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.
So what if the frog I’d be turned into would be a positronic robot frog. I still had to try.
At least there was one bit of hope amid all the tragedy: the records of the docking module energy sensors showed that the fugitives’ fuel reserves were almost empty, and they hadn’t had time to
