The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  I did what I could. What he had done, in the few minutes before I was blown out of the lock in a gust of freezing air, was to solve, mentally, a problem that would have taken me half a day to set up, and a computer to solve. And he had done it while knowing that the next half hour might end his own life.

  Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, Shadow Matter. The words spun through my mind as the world darkened, and McAndrew’s earnest face faded before my eyes. Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, Shadow Matter.

  Which one had dominated our past, to create the present structure of the Universe?

  I had no idea. All I knew for sure as I slid into unconsciousness was that the future of our Universe was going to be dominated by cool grey matter; the sort that McAndrew and a few rare others like him have between their ears.

  SIXTH CHRONICLE:

  The Invariants of Nature

  “I must say it was a surprise to me that you came here at all,” Van Lyle said pleasantly. “You really have to hand it to the Director. Anna Griss predicted all of this, you know—the effect of the announcement, McAndrew’s arrival, and then yours. Very perceptive of her. But, then, isn’t that exactly why she has the job of Administrator, and we do not?”

  He was standing in front of a huge pair of metal doors, checking a set of dials built into the frame. On the other side of them lay the processing vats, where all organic tissues—muscles, bones, nails, skin and hair—were dissolved to basic biotic molecules. Warning signals were splashed all over the chamber, and on both the doors: CONTROLLED ACCESS—DANGER, CORROSIVE GASES AND LIQUIDS—DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT PROTECTIVE SUITS—OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT REPRESENTATIVES ONLY PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT.

  Van Lyle turned to me questioningly. “Impressive, wouldn’t you say? Don’t be coy, Captain. I’d really like to hear your opinions on all this.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. I was sitting upright in a metal wheelchair. My wrists and elbows were bound to the chair arms with broad fiber tape, the sort that is hard to unstick and just about impossible to break. My lower legs were lashed to the chair’s metal struts with the same material. A broad sticky strip of it covered my face, from just below my nose to the point of my chin.

  “Ah, I see the problem,” Lyle went on. “But are you ready to talk nicely now, and not make a fuss?”

  I nodded—one of the few degrees of freedom available to me.

  Van Lyle nodded back. “Very good! And just in case you feel tempted to change your mind, let me point out that it would be quite pointless. This part of the installation is all automated. No one is here but the two of us.”

  He came across to me and touched one end of the tape that covered my mouth. But instead of pulling it loose, he paused to run his fingers along one side of my nose, and back down the other.

  “What a nice, shapely adornment,” he said. “Not at all like mine, eh? Before we finish, we’ll have to do something about that.”

  I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much he hated me. His nose was bent and slightly flattened, detracting from his rugged blond good looks. The mouth beneath the crooked nose twisted with anger as he ripped the tape away from my mouth.

  I worked my lips against each other, wincing. A layer of skin had been torn away by the super-adhesive tape, along with every fine hair on my face. I felt a trickle of blood down my chin.

  The less discussion of noses, though, the better. I had broken Van Lyle’s, half a light-year away from Sol, when he wouldn’t take his lecherous hands off me. That had been long ago, but unfortunately he didn’t seem willing to forget it.

  “You know McAndrew,” I said. “All it took was the right word, and he was ready to head for Earth. Nothing that I said could stop him from coming.”

  “So I understand.” Lyle nodded. “But you, Jeanie—surely you’re much more sophisticated than that? I would have bet money against you following him down here.”

  Van Lyle’s calling me Jeanie made my flesh crawl, but he was right. I didn’t have the excuse that Mac had, the siren song, the magic words that had left him helpless: a new invariant of nature.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve spent half my life chasing after Mac when he got into trouble. By now it’s second nature. But usually it’s to some place halfway to the stars—not a trip down to Earth.”

  I had no real interest in telling any of this to Van Lyle, true as it might be. I was merely stalling, postponing the moment when he would tape my mouth again and carry out the next stage of the proceedings. I had little doubt what that was going to be. Lyle hadn’t hauled me down to this processing plant, far offshore and a hundred meters beneath the surface of the sea, just to show off the advanced technology of Earth’s Food Department.

  It was also a very bad sign that he had mentioned the name of Anna Griss. In the past he had always refused to admit that he worked for her.

  I wondered what he was waiting for now. It shows how desperate I was feeling, but I actually hoped he might be planning another shot at raping me. Let him do anything—anything that might provide enough time for help to arrive, or give me a thin chance of resistance. That was better than being strapped in the wheelchair, able only to move my head and trunk from side to side.

  I didn’t have much hope. This wasn’t my environment, it was theirs. I might have an edge in deep space, but down on Earth, Van Lyle and Anna Griss held home field advantage.

  And suddenly I had no hope at all. Because I heard the steel doors at the back of the chamber open, the ones through which I had been wheeled in. There was the squeak of unoiled bearings, and a few seconds later another wheelchair was rolled alongside mine.

  McAndrew sat in it, his legs and arms tied to the chair’s metal struts, not by sticky tape but by thick, knotted cords. His mouth was not covered.

