Achilles choice

“If you could prove it was impossible, you’d get gold.” Holly stared. “No fertilizer, Holly, it can be very important to prove something’s impossible.”

“No fertilizer?”

Jillian flushed and shrugged.

Holly grinned happily at Jillian’s embarrassment. “Repeat after me. Shhh-come on, the whole world won’t stare in horror if you use the S word.”

Jillian wagged her head, but giggled. “I just can’t.”

“Girl, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. All right. What do you need?”

“Well, when they learned that about weather control, it started a whole new science. You can’t predict weather more than three, four days ahead. Could that be true of a Boosted athlete’s body chemistry?”

“What is it you want?”

“Let’s play a little. If we find something, you’ll still have to finish the work yourself. You’d have to invest a few months learning fractal geometry. If we find nothing but blind alleys, you invest nothing. See? And maybe I can come at something from a different angle.”

For the next couple of days they worked at Holly’s computer, with Holly on the keyboard.

That was justifiable. It was Holly’s equipment, and she was familiar with it. Jillian had not told Holly how bad it could be if They caught Jfflian using Holly’s systems.

So Jillian watched Holly at work, and speculated aloud, and asked questions.

“How expensive would it be to just Link everybody? Every Boosted Olympic contender. That’s the price we’re trying to undercut.”

Holly laughed. She had a number already in file.. a ballpark guess. A good deal of what made the Linked what they were, was proprietary. But it was an outrageous sum.

“Sonofagun-“

“Gun? Come on, will you. Try again. Rhymes with witch-“

”Holly!”

“Oh, all right.”

“Now, let’s see. We shouldn’t have trouble beating that. How about prosthetics?”

“Haven’t you noticed Abner’s prosthetics? The trouble is, when your nerves go, they don’t reach the prosthetics.”

“Mmm. Waldos? Teleoperated limbs. Transmitter in the brain. Send signals directly to the limbs.”

“Losing your limbs isn’t the biggest problem, Jillian. Deterioration goes on. I’m trying to… Well, one thing at a time. Waldos?”

“Yeah. What’s the state-of-the-art with waldos? Why don’t they see more use? I used to wonder why the old Rockwell Shuttle didn’t have a waldo hand in the cargo bay. Do they cost too much? How dependable are they?”

They probed.

Your basic waldo was a hand-shaped machine that moved the way your hand moved. It could be any size; it could be inhumanly strong or inhumanly delicate. Waldos were generally used in the most alien environments: the Moon, asteroids, underseas, the ground receptors for orbiting solar collectors (patches of desert running at 360 degrees Fahrenheit), the interiors of fusion plants.

The tractor-mounted waldos used undersea seemed the best model. Those would not be subject to lightspeed delays or deterioration due to radiation. They weren’t cheap, as it turned out. Still… arms and legs moved by transmitters in the brain should cost factor-of-fifty less than continually monitoring a Donny Crawford from orbit.

“But waldos aren’t that dependable, either,” Holly pointed out.

“Let’s get some figures on that.”

“What kind?”

“Holly, if my waldo sometimes spills the coffee, that’s okay. I might accept low reliability there, even if a bigger waldo would be spilling molten metal all over a foundry.”

“Well, darn. See what you mean.” Holly went after industrial accident reports, current.

“How fast is this technology improving?”

Holly summoned older records. Industrial accidents seemed to come in spurts. Holly said, “Graphs of chaotic events tend to have spikes in them, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Say you’re inoculating against AIDS or cancer. All of a sudden people are getting sick again, and you can’t figure why. It’s just the way of things. Let’s print these out, shall we?” The graphs didn’t look quite right.

Chaos tends to come in double parallel curves; look closer and they double again, and again. These didn’t. You could find the usual doubling pairs, but Jillian could see other lines.

During the past twenty years there had been waves of accidents, six tall spikes, with not much between. Lilith Shomer had died right at the peak of one of those spikes.

Jillian didn’t have to watch the old tapes again. She’d memorized them long ago.

Lilith Shomer, marine biologist for Agricorp, had died in an undersea mining accident due to the failure of a waldo. A pillow lava hill had crumbled, the signal to a waldo had been interrupted, the waldo arm hadn’t shut off. Huge steel fingers had ripped a dome open and spilled its air.

It was an accident. Sure it was. But a great many accidents had happened in the shellfish ranches offshore from the California coast, in April of 2049.

Beyond that Jillian would be guessing. From the way things were reported, you’d think intercorporate conflict was dissolved with a wave of the Counselor wand. But enough government and civilian craft, services, and products had been involved to leave traces.

Holly asked, “You getting anything?”