It said something for the lack of efficiency of the Food Department that they would drag McAndrew and me all the way to Earth for a meeting, then shuttle us back to the Penrose Institute and the Hoatzin on a Government-owned ship less than four hours after we arrived. Anna Lisa Griss would follow to the Institute in another and even fancier vessel, but Bayes went with us to continue the briefing on the way. Without his boss around he lost his intimidated look and became a much cheerier person.
“Let’s start with Lanhoff’s ideas,” he said. “Though after listening to Anna back in her office it’s apparently going to be called the Griss-Lanhoff Theory, at least while Lanhoff’s not on the scene. I’ll keep it short, but I’m not sure where to begin. In the Halo, I guess. Professor McAndrew, do you know anything about the Halo?” He cackled with laughter at his joke.
Griss had asked McAndrew that same question when she was giving us our first briefing. I had watched Bayes’ eyes bulge with astonishment. I felt the same way myself. McAndrew probably knew more about the Halo and the outer parts of the extended Solar System than anyone, living or dead—he had developed the entire theory that predicted the existence of the kernel ring, the broad belt of Kerr-Newman black holes that girdles the ecliptic at four hundred AU, ten times the distance of Pluto. And of course he had travelled out there himself, in the first test of the McAndrew balanced drive. I assumed that any scientist worth the name would know all about McAndrew and his work, but apparently Anna Lisa Griss proved me wrong.
McAndrew laughed. He and Will Bayes had needed only ten minutes alone together to discover a mutual fascination with bad jokes, and they were getting along famously. I thought ahead to a long trip with the two of them and shuddered at the prospect.
“Lanhoff wandered into our offices six or seven years back,” went on Bayes after he had had a good giggle at his own wit. “He’d been analyzing the results of Halo remote chemistry probes. Didn’t you do some of that yourself, a few years ago?”
McAndrew rubbed at his sandy, receding hairline. “Och, just a little bit. I wanted to find power kernels, not low-density fragments, but as part of the survey we sneaked in a look at some other stuff as well. Most of the Oort cloud’s so poorly surveyed, you know, it’s a crime not to explore it whenever you have the chance. But I never looked out more than a few hundred AU—it was before we had the drive, and probes were too expensive. I’m sure Lanhoff had all my results to work with when he started.”
“He certainly knew your work,” said Bayes. “And he remembered you well. You made quite an impression on him. He’s an organic chemist, and he had been looking at all the data on the Halo, and plotting body chemical composition as a function of distance from the Sun. He has a special algorithm that allows him to look at the fractional composition of each object—I think it came from Minga’s team. You probably don’t remember Minga, he never published much himself. I met him once or twice, way back…no, maybe I’m thinking of Rooney. You know, he was the one who did the high-energy work, I think it was for the Emerald Project, wasn’t it? Yes, I think so…”
It’s probably a kindness if I edit Will Bayes’ briefing of McAndrew and me. He tried hard enough, but everything he said reminded him of something else, and that something else had to be explained, too, and all the people involved in it reminded him or other people, and what they had done. Regression, ad infinitum.
We didn’t mind too much, with a two-day journey before we were back at the Institute, but I must say I thought a bit more kindly of Anna Griss before the trip was over. Staff meetings with Bayes must be hell.
Boiling Will’s verbiage down to a minimum, it was a simple story: Lanhoff had done a systematic chemical analysis of the cometary Halo, from its beginnings beyond the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, all the way to the fading outer edge nearly half a light-year away, where the Sun’s gravitational hold is so weak that the frozen bodies drift around in orbits with periods of millions of years.
That’s the Oort cloud, a great ball of loosely-held matter centered on the Sun. There are several hundred billion comets out there, ranging from near-planet-sized monsters a few hundred kilometers across to snowballs no bigger than your fist. Chapman’s Rule applies as well to the cometary Halo as it does to the asteroid belt: for every object of given diameter, there are ten objects with one-third of that diameter.
