Books by George!

&&&&&

From: Fleet Intelligence, Junior Commodore Wilhelmina Zhuravlyov commanding

To: Grand Supreme Admiral of the Fleet Arthur Thatcher

Subject: Visit of the Anglic Union Squadron

Admiral:

My tasks in the Exercise being pre-determined, I have had the needed time to assemble observations on the Anglic Union ships.

Anglic Union officers clearly had no idea how matters are done in a first, second, or even third-rate navy. It was explained to them, several times, that they needed to make an appropriate donative in exchange for having a position of respect in the fleet action. They had no interest in offering even a nominal sum.

To judge from this squadron, Anglic Union ships have remarkably eccentric designs. Oblate ellipsoidal hulls have been obsolete since early in the First Empire, but they seemed quite attached to them. Their observed maximum accelerations were quite low. In those accelerations their beta drives were kept very low on their power curves, indicating that their crews have no confidence in drive stability at higher power levels. Their four ships emerged from the warp point in very close proximity, much closer together than our safety regulations permit, indicating a lack of basic hyperspace navigation skills. On emergence from the warp point, they brought up their screens extremely quickly, far more rapidly than is specified in the orthodox powering-up sequence.

The Union ships were assigned to the asteroid search module, and quietly given the set of correct answers. All they had to do was to fly a pinnace or drone to the indicated locations, take an image of each, and be done. On one hand, in this well-known foolproof training demonstration, they failed to find several asteroids, despite knowing exactly where they are. On the other hand, they claimed to have located a considerable number of smaller rocks that were not on the answer sheet, and supplied images and mineral analyses of each rock. Fortunately we have a supply of Junior Ensigns who earned positions on punishment details, so I assigned the lot of them to validate the claims. The claims were valid.

Each of their officers at the banquet was assigned one or two ‘friends’ to sit next to them and report what they said. Their officers were without exception remarkably naive about how things should be done in a quality navy. They were quite fond of defending the primitive designs of their ships. A curious observation was reported by Junior Ensign Fifth Class Ekaterina Barterello. As is well known, the Union ships arrived several days before they were told to appear. They were supposed to arrive after the first exercise was under way, so that we could report that the Union barbarians could not adhere to simple schedules. They instead arrived early. Barterello asked how they did this. The bizarre claimed answer is that at several points in their travels they moved from system to nearby system using real-space faster-than-light movement, based on using their beta drives.

The breeze off San Francisco Bay was cold and dank.  James Chalmers still had his laboratory windows well open, with his laboratory hood drawing maximum draft.  Working behind lab coat, gloves, dust mask, and smock cap he was still adequately warm.  Having to weight down the pages of his lab notebook was a trifle inconvenient, but seemed the safer choice.

There came a knock at the door.

“Ah, Mr. Chalmers,” Professor Watership said, “I see you are hard at work, and being very cautious about something.  Your entry on the outside chalkboard — minerals being analyzed: unknown count — is a bit odd. How can you not know how many minerals you’ve been given?”

“Professor Watership! Welcome back from Los Angeles. I hope the train ride was pleasant.”

James Chalmers set down what he was working on and turned to face the Professor.   Watership was a short man, stout, with silver threads in his still-black hair, dressed in a proper three-piece suit with gold watch chain. Watership, Chalmers thought, had always been very supportive of his hard work, not to mention the time consumed by the two new minerals from Prescott, Arizona. Now Watership seemed slightly disturbed, perhaps because it had been a long trip, and perhaps because the chalkboard entry was a bit exotic.

“It was indeed,” Watership answered.

“While you are away,” Chalmers said, “Mr. Karl Eisenhower himself appeared from Prescott with two respectably large steel boxes. They are both full of strange minerals, at least, they are both full of minerals that he said he didn’t recognize. But they were recovered from the Blasted Heath. The two men who went to the center of the heath died on the way out. He warned me that one of them had been subject to a very careful autopsy, and the medical examiners were totally baffled about why he’d died. The best thought was that something in the air or the water or some emanation from the ground had poisoned him. But they’d taken very careful precautions, not as careful as mine now, stayed very little time in the Heath, and still died on the way out.”

