The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  What made me so sure? There’s one point that I neglected to mention about the run-in that we had with Anna Griss out in the Oort cloud. McAndrew had cut off her arm, which was bad enough but maybe forgivable since he thought he was doing it to save her life. But before that I had stared her down, overridden her authority, and asserted my own position as ship’s captain. She had been forced to accept it. But knowing Anna, I knew that would never be forgiven, or forgotten. Not even when she had taken an eye for an eye—or an arm for an arm.

  I heard the door at the back of the room open. Jarver was coming back in, and Lyle and Parmikan dutifully hurried back to his side. I shivered, and sat up straight in my seat. Something creepy had brushed by me in the past few minutes, and I didn’t yet know what it was.

  “So that’s it,” McAndrew was saying from the podium. “The two best candidates for the missing material needed to flatten the universe are hot dark matter—probably energetic neutrinos with a small rest mass, generated soon after the Big Bang; or maybe cold dark matter, particles like the axions needed for charge-parity conservation, or the photinos and other more massive objects required by supersymmetry theories.

  “So which should we believe in, the hot or the cold? We don’t know. They both have problems describing the way that the galaxies formed.

  “Worse than that, we aren’t measuring nearly enough of either kind of matter. Add everything together, and we still have less than half the mass density needed to make a flat universe. We must be badly underestimating either the cold dark matter or the hot.

  “Which? Theory still can’t provide the answer. Most of the events that decide all this began happening in the first 10-35 seconds after the origin of the universe, when we weren’t around to do experiments; when even the laws of physics may not have been the same.

  “We may never know the composition of the missing matter, until we can put our instruments in the right place for observation—deep in interstellar space.”

  He halted. Siclaro nodded his appreciation, and Mac came ambling back to his seat.

  Naturally, he had missed the whole interaction with Lyle and Parmikan. He’d have missed it even if it had happened under his nose, because he never saw anything when he was talking about physics. He had temporarily forgotten his annoyance at the changes to the Institute, and he seemed quite pleased with life.

  I wasn’t. I had been brought to the Institute so that McAndrew and I could fly half a light-year from home with Lyle and Parmikan. Anna Griss had engineered my arrival. It was inconceivable that the surprises were all over.

  What little goodies were in store when Anna’s bully-boys and I were flying far off in the Hoatzin?

  I lost track of that question in the busy days before departure. The Hoatzin was primed and ready, but I hadn’t performed my engine inspection or any of the other preparations that I like to do. I went over the ship, checking everything, and found nothing worse than a slight imbalance in the drive that would have meant a mid-course correction at ship turn-around, a quarter of a light-year from Sol.

  Neither Lyle nor Parmikan gave me any trouble. In fact, I hardly saw them until the four of us assembled for final check-in and departure. Then Stefan Parmikan rolled up with about ten times as much baggage as he was allowed.

  He objected strongly when I told him to take it away. “All that space.” He pointed outside, to the Hoatzin with its hundred meter mass disk and the four hundred meter axle sticking out like a great grey spike from its center. “There’s oceans of room for my stuff.”

  How could a man reach adulthood today, and know so little about the McAndrew balanced drive?

  “The disk you’re pointing at is solid compressed matter,” I said. “Density is twelve hundred tons per cubic centimeter, and surface gravity is a hundred and ten gees. If you want to strap your luggage on the outside of that, good luck to you.”

  “What about the axle? I can see that it’s hollow.”

  “It is. And it has to stay that way, so the living-capsule can move up and down it. Otherwise we couldn’t balance the gravitational and inertial accelerations. Either we move the capsule in closer to the disk as we increase the acceleration, or you tell me how we’re going to survive a hundred gees.” When he still didn’t show much sign of understanding me, I waved my hand. “The total living accommodation of the Hoatzin is that four-meter sphere. I’m not going to spend the next month falling over your stuff. And I’m not going to waste time arguing. That luggage isn’t going with us. That’s final. Get it out of here, so we can prepare to board.”

