Hidden Variables Read online

  Hidden Variables

  Charles Sheffield

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1981 by Charles Sheffield

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-060-6

  "The Man Who Stole the Moon" copyright © 1980 by Charles Sheffield; first appeared in Destinies Vol. 2, No. 3.

  "The Deimos Plague" copyright © 1978 by Random House, Inc.; first appeared in STELLAR #4, Del Rey Books.

  "Forefather Figure" copyright © 1981 by Charles Sheffield; first appeared in A SPADEFUL OF SPACETIME, edited by Fred Saberhagen, Ace Books.

  "Moment of Inertia" copyright © 1980 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Analog.

  "The New Physics" copyright © 1980 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first appeared in Analog.

  "From Natural Causes" copyright © 1978 by Ultimate Publications, Inc.; first appeared in Amazing Stories.

  "Legacy" copyright © 1977 by UPD Publishing Corporation; first appeared in Galaxy.

  "The Softest Hammer" copyright © 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc.; first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  "Hidden Variable" copyright © 1980 by Charles Sheffield; first appeared in Destinies Vol. 2, No. 4.

  "A Certain Place in History" copyright © 1977 by UPD Publishing Corporation; first appeared in Galaxy.

  "All the Colors of the Vacuum" copyright © 1981 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first appeared in Analog.

  "Perfectly Safe, Nothing to Worry About" copyright © 1977 by UPD Publishing Corporation; first appeared in Galaxy.

  "Summertide" copyright © 1981 by Charles Sheffield; first appeared in Destinies, Vol. 3, #2.

  "The Marriage of True Minds" copyright © 1980 by Mercury Press, Inc.; first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  For Ann, Bowler, Deb, Simon, and Jo.

  INTRODUCTION

  "Most readers come to see the show, not to watch the stage manager take bows in front of the footlights."

  —Stephen King, Night Shift.

  I'll keep this short.

  Story collections present two dangers to the buyer. They may be a re-packaging of old material under new titles, so nearly all the stories can be found in other collections. Or they may contain good stories padded out with unpublishables, dead dogs that no editor would buy. It's easy to find examples of both these ways of cheating the reader.

  I can't tell you how good the stories are in this collection—for that you have to read them. But I can guarantee that none of them appeared in the earlier collection, VECTORS, and all of them were bought by respected editors. Maybe I should also add that of the 356 pages in this book, 281 were either unpublished or committed when VECTORS came out, so this is not the sweepings left over from a first collection.

  One thing is common to VECTORS. I still believe that a bad story cannot be improved by a self-serving or explanatory introduction to it. I will instead provide brief afterwords that aim to provide perspective on how or why the story came out the way it did. But the story's the thing, the whole thing.

  —CHARLES SHEFFIELD, October 8th, 1980

  THE MAN WHO STOLE THE MOON

  The line was quite short but it was moving very slowly. By the time they reached the service desk, three hours had passed since they entered the License Office.

  "Application number?" The woman behind the desk did not look up at the two young men. She was in her mid-twenties, sloppily made-up and about forty pounds overweight. Her smeared make-up was a perfect match for the cluttered desk top and the battered metal filing cabinets behind her.

  "I'm Len Martello." The taller and thinner man was looking about him impatiently. "And this is Garry Scanlon. We've got an Evaluation petition in here, and we wonder what's happened to it."

  "Yeah?" The woman looked up at them for the first time. There was no flicker in interest in her eyes as she slowly scanned from one to the other. "I need yer Application number. Can't do nothin' without that. D'ya have it?"

  "Here's what we have. But it's not an Application number." Martello handed a slip of paper across the desk. He was thin, dark-haired and nervous, with sharp features and a pale, bony face. An old wound on his upper lip had healed to give him a twisted mouth and a skeptical, sardonic look. "We never received an Application number from you. All that came back to us was this, with a file code and an Evaluation petition acknowledgement. Look here." He leaned forward, trying to communicate his own urgency to the woman behind the desk. "We filed for the evaluation of our propellant four months ago, and we've had no answers at all. Not a word from here. What's the delay?"

  She stared at the yellow slip for a few seconds, rubbing one hand against her pimply cheek. At last she shook her head and handed it back. "You got the wrong office. You shoulda gone to Room Four-forty-nine. You'll hafta go over there."

  "But dammit, we asked downstairs, and they told us to come here." Martello had crumpled the yellow slip and stood there, fists clenched. "We asked the guard, and he was quite definite about it."

  The woman shrugged. "He tol' ya wrong, then. Ya know, we only do applications in here. We used to do 'em, evaluations, but not now. I mean, not since I've been here. You'll hafta go to Room Four-forty-nine, nex' floor up."

  Her look turned to the clock on the office wall. She began to pull tissues from a box on the desk and transfer them to her shoulder bag.

  "Look, we made six phone calls from outside, before we came over here." Martello's voice was furious. "Nobody seemed to be able to tell us where to go or what to do or anything. We've taken all day just to get this far."

  "Yeah. But you shoulda gone to Four-forty-nine." The woman stood up, showing a thick bulge of fat over her tight skirt. "They do evaluations, we only do the applications. Anyway, I can't stay an' talk now. You know, I gotta car pool."

