The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  Drive off, we felt only the one-gee pull of our mass plate as we dropped in to close approach. On Merganser, McAndrew and Nina Velez were lying in water bunks, cushioned with everything soft on the ship. We were on an impact course with them, one that would change to a near-miss after we ejected the water ballast. It looked like a suicide mission, running straight into the blue furnace of their drive.

  The sequence took place so fast it was anti-climactic. I saw the drive cut off ahead of us and felt the vibration along the support column as our mass driver threw the ballast hard towards Merganser. The brief pulse from our drive that took us clear of them was too quick for me to feel.

  We cleared the drive region. Then there seemed to be a wait that lasted for hours. McAndrew and Nina were now in a ship with drive off, dropping towards HC-183. They were exposed to the full fifty gees of their mass plate. Under that force, I knew what happened to the human body. It had not been designed to operate when it suddenly weighed more than four tons. Membranes ruptured, valves burst, veins collapsed. The heart had never evolved to pump blood weighing hundreds of pounds up a gravity hill of fifty gees. The only thing that Mac and Nina had going for them was the natural inertia of matter. If the period of high gee were short enough, the huge accelerations would not have time to produce those shattering physical effects.

  Wenig and I watched on our screens for a long, long moment, until the computer on Merganser counted off the last microsecond and switched on the drive again. If the life-capsule was free to move along its column, the computer would now begin the slow climb out of HC-183’s gravity well. No action was needed from the passengers. When we completed our own orbit we hoped we would see the other ship out at a safe distance, ready for the long trip home.

  And on board the ship? I wasn’t sure. If the encounter had lasted too long, we might find no more than two limp and broken sacks of blood, tissue and bone.

  It was another long day, waiting until we had been carried around in our orbit and could try to rendezvous the two ships. As soon as we were within radar range, Nina Velez appeared on the com screen. The drive was cut back, so we could get good visual signals. My heart sank when I saw the expression on her face.

  “Can you get over to this ship—quickly?” she said.

  I could see why all the professors at the Institute had lost their senses. She was small and slight, with a childlike look of trust and sad blue eyes. All a sham, according to everything I’d been told, but there was no way of seeing the strong personality behind the soft looks. I took a deep breath.

  “What’s happening there?” I said.

  “We’re back under low gee drive, and that’s fine. But I haven’t been able to wake him. He’s breathing, but there’s blood on his lips. He needs a doctor.”

  “I’m the nearest thing to that in thirty billion miles.” I was pulling a suit towards me, sick with a sudden fear. “I’ve had some medical training as part of the Master’s License. And I think I know what’s wrong with McAndrew. He lost part of a lung lobe a couple of years ago. If anything’s likely to be hemorrhaging, that’s it. Dr. Wenig, can you arrange a rendezvous with the mass plates at maximum separation and the drives off?”

  “I’ll need control of their computer.” He was pulling his suit on, too. I didn’t want him along, but I might need somebody to return to the Dotterel for medical supplies.

  “What should I be doing?” Thank heaven Nina showed no signs of panic. She sounded impatient, with the touch of President Velez in her voice. “I’ve sat around in this ship for weeks with nothing to do. Now we need action but I daren’t take it.”

  “What field are you in now? What net field?”

  “One gee. The drive’s off now, and we’ve got the life-capsule right out at the end of the column.”

  “Right. I want to you stay in that position, but set the drive at one gee acceleration. I want McAndrew in a zero-gee environment to slow the bleeding. Dr. Wenig, can you dictate instructions for that while we are rendezvousing?”

  “No problem.” He was an irritating devil, but I’d choose him in a crisis. He was doing three things at once, putting on his suit, watching the computer action for the rendezvous, and giving exact and concise instructions to Nina.

  Getting ourselves from one ship to the other through open space wasn’t as easy as it might sound. We had both ships under one gee acceleration drives, complicated by the combined attraction of the two mass plates. The total field acting on us was small, but we had to be careful not to forget it. If we lost contact with the ships, the nearest landing point was back on Triton Station, thirty billion miles away.

