□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546],
Special Sub-Forum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social Theories.
Do hidden influences control human affairs? Forget superstitions like astrology. I mean serious proposals, like Kondratieff waves, which seem to track technology boom-bust cycles, though no one knows why.
Another idea’s called “conservation of crises.” It contends that during any given century there’s just so much panic to go around.
Oh, surely there are ups and downs, like the Helvetian disaster and the second cancer plague. Still, from lifetime to lifetime you might say it all balances out so the average person remains just as worried about the future as her grandmother was.
Take the great peace-rush of the nineties. People were astonished how swiftly world statesmen started acting reasonably. Under the Emory Accords, leaders of India and Pakistan smoothed over their fathers’ mutual loathing. Russ and Han buried the hatchet, and the superpowers themselves agreed to the first inspection treaties. Earth’s people had been bankrupting themselves paying for armaments nobody dared use, so it seemed peace had come just in time.
But what if the timing was no coincidence? Imagine if, by some magic, Stalin and Mao had been replaced in 1949 by leaders just brimming with reason and integrity. Or all the paranoid twits had been given sanity pills, back when the world held just two billion humans, when the rain forests still bloomed, when the ozone was intact and Earth’s resources were still barely tapped?
It would have been too easy, then, to solve every crisis known or imagined! Without the arms race or those wasteful surrogate wars, per capita wealth would have skyrocketed. By now we’d be launching starships.
If you accept the bizarre notion that humanity somehow thrives on crisis, then it’s clear we had to have the cold war from 1950 to 1990, to keep tensions high until the surplus ran out.
Only then, with ecological collapse looming, was it okay to turn away from missile threats and ideologies. Because by then we all faced real problems.
Now some of you may wonder why I devote my weekly column to such a strange idea. It’s because of all these rumors we’re hearing on the net. It seems there’s a new crisis looming… something nebulous and frightening which strains the edges of reality.
Want the truth? I’d been expecting something like this. Really.
You see, for all our problems, it was starting to look as if people had finally begun to grow up… as if we’d learned some lessons and were starting to work well together at last. Perhaps we had things too well in hand. So, by conservation of crises, here comes something new to frighten us half to death.
It’s just an idea, and admittedly a half-baked, unlikely one. Still, picking apart ideas is what the net is all about.
• EXOSPHERE
inside a locked spaceship, she wasn’t expecting anybody. And yet, there came a knock at the door. Teresa had been wriggling through a cramped space, using a torque wrench to tighten a new aluminum pipe. She stopped and listened. It came again — a rapping at the shuttle’s crew access hatch. “Just a minute!” Her voice was muffled by the padded tubing around her. Teresa writhed backward out of the recess where she’d been replacing Atlantis’s archaic fuel-cell system with a smaller, more efficient one stripped out of a used car. Wiping her hands on a rag, she stepped across rattling metal planks to peer through the middeck’s solitary, circular window.
“Oh, it’s you, Alex! Hold on a sec.”
She wasn’t certain he could hear her through the hatch, but it took only a few moments to crank the release and swing the heavy door aside. Repairing and cleaning the hatch had been her first self-appointed task, soon after arriving on this tiny island of exile.
Alex waited atop the stairs rising from the pediment of the Atlantis monument. Or the shuttle’s gibbet, as Teresa sometimes thought of it. For the crippled machine seemed to hang where it was, trapped, like a bird caught forever in the act of taking off.
“Hi,” Alex said, and smiled.
“Hi yourself.”
The slight tension elicited by June Morgan’s visit was quite over by now. Of course she shouldn’t have felt awkward that her friend’s lover happened to pass through from time to time. Alex carried heavy burdens, and it was good to know he could relax that way on occasion. Still, Teresa felt momentary twinges of jealousy and suspicion not rooted in anything as straightforward as reason.
“Thought it time I dropped by to see how you’re doing.” Alex raised a sack with the outlines of a bottle. “Brought a housewarming present. I’m not disturbing, I hope?”
“No, of course not, silly. Watch your step though. I’ve torn up the deck plating to get at some cooling lines. Have to replace a lot of them, I’m afraid.”
“Urn,” Alex commented as he stepped over one of the yawning openings, staring at the jumble of pipes and tubing. “So the catalysts June brought you helped?”
“Sure did. And those little robots you lent me. They were able to thread cabling behind bulkheads so I didn’t even have to remove any big panels. Thanks.”
Alex put the sack down near the chaos of new and old jerry-rigging. “You won’t mind if I ask you a rather obvious question?”
“Like why? Why am I doing this?” Teresa laughed. “I honestly don’t know, really. Something to pass the time, I guess. Certainly I don’t fool myself she’ll ever fly again. Her spine couldn’t take the stress of even the gentlest launch.
“Maybe I’m just a born picture straightener. Can’t leave an honest machine just lying around rusting.”
Peering into the jumble of wires and pipes, Alex whistled. “Looks complicated.”
“You said it. Columbia-class shuttles were the most complex machines ever built. Later models streamlined techniques these babies explored.
“That’s the sad part, really. These were developmental spacecraft. It was dumb, even criminal, to pretend they were ‘routine orbital delivery vehicles,’ or whatever the damn fools called them at the time… Anyway, come on. Let me give you a tour.”
She showed him where NASA scavengers had stripped the ship, back when the decision had been made to abandon Atlantis where she lay. “They took anything that could be cannibalized for the two remaining shuttles. Still, there’s an amazing amount of junk they left behind. The flight computers, for instance. Totally obsolete, even at the time. Half the homes in America had faster, smarter ones by then. Your wristwatch could cheat all five at poker and then talk them all into voting Republican.”
Alex marveled. “Amazing.”
Teresa led him up the ladder to the main deck, where South Pacific sunshine streamed in through front windows smudged and stained by perching seagulls. The cockpit was missing half its instruments, ripped out indelicately long ago, leaving wires strewn across dim, dust-filmed displays. She rested her arms on the command seat and sighed. “So much love and attention went into these machines. And so much bureaucratic ineptitude. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got as far as we did.”
“Say, Teresa. Is there a way to get into the cargo bay?”
She turned around and saw Alex peering through the narrow windows at the back of the control cabin. It was pitch black in the bay, of course, since it had no ports to the outside. She herself had been back there only once, to discover in dismay that midges and tiny spiders had found homes there, lacing the vast cavity with gauzy webs. Probably they used cracks Atlantis had suffered when she fell onto her 747 carry-plane, ruining both ships forever. The Boeing had been scrapped. But Atlantis remained where she lay, her cargo hold now home only to insects.