This sounds really interesting but I have absolutely no idea what you mean. Is the ball the same as the bubble? Why does someone go into it? Who is the “guilty party”?
Once Bob puts Alice into statis, the stasis ball is impenetrable, so the cops don't know if Alice was alive or dead when she was involuntarily put into stasis.
However, they do know that the stasis bubble containing Alice will eventually open up and pop Alice back into the current time. And they know when that will happen. So, the state puts Bob (the guilty party) into stasis too; with Bob's stasis timed to end when Alice's ends.
In this way, both stasis fields pop at roughtly the same time, and Bob can be tried either for murder, or for whatever the name is when you transport someone into the future against their wishes.
Or alternatively, is the point that you can’t be punished for kidnapping if you might also have murdered the person, but that part can’t be proven? None of that makes sense.
Presume Alice was 'kidnapped' in the ball for XX years. You trial Bob and sentence him for 20 years. 20 years passes, Bob serves his sentence and some time later it occurs what Alice were dead all these years, but Bob not only left the country but served his sentence.
Or you sentence Bob for the murder of Alice (even better - execute him), yet Alice is alive, though 20 years later.
Thing is, till the bubble pops you don't know for what exactly you should punish someone and hence - how hard and harsh.
It's a classical dilemma of bringing in/justice with the lack of means to prove anything.
There was a short story in a similar vein with a 'light retarded glass', ie glass what slowed the passage of light through it for times. It were essentially a CCTV/DVR with a years to retrieve 'the record'. The protagonist of the story waited for ~decades waiting to confirm if he sentenced the culprit rightfully for murder or he murdered innocent person with the state authority. Maybe someone would remember what was the name of this story.
Bob could claim e.g. that she escaped after being kidnapped and he's no longer aware of where she is.
Alice's dead body can still be found at some point, which could prove that Bob killed Alice; or she can be found alive, but because of any reason did not want to be found.
By all means, sentence Bob for kidnapping, stick him in jail, have him get out, put a tracker on him and forbid him to leave the country. Then, when Alice pops out and is dead, you just trial him again. It's a different crime! What's more, even if it was the same crime, it'd be material new information!
(Quoth the ECHR: "The provisions of the preceding paragraph shall not prevent the reopening of the case in accordance with the law and penal procedure of the State concerned, if there is evidence of new or newly discovered facts")
You jailed Bob for years for the crime he didn't commit. Are you happy?
There is also the interesting question, what if Alice was never in the bubble in the first place?
Vinge posits a technology that is used for good and bad purposes. One of the protagonists is a cop who is bobbled by a criminal and emerges in the distant future, when the Earth is essentially uninhabited except for a handful of humans who have been bobbled (electively or not).
Involuntary time travel VS involuntary murder.
The bubbles in Vinge's story send people to a future they don't know, and that may be hostile or deserted (I think he wrote a sequel with that idea).
They bubble forward a bit, just in case everyone took a timeout (maybe a toxin was released and there’s a cave full of bubbles waiting for the earth to repair, who knows), but only a few new people show up. Not even enough to repopulate the species. The weird thing is that your status is determined by where you left from not how rich you are. A powerful family skips forward and finds themselves lower status than a group of lower-upper class people with what amounts to top of the line camping gear, which is so much newer than the family’s gear that everything it can do it does better than theirs.
There’s one reclusive person who basically has a space ship. She has been away from humans so long she is barely human (relatable) anymore. She goes out to check other solar systems and finds nothing there either.
The implication is that either we gave up or we ascended somehow, but since they can only travel forward there’s no way to know. They missed the boat.
In the first book, IIRC, they did not know that, and in fact believed the spheres would last forever.
The spheres were used like nukes, in a very indiscriminate way. Whole armies were sphered in a short time.
Many years after, when the first sphere popped, they realized a new way of time travel just opened.
As far as I know, the book doesn't cover if the bobble retain their angular momentum or charge.
I always wondered if creating a bobble around an off-center weight would allow you to kind of spin it by wobbling it.
There were some places where large pieces of land unbobbled without any relative movement, so maybe they were locked in their rotation somehow?
I really liked that book a lot.
Yes, till it got easy to make the bubbles. All you have to do to prevent being bubbled, was to carry a bubble. Doesn't prevent cutting you in half though, assuming they guessed the right half, so you might want to carry a few.
He’s retired now but he was a professor of CS and Math at San Diego State.