Mindbridge (2 page)

My dad’s-Robert Lefavre’s-shining hour was the paper he delivered at the 2034 American Physical Society meeting. It was called “The Levant-Meyer Translation: Physics as Wishful Thinking.” Look it up, it’s very convincing. It was well-received. But the next month, Meyer sent a mouse and a camera to Kruger 60 and they came back alive and full of exposed film, respectively. Via the LMT.

So in one day my father was reduced from Nobel candidate to footnote.

Even as young as I was, I could see that something broke in my father when that happened. Something snapped. With hindsight, now, I have sympathy for him. But he was a ruined man, and I grew up disillusioned with him, contemptuous and hostile.

It’s kind of a kick, watching this machine spell. I couldn’t spell contemptuous if my life depended on it. Now if they could only program it to put the semicolons in where they belong...

So as far as motivational analysis, I guess the main reason I became a Tamer was to hurt my dad.

After his anti-LMT thesis was demonstrated to be wrong, Dad took a sabbatical from the Institut Fermi and never went back. Maybe they asked him not to return, but I doubt it. I think it was just that he would have had to start work on applications of the Levant-Meyer Translation, like everyone else at the Institut. After spending six years trying to prove that there was no such thing as the LMT; that the freak accident that happened to Dr. Levant had nothing to do with matter transmission, but could be explained in terms of conventional thermodynamics.

So we gave up the nice Manhattan brownstone and moved upstate, away from Institut Fermi and the weekly seminar at Columbia, to a little junior college where Dad became one-third of the physics department.

He hated the job, but it gave him plenty of time outside of class. He would stay locked in his study all morning and evening, oblivious to us, trying to find where his thermodynamic proof had gone wrong.

Mother left in less than a year, and I left as soon as I was old enough to take the Tamer examination.

My nineteenth birthday came just three days after I graduated from gymnasium (we’d moved back to Switzerland in 2042), and that morning I was the first one in line at the AED employment office in downtown Geneva. The testing took two days, and of course I passed.

I went home and told Dad that I’d been accepted, and he forbade it. Those were the last words he ever said to me. I didn’t even see his face again until his funeral, nine years later.

Dad’s attitude was the familiar one (then), that we had just come too far, too fast. Less than a century had gone by between the first unmanned satellite and interstellar travel via the LMT. We hadn’t even finished cleaning up after the Industrial Revolution, he claimed-and here we were planning to export the mess to the rest of the Galaxy. And war and et cetera. We should grow up first, put a moratorium on the LMT until the race was philosophically mature enough to handle the vast opportunity.

Who was going to tell us when we’d grown up enough, he didn’t say. People like him, presumably.

So I slammed the door on his silence and went on to the AED Academy in Colorado Springs.

(Reading over the above, I can see that it gives a pretty lopsided picture of my motives for joining the AED. Although my father’s extreme stance in the opposite camp was very important, especially in keeping me from quitting the Academy when it got rough, I probably would have tried to join no matter what my family situation was. The profession seemed romantic and interesting, and my generation had grown up coveting it.)

I’m not the best Tamer to ask about “training evaluation.” It took me six years to get through the Academy (in those days a lot of people got through in four), even though I had no trouble with the course work or the physical training. My semester reports were always marked “profiled for psych.”

They’ve loosened up on this a bit, over the years. But when I was at the Academy there was one quality they valued over all others, for the people who made up a Tamer team: icy self-control. The kind of person who would face certain death with a slightly raised eyebrow.

They never got perfection, because they also were looking for qualities such as imagination and resilience, rarely found in robots. But I did have to admit that all of my fellow students seemed rather more self-possessed than I was. Mainly, I had one hell of a time controlling my temper. They put me through psychoanalysis and situational therapy and even made me study Buddhism and Taoism. But then they would test me with the damnedest things, and I would always flunk and get profiled.

They liked to use ringers, for instance. I got a new roommate once who turned out to have been an actor, and who spent a whole semester perfecting his role. He would borrow things and never return them, express outrageous opinions without deigning to argue about them, contemptuously refuse to study and yet get high grades. Plus a whole galaxy of small annoyances. And then, in the middle of the study week preceding the semester’s final exams, he sauntered into the room and announced that he had won over my current lover. And he had revealed to her certain things. Things a man will tell another man and feel protected by bond of gender.

I hoped the AED repaired his nose and fixed that kneecap. I left him there bleeding and went out to walk through the snow, actually afraid I would kill him if I stayed in the room. I stomped around until my fingers turned blue, then returned to find him gone, replaced by a note from my psych counselor.

It turns out that the two extra years served me well later on. I took a heavy load of technical electives, and things like discrete tectonics and atmosphere kinematics came in handy when we got down to practical geoformy. With a broad, general knowledge of the physical and biological sciences, I’ve always drawn more than my share of trailbreaker assignments. The first Tamer team that goes to a planet has to have a couple of generalists aboard, to help decide what sort of specialists will go on subsequent trips. And it’s a lot more fun to crawl around an unexplored planet than it is to go in with pick and shovel and geoform it. For me, anyhow.

Studying oriental philosophies didn’t improve me the way the psych board hoped. But Taoism did save my ass in a very direct way, in what I later learned was my final, make-or-break, situational exam. It also involved an actor.

My Taoism instructor was a kindly old gentleman named Wu, full of humor and patience. I was headed for Germany on summer break, and not planning to do any serious studying, but out of respect for him I agreed to continue the I Ching readings. Even though I privately considered the book’s wisdom to be only slightly more profound than the little notes you get inside of fortune cookies.