“Men paid with their blood to fetch your samples,” Watership said. “I take it Eisenhower didn’t give you a count of how many minerals he had?”

“He said he’d studied a half-dozen on the surface of each tin”, Chalmers answered. “He was very polite about it, said he was very sorry that you weren’t here, but he had to get back to his shop.  He found strange specific gravity and bead tests, and decided he should leave it to our hands. He even took me out to dinner. The next morning he had another meeting, about violet stones like the ones he gave us last time. He didn’t say who the meeting was with.”

“Interesting,” Watership said. “Only a few people in this department know what your analysis of the violet stone has revealed so far. Why would someone else be interested in them?”

&&&&&

The air circulators on the pinnace Hiram Percy Maxim provided the softest background noise to the conversation between Gabriel Smith and his senior officers. They had all been taken aback by the sumptuous splendor of what was supposedly a routine Fleet Officer dinner before a major set of maneuvers.

“They knew I was the senior captain of the squadron,” Gloriana Woodruff said, “and I’d quoted to them my equivalent Space Guard rank when they asked where Ship Commander fit into our rank structure. Because we are the visiting barbarians, they dropped me at one end of the head table. I considered protesting, Gabriel, that you should be up there, but I had absolutely no idea where you were, and assumed that you would speak up for yourself if it appeared appropriate. From your description of what the Junior Ensigns had to say, you learned more than I did. After the dinner, Grand Admiral Thatcher’s adjutant took me aside and announced that since I’d been opaque over dinner he would have to explain things clearly and simply. If we wanted a role in the maneuvers, we had to pay him off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral’s mistress off, we had to pay off an impressively long list of officers, but fortunately, since we had no idea how much to give to each of them, he would take care of that.  All I had to do was give him a hundred thousand Stellars to compensate him for his difficulties in having to deal with primitive barbarians like us. He was severely taken back when I explained to him that the Service does not pay bribes.  Apparently the lubricating power of cold cash is central to the operation of the Stellar Republic’s fleet.”

“Did anyone,” Gabriel Smith asked, “hear anything that did not suggest that the maneuvers are totally scripted? From the description, absolutely everything has been planned in advance, so the ships make the moves that had been planned for them, and the officers and men on each of them get to sit there and watch things happen. Whoever is at the helm actually has to point their ship in the right direction and fly it at the right acceleration, not that the automatic flight controls won’t do that, but they have exact flight plans.”

His officers shook their heads.

“I heard considerable pieces of the maneuver discussed,” Levi Roshwald, captain of the Orville Wright said, “and couldn’t understand how they could be so sure what was going to happen, but it didn’t occur to me they had absolutely no initiative during the exercise and were simply watching ships move around as if they were on a huge motion picture set. If I’d known what was the case, I might’ve asked why they bothered, as opposed to using computer graphics to generate videos of the battle, which everyone could watch while safely at home.”

“I somewhat asked,” Gail Robbins, captain of the Wilbur Wright asked, “how they could be so sure what was going to happen. I was told it was like experiments of long ago they had each performed in freshman physics labs. Everything you were supposed to to do was in the directions, your work was required to get the correct answer from the experiment, and if your answer was off by more than a few percent from the right answer, you were required to repeat the lab until you got the right answer. I don’t see how that approach to lab work leads to competent scientists.  The claim here was that by watching the course of the battle, you learned things you couldn’t learn by watching simulations or reading texts on strategy. I managed to respond ‘Oh, that’s very clever. We never thought of doing things that way’.”

“How did they answer your response?” Smith asked.

“That’s why you’re here, they said, to learn how to conduct fleet operations in the best possible manner, so that when the Union is admitted to the Stellar Republic, you will have the least difficulty in integrating your units into ours, though of course you will be receiving Imperial officers to replace yours until the training of your officers can be upgraded.”

“I was told the same,” Gail said, “and decided it would be hopeless to try to disabuse them of their ideas.”

“I was given,” Smith said, “a data stick with a list of all known asteroids in the volume we’re supposed to search. Electronic security will have to handle it carefully, lest we discover it has some issue. We should find most but not all of them, assuming the list is accurate, and perhaps find a few that aren’t on this list, assuming there are any to be found.  You should each assume that one of the purposes of the exercise is to make us look incompetent, and should not go too far in separating them from the notion that we are primitive and backward.  Of course, in many respects, especially given their patent rules, we are primitive and backward, but we have to live with that.”

