The Negative Butterflies

Illustration by Arthur George

Dear Stan:

They do say that you never hear the one that gets you—and I believed that, just like everybody else, until I heard the one that got me. You may be wondering where in hell I have been, this last year or so, and I have been in several hells and am still clambering out of the last few; it all started at John Gotti’s party.

You must know about this party, even if you live in Connecticut: Gotti, a big-time Mafia person (and I can avoid that weasel, “alleged,” since he has been well and almost truly convicted) throws a gigantic Fourth of July party every year for his neighborhood out in Thither Queens, and he hasn’t allowed prison to cramp his style any. Last year’s party was at least as big as usual, chock full of carousers, as well as food, drink and fireworks—and of course I was safer there than I’d have been in my own small apartment: people do not commit unwanted violence on Gotti’s doorstep, and the immediate area of his home may be the most peaceful immediate a. within a thousand-mile radius.

I had never been to a Gotti bash; I was in fact doing the tourist routine. New Yorkers can be tourists here too—it’s just that the sights are different: the Japan Air Lines origami Christmas tree, the Tibetan museum on Staten Island (but call first; they tend to open only by request), the spare Statue of Liberty (64th Street East of Broadway, on the roof of a building on the uptown side; it’s smaller than the original, but I guess it would do in a pinch), and the Gotti Fourth of July.

The street was in full swing when I arrived about seven; this is a family party, beginning early enough for the kids. I grabbed an Italian sausage sandwich and an iced tea—and sort of filtered my way through the crowd, eavesdropping on a conversation here and there, mostly about the kids’ school scores or a local grocery sale; peaceful neighborhoods tend to be dull neighborhoods.

Suddenly there was a bang and a hiss, and I was on the ground with my beard on fire. I did hear it—a fairly small firecracker gone out of control—and it did get me: I have had a good deal of Hospital and Rehab, but I am now a one-eyed man who has recently learned to walk all over again, damn it.

As for the one eye, if Odin can live with it I guess I can—but all this H&R is why I have been out of touch recently. I had some nerve jangles, too, and had to learn to type once more with my usual three fingers.

The beard has grown back, thanks.

And this adventure is what took me back to the Local University of New York.

LUNY is a small college (though there are those that love it, as Daniel Webster said about some other damn place), only the one building, but it’s a truly big building. They have a sort of teaching rehab setup occupying part of the top floor (and they do have elevators, thank God), and a friend in Computer Sciences up there told me it was first-class. He turned out to be right, according to some other friends and kibitzers, so I signed on. Made an X, in fact, which made me feel like one of the Joads, but that was before I started to get my hands back.

Rehab is surprisingly mathematical: everything gets measured, and every little ratio has a meaning all its own. This letter isn’t about Rehab, though—I’d just as soon forget it altogether; it’s just that their math hooked in, at LUNY, with a section called bio-mathematical physics, and I got friendly with a Professor Inkling over there.

His whole name was Amadeus Inkling, and his specialty was the mathematics of butterfly behavior—which I admit sounds like an odd specialty, but the whole department sounds a little odd—very LUNY, in fact. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from a place that uses Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories as a history honors course, or Charles Fort’s “Lo!” as the text for a Probability course. LUNY isn’t exactly like any other university I’ve ever heard of, and they’re rather proud of the fact. Even the usual university structure, by the way, is a little strange: faculty tenure is voted by the students (from sophomore class on up through the graduates) and is re-voted every eight years. I don’t say this is a good idea—I also don’t say it’s a bad one. But it certainly is a LUNY one, and there are more LUNY ideas than you might think, ideas that don’t seem to show up anywhere but at the Local University of New York.

Inkling was a lovely fellow, if you discount his habit of quoting Mark Twain, or whoever really said that thing: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody and so on. Charles Dudley Warner, if memory serves (my Oxford Quotes is still packed, because I’m unpacking one teeny bit at a time in order to be able to do the job without turning into a nervous breakdown product; I tell you, one firecracker can make for a surprising amount of chaos).

Whoever it was said it originally, Professor Inkling said it regularly. It did get tiring, but lots of things get tiring, and he was, once you had discounted the damn quote, a very nice change from Rehab. He knew some number theory, which has been my playground for a long while, and we traded divisibility theorems now and then.