So every morning I would compose myself with contemplation and prayer, trying not to feel silly, and then ask the I Ching a general question about the day ahead of me. Then I’d toss the coins, look up the proper commentary, and commit it to memory, so I could refer to it at various times during the day.

I don’t even remember the question I asked that morning before my final testing. But I’ll never forget the commentary:

Here a strong man is presupposed. It is true he does not fit in with his environment, inasmuch as he is too brusque and pays too little attention to form. But he is upright in character, he meets with (proper) response...

It struck me as oddly appropriate, and all day I walked around trying to be not-brusque and proper. That night, as I had done every night since coming to Heidelberg, I went to a quiet, inexpensive bar down the block from my hotel to read and relax from the day’s sightseeing.

A bellicose drunk was abusing the bartender for not serving him. I watched the argument for a while, noted privately that the big fellow could use a dose of the I Ching more than another drink, and returned to my reading.

I looked up when the argument stopped, and in the mirror behind the bar caught a glimpse of the drunk lurching by behind me. Then for no reason he picked up an empty stein and tried with all his might to brain me with it.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the AED was not going to allow me a seventh year of training. They didn’t care whether I got my brains bashed out for inattention or stopped the assault by simply punching the guy. Or breaking his back; he was getting paid enough to compensate for a long hospital stay or a prison term for second-degree murder.

Either way, I would have flunked out.

But I saw it coming and grabbed his wrist and twisted the stein away from him. I set it on the bar and asked him, “Do I know you?” in pretty good German, in a low voice. When he responded with a stream of bilingual invective, I told the bartender to call a cop. The “drunk” left.

The anger, bitter anger, hit me a few minutes later, in trembles and cold sweats and grinding teeth. But instead of going off in a rage, finding the guy and pulverizing him, I remembered who I was trying to be, and kept it bottled up. And wound up spending the rest of the short evening on my knees in the john.

There were three other people in the bar, and one of them was an AED observer. The next day, I got my papers.

Satellit Ubersendung Mitteilung ITT

ZU John Thomas Riley
VON Hermann Kranz
RECHNUNG-
  
DATTEL
     
ZEIT

Director of Personnel
    
Abgeordnete fur Mann
   
NUMMER

AED Academy
  
schaften

Kabel Adresse:
AED Munchen
01 285 78496
     
20 Jull 51
 
02.10

Starseed
Deutschland

Kollekt

My Dear Riley:

As directed, I was present at the informal testing of Tamer Candidate Jacuqe Lefavre. I am trying to reach you by telephone, but get no response from your office or home. You must be in the early evening; it is 2.00 AM here.

It is my pleasure to report that Candidate Lefavre reacted with dignity and restraint. He was obviously very angered by the encounter, but contained his anger even when the effort made him physically ill.

I was reading on the train to Heidelbert your profile of Candidate Lefavre and had myself developed quite a “case of nerves.” I was certain that here tonight I would see, one man or the other, murdered. But I think that, in your analysis, that Candidate Lefavre would perform much better under extreme stress than he does in a classroom situation, you were completely correct.

A tape of the confrontation was made from a ceiling camera, and will be forwarded to your office along with my complete report. When you see it, I think you will agree with my evaluation, that Herr Lefavre deserves no less than a 1,000 stress response rating.

I spoke to Herr Lefavre at the bar, before the actor began his job. His German is bad even for a Swiss. But he seems to be a personable young fellow, and I look forward to meeting him under less artificial circumstances.

Susanne and I will be in Colorado next month, and we look very much forward to calling on you.

Cordially

Kranz

GROOMBRIDGE 1618 MISSION,

17 AUGUST 2051

PERSONNEL:

1.
TAMER 4 TANIA JEEVES. FEMALE, 31. 8
^TH
MISSION. SUPERVISOR.

2.
TAMER 1 HSI CH’ING. MALE, 23. FIRST MISSION.

3.
TAMER 1 VIVIAN HERRICK. FEMALE, 23. FIRST MISSION.

4.
TAMER 1 JACQUE LEFAVRE. MALE, 25. FIRST MISSION.

5.
TAMER 1 CAROL WACHAL. FEMALE, 24. FIRST MISSION.

EQUIPMENT:

5 GENERAL-PURPOSE EXPLORATION MODULES W/ STANDARD EQUIPMENT

1 PERSONNEL RECORDER

1 HOMING FLOATER (SECOND SHOT)

POWER REQUIREMENT:

2 SHOTS 7.49756783002 SU, TUNING @ LOCAL TIME

13:21 :47.94099BDK477

13:27:32.08386BDK477

MISSION PRIORITY 5.

FUNDING #733089 TRAINING.

Jacque Lefavre’s first world was to be the second planet out from Groombridge 1618. It wasn’t an especially promising place; the planets accompanying small stars rarely pan out. They wouldn’t have wasted an experienced team on it.

Tama Jeeves was helping Jacque adjust his suit’s biometric readout. “Ten to one it’s just a rock. A hot rock or a cold one, we’ll see.”

The five of them were standing around the Colorado Springs ready room, having a last cup of coffee while putting their suits through final checks. They would be living in the suits for the next eight days.

“You don’t think we’ll find anything interesting, then?” Carol Wachal said. “Just an expensive training exercise?”

“Well, it’s always interesting. No two are alike, not even the rocks.”

“But you don’t think we’ll find any life?” Jacque said.

Tania shrugged and snapped shut the lid of the readout box. “I wouldn’t expect a Howard Johnson’s. Maybe fossils; maybe some tough species like the Martian nodules.”