Analog SFF, April 2008 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:07:59.818000+00:00

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Probability Zero: HOW I SAVED THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

by Robert Scherrer

I slouched in the captain's chair of my yacht, the Fallow Earth, watching seagulls on the Captiva dock spear french fries from abandoned plates outside Cap'n Al's Restaurant. I closed my eyes and leaned back to feel the warm Florida sunshine, then swiveled my chair to face the man from the FBI. “So it's a crime these days to make money?” I asked.

“Not at all, Dr. McCarthy.” The FBI agent smiled. “But when a government employee strikes it rich ... well, questions get asked."

“Look,” I said, “I wasn't a government employee—not really. I was what they called a ‘rotator’ at the National Science Foundation—rotated in for a couple years and then went back to Ohio State before I retired."

“All the more reason for us to be concerned.” The agent's eyes flickered around the yacht. “Someone comes in for two years, gets rich, and retires. Surely you can see—"

“Okay, okay,” I said, “I get your point. But there's a simple explanation. Give me ten minutes."

“No problem.” The agent leaned back against the sun-bleached wooden railing of my yacht and folded his arms. “I've got as much time as you need. Tell me all about it."

I followed Mark Sanders through the stacks of the science library in the basement of NSF headquarters. A sickly fluorescent bulb flickered overhead, and I studied the back of Mark's head in the pale blue light. I had known Mark since we were graduate students together—he had slowly shed his facial hair over the decades as he climbed the administrative ladder. He lost his beard when he became Department Chair at Princeton. The moustache went when he became Dean. And now that he was a Division Head at the National Science Foundation, he was starting to go bald.

Mark stopped to pull an ancient bound volume off the shelves. He handed it to me—Physical Review, 1937. I riffled through the yellowed pages, which crackled and smelled of mildew.

“We're drowning in words,” Mark said. He gestured toward the shelves of weathered journals, which stood at attention like soldiers from some long-forgotten war. “The number of published pages of scientific research doubles every decade. In the 1930s, Physical Review published a couple thousand pages a year. By the 1990s, it was up to 70,000 pages, and it's still climbing."

“Who cares, Mark? Nobody uses libraries anymore.” I slammed shut the journal and glanced around. “Jeez, this place is deserted—you could grow mushrooms down here. Everything's online now."

“And that just makes the problem worse,” said Mark. “Now we have to sort through gigabytes of digital drivel to find anything of importance."

“Hey, don't blame me.” I pointed the spine of the Physical Review volume at Mark. “You NSF guys started it. You gave money to people for publishing a lot of papers, and so they did. Big surprise, eh?"

“I know, and now I want to control the problem,” said Mark. “I brought you here as ‘Assistant for Special Projects.’ Now I've got a special project.

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