But mostly it was the weather—I don’t mean the quote, but the whole subject. Inkling had the idea that weather prediction (“in the very short term,” he said) and weather control were both finally within man’s grasp, and he didn’t mean stuff like satellite predictions or cloud seeding: “Or anything really complex,” he said one afternoon. “It is all going to be very simple, once it is set up—you’ll see.”

Well, people who think things are all going to be very simple usually have me backing away politely but damn rapidly—but Inkling had a sort of Nerd Magnetism about him. He was a reedy sort of fellow with sparse white hair that hadn’t been cut in two or three years, and metal-rimmed eyeglasses that made his eyes look about the size of, say, the eyes on Whitley Streiber’s visiting aliens. But he had this N. Magnetism; he was the sort of fellow who could persuade you that brown shoes would, too, come back into high fashion.

How it was going to be very simple to predict and control the weather he didn’t say, and I mentioned, as casually as possible, chaos theory. “That started with weather people, more or less,” I said. “The butterfly effect—one butterfly flaps its wings in Iceland, and weather patterns change all over the world. And you can’t predict the butterfly.”

“There are no butterflies in Iceland,” Inkling said.

“St. Olaf drove them all out?” I said—Olaf being the coldest-weather Saint I could come up with offhand. Inkling just stared at me.

“St. Olaf was never in Iceland,” he said. He had me there; I am not an expert on the Peregrinations of St. Olaf. Or anybody else; I tend to stay put, and assume other people will do the same.

“Iceland or Tierra del Fuego—and there’s a good title for a Robert Frost poem hidden in there someplace—you still can’t predict the butterfly.”

Inkling smiled at me. It was the thin smile of a man who knows something you don’t, and is sure that, when you find it out, you are going to be crushed flat by the surprise.

“We may not have to,” he said.

Many scientists have this habit—it’s a variation on the Royal “we,” and when they say: “We may not have to,” or: “We’re making great progress,” what they mean is the good old first-person singular. Inkling had the habit—picked it up from a Monarch butterfly, I shouldn’t wonder.

“Why not?” I said, but I didn’t get an answer, not then. Answers came later, as you’ll see, along with a rather urgent request for your readership.

I suppose I ought to pay for an ad, and make the request there, but all this Rehab and such has left me temporarily strapped, and I have to ask you to oblige me, if at all possible, and run the request somewhere in the book. If you’re planning any sort of What’s New In Science article, as Analog occasionally used to, a few lines at the end of that would be a fine spot—I can’t say for certain whether you’re still doing this sort of thing, since Rehab was not conducive to Analog reading. Or any other sort—it’s been a long while since I went gaily through a newspaper, for God’s sake. And the request for your readers will come along when I’ve explained to you why I’m making it. All will be made clear; we just need a little patience here, OK?

But all that’s to one side. Back to Inkling.

He was occupied, when I met him, in trying to find something that moved faster than an electromagnetic signal, and among many, many others I kept telling him there was no such thing, not in this space-time. Stuff that moves at the speed of light cannot be sped up any, no matter how hard you push.

He finally did give up on that one, saying sadly that light-speed would have to do, and when I asked him what sort of distances his signal would have to travel he told me:-“Roughly thirteen thousand miles, at a maximum.”

Light (or an electronic signal, if not an actual electron, which has actual mass) makes that in something like a fifteenth of a second, which seemed pretty fast for a trip four times across the United States, with a side-trip from here to Chicago thrown in as a frequent-speeder bonus.

After his flirtation with light-speed, he got curious about those spy satellites that can read your license plate, or diagnose your acne, from whatever number of miles up is the current record. He asked several LUNY professors if they knew any of the precise details of such satellites, from telescopes to comm links—hell, he even asked me, and I am not cleared for much beyond the National Enquirer.

What all this was in aid of I hadn’t the faintest idea. I was doing Rehab—flexing my toes and getting the flex measured, lifting teeny weights and having my arm strength measured, such as it was, and even more repetitive chores—and chatting with Inkling when I was free and he could be found. He was spending a lot of time over in electrical engineering, though—to what purpose, again, I had no idea.

