The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  The woman behind the desk went on fiddling with a great bank of controls in front of her, all flickering lights and low humming, but the man glanced up at me inquiringly.

  “I’m here to see McAndrew,” I said, and started towards the corridor on the left. I’d been here scores of times, and I knew where Mac hung out, in a cluttered room that made even the old entry to the Institute look elegant. Mac didn’t throw away junk equipment. He kept it in his office.

  “Not that way, ma’am,” said the man politely. “Professor McAndrew is the other way now. You will need an escort. And if you’d first please check in…”

  McAndrew’s voice was starting to whisper in my ear. By the time that I had signed in, stated my identity, had my ID independently checked with a DNA mapper, been assigned a badge, and refused refreshments (how long did they expect me to be in the reception area?) Mac’s voice was shouting at me. “Help, Jeanie,” it screamed. “Help, help, help!”

  This wasn’t the Penrose Institute that I had known, the place of casual procedure and superb science where Mac had worked for half his life. It had become a clone of a thousand Earthside technology offices.

  And it got worse. When I, checked and signed and badged, was led away towards the new working offices, I still did not reach McAndrew. “In a few minutes,” said my guide, in answer to my question. “But first, the Director.”

  I was ushered into a new chamber, starkly clean and sparsely furnished. My guide left at once and I looked around. There was no desk, no terminal. Over in one corner on an angular white chair sat an equally angular and thoughtful man, fingertips touching in front of his face.

  “Captain Roker,” he said, and stood up. He smiled, very white teeth in a thin-lipped, worried countenance. “I’m Dorian Jarver, the Director of the Penrose Institute. I must say I didn’t expect a visit until you’d heard more about the project. But it’s a blessing that you’re here, because now we can all do our best to persuade you.”

  “I’m persuaded already.” I realized that was true, and had been since I saw that ritzy new entrance foyer. “I’m reporting for duty right now.”

  “For the expedition described in Professor McAndrew’s letter to you? But the mission and your role in it are not yet fully defined.”

  “You can define that later. I’m here, and I’m ready to start.”

  Dorian Jarver must have been surprised at both my arrival and my instant acceptance. “I’m delighted to hear that,” he said, though he didn’t sound it. “You come to us with the highest recommendations. And I have to admit that I’ve been a little worried about this proposed expedition. It could be dangerous, and Professor McAndrew is too valuable to risk. He’s one of our most priceless assets.”

  No matter what else he didn’t know, he obviously understood McAndrew. It could be dangerous, because Mac would charge into Hell itself if he saw some intriguing scientific fact sitting in the innermost circle. He was too valuable to risk. But Jarver’s final word was disturbing to me. Not a scientist, not a human being. An asset.

  “You have been to the Institute before?” added Jarver.

  I nodded. I didn’t know what Mac had told him about me, but I suspected that the new director had no idea how close we were.

  “Then you’ll have noticed the changes here. The Council had been worrying about the Institute for quite a while. When Director Limperis retired and I came in, the Council insisted that from now on operations would have to be organized rather differently.”

  He talked about those changes for the next few minutes. Better equipment and facilities for the scientists. Bigger and cleaner offices. More attention by support staff to routine maintenance functions. Removal of the need for top scientists to waste their time on calls and letters and incoming requests for information, trivia that could be handled just as well by junior staff.

  It all sounded terrific. But McAndrew’s strangely awkward letter stuck in my head. I wanted to see him, and make sure that he was all right.

  With my mind on McAndrew as Jarver went on talking, I didn’t think that I was saying much in reply. But it must have been enough for the director, because after another few minutes he seemed to lose interest in the conversation, nodded, and said, “Now, Captain Roker, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to hear more about the expedition itself. Project Missing Matter will be testing some of the most fundamental ideas in cosmology; of course, you’ll get that better from McAndrew than you’ll ever get it from me.”