The Halo has been described and studied since the middle of the twentieth century, but Lanhoff’s interests were different. He divided the solar vicinity into regions of different distances and inclinations to the plane of the ecliptic, and he looked at the percentage of different organic materials within each orbital regime. Naturally, with a trillion objects to work with he could only look at a tiny sample of the total, but even so the analysis took him eight years. And he found something new and surprising. In a part of the Halo about 3200 AU from the Sun, running out to maybe 4,000 AU, the complexity of chemical compounds increases enormously. Instead of simple organic molecules like cyanogen, formaldehyde, and methane, his program told him he was finding higher compounds and complex polymers—macromolecules like polysaccharide chains.
“Like what?” At that point in the discussion I had interrupted Will Bayes’ rambling. Organic chemistry is low on the list of educational priorities for controlling a spacecraft.
“Organic polymers,” said McAndrew thoughtfully. He had been frowning hard as Bayes talked of the chemical composition. “Chains of glucose molecules, to make starches and cellulose.” He turned back to Bayes. “Did Lanhoff find any evidence of porphyrins, or nitrogen compounds like purines and pyrimidines?”
Bayes blinked. “You seem to know all about this already. Did Anna already brief you? Lanhoff’s work is all supposed to be a big secret.”
I had some sympathy with him. Briefing McAndrew is an unrewarding experience. At the end he seems to know everything you know and be able to explain it and apply it better. Now Mac was shaking his head and looking puzzled.
“She didn’t mention any of this to us. But I knew most of it years ago. Not the particular place in the Halo where we might find complex organic materials, but at least the fact that they might be there. It’s not a new theory at all. Hoyle suggested it more than a hundred years ago. I just don’t understand why there’s anything secret about it. A finding like this one ought to be available to anyone.”
“There’s a reason. Wait until you know Anna Griss a bit better and you’ll understand.” Bayes was looking outside for his first glimpse of the Hoatzin, which was now only a couple of hundred kilometers away. “She’s the hardest worker I know, but she’s super-ambitious. She wants to run the whole Council someday—tomorrow, if she had her way. When Lanhoff came to her with his proposal, the first thing she did was hit it with a classified label.”
“Didn’t anyone argue with her?” I said.
“No. Try it. It’s not something you’ll do more than once. There were a few mutterings, that was all. Anna offered some positive incentives, too. She thinks this will make her famous, and push everybody in the Department ten rungs up the management ladder.”
“Just because we’ve got a bit more information about the composition of the Halo? Not much chance of that.” McAndrew snorted his disbelief.
“No.” Bayes was still peering out of the port. “Lanhoff persuaded her that he had the only answer to the System food problem. All he needed was money and a ship, and USF permission to make some orbit changes to a few bodies out in the Halo. Good God!” He turned back from the scope. “There’s the oddest-looking ship out there. Surely we’re not proposing to chase after Lanhoff in that thing?”
Lanhoff’s suggestion sounded reasonable until you sat down to think about it. Out in the Halo, off where the Sun was nothing more than an extra-bright star, mountains of matter drift through space, moving to the tug of a faint gravitational current. Most of them are frozen or rocky fragments, water ice and ammonia ice bonding metals and silicates. But swarms of them, in a toroidal region three hundred billion miles from E
arth, are made of more complex organic molecules. If Lanhoff were correct, we would find an endless supply of useful compounds there—all the prebiotic materials from which foodstuffs are easily made. They needed only warmth and a supply of the right enzymes to serve as catalytic agents. Cellulose, polypeptides, carotenoids, and porphyrins could be transformed to sugars, starches, proteins, and edible fats. The food supply of the whole solar system would be assured for a million years.
Now sit down and think about it again. How do you seed a hundred million worlds and turn them to giant candymountains, when the nearest of them is so far away. How do you heat them; how do you get them back where they will be useable?
