east-west travel, the problem is angular velocity, not yaw. If you cross ten degrees of longitude eastward, for instance, you come out with the same speed as the surface, but in a different direction—tilted upward ten degrees. The net relative motion is upward and a little backward.”

  De Angelo thought a moment. “You’re crazy.”

  “Well, look here.” He turned to the computer. “Benji, let’s have a ten-degree isosceles triangle. Make one of the long sides the base.”

  The triangle appeared on the flatscreen.

  “Now erect a perpendicular from the base to the upper vertex.” He turned to De Angelo. “Okay, this bottom line represents the speed of the surface. The top line is the speed of the vehicle, and it’s the same—the two sides are equal. But because it’s tilted, the end of it isn’t perpendicular to the end of the other one. So while the surface is moving horizontally, the vehicle is moving upward at an angle, and by the time it gets here, it’s fallen this much behind. These are just the relative motions of the vehicle and the earth’s surface—we haven’t added in gravity yet. When we do that, we find that the shape of the tower is a parabolic curve with the fat part at the bottom.

  “Anyway, the problem is that we have to cope with these angular differences, and they get bigger the farther apart the stations are. For ten degrees at the equator, you’d have to build a tower a thousand feet tall. At the latitude of Portland, Oregon, it would still have to be over seven hundred. And if you wanted to do a twenty-four-degree hop at sixty-five north latitude, you’d get a tower sixty-seven hundred feet high.”

  “We can forget that one. How many stations would you need to get from Portland to Ottawa?”

  “Six, if you want to limit it to ten degrees. So that’s why you need the polar route, because it’s twenty-four degrees from Iceland to Norway.”

  “What about just going around the other way—west instead of east?”

  “I was coming to that, and it’s a whole new can of worms. When you go from east to west, the net motion is downward and you can’t let gravity decelerate the vehicle, you’ve got to decelerate intrinsic motion and gravity. There’s a limit on how much g force you can put on passengers in a commercial vehicle, and on some kinds of freight, too. Furthermore, there’s a safety factor involved. If something goes wrong, you don’t want a vehicle smashing into the bottom of a tower. I know it sounds loony, but the easiest way to get from east to west is to go south and north.”

  “Bob, does your brain ever crack?”

  “Only about twice a day. When you first look at this, you think it’s a free lunch, but in fact it’s fiendishly complicated. You really have three kinds of problems here. North and south are symmetrical, but east and west aren’t. Even for west to east, I don’t like those towers for a lot of reasons. So I began to wonder, why not think smaller? Take a look at this.”

  He asked the computer for a Mercator map of North America, then told it to draw a line from Oakland to Richmond. “I’m not using Portland to Ottawa, because that’s a different problem—we have to go around the Great Lakes. But this illustrates the general solution. See, the stations are just under one degree apart—that’s about fifty-four miles at this latitude. That way, the vehicle comes out with a relative speed of sixteen feet per second, and the tower, if you want to call it that, only has to be four feet high.”

  “How do you figure that? I’d think it would be eight.”

  “No, because it’s a ballistics problem; we’re taking the sum of two motions, one linear and one accelerated. Benji, give me a line chart, x axis sixteenths of a second, zero to sixteen, y axis feet, zero to sixteen. Draw a curve for sixteen feet per second. Draw another curve for thirty-two feet per second per second, using inversions of data. Okay, now draw the resultant on the same scale. Isn’t that a pretty thing, Doug? The two lines cross way over here, but the resultant is perfectly symmetrical.”

  “Yes, I see now.”

  “Anyway, when the vehicle gets to the top of the tube, right here, you zap it again to the next station, but it’s still cheaper than those thousand-foot towers. The pitch changes are minimal, and the passengers will never notice them anyway—the vehicle will be in free fall all the way.”

  “Free fall? Zero gravity?”

  “Has to be. Didn’t I mention that? The vehicle is a ballistic object—the only accelerating force is gravity. You could apply braking in the tube, but then the passengers would feel upside down. So you’ll strap them in, no big deal.”

  “We’re intending to promote this as an instantaneous system, though. How long will it take to get across the continent?”

  Windom grinned. “About twenty-three seconds.”