  As we stood up I thought that I had Dorian Jarver pegged. I had seen him before, many times. Not the man himself, but the type. The upper levels of Terran government were full of them: competent, hard-working men and women, who started out as scientists, found that they were never going to be better than average, and at an early age substituted management and administration for research. Jarver had changed over the years from scientist to calculating bureaucrat.

  Well, I’ve been wrong before. Let’s call that my first mistake on Project Missing Matter.

  The director led me to an office down at the far end of the corridor and opened the door. It was big, far bigger than McAndrew’s old, cluttered den. It had the same antiseptic look as the rest of the new Institute. But even Jarver couldn’t do much about the appearance of the occupant.

  McAndrew was lolling in an easy chair, staring vacantly at the wall. His shoes were off, his feet were bare and grubby. His thinning, sandy hair was standing up in little wispy spikes as though he had been running his hands through it, which he tended to do when he was thinking, and I could see from the redness of his finger and toe joints that he had been pulling them and cracking them, in the way that I hated.

  He glanced up as we came in, swinging his chair casually in our direction.

  “Jeanie Roker,” he said. He didn’t stand up, and he didn’t seem in the least surprised at my unexpected arrival. I glanced at Jarver out of the corner of my eye. If Mac wanted to convince the director that he hardly knew me, he should have acted quite differently.

  “Professor McAndrew,” said Jarver to me. It could have been an introduction, or possibly an apology. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain Roker, I’ll leave the two of you to discuss the expedition. I’ll meet with you again later.”

  As soon as he was gone I bent over and gave McAndrew a six-month separation hug. The hell with formal handshakes. He hugged me right back, then I flopped into the seat opposite and said, “Mac. What the hell is going on here?”

  “You saw it already.” His face took on a gloomy, give-up expression that I didn’t like at all. “New offices, new procedures, all the other folderol. Now tell me, did I need a new office?”

  “Does it matter that much? You can work as well in here as you could in your old place, and it’s nice to visit and sit on something softer than an optical scalar calibrator. And Jarver’s right, the Institute was getting a bit run-down. It looks good now. You’re becoming crabby in your old age.”

  He glared at me. “If that were the whole of it, I might agree with you…but it’s not. You had that letter. Didn’t it make you wonder a bit?”

  “Why d’you think I’m here?”

  I don’t believe he heard me. “Due procedure,” he said, “that’s what they call it. But it’s beyond that. No messages or memos or papers or letters go out from here without stamps of official approval on them. You saw how my letter to you sounded after they’d done messing with it. All the incoming mail is opened, too—personal as well as professional—before we get to see it. Spoken messages are just as bad. Incoming and outgoing calls are all logged and recorded. Did you see that blasted bank of equipment in the front area, with administrative staff snooping on everything? I’m telling you, it’s like being in a bloody prison.”

  “Mac, you’re overreacting. Jarver is used to running things Earth-style. They’re hot on procedure. It’ll take him a while to learn Institute ways. You and your buddies will sort him out.”

  “Will we now?” McAndrew snorted. “Me and my buddies will s
ort him out, will we—when Emma Gowers and Wenig and Lucky Macedo have already resigned and left.”

  That was a shocker. I knew all three, and there wasn’t one who didn’t make me feel, without their ever intending it, about as bright as a chimps’ tea-party drop-out.

  “Mac, that proves my point. If Jarver’s losing high-caliber people like that, he must know that he won’t last another three months. Unless he’s too dumb even to realize what he’s driving away?”

  I saw a change in McAndrew’s expression. He’s the system’s most honest man, even when it undermines his own arguments. Now he looked guilty.

  “That’s maybe the worst of it,” he said. “Jarver’s not stupid at all. He got the job here, likely, because he’s a relative of Anna Griss. She’s no lover of the Institute after what I did to her. But Jarver didn’t come here wanting to destroy the place. He’s a good physicist, see, with a real sense for what’s important.”

  “That’s not what I thought when I looked at his publication record. Not many papers to his credit, and all written a long time ago.”

