The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  I had brought all four, just in case, but I was holding my own with “Physics for Engineers.” I was finally gaining a clearer idea of just why we had to charge off half a light-year from Sol.

  Something was absent from the Universe, something that the best brains around thought had to be there: Missing matter.

  The “bright stuff”—visible matter—isn’t nearly enough to make the Universe hover on the fine line between expanding forever, and collapsing back one day to the Big Crunch. That’s what the theorists want, but there’s only about one percent of the mass needed in the bright stuff. You can pick up a factor of ten or so from matter that’s pretty much the same as visible matter, but happens to be too cold to see, and that’s all.

  This leaves you about a factor of ten short on mass. And there you stick. You have to start laying bets on other, less familiar materials.

  Neutrinos moving up close to the speed of light—hot dark matter—are one candidate. There are scads of neutrinos around, generated soon after the Big Bang but damnably difficult to find by experiment. Neutrinos don’t interact much with ordinary matter. They’d slip through light-years of solid lead, if you happened to have light-years of lead available. They’re a candidate for the missing matter, but they’re not the front runner. They don’t give a Universe with the right lumpy structure, and anyway they come up short on total mass.

  The other candidates are much slower and heavier than neutrinos. They’re the cold dark matter school, axions and photinos and gravitinos, and they don’t give the right lumpiness to the Universe, either. Even adding them to the neutrino mass, the whole thing still came up too small. McAndrew was saying, in effect, we’ve gone as far as theories can go. Let’s get out there, where the experiments have a chance to succeed, and measure how much hot dark matter and cold dark matter is around. Then we’ll know where we stand.

  It was all fairly new to me. I was concentrating deeply, struggling with the theories of WIMPs—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—when I was interrupted.

  For the past three days I had been aware of Van Lyle hanging around me. I became a lot more aware of him when two arms suddenly went around me from behind, and two hands clasped my breasts.

  “Hey, Jeanie,” Lyle’s voice whispered in my ear. “You’ve got lovely tits. It’s going to be nice and quiet for a while. Want to get friendly?”

  I jerked forward along the bunk, untangling my legs and trying to pull myself free. He was hanging on tight. That hurt.

  “Get your damned hands off me.” I wanted to say something a lot worse, but I knew we were going to be cooped up in the same space for another few weeks, no matter what. I had been trained to avoid onboard confrontations, and I wanted to stay cool and end this politely.

  I swung around to face him and pushed myself away.

  “Oh, don’t be like that.” He was grinning, a big, smarmy God’s-gift-to-women grin. “Come on. Lighten up. We could have some real fun.”

  He reached out towards my breast again, and I pushed his hand away. “Quit that, Lyle! I tell you, I’m not having any.”

  “You haven’t tried it. Lots of women could tell you, you won’t be disappointed. Want to have a look at my testimonials?” And then, as I pushed his groping hand away again, this time when it reached towards my crotch, “Hey, Jeanie, you’re strong. I just love strong women.”

  “You do, do you?” I’d had it. “This strong enough for you?”

  I swung with all my body behind it as his face came forward, and got him with my fist right on the bridge of his nose.

  It hurt like hell—hurt me, I mean. I didn’t care how much it hurt him. But I don’t think he enjoyed it, because as the blood spurted out of his flattened nose and splashed all over my bunk, he let out a terrible howl that brought McAndrew running.

  Just as well, because by that time I was upright, off my bunk, and all set to kick Lyle in the balls at least ten times as hard as I’d punched his nose. McAndrew got in the way before I could do it. He leaned close to Van Lyle, a rag in his hand to mop up blood.

  “What happened?”

  Lyle produced only a horrible snorting noise.

  “Tripped as he was coming in here,” I said, “and banged his face on the edge of the bunk. Get the medical kit.”

  McAndrew glanced at the bunk as Stefan Parmikan finally appeared. I knew that Mac was doing an instant height and angle match, and rejecting it. But he never said a thing. Nor did Lyle, unless you count the groans when Parmikan was moving his broken nose around in an attempt to achieve a reasonably straight result.

  We fixed the nose, more or less, and sedated Lyle. Parmikan went back to bed. During the sleep period, McAndrew leaned over the edge of my bunk and whispered to me. “Jeanie? I know you’re awake. Are you all right?”

  “I’m just fine.” I didn’t want him as furious as I was.

  “He didn’t bang himself on the bunk, did he? He made advances to you, and you hit him.”

  “What makes you think that?” Mac’s insights were supposed to be into Nature, but not human nature.

  “He was talking about you two days ago, when you weren’t present. He said he wanted to take you to bed. Get a piece, he said.”

  “And you were there? Why for God’s sake didn’t you stop him? Tell him that you and I are lovers, have been for years.”

  There was a long, worried pause. “It wouldn’t have been right, talking about you like that. And Jeanie, I don’t own you, you know.”

  McAndrew, McAndrew. If I weren’t so fond of you, I’d wring your scrupulous Puritan neck.

  “But you know what?” he went on, “I’m afraid that it’s going to make for a more difficult working atmosphere during the experiments.”

