Escape Craft

"License." 

When Rheinbogen and the stunned and kidnapped Marie have been winched up from Lake Minnetonka into a jet disguised as a helicopter, the jet sheds its rotors and false rear and easily outruns two pursuing helicopters. If the falling helicopter parts do any damage, then Rheinbogen will have to pay claims. The jet flies low to avoid radar but also has:

"...a temporary permit to break traffic rules." (p. 152)

However, a mother ship placed in the stratosphere above his place by Dulac releases a Delta-wing which pursues the kidnappers' jet. The pilots, who know each other as members of the two criminal unions, exchange greetings. Rhenbogen has to decide whether to surrender as they fly above land that had been devastated by forest fires during the Smashup and that really is as far as I go with this story this evening. As usual, it has much more going for it than I had expected.

One Last Dip Into "License" This Evening

"License." 

Labour chief Tom Swanson manages the CIO local, its benefit funds, banks, stores, factories etc. He knows Dulac's chief goon because both of them are prominent Rotarians.

Projects tenements rise on either side of the freeway with not more than three or four to a room, faces at every window and pedestrians like ants below. They are fed and entertained. A protein factory processes algae from Lake Superior. There is crowding everywhere on Earth but also a Peace Authority.

Dulac must have guided missiles in his home defence system because he has filed intent to shoot down any over-flying aircraft that is not police or Peace Authority.

The narrator, Rheinbogen, and his colleague, Nygard, check into a hotel where the bellhop asks if they want girls. "'Later...'" (p. 149) Posing as politicians' union executives, they must maintain their character and therefore add girls to their expense account.

Rheinbogen checks the taps. Water brands are not good since clan feuds wrecked the last great distillery.

The story reads like a very condensed future history background synopsis. I have read it at least once before but have no memory of the details and do not know what is going to happen next.

The Large Job

"License."

The client is James Hardy, vice chair, Teamsters' Union Inc. board.

His proposed kidnap victim is Marie Dulac, daughter of the head of the Chemicals Union Trust.

Miss Dulac has just turned twenty-one so she is no longer a minor and therefore can be kidnapped.

However, she has not taken out first-class citizenship and therefore is immune to murder, beating or criminal assault. (!)

Both the Teamsters and the Chemicals are trying to merge with the Federated Nuclear Scientists. Hardy holding Marie will make Dulac back out. (But surely it would be better if three unions merged?)

According to the narrator, Marie's imminent social debut will be an orgy.

The license certifies that, on payment of fees and filing of notice of intent, Hardy is authorized to kidnap Marie within six weeks and to hold her for not more than one year and to use any necessary and legal force on condition of paying weregild for any damage. Breach of the regulations means outlawry. 

The criminal union, the Criminal Industries Organization, will kidnap Marie but will then retain her so that they do not become accessories to, e.g., torture or slavery.

Dulac employs the American Freebooters' Laborunion which does not merge with the CIO because that might mean brothers fighting brothers. (Anderson is playing games with initials.)

Kidnapping requires information, planning, rehearsal and imagination and some locals use games theory computers.

Games theory again.

"License" III

"License."

My approach to this story has become just to keep noting its oddities until enough is explained to make some sense:

the narrator buys a whiskey at a newsstand;

water is rationed in different amounts around the country;

that new school was eighty stories high but its shooting range was overcrowded and housing projects stretch beyond the horizon so psychodynamicists have to find an answer;

the local union HQ can give our guy "'...a large job...'" (p. 143) - we will find out what;

a union brother, Sam Jeffreys, has been killed in a private murder with advance notification of intent filed, deed registered and weregild to be paid on schedule so nothing can be done about it; 

Sam had lived through the Smashup whatever that was but this sounds like we are getting to the point - some big social "smashup" that will explain how laws and customs have changed so drastically. Read on.

"License" II

"License."

The violence - and other unexpected social phenomena - continue!

While I wait for the TV news to come on:

The first person narrator, who is the taxi passenger, gets into the taxi just outside that crimeless area and wears a union badge which, we gather, identifies him not as a Teamster but as a gangster which was why the taxi driver knew to ask him if he was working. We have to read and reread carefully to pick up what is going on here. There was an airport bombing back east where he came from but both the cops and the unions (gangsters) got the perpetrators. This was unlicensed murder with illegal weapons and there were twenty innocent casualties! Our gangster narrator was outraged! 

At the YMCA, he is offered a three-room suite and asked if he wants a girl but says not yet!

There are "impurgated" editions of Romeo and Juliet and Moby Dick which change the story the way films do.

OK. Poul Anderson is doing his job as an sf writer, thinking of an outrageous premise, then showing us its implications, but I am still struggling with exactly what the premise is.

Read Anderson and think.

"License"

"License."

This story fills twenty-six pages of text in my copy of Seven Conquests (which is the same collection as Conquests). The text begins just above the half way point of p. 141 and ends about a quarter of the way down p. 167.

An sf short story that is not an installment of a series can be set on or off Earth, in the past, present or future or in an alternative timeline and in any kind of society, including societies that have never existed but are imagined for "thought experiment" purposes by a speculative author. And all of this has to be established very quickly. We flounder with "License." In its first page and a half:

place names establish an American setting;

travel is by rocket;

"...the crimeless area." (p. 141);

an armoured taxi with a gun turret;

you are reasonably safe inside a YMCA (but not elsewhere?);

the taxi driver opines that his passenger will find work because business is good which he seems to equate with crime rates jumping;

his cab displays "...framed bootlegging and procurement licenses." (ibid.);

the passenger is a gangster in summer but otherwise a Ph.D. student - it seems that the gangstering pays his expenses;

he studies psychodynamic equations so he is starting to sound like some other Anderson characters;

they pass a school where a gym class practices with machine guns in the playground;

football involves bloodshed - goggles so no more blinding but maybe legalized switchblades;

gangsters earn fat fees but have heavy expenses and the work is sporadic;

the passenger is frisked on entering the Y - it is a safe place, remember.

