Not because the Homo sapiens police didn’t want to suck up to our omnipotent employers, but because there’s a limit to everything. Too many resentful, xenophobic fundamentalist hotheads on the old planet would give their right arms (not much of a sacrifice, considering the current state of medicine and reconstructive grafts, but take it as a metaphor) to shred one of the hated pozzies, the aliens’ guard dogs. Even if I left my usual Humphrey Bogart fedora and trench coat behind, my golden epidermis would give me away. Not even the police could protect me from a determined attacker. Or protect the attacker from my counterattacks. No point stirring things up. I’d get to see Earth some other occasion. There’d be time.
But apart from the sacred cradle of humanity, I could go wherever I wanted. And request (that is, demand) the cooperation of any human authorities, federal or local.
When the Galactic Trade Confederation informed me of the wide authorization I’d been granted, I understood just how worried they were about what Makrow 34 and his friends might do—and that if I didn’t find them in time, I’d probably envy the fate of Zorro and Achilles.
First thing I did was rewatch the holotapes, over and over. I was intrigued by what happened to Achilles. He didn’t have time to understand what he had run up against, and the first few times I watched the recording, I didn’t get it either. It seemed like just a lot of bad luck, all coming at once and at the worst possible time. First he moved too slow and aimed badly. Then more slowness, topped off by a weapon malfunction. We checked, cleaned, and adjusted our weapons every day, so a misfire was unlikely, but it wasn’t out of the question.
I started by inspecting my buddy’s maser. It was in perfect condition: he hadn’t forgotten to oil it, the energy crystals were in top shape, no dust on the prisms. So what, then? Was it the buttered toast phenomenon—always falls butter-side down? Or Murphy’s law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong, especially when it does the most harm?
In principle, I don’t believe the universe has a statistical grudge against anybody. I kept looking. But it wasn’t until I was watching the scene for the third time that I noticed the detail. If I had involuntary muscle reactions like humans do, I would have trembled when I recognized the concentration on Makrow 34’s face as Achilles approached him and opened fire.
Especially with Zorro’s whip and black sombrero levitating as though the artificial gravity had gone out over that square yard of space. They were in the background, behind him, but perfectly visible.
It could only mean one thing: probabilistic fluctuation.
In other words, our Cetian really was a Psi. Not a telepath, though. Nothing that simple. Achilles’ mind, like all our minds, wasn’t susceptible to Psi control. He wasn’t a teleporter, either, or even a telekinetic; neither of those talents would have given him the time to modify the trajectory of a beam moving at relativistic speeds, such as microwaves.
I know what two and two make. With the impossible eliminated, only the improbable remained.
Makrow 34 had to be a Gaussical.
Gaussical. The term had only entered the human vocabulary (and therefore our own) fifteen years earlier. That was when a Grodo with this unforeseen power—Psi specialists on Earth had never predicted it—thought a Cetian trader had double-crossed him. In one of the internal passageways on board the Burroughs, the guy lost the self-control Grodos always show and unleashed a chaos of physical improbabilities. Objects floated in midair. It snowed upwards. Some people even claimed they saw a galloping herd of centaurs. Two-headed centaurs.
As Sandokan Mompracem, the pozzie who’s our current expert on alien languages, explained it to me, “Gaussical” is an unhappy effort on the part of a machine translator to turn a highly complicated Grodo pheromonal term into Standard Anglo-Hispano. A more precise translation would come out more like The Desconsiderado Who Willfully Distorts the Curva de Probabilidades. Earthlings call it a probability curve, a bell curve, or a Gauss distribution. The machine offered a bunch of possible translations, as it does when it comes up against new concepts. The one that stuck was Gaussical.
I went over the other options once, purely out of curiosity. Two of the most reasonable were Bellringer-Vándalo and Inconsciente-Twister. Doesn’t surprise me Gaussical was the one they went for. At least it gives you an idea of what it’s about. And reminds you that spoken languages are sometimes woefully incapable of expressing certain concepts.
I felt great now. Oh yes. So the fugitive was one of those statistically near-impossible Psi oddballs who could alter, through some as-yet undiscovered means, the shape of the Gaussian bell curve that describes the statistical probability of any number of events. The macroscopic equivalent of Maxwell’s famous demon, according to a pozzie named Einstein who knows more about physics than Sandokan Mompracem does about alien languages and customs.
Which did nothing to clear things up for me. Then Einstein put it in clear, pedestrian terms: the guy could make it rain inside a closed room. He could generate errors in a computer processor. He could make the molecules in one body momentarily intangible to another body. Fortunately the Uncertainty Principle is universal, so even a Psi case like that couldn’t decide beforehand which of all the possible fluctuation effects would occur in any given instance. In the rare cases when a Psi might be able to concentrate hard enough to produce a more controlled, voluntary effect, the Law of the Conservation of Energy says that other completely random events would have to occur simultaneously. Like the gravity-free microzone where my poor pal Zorro’s whip and sombrero floated up in the air.
So that’s why the aliens were so worried.
The case of Makrow 34 would have given Heisenberg himself a giant headache if he’d had to explain it. Or maybe the strange power was so strong in him, he could laugh at the laws of physics.
The prisoner didn’t need to carry weapons. He was a lethal weapon himself. The Colossaur and the human did well to free him as soon as they could. Nobody in his right mind fights by hand if he can get hold of a good maser. Taking on Zorro and the Grodo was the most those two could manage, and that only because they were caught by surprise. On their own, they could never have outfought a well-armed and alert positronic robot. But when the freak started messing with the odds, it was a different story.
Achilles never had a chance. It was a mercy he died without understanding what hit him. First his maser missed, then it stopped working; it could just as easily have exploded or turned into a block of ice—an unlikely but theoretically possible thermodynamic event. Something, in any case, would have happened to keep him from hurting Makrow. The fact is, all the statistical fluctuations of Heisenbergian hell were arrayed against Achilles. He never could have truly harmed the Cetian.
When I really leaned on them, the alien merchants confirmed my suspicions. And, of course, they apologized for not giving us the information sooner. But criminal or not, Makrow 34 was one of them, so the contents of his file had been classified. Go figure.
Now, as the case officer, I had permission to review his file. If I needed to know any other details, I could count on their sincere and complete cooperation. So long as I requested them far enough ahead of time and went through the proper channels and blah blah blah.
Understood?
Yep. Totally. I understood too well. Carte blanche in the Solar System or no, I wouldn’t have anything remotely like free access to information. They’d give me all the authority I needed, but they wouldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already found out on my own. So not only did I have to find a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, I had to grab it and pocket it—knowing that if I tried the needle might stab me, the hay might burst into flames, a roof beam might fall onto my head, I might be charged by a bull that hadn’t been there a second before, or I might be turned into a frog in the blink of an eye.