  He stared across at me miserably. “I’m sorry, Jeanie,” he said. “I really am. This is all my fault, every bit of it.”

  I tried to smile at him, and winced at raw, stripped skin. My lips began to bleed again. “Don’t feel bad, Mac,” I mumbled. “If it’s your fault, it’s my responsibility.”

  It had started at the Penrose Institute, over a month ago. I had been on the way home after a routine Europan delivery run. Orbital geometries happened to be favorable, so it was the most natural thing in the world for me to drop in on McAndrew. The Institute, after a disastrous couple of years of bureaucratic rule, was once more under the steady but informal guiding hand of old Dr. Limperis, dragged out of retirement to put things right. I wanted to see how everything was going, and renew old acquaintances.

  I headed straight for Mac’s working quarters. He was not there. Instead, Emma Gowers was loafing in his favorite chair and staring at a display.

  “Off in the communications center,” she said. “He’ll be back in a few minutes. You might as well wait here.” She was as blond, beautiful and blowzy as ever. And presumably as brilliant. She was the Institute’s resident expert on multiple kernel arrays.

  “Is he all right?” I asked. Mac usually had to be dragged out of his own office, unless he was off somewhere running an experiment.

  “Oh, he’s fine.” Emma pushed her mass of blond hair higher on her head. “But you know McAndrew. He’s got another pet project going. You can hardly talk to him any more.”

  I nodded. It was the most natural thing in the world to find McAndrew in the grip of a new scientific obsession. He would be delighted to see me, I knew that. But he might also be only vaguely aware of my presence.

  I sat down next to Emma. “What is it this time?”

  “There’s talk of a new fundamental invariant. I’m skeptical, frankly, but he’s a believer—at least enough to want to check it out for himself.”

  “Educate me, Emma. What do you mean, a fundamental invariant?”

  Simple explanations were not Dr. Gowers’ forte. She frowned at me. “Oh, you know. Things that don’t change under transformation. Like the determinant of a linear system under orthogonal rotation, or the Ne
wtonian equations of motion with a Galilean transformation, or Maxwell’s equations with a Lorentz transformation.”

  It’s an odd thing about Emma Gowers. Her own taste in men is for primitive specimens, dim and hairy objects who apparently decided to stop evolving somewhere in the early Pleistocene. Yet she insisted on assuming that McAndrew and I were on the same intellectual plane, just because we were long-time intimates.

  “Uh?” I wanted to say; but I was saved from new admissions of stupidity and ignorance by McAndrew’s own bustling arrival.

  “Using my chair and my data banks again, Emma,” he said. “Out, out, out.” And then to me, as though we had not been separated for months, “Jeanie, this is perfect timing.”

  Most people think that I tolerate behavior in McAndrew that I would never stand in any other human being, just because he’s a genius. He is that, the best combination of theorist and experimenter to arise in physics since Isaac Newton—at least, that’s what those few equipped to make the evaluation all tell me. But genius has nothing to do with my own tolerance of Mac, or his of me.

  I can’t do better than to say that we click. We are very different, but we touch at just enough points to make us stick.

  McAndrew puts it differently. “A hydrogen bond,” he has said to me, often enough to make it irritating. “Not an ionic bond, that’s all set and rigid, or even a covalent bond, where things are actually shared. No. We’re a hydrogen bond, loose and fluid and easy-going.”

  I’ll just say that we like each other. And if he thinks I’m so dim that everything he says to me about science has to be deliberately “dumbed down,” and if I think he is so wrapped up in abstractions that he ought not to be allowed outside in the real world without a keeper—well, that’s acceptable to both of us.

  This time he responded to my hug, but in an automatic and absent-minded way. “If you’re heading inward,” he went on, “as I suspect you are, then I’ll hitch a ride with you.”

  The space structure that houses the Penrose Institute is mobile, and at the time of my visit it was again drifting free, well outside the orbit of Mars. But inward? Mac’s interests usually lay well beyond the edge of the Solar System.

  “To Earth,” he explained. And, as my eyebrows rose, “Och, don’t worry, I’m not asking you to come with me. Drop me off at a libration point, Jeanie. That will do fine.”

  He knew my aversion to Earth, overcrowded and noisy and smelly. But I had always thought that he shared it, and he and I had other good reasons to avoid going there. One of Earth’s most powerful people was Anna Griss, former head of Earth’s Food Department, and now Administrator of the full Food and Energy Council. Mac had cut off her arm with a power laser, out in the Oort cloud. It had been done with the best of intentions, and it had saved her life; but I knew Anna. She would not have forgotten, or forgiven.

  As for me, I had been a target for her hatred since the same trip, perhaps even more so, because I had challenged her authority—and proved her wrong.

  It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them.

  So McAndrew knew very well what I was driving at when I stared at him and said, “Earth? Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “It’s a must,” he said. “I’m going to visit the Energy Council. To be specific, I’m going to the laboratory of Ernesto Kugel, where there is evidence that something wonderful has been discovered: a new Invariant of Nature.”

