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Cover art by John Allemand
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WILD GOOSE CHASE by Stanley Schmidt
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Reader's Department: ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS
Novella: SEED OF REVOLUTION by Daniel Hatch
Science Fact: THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: A NEW ERA by Dr. Don Lincoln
Novelette: THE BEAR WHO SANG OPERA by Scott William Carter
Novelette: PAYBACK by Tom Ligon
Science Fact: PRESERVING THE MEMORY by Janet Freeman
Novella: FAILURE TO OBEY by John G. Henry
Short Story: DUCK AND COVER by Don D'Ammassa
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TWO NEW KINDS OF WORMHOLES by John G. Cramer
Probability Zero: GLOBAL WARMING by Harry Turtledove
Special Feature: MUSINGS FROM THE FIRST GENERATION by Michael Carroll
Short Story: THE CALCULUS PLAGUE by Marissa K. Lingen
Series: TURNING THE GRAIN: PART I OF II by Barry B. Longyear
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. CXXIX Nos. 7 and 8, July-August 2009
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
Peter Kanter: Publisher
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Stanley Schmidt: Editor
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Editorial Correspondence Only: [email protected]
Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WILD GOOSE CHASE by Stanley Schmidt
In the middle of January, much of the country was captivated by one of the most striking true tales of genuine heroism in recent memory. A US Airways jetliner, just after taking off from New York City's LaGuardia airport, flew into a flock of Canada geese. Its engines “ingested” a couple of them, died, and the pilot suddenly had a very short deadline to decide where to take the plane down with minimal control. He quickly and wisely decided that an attempt to make any airport would be disastrous not only for the plane and its occupants, but for the dense concentration of people and buildings along any possible approach path. So he instead took the one reasonable course and ditched in the Hudson River just off midtown Manhattan. Thanks to his quick thinking, skill, and the smoothly coordinated efforts of a whole bunch of flight crewmembers and rescue workers, everyone on board got out alive and relatively unscathed.
Two days later, the tabloid New York Post devoted several pages to feature stories and editorials about the incident. Some of them praised the aforementioned heroism, but that's not where the main emphasis was. The tone was set by a full-front-page photo of a Canada goose in flight, with a gun's crosshairs centered on its breast and the 126-point headline, “PLUCK ‘EM!" A subhead exhorted, "Kill the geese before they down another NY jet." And a smaller teaser elaborated, “Shoot ‘em! Poke holes in their eggs! Wreck their nests! Do whatever it takes to stop the geese that threaten our airliners. If nothing's done, we could see another catastrophe like the one that downed a US Airways jet in the Hudson, experts say."
Well, yes, we could, and probably will—though not often—no matter what's done to control the geese. And things can be done, should be done, and are being done—but they'll never be completely effective and it's unrealistic to expect them to be. Admittedly the experts quoted inside (one expert, actually, a wildlife biologist formerly employed by the New York Port Authority) were considerably more moderate and reasonable in tone, though they (he) did in fact advocate use of all the measures mentioned in that teaser.
But I couldn't help wondering, in view of the prevailing tone of this coverage, just how far would the writers like to go with “doing whatever it takes,” if they could. How far could we go, using technology we already have or might believably develop? How far should we go?
My impression (and admittedly this requires some reading between the lines, in which I may be mistaken) was that they would like to go as far as possible, with no consideration for anything except saving every possible human life. The editorial started out, “It's time to kill the geese,” though it then qualifies that with, “It's especially time to kill those geese most likely to wreck another jet...” It also hedged by granting that the cause of the incident had not yet been officially determined, but then added, “Nobody doubts that the guilty birds were Canada geese."
"Guilty?” Guilty of what? Such phrasing makes it sound as if the geese mounted a malicious and premeditated attack on the airplane. Let's see, now ... Who flew what into whom, at a speed not naturally attained by anything living on this planet?
