Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  But I had also noticed quite early that I was usually faster on the uptake than most people. Unless the subject was me, anyway. I spent the better part of most conversations waiting for everyone else to catch up. Patterns form and combine in my mind like crystals reproducing at fast forward, sometimes so fast that even to me it seems like I skip whole steps in my logic process and just thumb to the back of the book for the answer. Telepathy is literally instantaneous; maybe sometimes other kinds of thought are, too.

  I saw the people present, I knew who all but two of them were, and it seemed that the instant I got over disbelieving the evidence of my eyes, I knew who the two strangers had to be, and how all of them must have gotten here, and why each of them had come, and what their presence could mean. The actual deduction and induction itself didn’t require genius, really—merely a willingness to think the unthinkable. I’d been doing that for weeks. I had most of it worked out by the time I’d stopped laughing.

  Jinnia Conrad, when last seen, had been in the market for a new promising young genius-carrier.

  Was there the slightest chance her grandfather would not have said to her, “This time, find one in some serious profession. No more damned artists,” and made it stick? Selecting a sax player had probably been as close as she’d dared come to a gesture of rebellion against her dynastic destiny, tolerated only because of my father’s pedigree.

  What was the exact global opposite of a sax player, if not an experimental physicist? Okay, perhaps a financier, but Jinny wasn’t a pervert.

  Assume she repeated the pattern, found the male offspring of one or maybe even two of the greatest such tinkerers in recent history, and assume that this lad had inherited the same kind of genius, the urge and ability to take the universe apart and put it back together in different ways with his own hands. He certainly had the eyes of a Tesla. And the naïveté.

  Propelled irresistibly by Jinny’s—oh, horrid pun—by her relative-istic drive, and funded by the unlimited resources of the Conrad Family—as if J. P. Morgan had been canny enough to simply find Nikola Tesla a wife who would keep him in harness—was there anything such a genius might not have accomplished?

  Suppose he was interested in faster-than-light star drives? His grandfather-in-law would like that.

  If he were, he would damn well have a ship equipped with one ready to test within five years, if I knew Jinny.

  If he and it survived the initial tests, then the passenger list for its very first official shakedown cruise as a commissioned vessel, long before the rest of the Solar System was told of its existence, was absolutely and beyond question going to include at least two people besides the inventor-pilot: the pilot’s wife, and her grandfather. This voyage would be not merely historic, but conceivably the most historic of all time—no possibility existed that those two names would not be in the first paragraph of the story.

  They say luck is the residue of good planning. If the most paranoid man that ever lived ends up being the only one in a position to escape the end of the world with a few playmates for company… can you even call that luck? They must have been on the dark side of Terra, or some other large planet, when it suddenly began to glow around the edges.

  If Conrad of Conrad was aboard a small vessel, a minimum of three others were, too.

  First and most essential to that paranoid old villain, a very very good and very very very reliable bodyguard. She would be the one I had mistaken for a companion, the cello voice with menace in its undertones. No wonder she looked fit! She could probably fight us all with one hand, while using the other to hold a shield… over her employer. If you’re compelled to try and screw literally everyone you’ll ever meet, you need a strong condom.

  Second, Rennick: pan-trained stooge, Speaker To Peasants, flapper, flunky, and designated fall guy should one ever become necessary. Don’t leave the castle without one.

  Third, Dorothy Robb: his walking desk, database, secretary, researcher, and necessary impertinent, licensed to sass him occasionally. She had the courage to be willing to pretend every day that she did not fear his terrible power… and the wisdom never to go so far that he began to suspect she really didn’t.

  Something about their respective positioning and zero-gee kinesthetics gave me the sudden insight that Jinny’s mocking nickname for Rennick had indeed been aptly chosen. His loyalty to his boss was charged with, if not based on, suppressed eroticism. His body language said his subconscious absurdly considered even ninety-year-old Dorothy Robb a potential rival.