  “Jeanie.” McAndrew stared at me with the disappointed expression of a man whose dog has slipped back into non-housebroken ways. “How many times have I told you, a publication record tells you nothing. Any clod can spew out words and equations, year in and year out, and push them into print. Papers don’t count for anything, unless other people use ’em. You should have looked at the Citation Index, to see how often Jarver’s work is given as a reference by other people. If you’d done that, you’d have seen hundreds of them. He’s not publishing now, true enough, but when he did, he was good.”

  Poor old McAndrew. I was beginning to see the real problem. Here was a new director who did everything that Mac disliked, a man whom he would love to hate and disparage. But he couldn’t do that. Jarver was a good physicist, and therefore almost beyond censure.

  “But if he’s that bright, you ought to be able to work with him. Persuade him.”

  “Damn it, I have persuaded him. That’s what the new expedition is all about. I’ve got Jarver convinced that we have to go out a long way from Sol. Then we stop, and sit still, and do our measurements, and learn more than anyone has ever known about the distribution of missing matter.”

  I had to find out more about that, but this wasn’t the time for it. Half a light-year from Sol was a long trip, even with a hundred gees of continuous acceleration and the relativity squeeze that our high speed would provide us. We’d have weeks to talk about missing matter, Mac’s experiments, and everything else in the Universe. But it would be nice to know why we had to go out there at all.

  “Why not do your experiments here at the Institute?”

  “Because it’s too damned noisy near in.” McAndrew became more like his old self as the conversation turned closer to physics. I decided there was hope—maybe he wasn’t a broken man after all. “It’s the Sun’s fault,” he went on. “Sol generates such an infernal din, gravitationally and in almost every electromagnetic wavelength you can think of, that you can’t do a decently sensitive experiment closer than half a light-year. It’s like listening for a pin drop, when somebody’s banging a bass drum right next to your ear. We have to go out, out where the interstellar medium is nice and quiet.”

  “But that’s exactly what you will be doing. You’ll be flying out on the Hoatzin, and as far from the Institute as you want to be. So why aren’t you pleased?” I had a horrible thought. “Unless you’re telling me that Jarver proposes to go along with us.”

  “No, no, no.” McAndrew went right back to being gloomy. “He says he’d like to, but he’s far too busy running the Institute. He’s not going. But he’s sending his aunt’s pet bully-boys, Lyle and Parmikan, along to keep an eye on things and report back. Now that’s what really has me going, Jeanie. That’s the reason I sent you the letter.”

  I got very annoyed with McAndrew. He was taking a perfectly natural decision, from Jarver’s point of view, and blowing it up out of all proportion.

  Of course, this was before I met Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan.

  The doubtful pleasure of that meeting was not long delayed. It came the same afternoon, when McAndrew dragged me along to the weekly seminar, a tradition of the Penrose Institute for as long as I had been visiting it.

  The old meeting room, with its poor air circulation and white plastic hard-backed chairs, had vanished. In its place was a hall with tiers of plushy seats running in banks up towards the rear. It could hold maybe three hundred. The seminars that I remembered might draw fifty if they were on a really hot subject.

  Today there were no more than thirty people in the room. McAndrew and I took seats at the end of the last occupied row. I tried to recognize the people I knew from the look of the backs of their heads. I did pretty well, over half the audience. Wenig and Gowers and Macedo might be gone, but most of the other old-timers at the Institute hadn’t given up yet.

  The lecturer, Siclaro—another Institute perennial—was already in position and raring to go.

  “The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting than the entire rest of the history of the Universe.” That was his first sentence. I couldn’t tell you what his second sentence was. I didn’t expect to understand the seminar, you see, because I never had in the past. But I might still enjoy it. Like the psychologist at the burlesque show I concentrated on the audience, examining the newcomers to try to guess their specialties and how good they were at them.