Not that I didn’t ask him, but the most he would say was: “To anyone who understands chaos theory, it should be obvious.”

I took that as a particularly vicious crack. I hadn’t said I understood chaos theory, I’d just mentioned that there was such a thing. I’ve been through some popular stuff, but the real subject, the math, is some ways outside my ambit. Your readers are the people to ask, if you really want to know on that level; I’ve said for years that the readers are smarter than both of us.

But I went back to the pop works and read about the butterflies, and the orbits of the planets, and Fourier analysis (which seems to be what chaos theory is emphatically not about) and such things, and couldn’t make them add up to spy satellites, speeds faster than light, and electrical engineering. I could see where weather might come in, but the books kept saying that nothing could predict weather very well—which is where I’d come in.

Inkling was talking about predicting it and controlling it. For a little while in there, I paid a lot more attention to Rehab, because it made more sense than the puzzle Inkling was being. But only for a little while.

Inkling was clearly up to something sizable, and, since I was in LUNY, there were very few limits on what that could be. Maybe, I thought, it was a business of controlling the weather by thinking good-weather thoughts and beaming them at light-speed to unstable air masses. That explanation sounded sufficiently LUNY, to be sure—I’ve told you a little about LUNY, Stan, but I haven’t even mentioned some of the high points; next letter, maybe—but it didn’t seem to cover all the bases.

Then I ran into a fellow from electrical engineering, and things began to make sense.

I mean I literally ran into him; wheelchair management is not much like leg management, and takes some getting used to. I was backing out of a traffic jam in Rehab (three wheelchairs and what they call a Gerrychair, a sort of near-horizontal wheelchair setup for geriatric patients or others who can’t sit up), and ran over the foot of a man standing behind me. It’s a lot harder to look behind you from a wheelchair, and I didn’t happen to have a warning beeper.

I apologized and he made light of the event and one graceful sentence led to another, and I mentioned Inkling’s interest in Electrical E. “I know,” he said. “He’s a nice enough fellow, but he’s been a terrible bother; he wants us to build a mechanical bird.”

“A what?” This new piece didn’t fit any of the other pieces.

“Well, not a bird,” he said. “A butterfly.”

“That one word,” as Holmes once told Watson, “should have told me the whole story, were I the ideal reasoner you are so fond of depicting.” And were I the ideal r. myself, it certainly would have. I’m sure Holmes himself would have had no trouble moving from spy satellites to mechanical butterflies (given a short course in both, since he has had no certified cases since 1917). The notion of mechanical spies shaped like butterflies, one immediate mental construction, is perhaps just a little too James Bond for consideration, though I did consider it for a few minutes. Not enough space for data collection and transmittal, I thought, and dismissed it.

Not, I’m afraid, the ideal reasoner, but which of us is? I mulled over Inkling’s butterfly for some time, never getting to ask him about it because he didn’t show up much for the next few days, and when he did he was almost totally abstracted—wherever the essential Amadeus Inkling was, it wasn’t where his body was located.

And by the time I did find him in, so to speak, and got ready to ask him what the hell was going on, I didn’t have to. He told me.

The whole grand scheme took my breath away, let me tell you. I have run into some large schemes in my time—there was that whole business of making strawberry-flavored envelopes with just the faintest touch of LSD, back in the ’60s, and there was one mad scientist’s idea of adding subliminal messages to all Talking Books (he wanted to turn us all into vegetarians, pacifists, and other uninteresting people)—but I think Inkling took the cake that one afternoon.

We were sitting in one of the Rehab gyms (not too much like your usual gym, but they smell the same, thanks), and Inkling announced, without preliminaries: “I have done it.”

“Done what?” I said; with Inkling I always seemed to be the straight man: How hot was it? “Fixed the weather?”

“Everybody,” he said, “talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He gave me a big, big smile. It looked odd on that face; behind the glasses his enormous eyes crinkled, and he looked like a Whitley Streiber jolly visiting alien. “I,” he said, “have done something about it.”

I suppose I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist saying it: “Bought an umbrella?”