  Given the not-terribly-surprising existence of young Gyro Gearloose—if any of them were here, he had to be—I fully understood at once the presence of Jinny, and her grandfather, and all three stooges. The one I had the most trouble explaining to myself was the person I still thought of as “little” Evelyn.

  Little she no longer was—but it made little sense that she should be here. If the Conrad superluminal yacht had an extra seat, why hadn’t it gone to some closer relative of Jinny’s than a mere cousin? Why not one of her own parents—or if they were dead or the old man loathed them, Evelyn’s?

  All I knew was that her presence was the single most wonderful phenomenon in the Galaxy at that time. I was absolutely certain of that.

  I’ve recounted this as if I examined each person there one at a time, and finished with Evelyn, because sentences can’t happen all at the same time. It wasn’t like that. Start to finish, she occupied a huge fraction of my attention and processing time. All the others I saw with peripheral vision—it was my day for clichés come true, and I literally could not take my eyes off her.

  The resemblance to Jinny at her age was striking even given their kinship, enough to be eerie. But the differences were just as striking to me, now that I looked. And very dear.

  This face was at least as strong as Jinny’s, as determined, as proud. But it was not ruthless. Its eyes were fully as intelligent and alert—but nowhere near as calculating. It was every bit as heartstoppingly beautiful as Jinny’s face had been at nineteen—and more, because it didn’t care. It did not think of its own beauty as a tool, or a weapon.

  For the first time I realized the imperfection in Jinny’s beauty that had always escaped my notice somehow, the missing note in the perfect chord: compassion. Evelyn believed other people were real, even non-Conrads. And liked them. Her eyes said in part that she had hurt others in her short life, and that she regretted more about that than the increased difficulty of getting them to accede to her whims.

  As I was watching her, she did a little zero-gee move too complex to describe that caused her to look ridiculous for a brief moment, because if she had not, she would have bumped into Jarnell. She did it unconsciously, and I knew in a million years Jinny would never have done such a thing. Jarnell would have ended up apologizing to her.

  This was a version of Jinny who could never play me the way the original had, no matter what the reasons.

  As quickly as I absorbed all these things and reached all these understandings, I also saw just as clearly a couple of things that only two others present had fully realized yet, two of the most important facts in this whole equation.

  Richard Conrad was not only still a very wealthy man, he was vastly wealthier than he had ever been, was now in fact without a doubt the wealthiest human being in the universe.

  But his inconceivable fortune consisted of two assets.

  And he only had one bodyguard.

  20

  The butterfly counts not months but moments.

  And has time enough.

  —Rabindranath Tagore

  By the time I’d finally gotten the last of my laughter out, airflow had nudged me back within reach of the bulkhead I’d come through to enter the Bridge, and I used it to launch myself toward the meeting.

  I tried to talk myself out of it all the way there. I guess I’m just not that big a man. When I reached the group, I used a deck chair to brake myself, and looked Conrad of Conrad in the eyes. For half a second.

/>   “Hey, Connie,” I said.

  And turned away. “Dorothy, good to see you again. Alex, I see you again. Crave pardon, ma’am, we haven’t been introduced, my name is Joel Johnston.” I bowed as graciously as I had free-fall skills for.

  “Alice Dahl,” she said crisply. That was a scary cello she was playing, all right. She did not acknowledge my bow with even a nod, or offer to shake, even with her non-gunhand. Maybe she didn’t have one. She was a golem.

  Jinny said, “Joel, I’d like you to meet my husband, Andrew J. Conrad. Andrew, this is Joel.”

  He and I exchanged about a hundred thousand words by eye traffic in three seconds, and each put out a hand at the same instant. I liked the man. The mustache looked silly, but I knew it had not been his idea.

  “It is an honor to meet you, Captain Conrad,” I said. “Congratulations on your historic achievements. And I speak for the moment only of the latest ones. First man to exceed c. First master of a transluminal passenger vessel. First and only man ever to match orbits with a relativistic starship in transit.” I thought of another one. “And one of only seven creatures we know of who’ve ever been in the close vicinity of an exploding star and lived to tell about it. Welcome to our covered wagon. We hope you’ll find our technology quaint.”

