The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  McAndrew’s forehead was beaded with sweat. As the shock of his wound wore off, the pain was beginning. I pointed to the medical belt of one of the invaders, who nodded and tossed an ampoule across to me. I injected McAndrew at the big vein inside his right elbow.

  The figure who had pushed past me was returning, followed by Yifter. The face plate of the suit was now open, revealing a dark-haired woman in her early thirties. She looked casually at the scene, nodded at last, and turned back to Yifter.

  “Everything’s under control here,” she said. “But we’ll have to take a Section from the Assembly. The ship we were following in caught some of the blast from the Lesotho, and it’s no good for powered flight now.”

  Yifter shook his head reprovingly. “Impatient as usual, Akhtar. I’ll bet you were just too eager to get here. You must learn patience if you are to be of maximum value to us, my dear. Where did you leave the main group?”

  “A few hours drive inward from here. We have waited for your rescue, before making any plans for the next phase.”

  Yifter, calm as ever, nodded approvingly. “The right decision. We can take a Section without difficulty. Most of them contain their own drives, but some are less effective than others.”

  He turned to me, smiling gently. “Jeanie Roker, which Section is the best equipped to carry us away from the Assembly? As you see, it is time for us to leave you and rejoin our colleagues.”

  His calm was worse than any number of threats. I floated next to McAndrew, trying to think of some way that we could delay or impede the Lucies’ escape. It might take days for a rescue party to reach us. In that time, Yifter and his followers could be anywhere.

  I hesitated. Yifter waited. “Come now,” he said at last. “I’m sure you are as eager as I am to avoid any further annoyance”—he moved his hand, just a little, to indicate McAndrew and Bryson—“for your friends.”

  I shrugged. All the Sections contained emergency life-support systems, more than enough for a trip of a few hours. Section Two, where the guards had been housed, lacked a full, independent drive unit, but it was still capable of propulsion. I thought it might slow their escape enough for us somehow to track it.

  “Section Two should be adequate,” I said. “It housed your guards in comfort. Those poor devils certainly have no need for it now.”

  I paused. Beside me, McAndrew was painfully straightening from his contorted position. The drugs were beginning to work. He coughed, and red globules floated away across the room. That lung needed attention.

  “No,” he said faintly. “Not Two, Yifter. Seven. Section Seven.”

  He paused and coughed again, while I looked at him in surprise.

  “Seven,” he said at last. He looked at me. “No killing, Jeanie. No—Killing vector.”

  The woman was listening closely. She regarded both of us suspiciously. “What was all that about?”

  My mouth was gaping open as wide as Bryson’s. I had caught an idea of what McAndrew was trying to tell me, but I didn’t want to say it. Fortunately, I was helped out by Yifter himself.

  “No killing,” he said. “My dear, you have to understand that Professor McAndrew is a devoted pacifist—and carrying his principles through admirably. He doesn’t want to see any further killing. I think I can agree with that—for the present.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “I won’t inquire what dangers and drawbacks Section Two might contain, Captain—though I do seem to recall that it lacks a decent drive unit. I think we’ll follow the Professor’s advice and take Section Seven. Akhtar is a very competent engineer, and I’m sure she’ll have no trouble coupling the drive to the kernel.”

  He looked at us with a strange expression. If it didn’t sound so peculiar, I’d describe it as wistful. “I shall miss our conversations,” he said. “But I must say goodbye now. I hope that Professor McAndrew will recover. He is one of the strong—unless he allows himself to be killed by his unfortunate pacifist fancies. We may not meet again, but I am sure that you will be hearing about us in the next few months.”

  They left. McAndrew, Bryson and I watched the screens in silence, as the Lucies made their way over to Section Seven and entered it. Once they were inside, I went over to McAndrew and took him by the left arm.

  “Come on,” I said. “We have to get a patch on that lung.”

  He shook his head weakly. “Not yet. It can wait a few minutes. After that, it might not be necessary.”