  Nina in the flesh was even more impressive than she was over the video link, but I gave her little more than a cursory once-over. McAndrew’s color was bad and even while I was cracking my suit open and hustling out of it I could hear a frightening bubbling sound in his breathing. Thank God I had learned how to work in zero gee—required part of any space medicine course. I leaned over him, vaguely aware of the two others intently watching. The robodoc beside me was clucking and flashing busily, muttering a faint complaint at McAndrew’s condition and the zero-gee working environment. Standard diagnosis conditions called for at least a partial gravity field.

  I took the preliminary diagnosis and prepared to act on it while the doc was still making up its mind. Five cc’s of cerebral stimulant, five cc’s of metabolic depressant, and a reduction in cabin pressure. It should bring Mac up to consciousness if his brain was still in working order. I worried about a cerebral hemorrhage, the quiet and deadly by-product of super-high gees. Ten minutes and I would know one way or the other.

  I turned to Wenig and Nina who were still watching the robodoc’s silent body trace. “I don’t know how he is yet. We may need emergency treatment facilities ready for us as soon as we get back to the System. Can you go over to Dotterel, cut the drive and try to make contact with Triton Station? By the time you have the connection we should have the full diagnosis here.”

  I watched them leave the ship, saw how carefully Wenig helped Nina to the transfer, and then I heard the first faint noise behind me. It was a sigh, with a little mutter of protest behind it. The most wonderful sound I ever heard in my life. I glanced over at the doc. Concussion—not too bad—and a little more bleeding than I wanted to see from the left lung. Hell, that was nothing. I could patch the lung myself, maybe even start the feedback regeneration for it. I felt a big grin of delight spreading like a heat wave over my face.

  “Take it easy, Mac. You’re doing all right, just don’t try and rush yourself. We’ve got lots of time.” I secured his left arm so that he couldn’t disturb the rib cage on that side.

  He groaned. “Doing fine, am I?” He suddenly opened his eyes and stared up at me, “Holy water, Jeanie, that’s just like a medic. I’m in agony, and you say it’s a little discomfort. How’s Nina doing?”

  “Not a mark on her. She’s not like you, Mac, an old bag of bones. You’re getting too old for this sort of crap.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Over on Dotterel, with Wenig. What’s the matter, still infatuated?”

  He managed a faint smile. “Ah, none of that now. We were stuck on Merganser for more than two weeks, locked up in a three meter living sphere. Show me an infatuation, and I’ll show you a cure for it.”

  The com-link behind me was buzzing. I cut it in, so that we could see Wenig’s worried face.

  “All right here,” I said, before he had time to worry any more. “We’ll be able to take our time going back. How are you? Got enough water?”

  He nodded. “I took some of your reserve supply to make up for what we threw at you. What should we do now?”

  “Head on back. Tell Nina that Mac’s all right, and say we’ll see you both back at the Institute.”

  He nodded again, then leaned closer to the screen and spoke with a curious intensity. “We don’t want to run the risk of having a stuck life capsule again. I’d better keep us down to less than ten
gee acceleration.”

  He cut off communication, without another word. I turned to McAndrew. “How high an acceleration before you’d run into trouble with these ships?”

  He was staring at the blank screen, a confused look on his thin face. “At least forty gee. What the devil’s got into Wenig? And what are you laughing at, you silly bitch?”

  I came over to him and took his right hand in mine. “To each his own, Mac. I wondered why Wenig was so keen to get here. He wants his shot at Nina—out here, where nobody else can compete. What did you tell her—some sweet talk about her lovely eyes?”

  He closed his eyes again and smiled a secret smile. “Ah, come on Jeanie. Are you telling me you’ve been on your best behavior since I last saw you? Gi’ me a bit of peace. I’m not soft on Nina now.”

