The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  The timing would be crucial. Once the lock was open, liquid would be drawn into the evacuated area around me. Then I would have to operate the drill unit so that the open lock moved to enclose the two swollen masses of snowballs, close the lock again, and pump the liquid out. But if I was too slow, the blizzard of snow would close in on me, too, and I would be as helpless as McAndrew and Anna.

  Delay wouldn’t help. I pressed the lever that opened the lock, moved to the side of the chamber, and started the drill extender.

  Liquid rushed in through the opening aperture. I struggled to move forward against its pressure, fighting my way back to the lock control.

  There was a swirling tide of white all around me. Feathered balls hit my suit and stuck to it, coating the faceplate in an opaque layer. Within thirty seconds I could not see anything, and my arms and legs were sluggish in their movements as I clung to the lock lever.

  I had not anticipated that I would become blind so quickly. Were McAndrew and Anna already swept into the chamber by the advancing drill and the opened lock? I had no way of knowing. I waited as long as I dared, then heaved at the lever. My arm moved slowly, hampered by the mass of snow-spheres clinging to it. I felt the control close, and sensed the muffled roar of the pump. I tried to thrash my arms, to shake off the layers that clogged their movement. It was useless. Soon I was unable to move at all. I was in darkness. If the snowballs could tolerate vacuum, McAndrew and Anna and I would go the same way as Lanhoff; we’d be trapped inside our suits, our communication units useless, until the heat built up to kill us.

  It was a long, long wait (only ten minutes, according to the communications link on board the ship—it felt like days). Suddenly there was a lightening of the darkness in front of my faceplate. I could move my arms again. The feather balls were falling off me and being pumped out through the airlock.

  I turned around, peering through the one clear spot on my faceplate. There were two spherical blobs with me in the chamber, and they were gradually taking on human shapes. After another five minutes I could see parts of their suits.

  “Anna! Mac! Turn around.”

  They clumsily rotated to face me. I saw them staring out of the faceplates, white-faced but undeniably alive.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait.” McAndrew was taking a bag from the side of his suit, opening it, and scooping up samples of liquid and snowballs. I decided that he was terminally crazy.

  “Don’t fool with that, Mac—let’s get out of here.”

  What was the danger now? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I reached out, grabbed his arm, and began to haul him back through to the other chamber. We were still sloshing in a chaos of fluid and floating feather balls.

  Anna grabbed at my arm, so I was towing both of them. I could hear her teeth chattering.

  “God,” she said. “I thought we were dead. I knew it, it was just like being dead, no sound, nothing to see, not able to move.”

  “I know the feeling,” I grunted—they were a weighty pair. “How did you get caught? I mean, why didn’t you get back into the airlock as soon as the snowballs arrived?”

  We were scooting back up the tunnel as fast as we could, McAndrew still clinging to his bucket of specimens.

  “We didn’t see any danger.” Anna was gradually getting control of herself, and her grip on my arm had loosened. “When we first came through the lock there were maybe half a dozen of those fuzzballs in sight. McAndrew said we ought to get a specimen before we left, because they were a more complex life-form than any that Lanhoff had reported. And then they started to arrive in millions, from all directions. Our suits were covered before we could get away—we didn’t have a chance.”

  “But what are they—and what were they doing?” I said.

  We had reached the top of the tunnel and entered the cargo sphere. There was no sign of Will Bayes—it occurred to me that I hadn’t sent him a single signal of any kind since I left. He must be frantic. I hit the switch that would fill the chamber with air. For some reason I was keener to get out of that suit than I had ever been.

  McAndrew placed his container on the floor and we all began to work our way free, starting with the helmets.

  “What were they doing? Now that’s a good question,” he said. “While we were stuck in the middle of them down there, I had time to give it some thought.”

  Well, that sounded right. When McAndrew stops thinking, he’ll be dead.