If you are Arne Lanhoff, none of those questions will deter you. The enzymes you need are available in small amounts in the inner system; once a body has been seeded and heat is available from a fusion reactor, enzyme production can proceed at an explosive pace. It will suffice to begin with just a few hundred thousand tons of the right enzymes, and make the rest where the supply of raw materials is assured. The types of enzymes needed to split polymer chains are well known, but the only sort of ship that can carry this much load is a boost-and-coast vessel with a maximum short-duration acceleration of only two-tenths of a gee. So be it. Plan on a trip out to the Halo that will take a couple of years, and allow another year or two to trundle around from one cometary body to the next, seeding and performing necessary orbital adjustments. The continuous-thrust engines that will be attached to each body add another two million tons to the ship’s initial payload. So be it. Fusion heaters to warm the frozen interiors will add a million more. Don’t worry about it. For a project of this size and importance, the Food and Energy Council will find the money and equipment.
McAndrew had shaken his head when Will Bayes described the plan to place the seeded bodies into radial orbits, thrusting in toward the Sun. “Man, do you realize what it will take to stop one of them? We’ll be trying to catch a billion tons travelling at two thousand kilometers a second.”
“Arne Lanhoff knew that before he left. He was planning just enough drive to bring them to the Inner System in twenty years. By that time they’ll be warmed and transformed in content.” Bayes smiled contentedly. “He felt sure that you’d find ways to catch them and slow them. It’s the sort of thing your group finds challenging.”
“Challenging! He’s insane.” But two minutes later McAndrew was miles away, working on his new puzzle. Arne Lanhoff knew his man rather well.
The ship that had left the Inner System four years ago did so with no fanfares or publicity. The Star Harvester was a massive set of linked cargo spheres with electromagnetic coupling. Each Section had an independent drive unit powered by its own kernel. It was quite similar to the Assembly that I pilot on the Earth-Titan run, and I was glad to know that I’d have no trouble handling it if the need arose.
That need might well arise. The Food Department had received regular communications from the Star Harvester crew during the long trip out—two years Earth-time, and the ship was too slow to make it noticeably shorter in shipboard time. Lanhoff had finally reached his first suitable target, a fifteen-kilometer chunk of ice and organics. He had officially named the body Cornucopia, planted the enzyme package, the fusion furnace, and the drive, and then started it on the long drop in towards the Sun. Without the drive it would fall for millennia. With a little continuous-thrust assistance Cornucopia would be crossing the orbit of Jupiter sixteen years from now. By that time it would be a fertile mass of the raw materials of nutrition, enough to feed the entire solar system for five years.
“No problems. Complete success in all phases,” read Arne Lanhoff’s message as they moved on to the next selected target, a mere five hundred million miles away.
The mission had operated perfectly for another five targets—each one named, processed, and directed toward the Inner System. Ambrosia; Harvest Festival; Persephone; Food of the Gods; and Demeter.
Then the pattern was broken. The seventh target had been reached ninety days ago. After an initial message announcing contact with the body Manna, a huge organic fragment sixty kilometers in length and incredibly rich in complex compounds, Star Harvester became inexplicably silent. A query beamed to it from Triton Station fled off on its nineteen-day journey, and an automatic signal of message receipt finally returned. But no message originated in the ship’s transmission equipment. Arne Lanhoff and his crew of four had vanished into the void, three hundred billion miles from home.
Our troubles didn’t wait until we were out in the Halo. As soon as Anna Lisa Griss arrived on board the Hoatzin, only six hours before our scheduled departure time, we had a problem. She looked around the living quarters disbelievingly.
“You mean we’re supposed to stay in this little space—all of us? It can’t be more than three meters across.”
“Nearer to four.” I paused in my run-through of firing sequence checks. “We left information about that with you before we came here—didn’t you look at it?”
“I looked at the size of the ship, and the column for the living quarters was hundreds of meters long. Why can’t we use all of it?”
I sighed. She had the authority to commandeer the Hoatzin but had never bothered to learn the first thing about how it operated.
