Simon Hawke - The Dracula Caper

The populace was propagandized into believing that this "bolt-on solution" was the answer and someone else came up with the brilliant idea that if people drove more slowly, they would save fuel and thereby pollute less. Unfortunately, this had very little to do with the principles of automotive engineering. It was a "sounds good solution- that made sense only to the technologically ignorant, who knew nothing about horsepower curves, gearing and torque and therefore were incapable of understanding how a high performance sports car driven at 85 miles per hour could be made more fuel efficient than a family sedan driven at 55. They wanted simple answers, not engineering complexity. Slower speed meant less fuel used-it was wrong, but it made sense to most people, so they wrote a law limiting the speed to 55 miles per hour. Delaney had once driven an antique internal combustion engined car from Denver to Houston and he had concluded that only idiots on the densely populated east coast could have passed such a law. Had they been made to drive the same distance over the same roads at a speed of 55 miles per hour, he had no doubt the law would have been quickly repealed. But it wasn't, because ithad great propaganda value and because rampant noncompliance with the law provided local authorities with easy revenue. Yet another way to fool the public and then skin them.

Nuclear energy was an even more graphic example. Before fusion was developed, nuclear power plants were potentially hazardous. If the proper safeguards were not observed, if personnel manning the plants were inadequately trained and if the plants were not constructed and maintained properly, then nuclear power plants could pose serious threats to the environment. In 1986, in the USSR, an accident occurred that was referred to in the media as a "fire"-a curious but more palatable term for a chain reaction. Dangerous levels of radiation were released into the atmosphere; an event which could have been prevented had the proper safety procedures, such as the use of concrete containment buildings, been observed. But the human factor was always the weak link. Engineering principles were only as efficient as the people who applied them. After the accident occurred, the danger was de-emphasized, the scientific ignorance of the populace facilitated political circumlocution, and the resulting "fallout of popular opinion blamed nuclear power itself as being too dangerous, when the real answer was that nothing could be rendered absolutely safe-it was all a question of relativity and trade-offs, of acceptable versus unacceptable risks, and of scientific illiteracy prevailing over educated and informed opinion. A scenario made to order for political stupidity.

The Time Wars were the ultimate example of people making decisions who were not even qualified to hold an opinion on the matter. When the Time Wars could have been stopped, the politicians prevailed, thinking about their own livelihoods, concerned about all the support industries created by the Time Wars which were providing jobs to their constituents, thinking about the propaganda value of being able to assure the folks back home that thanks to the Time Wars, they were immune to conflicts taking place in their own time-the only ones at risk were soldiers, all of whom were volunteers, and warfare in the past meant essential disarmament in the present. Propaganda, Halfway measures. Scientific illiteracy. Lies. Now they reaped the harvest.

The accident that everyone had dreaded had finally occurred. It was impossible to pinpoint exactly what had caused it. It was even impossible to determine if one particular event had caused it or if it was a result of cumulative temporal interference. Without an event-location which could be pinpointed, there was no "fix." And yet, the politicians were screaming for a fix. The scientists of the Temporal Corps had explained it to them over and over again, they had explained it to the media, but the question still persisted, always starting with the all-too- familiar "yes, but" phrase. "Yes, but how can it be fixed?" They screamed for an investigation. Who was at fault? Who can the finger be pointed at? If enough money could be spent, surely a solution could be found. Wrong, said the scientists. There is no solution, because the problem can't be solved. We can't cure the disease, we can only treat the symptoms. As for whose fault it was, finding a scapegoat would accomplish nothing, because it was everybody's fault, the fault of all those people who thought that lunch was free, that something could be gained for nothing, that there was a way to live secure, without the threat of risk. But such an answer was politically unfeasible, and so they didn't want to listen. And they blamed the scientists.

It was similar to what happened to the space program in the latter part of the 20th century. An enviable safety record had lulled the public into complacency. Budgetary cuts voted by scientifically illiterate legislators steadily reduced the safety factors and created additional pressure to make space exploration more glamorous and relevant, to keep it in the public eye. And then, when an accident occurred, resulting in tragic loss of life, once again, the media and the legislators screamed. How could it have happened? Who was to blame?

The magnitude of the problem was too great for them to comprehend. And explaining complicated scientific principles to the public in uncomplicated terms took up too much time-it could not be reduced to a simplistic statement or two in a live-minute interview on a news program. And a five-minute attention span was the most that the media could hope for. They wanted it short, informative and simple and if they were told that it could not be short, informative and simple, they became impatient and suspected obfuscation.

Shortly after the Temporal Crisis, as the media had dubbed it, had been publicly announced, a reporter had cornered Delaney at a bar near Pendleton Base, frequented by soldiers of the First Division. She was eager for the "simple truth," as she had put it, that a "frontline soldier" could provide.

"How much time have you got?" Delaney had naively asked her.

"Take as much time as you need," she said. "We'll edit it together later for the broadcast. We just want to hear the simple truth about the Temporal Crisis as a frontline soldier sees it."

Delaney had emptied his glass in a long swallow and leaned back against the bar while they trained the camera on him.

"Well," he said, "the simple truth is not so simple. Basically, the Time Wars were a terrific risk right from the start, but people were either willing to accept the risk or else they simply didn't want to hear about it. I suspect the truth is they just didn't give a damn until something went wrong. And something was bound to go wrong, because we were screwing around with temporal physics."

"What does that mean, exactly?" she had said.

"Well, let's take a real basic example and I'llmake it as simple as I can, okay?" Delaney had said. "Let's say that our country had a difference of opinion with the Nippon Conglomerate Empire. It got intense, no negotiated settlement could be reached, and so the grievance was submitted for arbitration to the Referee Corps. A ref was assigned to arbitrate the temporal action that would settle the whole thing. He asked the Nippon government to provide five hundred grunts and he asked our government to provide five hundred grunts. He selected an historical scenario for the arbitration conflict or the time war, as it’s more popularly called. He decided to use World War II. The troops were cybernetically indoctrinated and clocked back into the past, to fight among the troops of World War II. One of our guys got a bit carried away and used a warp grenade instead of a regular 20th century hand grenade. He didn't exactly set off a multimegaton nuclear explosion, he only used a small portion of the energy released by the grenade, no more than would have been released by a conventional 20th century hand grenade. The only problem is, he killed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who went on to become the President of the United States."