  “Lanhoff and I made a big goof,” he went on, “and for him it was a fatal one. We both argued that the food supply here was so plentiful that there’d be no pressure to evolve. But we forgot a basic fact. An organism needs more than food to survive.”

  “What else? You mean moisture?” I had my suit off, and air had never tasted so good.

  “Moisture, sure. But as well as that it needs warmth. Here on Manna, the evolutionary pressure is to get near a heat source. If you’re out too far from the center, you become part of the frozen outer layer. Those snowballs normally live down near the middle, getting as close as they can to the radioactive fragments that provide the warmth.”

  Anna was out of her suit. Now that we were safe, she was making a tremendous effort to gain her self-possession. Her shivering had stopped and she was even patting at her damp and tangled hair. She peered curiously down at the container of feathered snowballs. They were still moving slowly around in the yellow liquid.

  “The radioactivity must speed up their rate of evolution, too,” she said. “And I was thinking they wanted to eat us.”

  “I doubt that we’re very appetizing, compared with their free soup,” said McAndrew. “No, if there hadn’t been so many of them they’d have been harmless enough. But when we came along, they sensed the heat given off by our suits, and they tried to cuddle up to us. They didn’t want to eat us, all they were after was a place by the fireside.”

  Anna nodded. “This is going to create a sensation when we get back to Earth. We’ll have to take a lot of specimens back with us.”

  She was reaching down towards the open container. One of the snowballs had fully opened and was a delicate white mass of feathery cilia. She put out her forefinger as though she intended to touch it.

  “Don’t do that!” I shouted.

  Maybe she was not even considering any such thing, but my loud command made her stiffen. She looked up at me angrily.

  “You saved us, Captain Roker, and I appreciate that. But don’t forget who is in charge of this expedition. And don’t try to order me around—ever.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “I wasn’t ordering you around—I was speaking for your own good. Don’t you have any idea what might be dangerous?”

  My own tone must have betrayed my impatience and anger. Anna stiffened, and her color went from white to red.

  “McAndrew has pointed out that these lifeforms would have been quite harmless if there had not been so many of them,” she said. And then she reached forward into the container and deliberately touched the expanded snowball with her forefinger. She looked up at me. “Satisfied? They’re perfectly harmless.”

  Then she screamed. The ball was clinging to her finger as she withdrew it, and the cilia had enveloped it as far as the second joint.

  “It won’t come off!” She began shaking her hand desperately. “It hurts.”

  I swung my helmet hard at her finger, and the edge caught the ball near its middle. It was jarred loose and flew across the chamber. Anna stood and looked ruefully at her hand. The finger was reddened and swollen.

  “Damnation. It stings like hell.” She turned accusingly to McAndrew and held forward her injured hand. “You fool. You told me they’re harmless, and now look at my finger. This is your fault.”

  We all stared at her hand. The swelling on her forefinger seemed to be getting bigger and redder.

  McAndrew had been standing there with a startled and perplexed expression on his face. Before I could stop him he pic
ked up the laser that I had laid on the floor, aimed it at Anna, and pressed the switch. There was a crackle from the wall behind Anna, and the smoke of burned tissue. Her arm had been neatly severed above the elbow, and the wound cauterized with a single sweep of the instrument.

  Anna looked at the stump with bulging eyes, groaned, and started to fall sideways to the floor.

  “Mac!” I grabbed for the laser. “What the hell are you doing?”

  His face was pale. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get her to the robodoc. This isn’t too serious—she’ll have to wait to regenerate it until we get home and find a biofeedback machine, but we can’t help that.”

  “But why did you do it?”

  “I made one bad mistake, back there outside the air lock,” We were hurrying back through the ship, supporting Anna between us.

  “I don’t want to make another one,” he went on. “Lanhoff’s notes on the single-celled organisms inside Manna pointed out that they didn’t have a sexual method of reproduction, but they have something that resembles the plasmids down on Earth—they swap sections of DNA with each other, to get the mixing of offspring characteristics. I wondered about that when I read it, because it suggests a mechanism for speeding up an evolutionary process. But I skipped on past it, because I was so sure there would be no evolutionary pressures at work inside Manna.”

