“Maybe it’s because of those back-in-time echoes. Perhaps an electron can tell where it is in time — and which way it’s facing. And that s how come the forward-in-time waves are the ones that make sense.
“All this is analogy and anthropomorphism. Of course electrons don’t know anything. I could say, more formally, that the Feynman theory provides a way for the boundary conditions of the universe to impose a selection effect on retarded waves. But that would just be blinding you with science; and we wouldn’t want that, would we?” He was smiling, his teeth white. He was toying with her, she realized.
Malenfant and Ystebo talked on, slightly drunk, eager. It seemed to Emma that their voices rose up into the sky, small and meaningless, and far above the stars wheeled, unconcerned.
Bill Tybee:
Tuesday.
Well, June, I had my meeting with Principal Bradfield. She’s still determined she won’t take Tom back.
At least I found out a little more.
Tom, well, he isn’t the only one. The only supersmart kid, I mean. There are three others they’ve identified at the school, and a couple more they’re suspicious about. That makes it a couple per thousand, and that’s about right.
It seems this is some kind of nationwide phenomenon. Maybe global.
But the numbers are uncertain. The kids are usually identified only when they get to school.
The principal says they are disruptive. If you have one of them in a class she gets bored and impatient and distracts everybody else. If there is more than one, they kind of hook up together and start doing their own projects, even using their own private language, the principal says, until you can’t control them at all.
And then there’s the violence. The principal wasn’t about to say so, but I got the impression some of the teachers aren’t prepared to protect the kids properly.
I asked the principal, why us? But she didn’t have an answer.
Nobody knows why these kids are emerging. Maybe some environmental thing, or something in the food, or some radiation effect that hit them in the womb. It’s just chance it happened to be us.
Anyhow the school board is looking at some other solution for Tom. Maybe he’ll have a teacher at home. We might even get an e-teacher, but I don’t know how good they are. I did read in the paper there have been proposals for some kind of special schools just for the smart kids, but that wouldn’t be local; Tom would have to board.
Anyhow I don’t want Tom to be taken off to some special school, and I know you feel the same.
I want him to be smart. I’m proud that he’s smart. But I want him to be normal, just like other kids. I don’t want him to be different.
Tom wants me to download some of the stuff from his Heart for you. Just a second…
Emma Stoney:
Back in her Vegas office, Emma sat back and read through her
latest submission to Maura Della.
The antique treaties that govern space activities are examples of academic lawmaking. They were set down far in advance of any activity they were supposed to regulate. They certainly fail to address the legitimate needs of private corporations and individuals who might own space-related resources and/or exploit them for profit. In fact they are more political statements by the former Soviet Union and Third World nations than a workable set of legal rules.
We believe the most appropriate action is therefore to get our ratification of the treaties revoked. There are precedents for this, notably when President Carter revoked the Panama Canal Treaty by an executive order. And to put it bluntly, since the United States signed these treaties with a single main competitor in mind — the Soviet Union, a competitor which no longer even exists — there is no reason to be morally bound by them…
Malenfant was picking a fight by building his damn spaceship, out in the desert, exposing it to the cameras, and daring the bureaucrats and turf warriors and special-interest groups to shut him down. That boldness had carried him a long way. But Emma suspected that Malenfant had had an easy ride so far; the bureaucratic infighting had barely begun.
Emma — with a team of specialist lawyers mostly based in New York, and with backing from Maura and other friends in Washington — was trying to clear away the regulatory issues that could ground Malenfant’s BDBs just as surely as a blowup on
the pad.
Space activities were regulated, internationally, by various treaties that dated back to the Stone Age of spaceflight: days when only governments operated spacecraft, treaties drafted in the shadow of the Cold War. But the mass of badly drafted legislation and treaties gave rise to anomalies and contradictions.
Consider tort liabilities, for instance. If Malenfant had been operating an airline, and one of his planes crashed on Mexico, then he would be responsible and his insurance would have to soak up the damages and lawsuits. But under the terms of a 1972 space liability convention, if Malenfant’s BDB crashed, the U.S. government itself would be liable.
Another problem area was the issue of certification of airworthiness — or maybe spaceworthiness — of Malenfant’s BDBs. Every aircraft that crossed an international border was supposed to carry a certificate of airworthiness from its country of registry, a certificate of manufacture, and a cargo manifest. So was a BDB an air vehicle? Federal aviation regulations actually contained no provisions for certificating a space vehicle. When she’d dug into the records she’d found that the FAA — the Federal Aviation Administration — had dodged the issue regarding the space shuttle when, in 1977, it had ruled that the shuttle orbiter was not an aircraft, despite being a winged vehicle that glided home.
It was a mess of conflicting and unreasonable regulations, at national and international levels. Maybe it was going to take a bullheaded operator like Malenfant to break through this thicket.
And all that just concerned the operation of a private spacecraft. When Malenfant reached his asteroid, there would be a whole different set of problems to tackle.
Malenfant didn’t want to own the asteroid; he just wanted to make money out of it. But it wasn’t clear how he could do even that.
Malenfant was arguing for a system that could enforce private property rights on the asteroid. The patent and property registry of a powerful nation — specifically the United States — would be sufficient. The claims would be enforceable internationally by having the U.S. Customs Office penalize any import that was made to the United States in defiance of such a claim. This mechanism wouldn’t depend on the United States, or anybody else, actually claiming sovereignty over the rock. There was actually a precedent: the opening up of trans-Appalachian America in the seventeenth century, long before any settler got there, under a system of British Crown land patents.
But the issue was complex, disputatious, drowned in ambiguous and conflicting laws and treaties.
Unutterably wearying.
She got up from her desk and poured herself a shot of tequila, a particular weakness since her college days. The harsh liquid seemed to explode at the back of her throat.
Did she actually believe all this? Did she think it was right! Did the United States have the moral authority unilaterally to hand out off-world exploitation charters to people like Malenfant?
The precedents weren’t encouraging — for instance, the British Empire’s authorization of brutal capitalists like Cecil Rhodes had led to such twentieth-century horrors as apartheid. And there was of course the uncomfortable fact that the upkeep and defense of the British Empire, though admirably profitable for some decades, had ultimately bankrupted its home country, a detail Malenfant generally omitted to mention in his pep talks to investors and politicians.