  His forehead was beading with sweat again—and this time it was not from pain. I felt my own tension mounting steadily. We stayed by the display screen, and as the seconds ticked away my own forehead began to film with perspiration. We did not speak. I had one question, but I was terribly afraid of the answer I might get. I think that Bryson spoke to both of us several times. I have no idea what he said.

  Finally, a pale nimbus grew at the rear of the Section Seven drive unit.

  “Now,” said McAndrew. “He’s going to tap the kernel.”

  I stopped breathing. There was a pause of a few seconds, stretching to infinity, then the image on the screen rippled slightly. Suddenly, we could see stars shining through that area. Section Seven was gone, vanished, with no sign that it had ever existed.

  McAndrew took in a long, pained breath, wincing as his injured lung expanded. Somehow, he managed a little smile.

  “Well now,” he said. “That answers a theoretical question that I’ve had on my mind for some time.”

  I could breathe again, too. “I didn’t know what was going to happen there,” I said. “I was afraid all the energy might come out of that kernel in one go.”

  McAndrew nodded. “To be honest, that thought was in my head, too. At this range, the shields would have been useless. We’d have gone like last year’s lovers.”

  Bryson had been watching the whole thing in confusion. We had been ignoring him completely. At last, pale and irritable, he spoke to us again.

  “What are you two talking about? And what’s happened to the Section with Yifter in it? I was watching on the screen, then it just seemed to disappear.”

  “McAndrew tried to tell us earlier,” I said. “But he didn’t want the Lucies to know what he was getting at. He’d been fiddling with the kernel in that Section. You heard what he said—no Killing vector. I don’t know what he did, but he fixed it so that the kernel in Section Seven had no Killing vector.”

  “I’m sure he did,” said Bryson tartly. “Now perhaps you’ll tell me what a Killing vector is.”

  “Well, Mac could tell you a lot better than I can. But a Killing vector is a standard sort of thing in relativity—I guess you never had any training in that. You get a Killing vector when a region of space-time has some sort of symmetry—say, about an axis of spin. And every sort of black hole, every sort of kernel we’ve ever encountered before, has at least one symmetry of that type. So if McAndrew changed the kernel and made it into something with no Killing vector, it’s like no kernel we’ve ever seen. Right, Mac?”

  He looked dreamy. The drugs had taken hold. “I took it past the extreme Kerr-Newman form,” he said. “Put it into a different form, metastable equilibrium. Event horizon had disappeared, all the Killing vectors had disappeared.”

  “Christ!” I hadn’t expected that. “No event horizon? Doesn’t that mean you get—?”

  McAndrew was still nodding, eye pupils dilated. “—a naked singularity. That’s right, Jeanie, I had a naked singularity, sitting there in equilibrium in Section Seven. You don’t get there by spinning-up—need different method.” His speech was slurring, as though his tongue was swollen. “Didn’t know what would happen if somebody tried to tap it, to use for a drive. Either the signature of space-time there would change, from three space dimensions and one time, to two space and two time. Or we might see the System’s biggest explosion. All the mass coming out as radiation, in one flash.”

  It was slowly dawning on Bryson what we were saying. “But just where is Yifter now?” he asked.
<
br />   “Gone a long way,” I said. “Right out of this universe.”

  “And he can’t be brought back?” asked Bryson.

  “I hope not.” I’d seen more than enough of Yifter.

  “But I’m supposed to deliver him safely to Titan,” said Bryson. “I’m responsible for his safe passage. What am I going to tell the Planetary Coordinators?”

  I didn’t have much sympathy. I was too busy looking at McAndrew’s wounds. The fingers could be regenerated using the bio-feedback equipment on Titan, but the lung would need watching. It was still bleeding a little.

  “Tell them you had a very singular experience,” I said. McAndrew grunted as I probed the deep cut in his side. “Sorry, Mac. Have to do it. You know, you’ve ruined your reputation forever as far as I’m concerned. I thought you were a pacifist? All that preaching at us, then you send Yifter and his lot all the way to Hell—and good riddance to them.”