No doubt it's now time for the obligatory disclaimer for those readers who are about to sharpen their pens and keyboards and tear into me for sentimentally defending the geese and advocating that nothing should be done about them because they're so cute. That's not even remotely what I'm doing; if you think it is, please start over because you're missing the point. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or cuteness, and I'm not advocating doing nothing about the geese. I'm all too aware that they can be serious pests in the wrong places; I don't like them frequenting the same beaches I do, and I especially don't want too many of them around airports that I use (and I do expect to use LaGuardia at least once this year).
Geese aren't even my main subject here. They're just an illustration that happens to be in the public eye at the time I'm writing, of some more general human foibles.
Specifically, what I am doing is taking a critical look at:
The sheer bloodthirstiness and anthropocentricity of the Post's apparent attitude toward the problem;
The common human tendency to think that we must strive for absolute safety in all things; and
The common human tendency to think that we have any realistic hope of achieving absolute safety in anything.
I think my few quotes so far amply demonstrate my point 1 about attitude. Far be it from me to suggest that all people share these attitudes. The one expert the paper quotes explicitly acknowledges that measures like shooting geese and addling their eggs are unpopular in some circles (sometimes for reasons that are at least partly sentimental). But the sales figures and ubiquity of this paper and simil
ar tabloids in New York area stores suggest that their editorial views are at least widely accepted.
Points 2 and 3 are so bound up in each other that it's hard to consider them separately. We hear the phrase “If it saves even one human life...” so often it has become a cliché, often used to justify extreme precautions and punitive measures. (I recently saw a news story about two boys being thrown out of their school for having knives on the premises. I gather that this sort of thing is now done regularly and widely, and with no consideration of what kind of knife is involved or what anybody does with it. Under this kind of regime, I could have been thrown out of school at almost any time; once past the age of eight or nine, I always carried a pocket knife. I seldom took it out and never even remotely thought of it as a weapon. It was just a tool, which I could and did use safely in a wide range of everyday situations. But to today's administrative fanatics, I would have been a horrible juvenile delinquent.) We also hear the phrase, “We can't stop until we've made absolutely safe."
Well, I have news for people who say that. Nothing is absolutely safe, but we can drive ourselves and everybody around us crazy trying to make it so. It's certainly a good idea, in any endeavor, to do what we reasonably can to minimize risks. But the key word there is “reasonably.” In the real world, anything we do will involve some risk, and we must learn to accept and live with that. Even staying in bed all day, in a house built like a fortress, does not guarantee absolute safety. The house could be struck by a meteorite—it's not likely, but it could happen. Build an even stronger house? Okay; then you're safe unless a bigger meteorite comes along—even less likely, but still not impossible. If you want your life to include anything except guarding against every conceivable danger, at some point you have to decide how much of your resources you're willing to invest in protection against improbable threats, do that much, and then stop worrying about the remaining risks and get on with your life. Putting everything into a quest for absolute safety is a wild goose chase in the best figurative sense of the phrase.
In the case of the literal geese with which I opened these musings, my subjective impression was that the Post writers would ideally like to get rid of all the geese, everywhere, and only grudgingly recognized that they might have to settle for increasing, or at least continuing, the ongoing efforts to control goose populations on and around airports. After all, even if you drive off or kill all the geese living there now, it won't be long before more move in from elsewhere.
As long as there are geese. But what if there were no geese?
Getting completely rid of the “feathered fiends” (a phrase actually used in the Post) would seem to be the only thing that would really satisfy these writers. It still wouldn't guarantee absolute safety, of course. With the geese gone, we'd still have to worry about pigeons, gulls, coyotes, and other mindlessly malicious menaces.
Well, what if we could get rid of those, too?
At first glance, it might seem that the goal is too ambitious to be achievable—but is it really? Passenger pigeons, not much more than a century ago, were reportedly so numerous that their passing flocks darkened the sky for days on end—yet human hunters took only a few decades to exterminate them. Theirs is only one story among many.
And now we are beginning to acquire new methods that could make it even easier to get rid of species that humans find inconvenient. Engineered pathogens might well be developed to target a particular species and spread effectively enough to wipe it out without directly bothering anything else.