  It’s a good thing it was dark, so I couldn’t take a shot at his nose, too.

  The first twenty-three days of the trip out had seemed pretty bad. I learned the next morning that the remaining five were going to be a lot worse—and then after that we had the period of McAndrew’s experiments to look forward to, followed by a four-week return journey to the Institute.

  The pattern was established on the twenty-fourth day. Van Lyle was back on his feet early. The bruise from his broken nose had mysteriously spread, to give him two purple-black eyes. With a white, rigid plaster across the middle of his face, he resembled a vengeful owl as he staggered out of his bunk. He glared around him.

  “The inside of this capsule is dirty. It must be cleaned.”

  “It’s not bad,” I said. “It’s just the way you’d expect the ship to look after three weeks.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Lyle picked up a dish of soggy cereal, inverted it, and deliberately dropped it to the floor. “Get to work. This cabin first, then my quarters. I’ll be back to inspect your progress this afternoon.”

  I held myself in—just. When Stefan Parmikan appeared ten minutes later, I had all the cleaning equipment out of the ceiling racks and ready for use.

  He looked, not at me but past me. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Getting ready to clean the cabin. Following Officer Lyle’s instruction.”

  “Very well. You can do that later. I need you to explain the procedure for ship automatic course tracking to me.”

  Unbelievable. Could it be that Stefan Parmikan was at last taking an interest in the way that the Hoatzin worked? I rose to follow him, but he turned and pointed to the cleaning equipment.

  “Put those away first, back in the ceiling racks. I’m not going to spend the whole day falling over your stuff. And I’m not going to waste time arguing. You can get everything out again later.”

  It didn’t help to recognize that Parmikan was quoting my own words, about the luggage of his that I had refused to allow aboard.

  I began to put away the cleaning equipment, and thought favorably of Fletcher Christian.

  No one on the Hoatzin seemed happy for the next five days. Parmikan and Lyle constantly tried to push me over the edge, and were constantly d
isappointed. They came close, but I certainly wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of knowing how close.

  And McAndrew, who should have been as happy as a pig because the time of his experiments had arrived, had become intense and introverted. The Hoatzin had homed in close to his strongest anomalous signal, but it did not seem to have resolved his problem.

  “Look at this, Jeanie,” he said, during one of my rare breaks from slavery. I had just checked that the ship had achieved its final location and velocity, and confirmed that we were at rest again relative to Sol. “These are real-time signals, happening right this minute. I’ve got instruments focused on a region only two light-seconds from here. You can see the visual display of it on the left half of the screen.”

  I looked. Other than a triangle of three bright reference stars, the visible wavelength display was blank.

  “Nothing there,” I said.

  “Quite right. And now, the input from the mass detectors. They’re set up to scan the same field, and I’ve got them in imaging mode focused for two light-seconds away.” McAndrew popped the mass detector result on the right, as a split-screen display.

  I stared. I expected to see nothing on the right side of the screen, either, and that’s exactly what I saw. The region two light-seconds from us, where McAndrew’s mass detection instruments were focused, was empty of matter—more empty, in fact, than any other known region.

  “Well,” I began to say. And then something impossible happened. The left-hand screen at visible wavelengths continued to show nothing but distant reference stars; but the screen displaying the mass imaging system inputs showed an object floating steadily across it, from top to bottom. The blob was clean-edged and irregular in shape, its outline like a fat, curved and pimpled cigar. It took maybe ten seconds from the first appearance on the top of the screen to its leisurely disappearance from the lower boundary. It must be moving at just a few miles a second relative to the Hoatzin.

  “Mac, you’ve got the displays set up wrong. Those have to be showing different fields of view.”

  “They’re not, Jeanie. I’ve checked a dozen times. They’re showing the same part of the sky.”

  “Rerun it. Let me see it again.”

  “I don’t need to. Wait twenty seconds, and you’ll see another one. About one a minute.”

  We waited. At last a second shape, apparently identical to the first, came floating across the mass detector screen. And again the visible wavelength screen remained blank.

  “Ultra-violet,” I said. “Or infrared, or microwave…”

  “I’ve checked them all. Nothing, from radiation or particle sensors. Only the signal from the mass detectors.”

  “So they’re black holes. Kernels. They have to be.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought, when we were a ways off and the signal was just a fuzzy blob with no structure. But just you look at the shape of that”—a third shape like a thick, warty banana was crossing the screen—“when you know as well as I do that any black hole has to have at least rotational symmetry. Those things have no axis of symmetry at all. And another thing. I did an active test. I sent a particle stream off to intercept one of those objects. If it were a black hole, you’d get a return radiation signal as the particles were gravitationally caught. But I got nothing. The particles went right on through as though there wasn’t anything there at all.”

  I had a strange, prickly feeling up the back of my neck. We were observing nothing, a vacuum specter, a lost memory of matter. By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney, ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end…Except that in our case, ten leagues had grown to half a light-year.

  “Mac, they’re impossible. They can’t exist.”