  McAndrew was drifting far away on his big dose of painkillers. He half-winked at me and made his curious throat-clearing noise.

  “Och, I’m a pacifist all right. We pacifists have to look after each other. How could we ever hope for peace with people like Yifter around to stir up trouble? There’s a bunch more of them, a few hours travel behind us. Fix me up quick, Jeanie. I should be tinkering with the other kernels a bit—just in case the other Lucies decide to pay us a visit later…”

  SECOND CHRONICLE:

  Moment of Inertia

  “Now,” said the interviewer, “tell us just what led you to the ideas for the inertia-less drive.”

  She was young and vulnerable-looking, and I think that was what saved her from a hot reply. As it was, McAndrew just shook his head and said quietly—but still with feeling—“Not the inertia-less drive. There’s no such thing. It’s a balanced drive.”

  She looked confused. “But it lets you accelerate at more than fifty gees, doesn’t it? By making you so you don’t feel any acceleration at all. Doesn’t that mean you must have no inertia?”

  McAndrew was shaking his head again. He looked pained and resigned. I suppose that he had to go through this explanation twice a day, every day of his life, with somebody.

  I leaned forward and lowered the sound on the video unit. I had heard the story too often, and my sympathies were all with him. We had direct evidence that the McAndrew drive was anything but inertia-less. I doubt if he’ll ever get that message across to the average person, even though he’s most people’s idea of the “great scientist,” the ultimate professor.

  I was there at the beginning of the whole thing. In fact, according to McAndrew I was the beginning. We had been winding our way back from the Titan Colony, travelling light as we usually did on the inbound leg. We had only four Sections in the Assembly, and only two of them carried power kernels and drive units, so I guess we massed about three billion tons for ship and cargo.

  Halfway in, just after turnover point, we got an incoming request for medical help from the mining colony on Horus. I passed the word on to Luna Station, but we couldn’t do much to help. Horus is in the Egyptian Cluster of asteroids, way out of the ecliptic, and it would take any aid mission a couple of weeks to get to them. By that time, I suspected their problem would be over—one way or another. So I was in a pretty gloomy mood when McAndrew and I sat down to dinner.

  “I didn’t know what to tell them, Mac. They know the score as well as I do, but they couldn’t resist asking if we had a fast-passage ship that could help them. I had to tell them the truth, there’s nothing that can get out there at better than two and a half gees, not with people on board. And they need doctors, not just drugs. Luna will have something on the way in a couple of days, but I don’t think that will do it.”

  McAndrew nodded sympathetically. He knew that I needed to talk it out to somebody, and we’ve spent a lot of time together on those Titan runs. He’s working on his own experiments most of the time, but I know when he needs company, too. It must be nice to be a famous scientist, but it can be lonely travelling all the time inside your own head.

  “I wonder if we’re meant for space, Mac,” I went on—only half-joking. “We’ve got drives that will let us send unmanned probes out at better than a hundred gees of continuous acceleration, but we’re the weak link. I could take the Assembly here up to five gee—we’d be home in a couple of days instead of another month—but you and I couldn’t take it. Can’t you and some of your staff at the Institute come up with a system so that we don’t get crushed flat by high accelerations? A thing like that, an inertia-less drive, it would change space exploration completely.”

  I was wandering on, just to keep my mind off the problems they had out on Horus, but what I was saying was sound enough. We had the power on the ships, only the humans were the obstacle. McAndrew was listening to me seriously, but he was shaking his head.

  “So far as I know, Jeanie, an inertia-less drive is a theoretical impossibility. Unless somebody a lot brighter than I am can come up with an entirely new theory of physics, we’ll not see your inertia-less drive.”

  That was a pretty definitive answer. There were no people brighter than McAndrew, at least in the area of physics. If Mac didn’t think it could be done, you’d not find many people arguing with him. Some people were fooled by the fact that he took time off to make trips with me out to Titan, but that was all part of his way of working.