  We were almost at the Control Section of Star Harvester. Unless Will had gone mad and flown off in the transfer pod, we were only twenty minutes away from the Hoatzin’s robodoc. Anna was coming out of her faint, and groaning a little.

  “Mac, I still don’t see it. Why does the evolution method of the creatures inside Manna mean you had to burn off Anna’s arm?”

  “If they do swap tissue regularly, their immune reaction systems have to recognize and tolerate the exchange. But we’re not made like that—Anna’s immune reaction system might mop up the materials that the snowball transferred to her bloodstream, but more likely the stuff would have killed her. I daren’t take the chance.”

  We had come to the hatch that led to the transfer pod. Will Bayes stood there. For a fraction of a second he looked relieved, then he took in the whole scene. We were all pale and panting. I was dragging Anna along while she lay in a near-faint with only a stump of a right arm; and McAndrew, wild-eyed and lunatic, was bounding along behind us, still brandishing the laser.

  Will backed away in horror, his hands held in front of him. “Come on, man, don’t just stand there,” said McAndrew. “Get out of the way. We’ve got to get Anna over to our ship and let the doc have a go at her. The sooner the better.”

  Will took a hesitant step to one side. “She’s not dead, then?”

  “Of course she’s not dead—she’ll be good as new once she’s been through a regeneration treatment. We’ll have to keep her sedated for the trip back, but she’ll be all right.”

  I went to the controls of the pod, ready to take us back to the Hoatzin. It hadn’t occurred to me that Anna would be quieted down now for the return trip, but I wouldn’t be the one to complain.

  “You mean we’re actually going home?” asked Will. His tone suggested that he had never expected to see Earth again.

  “Just for a while.” McAndrew had settled Anna as comfortably as he could, and now he was looking disconsolately around him for the bucket of lifeform samples that we had left behind in the Control Section of Star Harvester.

  “We’ll be back, Will, don’t you worry,” he said. “Anna was quite right: when Lanhoff found Manna he stumbled across a real treasure trove. We’ve hardly scratched the surface. As soon as we can get organized, there’ll be another party from the Food Department. And I’m sure we’ll all be here with it.”

  My attention was mainly on the controls, so I’m not sure that I heard Will’s low mumble correctly. But I think he was saying something about a transfer to the Energy Department.

  FIFTH CHRONICLE:

  The Hidden Matter of McAndrew

  The message was concise and clear:

  Dear Captain Roker,

  The Institute is sending a party to explore a region approximately half a light-year from Sol, for the purpose of verifying dark matter conjectures in current cosmological theories. Our projected departure date is six days hence. Knowing of your experience with Hoatzin-class ships employing the balanced drive, we wonder if you might be available to serve as a crew member for Project Missing Matter. If you are interested in so serving, I invite you to contact me or Dr. Dorian Jarver, at the above address.

  Sincerely,

  Arthur Morton McAndrew,

  Research Scientist,

  Penrose Institute.

  Clear, but also totally baffling. It was no surprise that McAndrew wanted to test obscure scientific theories. That was his stock-in-trade. People who knew physics as I would never know it told me that McAndrew was better than anyone else alive, a name to be mentioned in the same breath as Newton and Einstein.

  It was also predictable that he might be heading far out of the Solar System. He had done that whenever he thought there was something interesting to look at, or just when he needed a little time and space for serious solitary thinking. “I have to have it, Jeanie,” he’d said to me, a score of times. “It’s very nice to work with colleagues, but in my line of business the real stuff is mostly worked out alone.”

  Nor was it odd that I was learning about the trip so late—a couple of times he had hared off on wild sorties far outside the Solar System, and I had been forced to chase after him and drag him out of trouble.