  Parmikan glowered and grumbled, and finally dragged it away. When he reappeared an hour later with a much smaller package I hustled everyone onto the Hoatzin as quickly as possible to avoid any more hold-ups. Maybe I wasn’t as thorough as I should have been inspecting luggage. But I suspect it would have done no good if I had been. There must be a definite threat before you start opening people’s personal effects. I was anticipating rudeness and arguments and possible discipline problems, but not danger.

  Let’s call that my second mistake in Project Missing Matter.

  Once we were under way I felt a lot better. With the drive on the perimeter of the mass disk turned on, the Hoatzin is surrounded by a sheath of highly relativistic plasma. Signals won’t penetrate it. Communications with Anna Griss, or anyone else back in the Solar System, were blocked. That suited me fine.

  By the end of the first twenty-four hours at full drive we were doing well. We were up to a quarter of light-speed, heading out from Sol at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic and already at the distance of Neptune. We had settled into a typical shipboard routine, each person giving the others as much space as possible. You do that when you know you have to spend a long time packed together into a space no bigger than a fair-sized kitchen.

  And then, unexpectedly, our communications silence caused trouble.

  The Hoatzin had been pleasantly quiet for hours. McAndrew had donned a suit, one of the new transparent models so light that you could sit in high vacuum and hardly realize you had a suit on at all.

  He was going outside. Most people would be terrified at the prospect of leaving the capsule when the drive is on—if for any reason it turned off, the capsule would automatically spring out to the far end of the axle, to hold the interior field at one gee. But anyone not firmly secured to the capsule would fall at a hundred gee acceleration towards the mass disk. A quick end, and a messy one.

  It never occurred to McAndrew that his inventions might fail. He had happily gone outside, for a status check of one of the new mass detectors that he would be using when we reached our destination in the middle of nowhere. We were heading for the region of lowest matter density known, out beyond the limits of the Oort cloud where we would find less than one atom per hundred cubic meters.

  I was looking at the outside display screens, partly to scan the plume of plasma behind the Hoatzin for any sign of drive variability, and partly, to tell the truth, because I wanted to keep my eye on McAndrew. He doesn’t believe the balanced drive can give trouble, despite the fact that its very first use nearly killed him.

  While I had my attention on the screens, Stefan Parmikan crept up behind me. I didn’t know he was there until I heard a soft, sibilant voice in my ear. “I am required to send a report to the Council every day, and be able to receive messages from them.”

  I jerked around. Parmikan’s face was only a foot from mine. It was probably not his fault, but why was his mouth always so wet-looking?

  “But Professor McAndrew tells me that we cannot send messages to Terra when the drive is turned on,” he continued.

  “Quite right. To Terra, or anywhere else. The signals can’t get through.”

  “In that case, the drive must be turned off once every shipboard day.”

  “Forget it.” I was a bit brusque, but Lyle and Parmikan seemed to have come along on the expedition without learning a thing about the ship, the drive, or anything else. And Parmikan didn
’t sound like he was asking—he was telling. “We lose a couple of hours every time we turn power on and off,” I went on. “And you’d have the living-capsule going up and down the axle like a yo-yo, to balance the change in acceleration from a hundred gee to zero. And anyway, once we’re a long way out the signal travel time is so long the messages would be useless.”

  “But it is technologically feasible to turn off the drive, and to send and receive messages?”

  “It is. And practically ridiculous. We won’t do it.”

  Parmikan smiled his wet smile, and for once he appeared to be genuinely pleased about something.

  “We will, Ms. Roker. Or rather, you will. You will turn the drive off once a day, for communication with Earth.”

  He drew a yellow document from his pocket, stamped prominently with the Council seal, and handed it to me.