“The living-capsule moves up and down that column,” I said. “Farther from or closer to the mass disk, depending on the ship’s acceleration. We can put the supplies outside the capsule area, but if we want to live in a one-gee environment we’re stuck with this part—it’s not bad, plenty of space for four people.”
“But what about my staff?” She gestured at the five people who had followed her into the Hoatzin. I realized for the first time that they might be more than merely carriers of luggage.
“Sorry.” I tried to sound it. “This ship is rated for a four-person crew, maximum.”
“Change it.” She gave me the full force of her imperial manner. I suddenly understood why Will Bayes chose not to argue with her.
I stared back at her without blinking.
“I can’t. I didn’t make that rule—check with the USF back at Lunar Base if you like, but they’ll confirm what I’m telling you.”
She took her lower lip between her teeth, turned her head to survey the cabin, and finally nodded. “I believe you. Damnation. But if there is a four-man limit we still have a problem. I need Bayes and I want my own pilot. And I need McAndrew. You’ll have to stay behind.”
She didn’t look at me this time. I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to do it, but if we were going to bang heads we might as well get it over with. Now was as good a time as any.
“I suggest that you discuss this with McAndrew,” I said. “Better talk to your pilot, too, while you’re at it. I think you’ll find that Mac will refuse to go along without me—just as I wouldn’t go without him. This is not a conventional vessel. Ask your own pilot how many hours of experience he has with the McAndrew Drive. Mac and I have essential experience and skills for the successful performance of this mission. Take your pick. Both, or neither.”
My voice sounded trembly. Instead of replying she turned to head for the steps to the lower level of the living-capsule.
“Prepare us for departure,” she said over her shoulder as she went. Her voice was so calm that I was shocked by my own tension. “I will talk to Bayes. He must assume additional duties on this project.” She turned again when just her head and shoulders were visible. “Did you ever consider taking a job down on Earth? You have abilities that are wasted out here in the middle of nowhere.”
I swiveled my chair to face the console screen and wondered what sort of victory I had won—if any. Anna Lisa Griss was wise in the ways of political infighting, while I was a raw novice. But I was damned if I’d give up my place on this trip without a struggle. The ship was easy to handle, but I’d never admit that to Anna Griss.
Will Bayes came in to stand beside me while I was still having trouble getting my attention back to
the status reports.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “What did you say to her? I’ve never seen her in such a weird mood. I can’t read her at all. She just told Mauchly and the rest of her staff to get back to Headquarters—no explanation. And I’ve been given double duty for the duration.”
I ran the trajectory parameters out onto the screen, jabbing viciously at the buttons. Then I gave him a quick sideways glance. “I had to make a choice. Which would you rather have: Anna Lisa Griss in a peculiar mood, or a ship run by people who don’t know the McAndrew Drive from a laser-sail?”
He grunted and stared gloomily at the screen. “That’s not an easy decision. You’ve never seen Anna when she’s really annoyed. I have. Let me tell you, it’s not something I want to go through again.” He leaned forward. “Hey, Jeanie. Surely that’s not the plot of our flight out you’ve got on the display there.”
“It certainly is.” I rotated axes so that all coordinates were in ecliptic spherical polars and stored the result. “Don’t you like it?”
“But it looks so simple.” He moved his finger along the screen. “I mean, it’s just a straight line. Not a real trajectory at all. What about the Sun’s gravitational field? And you’re not making any allowance for the movement of Manna while we’re flying out there.”
“I know.” I loaded the flight profile to main memory and as I did so the knot in my stomach seemed to loosen. “That’s why I’ll be piloting this ship, Will, rather than one of your buddies. We’ll be accelerating away from the Sun at a hundred gee, agreed? Did you know that the Sun’s acceleration on us here near Mars orbit is only one three hundred thousandth of that? It has tiny effects on our motion.”
The Compleat McAndrew Page 12