  You could hear the capital letters.

  “Told you so,” said Emma Gowers. And she stood up, tugged her short dress down as close to her dimpled knees as it would go, and swept out.

  If McAndrew’s words were designed to impress me, they failed.

  “Mac,” I said. “With me, three invariants and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.”

  “You’re a barbarian, Jeanie,” he said amiably. “I’m just using the term that Kugel used: a new invariant of nature. Would it help if I rephrased that, and said that he claims to have found an important new conservation law?”

  It did help, because I have been around McAndrew for a long time. But it didn’t help much.

  “New, how?” I asked. “I mean, I know that energy is conserved, and momentum is conserved—”

  “In a closed system.”

  “In a closed system, fine. But how can there be a new conservation law?”

  “Well, that’s where things get interesting. Now and again, physicists realize that certain things that they used to think of as independent are actually different aspects of the same thing. For example, a few hundred years ago, heat and motion and light used to be thought of as quite separate entities. But then, after lots of work by people like Rumford and Joule and Kelvin, scientists realized that those separate things were all forms of energy. And though different types of energy can be converted, one to another, they decided that the total could never be changed. That was the principle of conservation of energy.

  “Starting with the work of chemists like Lavoisier, people also observed that mass is conserved, too, in every form of physical and chemical reaction. So you had conservation of energy, and you had conservation of mass. But the big breakthrough came in 1905, when Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent, and that their total is the thing that is conserved, rather than either one. And he also showed that it didn’t matter which reference frame you use for the measurements. The energy-momentum four-vector is invariant. That single principle helped to unify the whole field of physics.

  “The same thing happened with angular momentum. For a while it looked as though it wasn’t conserved in nuclear reactions. But then workers in quantum theory found that an internal angular momentum had to be added to the picture for many particles—spin—and after that angular momentum became a fully conserved quantity. That, too, was a terrific generalizing idea. Did you know that in 1931 Pauli deduced the existence of a new particle, the neutrino, just because the principles of conservation of energy and of angular momentum required that it exist?”

  “I did know that, Mac”—once—“and you haven’t answered my question. I realize very well that there are conservation principles. But how can there possibly be a new one?”

  “I can give you two possible answers to that. The first is that the physical laws of the universe, as we already know them, admit some conserved quantity that we simply haven’t recognized yet.”

  “Isn’t that unlikely?”

  “You might think so, after all the time and effort we’ve put into searching for that sort of invariance principle, for the past hundred and fifty years, with nothing to show for it. But there’s another possible answer, one that at first doesn’t sound much more likely. It could be that Ernesto Kugel’s lab has discovered a new fundamental form of physical law.”

  McAndrew was starting to make sense to me, which should have been a tipoff right there that something was about to go wrong. Usually, the longer that we talk, the more confused I become.

  “You mean, a new force? Something like discovering gravity for the first time?”

  “That will do nicely. We happen to have been aware of gravity for as long as humans existed, and we’ve had theories of it for over five hundred years. We’ve known the electromagnetic force for three centuries, and the strong and weak forces that govern nuclear interactions for just a couple. But gravity is actually a very weak force, something we only feel because very large bodies are involved. Suppose that we had evolved as tiny creatures, no bigger than fleas, in the middle of an energetic plasma? Then gravity wouldn’t have much
immediate effect on our lives. We’d have learned about electromagnetism early, but we might still not know about gravity.”

  I was finally getting the head-swirling buzz that usually accompanied a McAndrew explanation. “But we didn’t evolve smaller than fleas, in the middle of a plasma.”

  “No. But different environments make it easy to detect different forces.”

  “But less than a year ago you were telling me that the place to look for new laws of nature is out in deep space where we’ve never been, out where the sun and planets don’t interfere with observations.”

  “I did say that. But suppose I’m wrong. Wouldn’t that be exciting, Jeanie? A new law of nature, sitting there under our noses all this time, and detectable down on the surface of Earth.”

  And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence.

  But I still hated the idea that he’d be going to Earth. “This Ernesto Kugel. If he’s in the Energy Department, that means he works for Anna Griss.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Not personally. But I know his work, very well. Ernesto Kugel built the Geotron.”

  Capital letters again. I resisted the urge to be distracted by that. “Is he the sort of person you believe might make a fundamental new discovery?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well…”

  “Not him. He’s an engineer—and a first-rate one—but he’s no physicist. Someone in his lab would have done the work. Someone I don’t know. Kugel would probably put his own name on the report just to make people pay attention.”

  “But surely you don’t think that some total unknown would have come up with a big scientific breakthrough?”

  “Jeanie, the big breakthroughs always come from some total unknown. And genius can pop up anywhere. Kugel got lucky.”

  “Maybe. But Kugel works for Anna Griss, and she hates your guts. Don’t you remember what you did to her?”