  A futile exercise, of course. Emma Gowers, the System’s top expert on multiple kernel arrays, looks and dresses like a high-class whore. Wenig could be her pimp, and McAndrew himself resembles an accountant in need of a haircut and a good meal.

  You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

  Over to the far left of our row sat a group of three. I saw Dorian Jarver. He was leaning forward, intent on the presentation. To his immediate right were two men of particular interest to me—because they too were taking no notice of the lecture and showing a lot of interest in the audience. I nudged McAndrew, just as someone hurried in from the back of the room and leaned over to whisper in Jarver’s ear. He sighed, shook his head, and followed the woman quickly out of the hall.

  “What?” said McAndrew at last. He had missed the whole episode with Jarver.

  “Those two men. Who are they?”

  He snorted. “Them two? Van Lyle. Stefan Parmikan.”

  I stared with redoubled curiosity. Van Lyle (I found out later which was which) was a big, broad-shouldered fellow with curly blond hair and a handsome, craggy profile. He made no pretense of listening to the lecture, but he observed the audience with open interest. At his side the little, round-shouldered figure of Stefan Parmikan was far more discreet. To a casual observer he was following everything that Siclaro said—but every few seconds his head would turn for a moment and his eyes would flicker over everyone. When they met mine he at once turned away.

  “Mac,” I said. And paused.

  He had slipped away from my side. I saw him down by the lecturer’s podium next to Siclaro, one hand pointed at the screen.

  “You know the problem,” he was saying. “We all believe that the amount of matter in the universe is just enough to keep it expanding forever. That gives asymptotically flat spacetime, an idea we have half a dozen good theoretical reasons for wanting to believe. But the bright matter—the stuff we can see—only accounts for maybe a hundredth of what’s needed to close spacetime. So, where’s the rest of it? Where’s the missing matter?

  “I agree with Siclaro, it’s the devil to answer that question from any experiments we’ve been able to do so far. I wouldn’t propose to try. But we’ve designed a whole new set of crucial experiments that we can do if we are far out from Sol, where there’s not so much interference.”

  He was getting into a discussion of the hidden matter, the reason for taking the Hoatzin on its light-year round-trip. But I couldn’t listen to him, bec
ause I was no longer alone. The two men next to Jarver had slid quietly across from the other side of the room and were now by my side.

  “Captain Roker?” said the blond-haired man. “I wanted to say hello. I hear we’re going to be shipmates.”

  He gazed sincerely into my eyes, took my hand in his big, meaty paw, and held on a few seconds longer than necessary.

  “Pleased to meet you,” added his companion, leaning across and taking my hand in turn. “I’m Stefan Parmikan. I’ve heard a lot about you.” His smile was a wet, shapeless version of Van Lyle’s intimate grin. And instead of riveting me like Lyle, his brown eyes would look anywhere but into mine.

  “You heard about me?” I was surprised. McAndrew is closer than a clam. “From whom?”

  “The boss. Councilor Griss.”

  His limp grip was like a lump of wet gristle, much worse than Van Lyle’s intimate clutch; but that wasn’t what bothered me.

  Suddenly, I could put it all together. So far my thinking had managed to get everything wrong. Anna Lisa Griss could push her relatives into high places, and no one would be surprised by that. Nepotism never changes. She had arranged for Dorian Jarver to take over the Penrose Institute.

  But it was her bad luck that Jarver happened to be genuine, a conscientious scientist with a real feel for physics and science. She couldn’t change his nature. What she could do, though, and had done, was to install as his assistants her chosen few: people with no feeling for science, who would follow the Councilor’s style of operation and do exactly what she said. She had told them to mold the Institute to her own taste, to change it to a copy of the standard Terran bureaucracy that she understood and controlled so well.

  And they were doing it. I was now convinced that the real author of the message to me had not been McAndrew. Lyle or Parmikan had structured it, with Anna Griss behind them. Mac had asked for my help, but she had been the manipulator. She wanted me on board the Hoatzin, for a trip that she would control, through Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan, from beginning to end.