  He didn’t preen, or look smug, or sneer arrogantly, or try to pretend he didn’t enjoy the praise. He nodded and said, “Please call me Andrew. Thank you, Joel. I’m glad to be here.”

  “You’re welcome, Andrew.”

  “Jinny told me you’re a quick study. I can see she was right; you seem up to speed. We’re all lucky to be here.” His face clouded. “And I can’t hope to tell you how much I wish I’d built the Mercury years sooner. Centuries ago. Even last year….”

  “We all do, son,” Captain Bean said softly. “Play the cards in front of you.”

  Andrew nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s good advice.”

  Van Cortlandt spoke up, his voice a pleasant tenor. “How did you ever figure out what was happening in time to run?”

  “We were fortunate enough to be in Terra’s shadow when she lit up.”

  “And you’re sure destruction was complete?”

  “We reached Ganymede with a thirty-three-minute lead over the wavefront, and spent five minutes talking to telepaths on the ground there. They were just receiving information consistent with the annihilation of Terra. We jumped again, and thirty minutes later telepaths on Saturn confirmed the destruction of Ganymede, with timing consistent with a solar explosion. At that point, I gave her the gun.”

  “Andrew’s quick reactions saved us all,” Jinny said proudly, and his shoulders widened.

  “What can you tell us about her drive?” I asked.

  Solomon spoke up. “The subject came up, as you may imagine. Captain Conrad discussed the nature of the Mercury’s novel propulsion system frankly and forthrightly at some length, using short simple words, and continuing until the last of us lost the struggle to pretend we had the faintest clue what he was talking about. I myself gleaned only that its basic principle is—sometimes—called Drastic Irrelevancy. Have I got that right, Captain?”

  “Drastic Irrelevancy Synergism, yes,” Andrew agreed. “You see, it’s… but then you don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Is there even a Sunday supplement shorthand version, albeit grossly oversimplified or crudely approximate, that you could give us?” Lieutenant van Cortlandt asked.

  Andrew pursed his mouth in thought a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “In a week, I could probably provide Relativist Short with enough tools to begin thinking about the first part of the answer you want. Uh, there are a lot of parts. Yourself, and a few others here, a month would probably do it. For sure,” he amended, seeing van Cortlandt’s expression.

  Richard Conrad had put up with the unnatural state of being ignored for as long as he was prepared to. Ten percent louder than anyone had spoken so far, he said, “We’ve failed to cover this already. Can we for the love of privacy just accept for now that the Mercury is towed by a fleet of hyperphotonic swans under an enchantment, and move on?”

  He was now merely a man like any other, without a multiplanet empire behind him anymore, and everyone in the room probably knew it. But he was also Conrad of Conrad, and had been all his life. We all flinched at his whip-crack interruption and fell silent, and the first one of us who felt capable of obeying him did so.

  Captain Bean said to Andrew, “Captain, I have a confession to make. While I’m no mathematician, I’ve always thought myself capable of simple kitchen arithmetic, at least.” Both his lieutenants made brief nasal sounds. “And ever since I received your hail… amend that: ever since I convinced myself your hail was not a hallucination, I’ve been using part of my mind to try and calculate what speed you were making. But there are a few more variables than I can handle, and I keep losing my decimal point. Curiosity trumps pride: Will you tell us your top speed?”

  Conrad of Conrad—there were just too many Conrads present; I was going to have to start thinking of him as Richard somehow—started speaking at the same instant Andrew did, obviously trying to cut him off. I was surprised when Andrew didn’t yield, then again when the old man did.

  “…not possible to answer your question, in the strictest sense,” Andrew was saying, “but I’ll do my best. You’ve traveled roughly 10.4 lights in a little over 6.41 years—your years, I mean. Thirteen years for us back home. We caught up in a little over six and a half weeks, by your clock.” He sensed that he was taking too long. “But in the terms you’re using, our equivalent of a maximum real-world velocity works out to be on the order of 19.6 c.”