  “I’ll see.” I went across to the drive and moved us up to forty gee. “Wait until the crew on Titan hear about all this. You’ll lose your reputation.”

  He sighed. “All right, I’ll play the game. What’s the price of silence?”

  “How long would it take a ship like this to get out to Alpha Centauri?”

  “You’d not want this one. We’ll have the next one up to a hundred gee. Forty-four ship days would get you there, standing start to standing finish.”

  I nodded, came back to his side and held his hand again. “All right, Mac, that’s my price. I want one of the tickets.”

  He groaned again, just a bit. But I knew from the dose the doc had put into him that it wasn’t a headache this time.

  THIRD CHRONICLE:

  All the Colors of the Vacuum

  As soon as the ship got back from the midyear run to Titan, I went down to Earth and asked Woolford for a leave of absence. I had been working hard enough for six people, and he knew it. He nodded agreeably as soon as I made the formal request.

  “I think you’ve earned it, Captain Roker, no doubt about that. But don’t you have quite a bit of leave time saved up? Wouldn’t that be enough?” He stopped staring out of the window at the orange-brown sky and called my records onto the screen in front of him.

  “That won’t do it,” I said, while he was still looking.

  Woolford frowned and became less formal. “It won’t? Well, according to this, Jeanie, you’ve got at least…” He looked up. “Just how long do you want to take off?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere between nine and sixteen years, I think.”

  I would have liked to break the news more gently, but maybe there was no graceful way.

  It had taken McAndrew a while to deliver on his promise. The design of the more advanced ship contained no new theory, but this time he intended that the initial tests would be conducted more systematically. I kept pushing him along, while he tried to wriggle out of the commitment. He had been full of drugs and painkillers at the time, he said—surely I didn’t consider it fair, to hold him to what he’d been silly enough to promise then?

  Fair or not, I wouldn’t listen. I had called him as soon as we were on the final leg of the Titan run.

  “Yes, she’s ready enough to go.” He had a strange expression on his face, somewhere between excitement and perplexity. “You’ve still got your mind set on going, then, Jeanie?”

  I didn’t dignify that question with a reply. Instead I said, “How soon can I come out to the Institute?”

  He cleared his throat, making that odd sound that spoke to me of his Scots ancestry. “Och, if you’re set on it, come as soon as you please. I’ll have things to tell you when you get here, but that can wait.”

  That was when I went down and made my request to Woolford for a long leave of absence. McAndrew had been strangely reluctant to discuss our destination, but I couldn’t imagine that we’d be going out past Sirius. Alpha Centauri was my guess, and that would mean we would only be away about nine Earth years. Shipboard time would be three months, allowing a few days at the other end for exploration. If I knew McAndrew, he would have beaten the hundred gee acceleration that he projected for the interstellar prototype. He was never a man to talk big about what he was going to do.

  The Penrose Institute had been moved out to Mars orbit since the last time I was there, so it took me a couple of weeks of impatient ship-hopping to get to it. When we finally closed to visible range I could see the old test ships, Merganser and Dotterel, floating a few kilometers from the main body of the Institute. They were easy to recognize from the flat mass disc with its protruding central spike. And floating near them, quite a bit bigger, was a new ship of gleaming silver. That had to be the Hoatzin, McAndrew’s newest plaything. The disc was twice the size, and the spike three times as long, but Hoatzin was clearly Merganser’s big brother.

  It was Professor Limperis, the head of the Institute, who greeted me when I entered. He had put on weight since I last saw him, but that pudgy black face still hid a razor-sharp mind and a bottomless memory.

  “Good to see you again, Captain Roker. I haven’t told McAndrew this, but I’m very glad you’ll be going along to keep an eye on him.” He gave what he once described as his “hand-clapping minstrel-show laugh”—a sure sign he was nervous about something.

  “Well, I don’t know that I’ll be much use. I’m expecting to be just a sort of passenger. Don’t worry. If my instincts are anything to go by there won’t be much danger in a simple stellar rendezvous and return.”