&&&&&

Winston shrugged and raised his hands in surrender. “No progress,” he said slowly. “Folks at Berkeley say I found two new minerals, not part of my job. They say the minerals contain three new chemical elements, also not part of my job. I’ll skip the sciency part.”

“Thank you for protecting my digestion,” Radnor said. “I’ve been here many years, and the elements that matter are gold, silver, copper, and lead. OK, iron ore. And I saw in the paper, many years ago, this Frenchwoman found a new element that glows in the dark, or something like that. Radium, it’s called, I think. Is three new elements a lot?”

“For sure, that’s an incredible lot,” Winston answered. “It almost has to be wrong, but Berkeley has really good chemists. I’ve heard no details yet what sort of elements they found, or why no one’s noticed them before. For sure, lots of prospectors have worked the land from here to Phoenix, and Mister Eisenhower has regularly sent minerals off to Berkeley to be analyzed. But I’ve never heard mentioned that he found a new element, not before now. OK, no sign it’s related to the deaths.”

“And Phoenix, bless their hearts, gets the tourists,” Radnor grumbled. “Closer to the Heath, better hotels.”

&&&&&

Karl Eisenhower and his attorney sat in one corner of the Prescott Sheriff’s office. Around the table were the Sheriff, the Sheriff’s grandson, the Prescott City Attorney, a representative from the State Attorney’s Office, the Phoenix Coroner, Karl Eisenhower, and his attorney. In the middle of the table were two steel boxes, tightly sealed.

“Those two men were Prescott residents,” Sheriff Radnor Cooper said. “Are we finally done arguing that their deaths happened in Phoenix’s jurisdiction, so they get to investigate?” He waited for disagreement. “Also, Mister Eisenhower here paid for them to recover rocks, they did so, rocks being in the saddlebags of the mules, so the rocks belong to Mister Eisenhower. That’s in the contract the decedents signed. I gather the Governor gave up on claiming the rocks belong to the State Government, or are evidence of anything.”

“That’s correct,” State Deputy Attorney General Peter Thornton said. “Mister Eisenhower here got a Federal Court order, the men having died on Federal land, which my office does not want to contest.”

“I thank Coroner Washburn,” Radnor continued, “for traveling up here from Phoenix, a long day on the train even with the new schedule, and telling us the cause of death is unknown.”

“Indeed,” Washburn agreed. “But I have relatives in Prescott, so the trip had personal benefits. I should also thank Karl Eisenhower here for paying for the burial expenses and the tombstones. I gather that James Whitesides and Aaron Levy had no known relatives, so we gave them both proper burials in Phoenix. Baron Goldwater and the local synagogue ensured that Aaron was given a funeral according to his faith.”

“Least I could do,” Eisenhower said. “Jim and Aaron only needed a few hours in the heath, wore dust masks and protective clothing, should have been perfectly safe. State militia has had people go onto the Heath for much longer than that, no protection, and come back out; they recovered to good health afterward. At least neither of the men had families. Thank the Lord.”

“Winston, are you getting all this down?” Radnor asked.

“Keeping up, so long as no one talks too fast,” Winston Cooper answered. “Notehand helps a lot.”

“Notehand?” Thornton asked.

“Like shorthand,” Winston answered. “Learned it in Europe.”

“I heard much legal chatter for several hours this morning,” Radnor said as he pointed around the table, “amazing how complicated things became, but everyone in the same room was what was needed to settle things. Are we now happy? Have everyone’s claims been settled?” There were nods. “Good. In that case, you out-of-towners, I recommend the Trinity House Cafe for lunch. I’m going there myself, so soon as my grandson here, Doctor Cooper, finishes typing up his notes.”

The men stood and left the jail, leaving Winston and Radnor behind.

“Dear me,” Radnor said, “I thought that would never end. But in the end they were all happy. I was afraid there’d be dueling attorneys, worse, papers needing to be served, even worse than that, reporters interrupting my breakfast…and now all we have is that final document.”

