The Gentle Seduction (20 page)
New waves of shock washed through Encrai's brain, waning as his mind froze, waxing each time a coherent thought tried to form. "My fleet. The center of my fleet." He shuddered. "But your own ships! That star will destroy your own ships as well!"
Thearsporn turned sober. "Yes, it will. Only the farthest research vessels will survive."
Encrai ripped deep tears in his web, unbelieving, incapable of believing. "Why? How?"
The Admiral's voice answered gently. "Let me tell you the story of the Bully and the Crazy Boy."
Encrai had no answer.
"Once there was a crazy boy who always walked home from school. One day a bully confronted him, and dared the boy to get around him. The boy tried to cajole the bully, but failed. So they fought. And the bully beat the boy unmercifully. But in the course of the fighting the boy got in one good blow, and bloodied the bully's nose."
The voice through the translator was soft, soothing; by concentrating on the voice, Encrai could think again.
"The next day, the bully and the crazy boy met and fought again, and the boy was brutally beaten, but again he got in one good blow, kicking the bully in the knee."
Encrai noticed Thearsporn's face; it became increasingly contorted as he spoke. The words were heated now, and Thearsporn's eyes, which were bright before, now burned.
"And they continued to meet and fight for a week. By then the crazy boy was a bruised mass of ruptured flesh. But despite all the bruises he wasn't defeated. In fact, he looked up at the bully and pleaded, 'Please, please don't make me hurt you again.' The bully laughed at him, knowing he was a crazy, stupid boy—but he stopped laughing because laughing hurt, because the boy'd split his lip the day before, and the bully put his hand to his lips, and felt the swelling from his eye that still hadn't subsided, and felt the pain in his knee as he shifted his weight. And the bully looked at the crazy boy with horror, and turned and hurried away."
Encrai felt bile rise in his throat. Insanity, insanity was what this man was about. Why couldn't Thearsporn and his kind just accept the idea of slavery, like rational beings, when the alternative was death?
Encrai's numbness was gone; rational thought replaced the emptiness.
And with new thoughts came a new wave of horror. He formed new orders on his console; orders for his flagship and personal guard.
Captain Taress gasped as he read the orders. "25g's! The compensators won't be able to handle it all."
"I know that, Captain," Encrai growled. "Do it anyway!" Encrai turned back to the human Admiral. "Are any of those suicidal ships headed for
us
?"
Thearsporn shook his head. "Nope, 'fraid not."
A stench from the liesniffer assailed Encrai's senses; his snarl was cut off as a hammer of acceleration nailed him in his webcradle. The human snapped sideways in his chair, awkwardly positioned to survive such force. "Where are they?" Encrai demanded of his prisoner. "How soon will the suiciders get here?"
Thearsporn twisted into the acceleration, trying to get away from the even more terrible agony assaulting him from the pain transmitters in the chair. "They're, they're off to one side, away from the scouts. Coming from an off angle. Should be here any minute."
Even as Thearsporn spoke, Encrai saw a dozen cosmic rays blossom into existence on his flagship's own scanners. With a strangled cry, Encrai screamed interception orders for his ships, orders they had only seconds to execute.
But Encrai's officers were the best in the universe, and they made it. The guardships lurched forward, spraying death even as the guards themselves died. The flagship's acceleration rotated 90 degrees and doubled. And the dead crews of the suicide ships couldn't retarget on the dodging flagship.
"We made it," Encrai muttered, then shouted in joy, "we made it!"
His thoughts turned to the future even as his happiness swept away his horrors. They would have to send another fleet to this system, he realized. His personal career was destroyed, of course, but there was something more important here. These crazy primates had to be subdued.
It would be difficult to convince the High Command to send another fleet now, with the retrenchment wars coming, but Encrai would convince them. And it wouldn't take much; even a class H fleet, hardly bigger than the original exploratory group, could beat the remains of the human defenses. Yes, a class H fleet . . . and a single Planetburster, just in case the fleet failed to conquer. Yes. Encrai turned cheerfully to his prisoner.