OK. This is a violent scene. Maybe I need a break from it!

Ability And Potentiality

Poul Anderson, "License" IN Anderson, Seven Conquests (New York, 1970), pp. 141-167.

The author's introduction to this story:

"Wars could not be fought were men psychologically unable to fight. An abolition of war, if such can be accomplished, will leave us with that potentiality of violence. How then shall we express it?" (p. 141)

Some regular blog readers might know that this issue has been an on-off bone of contention in post comboxes for quite a while. I certainly have no intention of plodding through that argument yet again. However, I am responding to Poul Anderson's text. I will say what I think although I might use an editorial "we" now and again. 

The first sentence is undeniable. Men psychologically unable to fight would not be able to fight in wars. This ability to fight is a potentiality to fight or a possibility of fighting. However, we now reach an ambiguity. (I think.) The phrase "potentiality of violence" can mean either:

(i) we have the potential to respond violently to certain situations (the classic challenge to a pacifist: "What would you do if you saw an enemy soldier about to rape your sister?" etc);

- or:

(ii) there is in each and every one of us the potentiality suddenly to behave violently in any and every situation, even without any threat, provocation, deprivation etc. 

I agree with (i) but not with (ii). But the question, "How then shall we express it?" seems to assume some version of (ii).

Wars happen not because large numbers of individuals in one country suddenly want to attack large numbers of individuals in another country but because, for historical, economic and political reasons, each country maintains armed forces and sometimes uses them. We can discuss how to organize countries differently. Social organization has already changed significantly several times throughout history and prehistory, after all.

Imagine:

a world federation of democratic republics;

each republic maintains at most an internal police force but not any bodies of armed men for attacking/defending against each other;

resources that would have gone into massive arms expenditure go instead into social infrastructure and into addressing common problems;

the republics trade, publish new scientific discoveries and cooperate economically and in maintaining the environment. 

"...if such can be accomplished..." We can try to work towards it. Or we can say that the problem is insoluble.

I have yet to reread "License" and cannot remember what happens in it. But that can be another discussion. 

The Significance Of An Ending

Backtrack to "Details."

"As for this planet called Earth, maybe the new man could salvage it. If not, well, it was only one planet." (p. 140)

What is the significance of such an ending? Most obviously, it puts us in our Galactic place: just one planet. 

The Galactic psychotechnician in charge of covertly furthering social development on Earth has not only failed to prevent but has even caused the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century. His superior, one High Commissioner with an office beneath a clear dome on the roof of a mile-high skyscraper on another planet, tells him that:

"'At best, progress has been retarded two centuries, and millions of people are needlessly dead.'" (p. 139)

We know of the millions dead. We have no way to guesstimate progress retardation. 

The text ends by telling us that the new man might salvage Earth but what does this mean for us? That we might soon know whether or not we have been salvaged? Yes, partly. We have not gone under so far. However, stepping outside of the fiction, we know that it is very unlikely that anyone is coming from the Galaxy to save us. What happens to Earth is down to us.

A Few Decades

Backtrack to "Cold Victory."

Remembering the days when the Solar Guard had protected everyone, Robert Crane thinks:

"Please God, that day would come again." (p. 82)

After the Unionists have won the civil war:

"'If nothing else,' said Neilson-Singh, 'you people bought for Earth a few more decades of freedom. They can't take that away from you.'

"I looked at her with sudden respect. It was true. Men died and civilizations died, but before they died they lived. No effort was altogether futile." (pp. 93-94)

We saw here that those "few" decades would be twelve in number, several generations.

The message that peace and freedom are won only for a while but that that while is worth having is common to Poul Anderson's works.

When Manse Everard of the Time Patrol has saved Tyre from destruction, a full page of text describes the bustle and the comings and goings at the Egyptian Harbor, then Everard reflects:

"It would die at last, all of this, centuries hence, as everything must die; but first, how mightily it would have lived! How rich would be its heritage!"

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 328.

When Valeria Matuchek concludes her story at the Old Phoenix, she says:

"'Nothing ever was forever, anyway. Peace never came natural. The point is, it can sometimes be won for some years, and they can be lived in.

"'Enough. I hope you've enjoyed my story.'"

-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Epilogue, p. 229.

This post quotes from Poul Anderson's:

Psychotechnic History;

Time Patrol series;

Old Phoenix multiverse.

I am sure that a blog reader will be able to find a comparable quote from his Technic History.

A Science Of Society: Games Theory

"Inside Straight."

Because the Hermesians, as they are called here, are gamblers and have even based their planetary economy on gambling, they have developed games theory more than anyone else (games theory is one of the inputs to psychotechnics in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History and is applied by a Galactic psychotechnician in "Details.") and, by letting a spy escape with crucial military intelligence, they make the enemy's actions even more predictable. Thus, they win the interstellar war. Is this enough to base a short story on? Well, Anderson did base this story on it and the story has given us three blog posts in addition to several earlier.

The two remaining stories in Seven Conquests are "License" and "Strange Bedfellows." I have no memory of the contents of "License" but am still sitting at home recovering from a cold so maybe "License" is next on the reading list.

"Cold Victory," full of content, generated a dayfull of posts yesterday.