“Soon enough,” Winston answered. “Bringing them all here was clever of you. So what does Karl do next?”

“He’s personally taking those rocks of his to California, to Berkeley—that’s near San Francisco—to learn how many new minerals he’s found.”

The four junior officers all looked at their belt-comps. 

“Yes, sir,” Pavel Vladimirovitch said. “Two in the afternoon.”

“That seems remarkably late,” Smith answered, “but I suppose there must be yet another difference in your customs.”

“Usually we’d start at nine,” Pavel Vladimirovitch answered, “but an event like this customarily turns into an extended drinking party, in which the participants do not get to bed until extremely late, or perhaps I should say somewhat early the next morning, and will need to recover after they wake up. Then we reach noon, and need a couple of hours delay for a proper lunch.”

“Your customs are indeed different from ours,” Smith said. “However, as we are really only here for the military aspects of the situation, not for attempting to establish ties and relationships that might advance my promotion, I do believe I will now be on my way. Please don’t feel any obligation to leave just because I am, any of you. Again, it was a pleasure to meet the four of you, and I wish you all a good evening.” He stood.

Ekaterina joined him in standing. “But I’ll be going back to my study systems,” Ekaterina said, “and leave efforts to deplete the Grand Admiral’s liquor warehouse to the three of you.”

“We are all heartbroken,” Chiang  Jianhong said. “Have you ever heard of anything other than work?”

“Yes, of course,” she answered. “More work. Everyone knows that.”  She turned to Smith. “Commodore, if you take the A37 corridor to the end before using the lift it will get you back to your pinnace much more directly than the roundabout route through Main Hub.”

“Ah, thank you,” Smith said. “And I see my pocket comp is approving the route, given that I am a foreign barbarian undoubtedly under suspicion of something, and not allowed to visit parts of this station.  I have summoned my officers and staff members, so we will soon be going on our ways.”

Pavel Vladimirovitch snapped to his feet and gave Smith a sharp salute, which Smith returned.

&&&&&

Winston Cooper strode into the Sheriff’s office, waving a newspaper in one hand. A glance at the wall clock confirmed that he was on time. Grand-dad Radnor Cooper came in at six in the morning, took a break for lunch, and was there until five, when he vanished for dinner. Gramps expected Winston to appear by eleven, and work until well after dark, spending much of his time typing reports.

Radnor looked up from his desk, waved, and called out: “Early today? It’s only ten.” Winston held up the office copy of the Phoenix Newspaper. The headline read “Blasted Heath Explorers Dead!”

The article underneath read

“James Whitesides and Aaron Levy of Prescott, Arizona boldly rose to the center of the Heath, the Sea of Glass. They were expected back the same day. They did not return. Courageous aerial reconnaissance by Aviator Cornelius Polk and Charles Grigsby, Major, Air Observation Corps, on board a Curtis Oriole belonging to Phoenix International Airways of Phoenix, Arizona, found their bodies and their mules, one of which had also died. Four incarcerees from Phoenix State prison volunteered to recover the bodies and rescue the mules. The incarcerees are now under observation in the prison hospital, and hope for reductions in their current very long sentences.

“Whitesides and Levy were hired by Karl Eisenhower of Honest Ike’s Gems, Prescott, Arizona to recover mineral samples. They took rigorous precautions against breathing any poisonous dust, precautions that apparently proved inadequate. We understand that many samples were recovered. The State Attorney has filed a claim on several steel boxes labeled ‘rocks’, claiming that they are evidence for an unspecified crime. Litigation is expected.

“The Governor claims that the deaths were due to heat exhaustion. He plans to prove that there is no danger in the Heath by setting up camp well inside its boundary, remaining a few days and returning. Meanwhile, the Phoenix Public Health Department warns curiosity seekers, of which there are many now filling Phoenix hotels, to stay clear of the Heath, until any danger is understood.”

“Interesting,” Radnor said. “We lucked out. Not my jurisdiction. Phoenix Sheriff, that Gates fellow, gets to investigate. Mystery death, no known cause? Was it murder? Where did the Heath come from?”