The prisoner was clamping his jaw, swallowing hard. Encrai remembered the psychmed talking about a stimulant in the primate's teeth.
"What . . ." Encrai started, then slapped his hand down on the alarm button. The man's complexion darkened, perspiration erupted from his face, and Encrai could smell the man's anger as he tore himself from the ill-fitting prison chair in the 5 g gravity.
With a powerful lunge Encrai was upon the beast— for beast Thearsporn was, with the light of insanity in his eyes. Closing swiftly, Encrai delivered a lethal stroke of his claws.
But Thearsporn snapped away, and the lethal stroke merely raked across his side, drawing a swath of skin and blood. Thearsporn extended his fist with impossible strength, and bones snapped in Encrai's side as he crashed through the air.
Disregarding his pain, Encrai followed as Thearsporn dodged down the corridors. A Marine appeared and fired a lasegun through Thearsporn's abdomen, but it didn't diminish his speed. He disappeared around the corner.
Encrai realized that he was heading for the fusion pool at ship's center.
The creature was insane, no doubt about it. Worse, he was dying—he was already dead, if he would just realize it; no doubt about it. But he would not realize it, and he would get to the fusion pool; there was no doubt about that either. Encrai wondered briefly how the Admiral knew where to go and how to get there.
Not that it mattered. Encrai started to take a deep breath, found it was a terrible mistake. The broken bones in his chest must have punctured a lung. And an artery. Moist warmth collected near his throat. He was dying.
Not that it mattered. In a few moments he would become part of another, even smaller, star. Admiral Thearsporn's star.
Encrai sighed. He felt a certain sense of guilt, failing his people like this, but the guilt seemed remote. Poor, poor Kalixi. He wished he could tell them; he wished he could tell them how much they still had to learn before they could conquer.
But for now the learning was too late; and soon the fury of atoms in bondage conquered all.
Evolution Of Entropic Error
Have you ever served on a jury? Have you listened to the careful framing of the statements, watched the little rituals which subdue the emotions that would otherwise interfere with reason, obscuring the correct analysis of evidence? For all the faults of our judicial system, you simply can't doubt the superiority of this system to two forms of justice that preceded it: the will of the powerful, and the whim of the lynch mob.
Technologies, like nuclear power and genetic engineering, are still judged by the traditional methods of two centuries ago. Wealthy lobbies maneuver behind the scenes to ensure that their products receive subsidies, while also working to assure that competing technologies are abolished by fiat and or crippled by regulation—the will of the powerful.
Meanwhile protesters sally forth to destroy their favorite enemies, armed with more anger than knowledge, while the news media magnify the loss of sanity, focusing on the emotions of the contestants, treating the subtleties of serious issues like homely wallflowers at the high school dance—the whim of the lynch mob.
Hopefully we will invent—and learn to live by—a variant of trial by jury for technology. We need to hurry, however, because our technologies grow more potent every day; every day, it becomes easier for the lobbies and the lynch mobs to cripple us so badly that we cannot recover.
Goodness! This is a terribly serious introduction for such a lighthearted bit of research as "The Conservation of Error in Closed Conservative Systems." How is it connected?
Well, regardless of what means one uses to make decisions on the use and abuse of technology, there are clearly dangerous technologies. 1 have here an update on the latest research in one such technology. You may not have heard of it before—but as you can see from this article, the potentialities are beyond any mortal grasp. Indeed, I would like to take this opportunity to demand a total, outright ban on work in this field, to go into effect immediately.
There are just some things that we weren't meant to know.
Evolution Of Entropic Error In Closed Conservative Systems
Ever since the successful quantization of universal error by our statistical mechanics group here at Oxford,
1
Dr. Zachariah Marnel's mathematicians in the U.S. have denounced us.
2
Yet every experiment we conduct lends more support to our Theory of Error Conservation.