  Several of us either sucked in air or expelled it noisily. You could almost hear a whining sound as many mental calculators began operating at full capacity.

  How far away was Brasil Novo, at twenty c? I could make a stab at it in terms of objective years, what Andrew had called “real-world” time, but when it came to how much time it would seem to take for a passenger, I lacked a basis from which to even guess.

  Screw that: the answer was, a hell of a lot closer than it had been, whether you were speaking subjectively or objectively.

  And real-world years, out there in the subliminal universe, had more than academic importance, too. They were the measure of how long we had to warn the rest of the colonies, before all their skies turned to fire.

  And we’d have been here nearly a day ago, if you people hadn’t been silly enough to shut off your drive. We were lucky to find you at all.”

  Rennick’s voice and ill-mannered irritation were like a cold-water bath. I saw Captain Bean, van Cortlandt, and Solomon all open their mouths to retort.

  But Dorothy Robb beat them all to it. “Alex, if you actually believe anyone voluntarily shuts down a quantum ramjet, you’re sillier than that would have been. None of these people have been rude to you yet.” The hesitation between the last two words was perceptible, but so slight there isn’t a punctuation mark subtle enough to render it.

  Van and Solomon savored Rennick’s facial expression, so it was the Skipper who spoke next. “Rennick, the Sheffield has had the great misfortune to lose three of her Relativists, the last just over a week ago. Heroic effort by the surviving three proved insufficient to overturn the laws of physics for more than a few days. Our drive shut itself off, sir.”

  “Mr. Rennick intended no offense, Captain Bean,” Richard Conrad said mildly, and Rennick went from a blush to dead white.

  There was a short silence, in which everyone tried to think of something to say or ask next that might not sound stupid in retrospect. It was pretty fast company; nobody was in a big hurry to be first.

  I was mildly surprised at who turned out to be bold enough. It was Paul Hattori who cleared his throat and said, “I crave pardon if this question is impertinent, but curiosity overwhelms my manners. May I ask the passenger-carrying capacity of the Mercury?”

  Again, that ultrasonic whining sound, as a dozen minds radically
shifted direction and then reaccelerated.

  Richard Conrad spoke with maximum force. “Captain Bean, I must insist we adjourn this discussion to your quarters, or a place of equal privacy, now. I quite understand the natural curiosity of all present, have indulged it as long as I deem prudent, and will continue to address it as time permits. But there are matters that must be discussed first only in private, and among those of the highest rank. Matters of extreme importance. There is no time to lose.” When the Skipper did not answer instantly in the affirmative, he forced the issue by rotating in place and launching himself toward the hatch. “Will you be kind enough to direct me,” he called over his shoulder as he floated away, and I haven’t given that a question mark because he didn’t.

  Most of the rest of his party began to trail him out of sheer instinct, like pilot fish who go wherever the big shark goes. Captain Bean was visibly angry, but he wasn’t the kind of man who would make a scene for no better reason than to establish his authority on his own ship. This party was going to follow Conrad, and the only people who considered me of the highest rank were music lovers. I felt sharp dismay.

  Conrad rotated to face us again on his way to the door. “Alex, ladies,” he called, “perhaps you’d be willing to answer any questions the rest of our hosts may have, insofar as you are able.”

  Jinny, Rennick, and Robb were already in transit, but all three immediately rotated themselves so they could rebound and rejoin us once they reached the hatchway. Evelyn had not yet committed herself to a launch, and stayed where she was, using a large unused monitor for a handhold.

  “Solomon, Van, Mr. Cott, come with me, please. Mr. Hattori, your input could prove useful as well.” Bruce opened his mouth, but Captain Bean continued, “You have the con, Mister,” and he closed it again. “The rest of you may remain here under Lieutenant Bruce’s command until I return if you choose.” Hattori was smiling like a musician who’d just been asked to sit in with Louis Armstrong.