She, Smith thought, had been his fourth companion at dinner, had politely asked a pair of extremely sensible questions of him, directed to understanding the internal politics of the Anglic Union, but had not been very informative when asked questions herself.  Of course, most foreigners had no understanding of the Seldon Legion or its relationship with any government.  He nodded agreement.

“I have your departure date from Sol system.  If it’s not a secret, how did you manage to get here so quickly? There is a nominal shortest path, but there are a lot of jumps in between, reasonable delays at each warp point due to lines of ships and the like, so you were expected not to be here for several days yet.”

“That’s actually not a secret,” Smith said, “it’s a matter of the design of our ships. The Stellar Republic doesn’t need to know every detail, but there are inspections of our ships on intellectual property issues.  Our ships use the nominal root-point design for alpha nodes. Our beta drives are optimized for real-space faster-than-light speeds, meaning there are several points along the trip in which it was far faster for us to go from star to star in real space, rather than having to go a very long way around by traveling from warp point to warp point. The net result is that our trip was significantly shorter than you would’ve expected, given the nominal shortest path.”

“I know what a root-point design is, but why do you use it for your alpha nodes?” She asked.

“Patent royalties,” Smith answered. “At the time our design was laid down, it was unclear whether or not we could obtain the needed intellectual property rights to use a patented design. However, the original root-point design cannot be patented, so we used it. That design corresponds to a really large node, one whose warp field is an oblate, not prolate, ellipsoid.  As a result, no one has used that design in a faster-than-light ship in an extremely long time, going back to early in the First Empire.”

“Thank you very much,” Ekatarina said. “I see that the Grand Supreme Admiral of the Fleet and one of his staff members are leaving, so, as you may not be familiar with our customs, and would not mean to give offense, that means that we are now free to go. The party will doubtless go on for some considerable time, with more and more vigorous singing and drinking, but the formal social event has come to a close.”

Smith looked at the far end of the room, where indeed the Grand Admiral and a spectacularly attractive, much-younger woman had stood, waved to various people, and were backing out the door behind them.

“Thank you for explaining your customs on this matter,” Smith said. “I was noting the extent to which wine was being replaced with stronger liquor, conversations are becoming louder and louder, and wondering how I could gracefully make my escape. I believe I should be on my way to be back in time for the staff meeting tomorrow. Do your schedule still show that happens  tomorrow afternoon?”

At the final remark, Chalmers felt a great sense of relief. He thought he had put together all the evidence, made sure it was all consistent, and reached his conclusion. But here was a new piece of evidence, which he had not used in his discussion, which was consistent with the interpretation he had found. You could connect the dots on a map in strange ways that looked good, but when you added another dot you had an acid test — was or was not the new dot consistent with your pattern?

As the hour approached, Professor Watership slipped in his question. “There was a second mineral from Karl Eisenhower. Where are you on analyzing it? Just asking for my friends in Prescott.”

“Yes, the violet crystal,” Chalmers answered. “Fortunately, there was a trace of its dust, so I was able to obtain a good spark spectrum of the native mineral. In addition to silicon and oxygen, it clearly contains one or more additional elements.”

“Yes?” Watership drew out the one word. “Which elements?”

“Unknown elements,” Chalmers said. “More of them. Not X, Y, or Z. I can’t tell how many yet, except there were a lot of spectral lines for it to be just one. Alas, it seems difficult to dissolve the crystal. It just sits in hydrochloric. So Mister Eisenhower and his friend have another mineral to their credit, and you have another paper to yours.”

“Have you tried magic acid yet?” was a voice from the back of the room, a much older man who Chalmers did not recognize.

“Magic acid?” a puzzled Chalmers asked.

“Two parts nitric, two parts sulphuric, one part hydrofluoric, saturate with potassium fluoride. Make fresh, neutralize as soon as you are done with it, before it eats your container, which it will.”

“I’ll have to ask the Safety Committee. First,” Chalmers said emphatically.

“I believe we have interrogated Mister Chalmers enough for one day,” the Department Head finally announced. “I see several students wisely taking notes, so all of our suggestions about what to do next can be handed over to the speaker. But I have a closing remark to Mister Chalmers.: Finish your manuscript, get it typed up, and send it off to JACS. Make your priority claim: Telegraph them now. Department will pay. ‘Manuscript being typed. Title: Three New Elements’. I’d better do the telegraph for you. Students: Some of you may in the rest of your lives hear another chemistry talk this spectacular. If the result can be duplicated, and several of us faculty have already duplicated parts, you just might have heard a talk leading to the Nobel Prize. But don’t count on it, Mister Chalmers.”