He didn’t take umbrage and stalk away; he was too damn happy to take any umbrage at all. “I can predict and therefore control the weather,” he said. “Finally and absolutely. Have you ever noticed (for instance) that New York is littered with drought warnings when our reservoirs are low, and we are then cailed upon, idiotically, to welcome any passing bucket of rain that falls here—many miles from the reservoirs?”

I’d noticed that, and been as irritated by it as everybody else. I said so.

“Now,” he said, “it will rain into the reservoirs. The city, as it should, will stay nice and dry for us.”

“Great,” I said. “Got any other improvements?”

“Hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons and all the rest will no longer be worrisome. They will occur in designated Storm Areas, varied from week to week but always over large bodies of water. Ships and planes will be warned to stay clear of a given week’s Storm Areas.”

“And?”

“Spring will be spring again, and autumn autumn. It might even be possible to do something about global warming, though that development is still in work.”

“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “Just how is all this going to be accomplished? Or is it accomplished already?”

“It requires money,” he said. “Large, visionary money.” And he explained it to me.

Not then and there; the gym was filling up with grunting, sweating people. We went to the LUNY cafeteria (a nice place, wheelchair-accessible—do you know, by the way, that many federal post offices aren’t?—and full of good, if odd, food—I’ll tell you about it some time) and he drank coffee and I drank some and spilled some, and he laid it all out for me.

Which brings me to that request.

What Inkling needs, and I think deserves to have, is the hell of a lot of development money. In order to make his scheme work, he needs a great deal of cash with which to underwrite the construction of thousands of mechanical butterflies, each equipped with a comm unit—and a network of communications stations with links to the global net of weather satellites. (It develops, as you probably know, that I was wrong about the amount of space required for this; miniaturization has come a long, long way, and what you can write on the head of a pin these days is the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

It’s his feeling that ten thousand mechanical butterflies will be enough, but he admits that the figure may not be quite right. “The problem is susceptible of fairly simple analysis,” as he says, “and it’s just a loose end that will be tied up fairly soon.”

But I don’t think the world should wait even an hour longer than it has to for complete weather prediction and control. I think we should go for it now, and support Inkling’s system. A medium-sized contribution from every reader would do the job nicely—something more accurate than “medium-sized” will get to you in a few days, when I have some final figures from Inkling.

Stan, he really does have something here—and it’s the answer to most of the difficulties chaos theory keeps mentioning, just by the way, at least as far as I understand chaos theory.

(And why can’t he apply for a government grant? Two reasons: first, LUNY never takes any government money, being a little afraid that the government would then step in and alter the place—a stance I think is perfectly reasonable—and second, the government is being very chary about grants of any kind these days, what with the Balancing Budget Side Show, among other things. No, this has to be private money—every contributor to be a shareholder in the eventual company, of course, which may be an added spur to interested readers.)

And what is his scheme? Its simplicity is just staggering.

Somewhere (not in Iceland), a butterfly flaps its wings, upsetting weather patterns all over the globe and making real weather prediction (and therefore control) out of the question; nobody (we assume) can track every butterfly.

But, with the help of spy-satellite technology built into the mechanical butterflies, you can. Assign each mechanical butterfly a fairly small space of that part of the world which has butterflies in it. Key the butterfly to report instantly on the movements of its real-life cousins.

Then duplicate the movements—in reverse—with the mechanicals. When the butterfly goes east, the mechanical goes west; when its wings flap up, the mechanical’s wings flap down.

Just as with some new sound-deadening systems, the reverse motion will cancel out the original motion (we won’t have to fly the mechanicals as low as the originals—the differences in air density, wind and so on can be allowed for, and a capable computer system can vary the duplication as needed).

The result will be a world of simple, predictable weather patterns, entirely free from the butterfly effect. And prediction does mean control here; weather-control, once you’re sure of the weather, isn’t terribly complex to set up.

(I said, by the way, that this notion smoothes out a lot of the difficulties pointed at by chaos theory—and it does. All we need is enough money, for instance, to build Negative Planets [and Negative Asteroids, to be sure], and we can regularize the Solar System perfectly. Other applications will doubtless spring to mind—they certainly keep springing to mine.)

Inkling’s Negative Butterflies look like a giant step forward for humanity—and I think you’ll agree, Stan, that they are a truly LUNY concept.