3
Dr. Marnel's dogmatic clinging to his own theory of entropic error has become absurd.
I am sure the basic difference between our two theories is familiar to all readers; Error Conservation states that the total error of a closed system remains constant. The theory of entropic error, on the other hand, claims that the total error of any system is constantly increasing, just as the entropy of the universe increases. Thus, according to Dr. Marnel, every time an error is neutralized (or "corrected" in the terminology of the specialists) this neutralization causes the creation of two or more new errors.
4
One could express it in this manner: Although two wrongs don't make a right, two rights do make a wrong. This, on the face of it, is absurd.
But let us settle the matter with an examination of our most recent experiments. The first experiment was an attempt to determine the factors and formulae relating different types of error. Three types of error were investigated: 1) scientific error, 2) legislative error, and 3) administrative error. The experimental design was straightforward: A government research project was analyzed in terms of a) the inaccuracies of the conclusions of the scientists, b) the injustices written into the laws based on these conclusions, and c) the misinterpretations of these laws by the officials in charge of enforcement. We chose to study these three types of error because Error Conservation applies only to closed systems. Although no real system is truly closed, all three of these groups work in vacuums divorced from reality. They approach the idea very closely.
We discovered a linear relationship between scientific error (S) and legislative error (L):
L = K(S) + L
1
where K is the conversion coefficient and L
1
is the natural error of the legislative body in the absence of scientific input. L
1
varied from legislative body to legislative body; it seemed to be roughly proportional to the number of representatives in the given legislature, but we did not explore this in any depth. The conversion coefficient was found to be approximately 2.7x 10
4
legislative error/scientific error. This K was constant to within the limits of our measurement accuracy over a wide array of scientific research projects.
The administrative error (A) was a somewhat more complicated function of the scientific error:
A = A
0
e
GS
Where A
0
is the natural error of the administration in the absence of scientific input, and G is the conversion factor. Here, the conversion factor G is approximately 4.5 x 10
7
/scientific error. As is obvious from both the function and the factor, administrative error rises much faster than legislative error as the system increases in size. We postulate the difference to be caused by the following phenomenon: Whereas a group of legislators must ultimately resolve their errors into a single unified statement, administrators are free to act independently in their misinterpretation and generate individual errors at will.
In any event, this relationship remained constant over many cycles of research-leads-to-laws-leads-to-enforcement-leads-to-new-research as the enforcement failed to give the desired results. Error was always conserved when expressed in constant units—we converted to scientific error for all comparisons. Even when research groups were broken into smaller groups or lumped into larger ones, the total error of the original bureaucracies always equalled the sum of the errors of the new bureaucracies.
One of the most striking predictions in Dr. Marnel's theory of entropic error is the existence of error- generating (i.e. "accident-prone") persons.
5
Obviously our Theory of Error Conservation leaves no place in the universe for such error-generators. In a diligent search we were able to locate three individuals with some of the theoretical characteristics of the accident-prone as described by Dr. Marnel. Unfortunately, two of them met with untimely deaths before we could contact them, and the third was hospitalized the day experimentation was to begin. So we have not yet verified or contradicted the existence of error-generators, although we are still trying.
We have, however, explored the so-called Theoretician's Dilemma.
6
This is the common superstition that when a theoretician enters the laboratory, everything goes wrong (i.e., if the theoretician observes an experiment, errors are made that invalidate the experiment).
Our initial results in this area were dismaying: scientific error did in fact increase when a theoretician received access to the lab. We were baffled for some time by this phenomenon. But then we noticed a curious subtlety in the effect. As the theoretician observed for longer periods of time, he caused less increase in error.
From this we deduced the existence of both potential and kinetic error. Kinetic error is directly observable, whereas potential error is "stored." Potential error must be reconverted into kinetic error to become observable.