  14

  That spring the drought in Africa entered its second year. Streets and buildings in Frascati were covered with cinnamon-colored powder so fine that it seeped in around window-frames; Julie hired a second housecleaner, who did nothing but dust and vacuum all day. Grain, flour, milk, eggs and meat were in short supply; there were lines at all the food stores. At Julie’s insistence, Stevens gave generously to famine relief, but he knew it was futile: it would take billions of dollars to feed all those who were now starving to death.

  Foreseeing even more severe shortages to come, he had taken steps to ensure a supply of fresh fruits and vegetables, shipped directly to him from Calabria, and he had also vastly augmented his stockpiles of dried and irradiated food, medicines, bandages and other necessities. He kept these goods in the cellar of the villa and in other places within walking distance of Frascati; he had considered establishing caches near other world capitals, but had given up the idea because he believed that when the crash came, transportation would become difficult or impossible. Meanwhile he went on with what he was doing.

  In April he met Palladino again in Geneva and proposed a partnership, to which Stevens would contribute capital and organization, Palladino his knowledge and services. Palladino wept with gratitude. The papers he signed had been carefully drawn up: every scrap of Palladino’s writing now belonged to Nuovo Orizzonte, S.A., of which Stevens was president and managing director. The board of directors, at the moment, consisted of Julie and Stevens’ lawyer.

  At his next meeting with Palladino he said, “Maestro, as you know, I believe in my heart that you are right. All the same, I must bring up certain objections so that I can know how to meet them when others bring them up.”

  “Certainly, of course.”

  “Very well, then, imagine that I am a very young man. I have no job, or else I have a job that pays me very poorly. What I like is expensive automobiles and fashionable clothing, but I can’t afford them. Now your moneyless society comes into being. Suddenly everything is free; I put myself on the waiting lists for Bugattis, Mercedes, Torinos, or I enter the lotteries, and while I am waiting I watch holos and go to restaurants with girls. Eventually I will get everything I desire. Why should I work?”

  Palladino looked grave. “My friend, have you no desire to create anything or to master a skill, or to be useful to society?”

  “None whatever, and there are thousands like me.”

  “Then, my boy, you should not work. But I think you may change your opinion when you are older.”

  “But in the meantime,” Stevens said, “here I am enjoying all the good things of life and contributing nothing. When I pass those who are working, in my new Alfa-Romeo with the top down, I laugh.”

  Palladino shook his head. “What you are describing will certainly happen,” he said, “but it will not destroy the moneyless society. Let me suggest an even more extreme case. There is a young man or woman who is afflicted with greed. Whatever is given, he takes. He fills his house with furniture, clothing, food, far more than he can use, and he takes so much that there is not enough for others. What do they do?” Wi
thout waiting for a reply, Palladino said, “They go to his house and take away all the things he does not need. If he persists, they do it again, as many times as necessary. And they shake their fingers at him when they see him, they show their disapproval. Eventually such a person becomes well known. The shops and restaurants will not serve him. He must change his ways or he cannot live in the community, because they will make him ashamed.”

  He looked at Stevens earnestly. “Do you see? Now imagine that you are a young boy growing up in the moneyless society. You see how they are treating this young man because of his idleness and greed. Your parents talk to you about the rewards of work. You are not living any more in a world where you can work and still go hungry. There is work for everyone. Young people are encouraged to find the sort of work they like and do it. What will you do?”

  “I think I’ll go to work,” Stevens said. “Thank you, Professor.”

  “It’s nothing. I know some of these things are hard to see, even for people who believe in the moneyless world. That’s because we are so used to our present world, with all its ugliness and irrationality, that we believe it is natural and cannot be changed. But it is unnatural and must be changed. Wait and see.”

  Palladino’s remarks about the education of young people for the moneyless society gave Stevens an idea or two. There ought to be an instruction manual for parents to use with their children; yes, and there should be demonstrations, regular meetings at which the members could play at being in a moneyless world. Palladino accepted both ideas with enthusiasm, and they planned the demonstrations together. They would be family social events, held in school auditoriums or similar places; the parents would bring food to share with each other, and the products of their labor, the children could bring handicrafts, perhaps, little trinkets they had made. Each family would have a card table or two piled with its gifts (gift certificates, for services?). If they had brought enough for everybody, people would simply take whatever they wanted, or if not, there would be raffles. And music. There should be songs about the moneyless world; when they sang them, they would feel united and proud of themselves. What about special costumes to be worn on these occasions, or at least badges and ribbons?