  Garry Scanlon put a restraining hand on Len Martello's arm and stepped forward. He was fair-haired, pink cheeked, and slightly pudgy. "Thank you, ma'am. "He smiled at her. "I was wondering, could you maybe call up there and tell them we're on the way? We'd like to see them, and we shouldn't have to wait in line all over again."

  "Sorry." Her eye turned again to the clock. "You'll hafta start over anyway. I mean, they close same time we do, in another coupla minutes. They won't see you today. I can't change that, ya know."

  "You mean we'll have to begin the whole thing again tomorrow?"

  "Guess so, yeah. Offices here open at eight-thirty." She picked up her bag and shepherded them in front of her, out into the corridor, then looked at them uncertainly. "Well, have a nice day," she said automatically, and was off, wobbling away on her high heels.

  Garry Scanlon slumped back against the corridor wall and took a deep breath. "Christ, Len, there's another whole day wasted."

  "Yeah." Martello was paler than ever, with anger and frustration. "God, no wonder we couldn't get any sense out of these turkeys over the phone. If they're all like her, I don't see how Government evaluations ever get done at all."

  "So what do we do now?"

  Martello shrugged. "What the hell can we do? We'll have to come back. We're trapped, Garry. It's going to be the same old crap. If we don't get an approval, we'll never get an industrial group to look at us. And we've agreed that we'll never get the bench tests done without outside financing."

  He shook his dark head. "I hope the propellant's as good as we think it is. Another night in this crazy place, and I thought we'd b
e on our way back to Dayton by now. Come on, let's see if we can check in at the Y again."

  He started to walk away, head bowed, along the dingy corridor. After a final, helpless look at the empty office, Garry Scanlon followed him.

  * * *

  "Yes, yes, it's here all right. Martello and Scanlon, right, Evaluation Request 41468/7/80. Now, if you'll wait a minute I'll run a computer search and see where it's got to."

  The speaker was small and white-haired. He wore a flowered red vest, opened to show old-fashioned suspenders and a well-pressed white shirt. A carved wooden sign on the desk in front of him read: "Henry B. Delso—the Last One Left." He hummed softly to himself as he carefully entered the data request, pecking away at the keyboard with two gnarled fingers. When it was done he swivelld the display screen around so that they could all see it.

  "Be just a few seconds, while it does the search. Rocket propellant, you said?"

  "That's right." Len Martello swallowed. "A good one."

  "Don't get many of those any more." Delso shook his head. "Well, here she comes."

  The characters that filled the display screen were unintelligible to Len and Garry. They watched Delso, trying to read his expression.

  "What's it say?" asked Garry.

  "Not much." Delso shook his head again, and looked at his watch. "I'll get a hard copy output of this for you, and tell you how to read it. But I don't think it'll do much for you."

  He leaned forward in his wooden, high-backed chair. "Look, how long have you boys been working on this?"

  "Here in Washington? Just three days." Garry's pink face was earnest. "But we filed the forms over four months ago."

  Delso nodded. "First application, right?"

  "Yes. Did we file it the wrong way?"

  "Nope. You did it right, evaluation request's on the right form, everything's in order there." He looked again at his watch. "I'm done for the day, just about. Gimme a hand here and I'll boil up a cup of tea for all of us—better for your gut than the stuff in that coffee urn—and I'll tell you what the problem is. Can't tell you the solution, wish I could. You'll have to figure something out for yourselves. Good luck on that."

  He carried a battered shiny kettle into the back room, filled it, and came back. "Go bring the teapot and milk through here, would you? And get cups and a spoon while you're there." He plugged the electric kettle into an outlet on the wall behind him. "There we go. Three minutes, and it'll be boiling."

  He leaned back. "So, you've got a new propellant? I'll believe you, even believe it might be a good one. But do you know what happens when you file your evaluation form with the Government here?"

  Garry and Len looked at each other in bewilderment. Len shrugged. "I guess somebody here takes a look at it. And decides if it's dangerous for us to test it. If it's not, we get a permit from you and we go ahead and do the bench tests."

  "Just so." Henry Delso was carefully measuring four spoons of tea into the big brown pot. "Sounds very fair and logical, eh? And you know, it used to be. I've been around this office for thirty-five years—as long as we've had the evaluation procedure. When I first started here, I read all the applications—we didn't distinguish in those days between applications and evaluations, that only came in fifteen years ago. I'd take each application, and I'd study it for a day, maybe two days. For something like a propellant I'd dig out the relevant patents, and the engineering handbook. Maybe do a few calculations, see if things seemed to be in the right ball-park. And you'd get an answer, yes or no. It took a week, sometimes two weeks, from start to finish."

  "But we've waited over four months," said Len.

  "Right." A rueful smile. "That's progress, yer see?"

  Delso looked around his office, at the ranks of file cabinets, the computer terminal, and the elaborate multi-channel telephone. "I had none of this in the old days. Look at what we have to do now. Rocket propellant, see, first thing I have to do is look up the Industrial Codes. I can do it in that book"—he pointed at a three-inch thick volume with a bright red cover—"or I can check through the terminal there. That tells me which Government departments must be involved in the evaluation procedure, where they are, and so on."