  “Er, yes.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “That was my own reaction. I gather that Professor McAndrew has not mentioned to you his change of target?”

  “Change of target? He didn’t mention any target at all.” Now my own worry bead was beginning to throb. “Are you suggesting that the trip will not be to a stellar rendezvous?”

  He shrugged and waved his hands, pointing along the corridor. “Not if McAndrew gets his way. Come along, he’s inside at the computer. I think it’s best if he is present when we talk about this further.”

  Pure evasion. Whatever the bad news was, Limperis wanted me to hear it from McAndrew himself.

  We found him staring vacantly at a completely blank display screen. Normally I would never interrupt him when he looks as imbecilic as that—it means that he is thinking with a breadth and depth that I’ll never comprehend. I often wonder what it would be like to have a mind like that. Humans, with rare exceptions, must seem like trained apes, with muddied thoughts and no ability for abstract analysis.

  Tough luck. It was time one of the trained apes had some of her worries put to rest. I walked up behind McAndrew and put my hands on his shoulders.

  “Here I am. I’m ready to go—if you’ll tell me where we’re going.”

  He turned in his chair. After a moment his slack jaw firmed up and the eyes brought me into focus.

  “Hello, Jeanie.” No doubt about it, as soon as he recognized me he had that same shifty look I had noticed in Limperis. “I didn’t expect you here so soon. We’re still making up a flight profile.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll help you.” I sat down opposite him, studying his face closely. As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses work harder than anyone else, not less hard. His face was thinner, and he had lost a little more hair from that sandy, receding mop. My argument with him over that was long in the past.

  “Why don’t you grow it back?” I’d said. “It’s such a minor job, a couple of hours with the machines every few months and you’d have a full head of hair again.”

  He had sniffed. “Why don’t you try and get me to grow a tail, or hair all over my body? Or maybe make my arms a bit longer, so they’ll let me run along with them touching the ground. Jeanie, I’ll not abuse a bio-feedback machine to run evolution in the wrong direction. We’re getting less hairy all the time. I know your fondness for monkeys”—a nasty crack about an engineering friend of mine on Ceres, who was a bit hairy for even my accommodating tastes—“but I’ll be just as happy when I have no hair at all. It gets in the way, it grows all the time, and it serves no purpose whatsoever.”

&n
bsp; McAndrew resented the time it took him to clip his fingernails, and I’m sure that he regarded his fondness for food as a shameful weakness. Meanwhile, I wondered who in the Penrose Institute cut his hair. Maybe they had a staff assistant, whose job it was to shear the absent-minded once a month.

  “What destination are you planning for the first trip out?” If he was thinking of chasing a comet, I wanted that out in the open.

  McAndrew looked at Limperis. Limperis looked at McAndrew, handing it back to him. Mac cleared his throat.

  “We’ve discussed it here and we’re all agreed. The first trip of the Hoatzin won’t be to a star system.” He cleared his throat again. “It will be to pursue and rendezvous with the Ark of Massingham. It’s a shorter trip than any of the star systems,” he added hopefully. He could read my expression. “They are less than two light-years out. With the Hoatzin we can be there and docked with the Ark in less than thirty-five ship days.”

  If he was trying to make me feel better, McAndrew was going about it in quite the wrong way.

  Back in the twenties, the resources of the Solar System must have seemed inexhaustible. No one had been able to catalog the planetoids, still less analyze their composition and probable value. Now we know everything out to Neptune that’s bigger than a hundred meters across, and the navigation groups want that down to fifty meters in the next twenty years. The idea of grabbing an asteroid a couple of kilometers across and using it how you choose sounds like major theft. But it hadn’t merely been permitted—it had been encouraged.

  The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go. How do I know? Look, you don’t pilot to Titan without learning a lot about your own personality. Before we found the right way to use people like me, I would probably have been on one of the Arks.