Indirectly, of course, is another matter. An ecosystem is a massive, complex, interlocking system of linked physical and chemical feedback loops. Arbitrarily eliminating any part of it, such as a species of plant or animal, can disrupt a cascade of those loops, making the whole system collapse, with disastrous results for all parts of it (including us). For this reason, we sometimes hear that every species is essential and we don't dare let anything go extinct. It's a nice thought, but not necessarily true. Some species (like mosquitoes in the Arctic, which are fundamental to just about everything larger) are functionally much more important than others to the whole. Some species could be eliminated (and many have been, throughout evolutionary history) without causing universal catastrophe. Even species that were important have disappeared, and the disrupted balance merely readjusted itself into a new one (until the next such event).
It's even possible to imagine humans getting rid of all other species and carrying on by themselves. They would still need something to carry out the many energy-related functions of a biological ecosystem, which means they would in effect have to create an artificial “ecosystem” which might or might not involve engineered biological organisms. It would be an enormous undertaking, and no civilization now on Earth has anywhere near the technical skills or ecological understanding that would be needed to carry it out. But in principle, it's possible.
In my novels The Sins of the Fathers and Lifeboat Earth, I imagined a very old, very advanced civilization that had done exactly that. When circumstances brought them to Earth and for the first time they saw a wild profusion of other life forms, they were fascinated and overwhelmed. At least a few of them managed to feel at least a hint of regret at what their ancestors had thrown away.
Personally, I don't want to be one of those ancestors. I would rather continue to enjoy sharing this planet with a rich variety of other life, even if doing so means accepting a tiny bit of risk that could conceivably be reduced still further. In the particular case of the geese that started all this, I do want the Port Authority to continue making reasonable efforts to keep their numbers down near airports. But when I board a plane, I will know and accept the slight risk of a lethal encounter with them. I'm not interested in giving up everything else for a wild goose chase after absolute safety in all things.
Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt.
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 7 & 8, July/August 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.
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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
People often wish they could keep their youth forever, but what if they really could, in an extreme way? And what if somebody else makes that decision for them, to keep the physical and mental advantages of a child while gaining some of the best features of adulthood? That's what happens in “Evergreen,” Shane Tourtellotte's lead novelette in our September issue. And, as so often happens, the ramifications of a choice that sounds simple are far more complex and less clear-cut than those who make it—or those for whom it is made—might imagine or wish....
We'll also have fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee and Eric James Stone, plus the thoroughly engaging conclusion of Barry B. Longyear's Turning the Grain.
Richard A. Lovett supplies the scie
nce fact article, “From Atlantis to Canoe-Eating Trees: Geomythology Comes of Age.” Ideally science relies on careful observation, measurement, and (whenever possible) controlled experiments. But at the scales of prehistory, planetology, and astronomy, some of the most interesting phenomena are out of reach for direct observation and experiment, yet strongly hinted at by folklore and ancient writings. By themselves, those are not science—but they can suggest the existence of events for which evidence can then be found and tested by thoroughly scientific methods....
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Reader's Department: ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS
It's time again to thank everyone who voted in our annual poll on the previous year's issues. Your votes help your favorite writers and artists by rewarding them directly and concretely for outstanding work. They help you by giving us a better feel for what you like and don't like—which helps us know what to give you in the future.
We have five categories: novellas, novelettes, short stories, fact articles, and covers. In each category, we asked you to list your three favorite items, in descending order of preference. Each first place vote counts as three points, second place two, and third place one. The total number of points for each item is divided by the maximum it could have received (if everyone had ranked it 1) and multiplied by 10. The result is the score listed below, on a scale of 0 (nobody voted for it) to 10 (everybody ranked it first). In practice, scores run lower in categories with many entries than in those with only a few. For comparison, the number in parentheses at the head of each category is the score every item would have received had all been equally popular.
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NOVELLAS (5.00)
1. “Tenbrook of Mars,” Dean McLaughlin (5.65)
2. “The Spacetime Pool,” Catherine Asaro (5.17)
3. “Brittney's Labyrinth,” Richard A. Lovett (4.56)
Analog SFF, July-August 2009 Page 1