  If you deduce from this that I’m not up at that rarefied level of thought, you’re quite right. I can follow McAndrew’s explanations—sometimes. But when he really gets going he loses me in the first two sentences.

  This time, his words seemed clear enough for anyone to follow them. I poured myself another glass of ouzo and wondered how many centuries it would be before the man or woman with the completely new theory came along. Sitting across from me, Mac had begun to rub at his sandy, receding hairline. His expression had become vacant. I’ve learned not to interrupt when he’s got that look on his face. It means he’s thinking in a way that I can’t follow. One of the other professors at the Penrose Institute says that Mac has a mind that can see round corners, and I have a little inkling what he means by that.

  “Why inertia-less, Jeanie?” said McAndrew after a few minutes.

  Maybe he hadn’t been listening after all. “So we can use high accelerations. So we can get people to go at the same speeds as the unmanned probes. They’d be flattened at fifty gee, you know that. We need an inertia-less drive so that we can stand that acceleration without being squashed to a mush.”

  “But that’s not the same thing at all. I told you that a drive with no inertia isn’t possible—and it isn’t. What you’re asking for, now, it seems to me that we should be able…”

  His voice drifted off to nothing, he stood up, and without another word he left the cabin. I wondered what I’d started.

  If that was the beginning of the McAndrew drive—as I think it was—then, yes, I was there at the very beginning.

  So far as I could tell, it wasn’t only the beginning. It was also the end. Mac didn’t talk about the subject again on our way in to Luna rendezvous, even though I tried to nudge him a couple of times. He was always the same, he didn’t like to talk about his ideas when they were “half-cooked,” as he called it.

  When we got to Luna, McAndrew went off back to the Institute, and I took a cargo out to Cybele. End of story, and it gradually faded from my thoughts, until the time came, seven months later, for the next run to Titan.

  For the first time in five years, McAndrew didn’t make the trip. He didn’t call me, but I got a brief message that he was busy with an off-Earth project, and wouldn’t be free for several months. I wondered, not too seriously, if Mac’s absence could be connected with inertia-less spaceships, and then went on with the cargo to Titan.

  That was the trip where some lunatic in the United Space Federation’s upper bureaucracy decided that Titan was overdue for some favorable publicity, as a thriving colony where culture would be welcomed. Fine. The
y decided to combine culture and nostalgia, and hold on Titan a full-scale, old-fashioned Miss & Mister Universe competition. It apparently never occurred to the organizers—who must have had minds that could not see in straight lines, let alone around corners—that the participants were bound to take the thing seriously once it was started. Beauty is not something that good-looking people are willing to take lightly. I had the whole Assembly filled with gorgeous, jealous contestants, screaming managers, horny and ever-hopeful newshounds from every media outlet in the System, and any number of vengeful and vigilant wives, lovers and mistresses of both sexes. On one of my earlier runs I took a circus and zoo out to Titan, but that was nothing compared with this trip. Thank Heaven that the ship is computer-controlled. All my time was spent in keeping some of the passengers together and the rest apart.

  It also hadn’t occurred to the organizers, back on Earth, that a good part of the Titan colony is the prison. When I saw the first interaction of the prisoners and the contestants I realized that the trip out to Titan had been a picnic compared with what was about to follow. I chickened out and went back to the ship until it was all over.

  I couldn’t really escape, though. When it was all over, when the winners had finally been chosen, when the protests and the counter-protests had all been lodged, when the battered remnants of the more persistent prisoners had been carried back to custody, when mayhem was stilled, and when the colonists of Titan must have felt that they had enjoyed as much of Inner System culture as they could stand for another twenty or thirty years, after all that it was my job to get the group back on board again, and home to Earth without further violence. The contestants hated their managers, the managers hated the judges, the judges hated the news media, and everyone hated the winners. It seemed to me that McAndrew may have had advance information about the trip, and drawn a correct conclusion.