This concept fitted our observations neatly. The theoreticians we studied worked mostly with mathematics, which made it difficult for them to commit real errors. Yet error was constantly being pumped into them by experimental results. This caused a buildup of potential error which had little chance to escape. When the theoretician observed an experiment, this potential leaked off and showed up as kinetic error in the laboratory. As the potential error was exhausted, the Theoretician's Dilemma disappeared.
There have been several articles hotly debating what happens to a theoretician's potential error when he dies. We are now filling out paperwork to acquire a theoretician with which we can experiment. In light of the large numbers of Ph.Ds currently on the welfare roles, our only fear is that the government will release more theoreticians to our research than we could hope to exterminate and analyze in a timely fashion.
It should be noted in passing that our work has many practical uses. We now see that important research should involve as few people as possible. This holds down the total error. The theoreticians for important research should always be observing extraneous experiments, so that the error they absorb from the team's real experiments can be channeled off into other fields (some groups have always had their theoreticians involved in pointless experiments, which shows the power of human intuition). And although our government has chosen to overlook the military applications, others have not. The United States, with guidance from Dr. Marnel's group, is working on a method to parachute theoreticians into enemy territory.
7
It is estimated that a single high-yield physicist (i.e., a physicist who has done voluminous work with no experimentally verifiable results— such a man would have a large potential error buildup) could incapacitate the Kremlin for a decade, if the potential error were released properly. And it is rumored that Russia is working on a technique for storing administrative potential error.
8
This would be a major strategic breakthrough; administrators are more numerous, more expendable, and easier to plant in high-security areas. Once again, the weapons of tomorrow are being developed by the superpowers of today.
But I have digressed. My main purpose here is to reply to the ridiculous accusations of Dr. Marnel. He has repeatedly vilified the research which my group has done. Our experimental results consistently confirm our claims for error conservation. Other groups throughout England have verified our results. Yet Dr. Marnel has not turned his attention to the flaws of his theory. Nor has he attacked our results or our methods. Rather, he has attacked myself and my colleagues personally: he claims that our research has failed to find growth in error because we ourselves have made errors in our measurements—and that, when we add these errors in, the total error has increased at every step.
Now, my coworkers are careful, objective men, and I am appalled that a reputable scientist such as Dr. Marnel would lower himself to personal attacks when he is unable to find flaw in a rival's theory. I can only hope the scientific community will censure him as long as he continues in his ungentlemanly—and unscientific— conduct.
REFERENCES
1. Marc
Stiegler and Hal O. Caust, "A New Mechanism for Quantization in Error Bound Environments,"
Association for Statistical Studies of Erroneous Systems
, Vol. 5, No. 3, Nov. 1980, pp. 13-1313.
2. Z.
Marnel, "Error Reporting in Conservative Theories,"
Journal of Mistaken Engineering
, Vol. 2, No. 18, March 1981, pp. 13-14.
3. Manfred
Reasons, "Conservation of Error: Validation and Verification,"
Fault-Intolerant Research Methodologies
, Vol. 0, No. 0, May 1981, pp. 0-13.
4. Skip
N. Slide, "Entropic Rise of Error Power in Industrial Settings,"
Applications for the Error Engineer
, Vol. 8, No. 16, July 1981, pp. 17-23.
5. Cat
A. Strophe and Gibs G. Stelman, "Prevention of Accident Cascade in the Individual
," Journal of Accident Research
, Vol. 3, No. 6, Nov. 1981, pp. 1129-1138.
6. Abe
Stractions, "Max's Demon, Schrod's Cat, and Our Dilemma,"
Theories of Theorizing
, Vol. 9, No. 11, Aug. 1981, pp. 33-37.
7. Gen.
G. Pyle, "Survivable High-Yield Nonlethal Weaponry in Commercial Non-Ruggedized Containers,"
Military Means Quarterly
, Vol. 11, No. 12, Feb. 1981, pp. 118-121.
8. Steep
Throatski, "Bureaucracy Holding Its Own in Foreign Powers,"
Aviation Secrets Weekly
, Vol. 84, No. 9, March 1981, pp. 1970-1982.