Applause was not customary, but when the faculty stood and applauded, the students joined in.

“You are from very far away,” Chiang said, “and doubtless have very different customs than we do, but the answer is that there is a bidding process, in which the ship officer who wishes to be in an especially favorable position makes an appropriate payment to the Grand Admiral’s staff, and as a result his or her ship is assigned the position in the choreography in which the officer is reported as having performed illustrious acts. It’s all very effective, and ensures that virtuous people are highly rewarded.”

Smith recalled as a very little boy reading a comic book on ancient Greece, in which three people debated how to identify who were the best leaders. The Spartan answered the best leader was the bravest warrior. The Athenian answered that the best leader was the wisest philosopher. The woman from Thebes answered that the best leader was clearly the one who had the most money. Smith remembered reading this and concluding that the ancient Greeks had some very strange ideas. When he grew up, he remembered reading what had happened before the Interregnum, in which all offices were purchased so that indeed whoever could collect the most bribes, or as they called them at the time ‘campaign donations’, was identified as being a great leader.

“That’s very interesting,” Smith said. “If I were to put down a payment for a position, my government would howl ‘bribery’, throw a fit, and have me removed from the Service.  I can say with great certainty that my squadron will not be offering a payment to anyone, and therefore should wonder where we are likely to be assigned in this operation.”

“This question occasionally comes up when foreign ships join one of our maneuvers. Of course, that doesn’t happen very often, because most foreign ships, and I am not referring to yours, Commodore Smith, are not viewed as being good enough to support the Imperial Navy. In fact, and I do not mean this as a criticism of you, Sir, it is my understanding that you are here because the Anglic Union controls part of Ancient Terra, your Union had started building ships again, and there was therefore some interest as to how good your ships are or are not. However, I would expect that since you have survey ships, and are not offering to obtain a heroic position in the choreography, you will be assigned the notional duty of protecting some section of the rear of the Fleet during the battle, and the practical duty of surveying some section of this system’s Kuiper belt and reporting on what you found.”

“I see,” Smith said. “This is been a very educational discussion for me.  I had no idea that your methods of doing things were so, how shall I put it, advanced.”

“May I ask you a question, Sir?” Ekaterina Barterello asked.

“I’m James Chalmers.  My title today is ‘An Anomalous Mineral from the Arizona Blasted Heath.’  I know it’s traditional to start with conclusions, and then give the data supporting it, but I’d rather have my data considered before I give my explanation, so that you listen to the data. To start at the beginning…

“…which leads me to my conclusion.” He paused, half for emphasis, half to overcome stage fright. “I announce the discover of three new non-Mendeleyev elements, tentatively X, Y, and Z. If my results are confirmed, I will name them Prescotium, Arizonium, and Berkelium.  They are non-Mendeleyev because the atomic masses of their single isotopes are not close to being integers,  and because they have non-integer charges.  For example, X is charge +1/3, and atomic weight 17.5, so its chloride salt boiling point elevation is understood as a solution of X₃Cl.”

At this point he was interrupted by the audience, calls of ‘ridiculous’ from his fellow students and faculty talking over each other from the rear of the room.  The Department Head finally brought the room to order, and the serious questioning began.

“17.5? Did you try the mass spectrometer?” The speaker was Marjorie Woodruff, who Chalmers remembered as reputedly being the sharpest graduate student in the department.  What she would do with a Chemistry doctorate was not quite clear to him, but that was her problem.

“Yes,” he answered, “It measured charge-to-mass ratio, so with a charge of +1/3 it appears to have a mass of 52.5.” 

“However,” Professor Smith interjected, “in the spectrometer X can ionize, giving you an atom with a charge of +4/3, and thus an apparent mass of 13.1, exactly as found.  We actually both saw that line when you visited, but 52.5 agreed with your colligative measurements, so we took 13.1 to be an impurity.”