  "Hell, if we'd known that we could have contacted them before we sent in the forms," said Len. "We could have saved you a lot of time here."

  "Not the approved method." Henry Delso poured tea into three chipped cups and pushed the tray forward. "Help yourselves to milk and sugar."

  He picked up a cup. "I can tell you the complete list if you want it, but it wouldn't help you. The law says that they have to be contacted from here, whether you talk to them or not. Let's look at just a few of them. Environmental Protection Agency, naturally—you have to get their approval, because you'll be releasing some substances into the air. It might affect the environment when you do the bench tests. Center for Air Quality, same thing applies to them. Food and Drug Administration"— he looked at them over the top of his thick glasses—"didn't think of them, did you? You'll be working with new compounds, they'll want samples to test for the effects on humans, plants, and animals. Might be harmful effects there. Then there's Defense, they have to be involved on anything that might have defense implications. Then, let's see, Office of Safety are on the list—with a new material test, they have to be sure there'll be no danger to workers who'll be involved."

  "But we're the only two people who'll be involved!" Garry's eyes were bulging. "We don't want their stupid protection."

  "Ah, but it's for your own good—you don't have a say in it. Where was I?" Delso leaned back, checking off on his fingers. "Health Department, naturally—they duplicate some of Food and Drug's work and some of the Office of Safety, but they have their own checking system and that has to be followed."

  Len Martello's scarred mouth was more twisted than usual. "I just can't believe it. You mean we have to get approval from all those groups before we can get a positive evaluation from you—that we can't do any more testing until that's finished?"

  "That's right." Delso handed him a cup. "All those groups—and we're just getting started. Equal Opportunity, there's a dilly for you. They have to be sure that your company will have a positive action program for minorities."

  "But there's only the two of us in it!"

  "Makes no difference, laws are laws. Then there's the Women's Civil Commission. They'll have to be satisfied that there's no sex discrimination in the operation—that's not considered the same thing as the minority question. Mustn't forget the Department of Transportation, too. You'll need to get a clean bill of health from them, to ship your propellant."

  "We won't be shipping any propellant!" Garry slammed the cup down on the old desk. "Well be making it right where we test it. Damn it, Mr. Delso, these regulations are ridiculous. Why should we have to get approval from a whole bunch of places that won't have anything at all to do with the development?"

  Delso pursed his lips and shook his head. "I can't disagree with you. You're five hundred percent accurate. That's exactly what I'm trying to get across to you. I can't change the laws, they've all been passed and we have to go along with them here. I think they're as silly as you do, most of them, but I can't break those laws—not if I want to see my pension in a couple more years."

  Len Martello put down his cup and stood up. "Mr. Delso, I don't know all those laws, but I do know how to count, and I think I understand probability. How many negative evaluations from those departments would it take to kill our chances?"

  "One is enough, for the evaluation to come out negative. You can always re-file, of course."

  "And start all over again? Look, if we have to get, say, twenty independent agencies to approve, and there's just a one-in-five chance that any one of them will say no to us, do you see what that means? The probability that we'll get approval is down to four-fifths to the twentieth—less than one chance in eighty. Am I right?"

  "Quite right, I'm afraid." Delso nodded. "Your arithmetic's probably right, and I'm s
ure about your conclusion. In the past ten years, since the last set of regulations came into effect, I can count the number of successful evaluation petitions from small companies like yours on the fingers of one hand. I tell you, I'm just trying to help, even if it sounds as though all I'm doing is offering bad news."

  "So what ought we to do?" Len sat down again and looked intently at the old man.

  "You don't know much about law, do you? Either one of you."

  "Hardly anything—we've never needed it."

  "Well, let me give you some free advice. It's the best I can offer but I don't think you'll like it. If you ever hope to get a positive evaluation nowadays, go and hire a lawyer—a whole bunch of lawyers. And you'd better be ready to spend a year and a lot of money, if the petition involves advanced technology."

  He peered over at their cups, buttoning his vest as he did so. "You've not touched your tea, either one of you. How old are you now, twenty-one?"

  "Twenty-two." Len laughed without any sign of humor. "Twenty-two, and the more I hear, the older I feel. You're telling us there's no hope—this whole trip has been a waste of time."

  "I'm telling you I don't think you have much hope, the way you're doing it now. But you're young, and space-mad from the looks of you. Don't give up."

  "So what ought we to do?"

  "You've got plenty of energy, and you want to work on the space program. I don't think you can get far these days on your own. Forty years ago, there weren't all these restrictions. Nowadays, you ought to join the Government, or one of the really big corporations. They can afford to hire a whole team of lawyers, and they can afford to sit and wait until all the roadblocks to permits are out of the way. You can't do that, you don't have the resources."

  Len stood up again, and this time Delso rose also. He walked over to the door and took an umbrella from the hook behind it, then a heavy and out-of-style overcoat. "You can't wait—and it gets worse every year. I see it happening, right here."