  “They do, though.” McAndrew’s eyes were gleaming. I realized that I had mistaken his emotion. It wasn’t frustration. It was immense, pent-up excitement and secret delight. “And now I’ve seen them in more detail, I know what they are.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’ll tell you—but not until we get a chance for a real close-up look. Come on, Jeanie.”

  He headed straight for Parmikan’s private quarters, banged on the wall, and pulled the curtain to one side without waiting for an invitation. Parmikan and Lyle were both inside, heads close together. They had kept to themselves completely since the previous day, after an unusually long message to or from Earth. They jerked apart as McAndrew barged through.

  “We want to move the Hoatzin a bit,” he said without preamble. “And I have to go outside. I’d like Captain Roker to go with me.”

  If he was asking permission, calling me “Captain Roker” to Stefan Parmikan was the worst way to go about getting it. I expected an instant refusal. Instead a rapid glance passed between the two men, then Parmikan turned to McAndrew.

  “What do you mean, move the ship?”

  “Just a smidgeon, a couple of light-seconds. There’s something I need to look at as part of my experiments. As soon as we’re in the right position I need to take a couple of mass detectors outside with me and examine a structure. It will take a few hours, that’s all. But it’s a two-person job, and I’ll need help.”

  I certainly didn’t expect that Lyle or Parmikan would volunteer for the job of helper, but equally I didn’t expect that they’d agree to my doing it—if I were outside, how could they give me disgusting chores? But Parmikan nodded his head at once.

  “Right,” said McAndrew. His diffident manner had vanished. “Jeanie, while I get the equipment ready I want you to take the Hoatzin to encounter one of the anomalies. Put us smack in the middle, and set us to hold at zero relative velocity.”

  I didn’t argue. But as he went off to the rear of the living-capsule, I did exactly half of what he had requested. A small, watchful region of my brain was awakening, from a slumber it must have been in ever since I decided to reply to McAndrew’s letter by flying straight to the Institute. Now I closed in on one of the objects and set us to zero relative velocity—but I kept our ship a couple of kilometers clear rather than providing McAndrew’s requested encounter. He might know exactly what he was dealing with, and be sure that it was safe. Until I had that knowledge, too, I was going to regard any region of empty space occupied by a mystery as possibly dangerous.

  As I was completing my task I noticed a minor oddity in the operations of the Hoatzin’s computer. The program was functioning flawlessly, but as I directed each change in position or speed, a status light indicated that an extra data storage was being performed. The response time was a fraction of a second longer than usual.

  I’d probably have caught it when at Parmikan’s insistence we switched the drive on and off every day, but Mac had programmed all those changes as a favor to me. And if McAndrew had been ready to go outside at once, I might have ignored it now. Instead, I took a look to see where the generated data were being stored.

  I found a Dummy’s Delight.

  The data I was creating were being placed in a trajectory control program of a type much despised by professionals. It was the sort of thing that anyone could use and no one ever did, because it was guaranteed to be inefficient. In a Dummy’s Delight, for every move made by the ship the inverse move was generated and stored. If the program were then executed, the ship would return to its point of origin along whatever convoluted trajectory it may have taken to fly out.

  The program’s only advantage was simplicity. One push of a button, and all need for piloting went away.

  But there was no way that we would fly back along our original trajectory—there were much more efficient thrust patterns. And I certainly hadn’t given the command to place the required data into the Dummy’s Delight before the Hoatzin left the Penrose Institute.

  Had Mac done it? And if so, why?

  My wariness node had started to work overtime. On impulse I wiped from memory the whole Dummy’s Delight sequence, and left a message on the control screen: AUTOMATIC RETURN PROGRAM TO TERRA HAS BEEN ERASED BY CAPTAIN ROKER. It se
emed reasonable when I did it, but I started to have second thoughts as I hurried to join McAndrew. He had his mass detector survey instruments working as free-standing units and was already in his suit.

  “Mac.” I waited until I had my own suit on, and was absolutely sure that we could not be overheard by Van Lyle or Stefan Parmikan. “Did you set up a Dummy’s Delight in the Hoatzin’s computer?”

  He was busy, guiding the bulky detectors into the lock. “Now why would I do a daft thing like that?” he said, and vanished into the lock himself.

  Why would he do a thing like that? I asked myself. Why would anyone do it?—unless they suspected that no competent pilot, like me or McAndrew, would be around to fly the Hoatzin on its return journey to Sol.

  Paranoid? You bet. It’s the only way to fly.

  I emerged from the lock into that great forever silence that fills all the space between the stars. Sol was dwindled, indistinguishable from dozens of others. I picked it out from its position, not its superior brightness. The region I floated in appeared totally empty and featureless, despite the suit’s vision enhancement systems. Particles were fewer here, the vacuum a little harder. But the human observer would never know the difference.

  I glanced back at Sol. Look at the situation any way you liked; if I blew it and something went wrong, it was a long walk home.

  I propelled myself gently away from the ship and towards McAndrew. He was staring at his mass detector readings in great irritation.

  “Jeanie, you’ve made a mistake. We’re kilometers away from the source.”

  “We certainly are. Two kilometers, to be exact. I know you can see right through it and it looks like nothing’s there, but I want to approach this particular nothing very carefully.”