  Not Captain Roker. Ms. Roker. It took only a few seconds to scan the paper and understand what it was. I was holding Parmikan’s appointment as captain of the Hoatzin for this mission. In all the excitement of preparing for our departure I had completely forgotten the original letter to me. An invitation to serve as crew member on the expedition, not captain. For the days before our departure I had instinctively and naturally assumed the senior position. And Lyle and Parmikan had been sly enough to go along with me, even addressing me as “Captain Roker” until we were on our way and it was too late to do anything about it.

  “Well, Ms. Roker? Do you question the authority assigned by this document?”

  “I question its wisdom. But I accept its validity.” I scanned down the rest of the page. Parmikan’s command extended from the time we left the Penrose Institute until the moment when we docked on our return. No loopholes. “I agree, you’re the captain. I don’t see anything here defining my duties, though, or saying that I’ll agree to them. So if you want to turn the drive off yourself, without my help…”

  Stefan Parmikan said nothing, but his sliding brown eyes met mine for one triumphant split-second. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny playback unit, and turned it on.

  “I’m reporting for duty right now,” said a voice. It was my own.

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

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

  There was a pause, as that section of the recording ended. Then Jarver’s voice came again: “In accordance with Captain Jean Pelham Roker’s earlier statement, this serves to define her duties on the Hoatzin mission identified as Project Missing Matter. Ms. Roker will serve as a general crew member, taking her orders and assignments from Captain Stefan Parmikan and from Senior Officer Van Lyle.”

  Set-up. But my own fault completely. I had felt bad vibrations the moment I met Parmikan and Lyle. Then I had gone right ahead and ignored my own instincts. Let’s call that my third mistake.

  McAndrew was climbing back in through the tiny airlock. I turned to him. “Mac, suppose we turned the drive off every day for a minute or two, long enough to send a burst mode message back to Earth. Allowing for the time we need to power the drive down and back up, how much would that add to our total trip?”

  He stared at me for a moment, then his jaw dropped and his face took on a strange half-witted vacancy. That was fine. It just meant that he was off in his own world, thinking and calculating. I had given up trying to understand what went on inside McAndrew’s head when he was solving a problem. Even though what I had asked him was straightforward and I could have done the calculation myself given a little time, I would bet money that he was not using any technique I’d have chosen. As one of the Institute members told me years ago, McAndrew has a mind that sees round corners.

  “Five days,” he said after a few seconds. “Of course, that’s shipboard days. Two months Terran, allowing for time squeeze.”

  “Quite acceptable,” said Parmikan. “Ms. Roker, please work out the necessary arrangements and bring them to me.”

  He turned and headed off for the private area of his own bunk, leaving me to fume and curse. And then, after a few minutes, to sit down and work out the best times for a regular interruption to the drive. I had to work it into other activities, so that Parmikan would make his daily call with minimum disruption to ship routine.

  McAndrew came to me when I was almost finished. “Jeanie, I didn’t catch on to what he wanted when you asked me that, or I’d have said it was hard to do. You don’t have to take this sort of guff from him.”

  “I do.” I picked up the results of my efforts, aware that Van Lyle had been watching me all the time I was working. “You know the first rule of space travel as well as I do: Like it or not, you can only have one captain. Parmikan is the captain of the Hoatzin.”

  I carried the schedule I had generated across to Parmikan’s curtained rest area. The little private spaces allotted to each of us were intentionally set as far apart from each other as possible, around the perimeter of the living capsule. I rapped on the curtain rail. “This is my recommended schedule,” I said, when Parmikan’s head poked through. I held it out to him, but he did not take it.

  “Is it a simple procedure?” he asked.

  “I believe so. I’ve done my best to make it as simple as possible.”

  “Good. Then you should have no trouble carrying it out. Notify me when the drive is off, and we are ready for our first communication opportunity with Terra. By then I’ll have another assignment for you.”

  His head vanished back through the curtain. I had an insight into Parmikan’s style of command. He would give all the orders. I would do all the work. This was Anna Lisa Griss’s revenge for my asserting my authority over her. I would have to obey Parmikan’s every random whim for two months.