  But now for the mysteries: He had never, in all the many years since first we met, sent a letter to “Captain Roker,” or signed himself with his full name. I was always “Jeanie” when he wrote to me, while he signed as “Mac” or “Macavity”—my private Old Possum-ish name for him, because like Macavity the Mystery Cat, McAndrew did things that seemed to break the law of gravity.

  Second, he didn’t write when he was planning an expedition. There would be a random call, at any hour of the day or night. He was thinking of making a trip, he’d say vaguely. Would I perhaps like to go along?

  Third—a detail, but one that chafed my ego—I was invited to go on the Project Missing Matter expedition as a crew member. Mac knew that I’d served as ship’s captain, and only as captain, for fifteen years.

  Fourth, the whole tone of the letter was too stilted and officious to be genuine McAndrew. He couldn’t sound that formal if he tried.

  And one more mystery, to round out the set. Who the devil was Dorian Jarver? I thought I knew all the key scientists at the Penrose Institute.

  That question was fifth on the list, and the least important until I tried to call McAndrew for an explanation. Then instead of the old direct-access lines into individual offices at the Penrose Institute, I found myself dumped to a Message Center where my call was at once rerouted from McAndrew to Dorian Jarver. Director Jarver is unavailable, said a polite voice. Please leave your name, and he will return the call as soon as possible.

  I hung up without waiting to learn if the voice at the other end was live or recorded. Director Jarver? What had happened to my old friend Professor Limperis, the blackest man alive, who had run the Institute since long before my first visit?

  Finding the answer to that was not difficult. I tapped one of the general data bases and queried for the staff file of the Penrose Institute. Professor Limperis was listed, sure enough—but as professor emeritus and ex-Director. The new director was Dr. Dorian Jarver, former head of the Terran science applications group, and—bad sign—nephew of Councilor Griss, head of Terran Food and Energy.

  Anna Lisa Griss, that was, a lady whose arm McAndrew had once, with the best of possible intentions, cut off with a power laser out in the Oort cloud. It would have been regrown, long since; but I doubted that the memory had faded with the scar.

  I followed an old McAndrew principle, and went to a publications data base. Dorian Jarver was there, with eight or nine decent-sounding
physics papers credited to him; but they were not recent. The newest one was eleven years old. The new director of the Penrose Institute appeared to be an ex-physicist.

  McAndrew was anything but an ex-physicist. Why would he cite his own name and Jarver’s as someone I might contact?

  When I received the message from McAndrew I was on the tail end of a routine run home from Titan. As soon as the Assembly I had been piloting was tucked away and all its Sections placed in a stable parking orbit, I signed off and headed straight for the Penrose Institute aboard one of the 5-gee mini-versions of the McAndrew balanced drive.

  “I invite you to contact me or Dr. Dorian Jarver,” the letter had said. Contact can surely include a visit.

  The outline of the Institute at last appeared as a lumpy and spiky double-egg during my final approach. I examined it closely. It would wander around the Inner Solar System depending on research needs, anywhere between Mercury and the Belt, but its facilities shouldn’t change. They hadn’t. As we docked I could see the Dotterel and the Merganser moored in the external hoists. They were the first prototypes using the McAndrew balanced drive (which everyone else, to Mac’s intense annoyance, insists on calling the McAndrew inertia-less drive). Those early ships were no longer in use. They had been replaced by a more advanced design, embodied in the Hoatzin. I could see its bulky massplate and longer central spike off in the distance. It appeared slightly grubby and battered-looking, as befitted the first and only ship to visit both the Ark of Massingham and the Oort cloud.

  The changes began inside, as soon as I passed through the lock. In the old Institute the visitor found herself wading at once through a junkyard of obsolete equipment waiting for disposal. It would have been quite an obstacle course in an emergency, but nobody had ever seemed worried about that.

  Now I found myself in a clean and uncluttered chamber. The walls were painted white, the floor was polished grey, and in the middle of the room sat something that the Institute had surely never seen before: a long desk, two receptionists, and in front of them, a sign-in terminal and a tray of badges.