Page 90 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Mother Ship is Real!

to cats, factual or fictional—your precious Puss or Schrödinger’s
imaginary stray in his quantum death chamber—is no stimulus to
inspiration for me.”
“Thank you,” said Fred drily. “That well may be the crux:
without the mother ship, cats could run wild. A sad ending, and not
all that exciting. What humans do in response to learning about the
situation is more interesting and what I should probably pursue.”
Rutger Schlager looked like he was formulating final battle plans
for a war to the finish between species, but Cyril Kornfleck spoke
up first.
“It seems to me that every scientist not already working for a
private company or a government agency is nevertheless always
being watched by those other institutions for research topics and
results that could have commercial or military applications. In this
case, as you described it, Fred, information from several
disciplines—animal behavior, neurology, physics and astronomy
would have to be pulled together to make a case for the mother
ship’s existence. In other words, it would take a generalist outside
those fields to do that, and that person would come to their
conclusions either accidentally or because they were looking for
such proof. Who could that be? It would be someone outside the
purview of both academia and the military-industrial complex. In
other words, an independent researcher. Such people have trouble
being heard. So, there’s your protagonist: what will happen when he
or she tries to interest the authorities about the discovery?”
“All the usual plots are available,” said Hydrargyrum Diggers.
“First thing: decide on the general plan: any hidden knowledge is
power, therefore has potential for good or evil. Good would be
exploitation of invisible orbital platforms for all sorts of uses. The
sky is already clogged with space junk making astronomy difficult.
Evil would be appropriating the ancient feline technology to build
new and nastier weaponry. Then you have to decide who is going to
triumph and who is going to be thwarted, and how. That would
wrap it up in a fashion both recognizable by and acceptable to our
average reader.”

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