  I was still naive enough to think that would be enough to satisfy her. My fourth mistake, was that? I’m beginning to lose count.

  I stayed angry at being ordered around, until I remembered Lyle and Parmikan’s general ignorance of shipboard matters. Then I thought, Hey, it’s better like this. How would you feel if Parmikan took over the controls himself? And I went away to set up the program to power down the drive at regular intervals.

  Except that McAndrew had heard my exchange with Parmikan, and he was feeling sorry for me. He insisted that he would do the tedious job of changing the drive program schedule. I let him. It was quite safe to do so, because Mac’s such a perfectionist on this sort of thing that he sometimes makes me feel sloppy.

  But Mac is only devious in scientific matters. He didn’t catch something in the Hoatzin’s overall mission profile that I would have noticed at once.

  I discovered it much later, and almost too late. Call that my fifth mistake, and let’s stop counting.

  To me, the interruptions to our outward progress were a useless nuisance. I have no idea what was sent or received by Parmikan and Lyle in their daily communications. I was specifically excluded from them, and in any case Parmikan had me far too busy with a hundred other things to worry much about messages—he had an absolute genius for thinking up demeaning and pointless tasks. I do know, though, that the person sending or receiving at the other end was not Dorian Jarver. The link was set up to a location on Terra, not to the Penrose Institute.

  And McAndrew, being McAndrew, contrived to turn the periods when the drive was off into an opportunity. He decided that he could use those few dead minutes every day to perform his first experiments. One morning right after breakfast I went to the rear of the living capsule to escape from Van Lyle—he, and his probing eyes, followed me everywhere. I found McAndrew sitting beside his instrument panel, frowning at the wall.

  “Problems?”

  He shrugged, and scratched at the back of his balding head. “I’d have said no. Everything passes the internal checks. But look at this.” He pulled up a display. “I’ve got the most sensitive mass detectors ever, lined up on our final destina
tion. All the other instruments confirm that there’s absolutely nothing out there. But see these.”

  He pointed to small blips in the output level of the instruments.

  “Noise?” I suggested. “Or the result of our high velocity? Or maybe a local effect, something on the Hoatzin?” He had told me that his new instruments were supernaturally sensitive to disturbance.

  “No, they’re definitely external, and far-off. And regular. That’s just the signals I’d be getting if massive objects were flying, evenly spaced, across my field of view. Except there’s nothing there. It’s a total mystery.”

  “Then you’ll just have to be patient. We’re already past turn-around. In twelve days we’ll be there, and you’ll be able to see for your—”

  “Crewman Roker!” It was Parmikan’s voice, ringing through the living capsule. “Come here immediately. I have a task that must be performed at once.”

  I took a deep breath, and held it. Another fun-filled day was beginning. Twelve more to go, before we came to rest in the most perfect nothingness known to humans, half a light-year from the Sun.

  With the whole habitable space of the Hoatzin only four meters across, I knew before we left the Institute that we’d be living close. But given the lack of privacy, there was one form of closeness I had never expected.

  The surprise came late in the evening on the twenty-third day out, when Mac was in the shielded rear of the living capsule muttering over his still-anomalous instrument readings. The blips were growing. With Parmikan’s consent Mac had gradually changed our course, angling the ship’s direction of travel towards the strongest source of signal. We would arrive a tenth of a light-year away from our original destination, but as McAndrew pointed out, the choice of that had been more or less arbitrary. Any place where the matter density was unusually low would serve his purpose equally well.

  By eleven o’clock Stefan Parmikan was asleep. I was sitting cross-legged on my bunk, listening to an Institute lecture from my talking library. It was “Modern Physics for Engineers,” by Gowers, Siclaro, and McAndrew, a course designed to be less high-powered than the straight two-hundred-proof Institute seminar presentations. There were three other series available, of rapidly descending levels of difficulty. They each had official names, but inside the Institute they were known as “Physics for Animals,” “Physics for Vegetables,” and “Physics for Football Players.”