The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  “She could, but she won’t. She’d like to get us, but she’ll remember that pit. Anna understands power. If her people tried and failed again, she knows I’ll come after her. The pleasure of finishing me isn’t worth the risk.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am. Mac, trust me. If I don’t question your spinors and twistors and calibration of optical scalars, you shouldn’t second guess me on Anna Griss.”

  “So you think it’s safe to go back to the Geotron, and see how the experiments came out? I left before the results were in, you see, because of what you said to me.”

  He was returning to normal. Which is to say, totally abnormal.

  I sighed. “Sure. We can go to the Geotron.”

  That sounded like the end of it, but it wasn’t. We were in the submersible, cruising back to Ernesto Kugel’s lab, while I wondered what story I was going to tell. Probably I’d say nothing. I’d pretend I had a nice pleasant tour, and leave it to Anna Griss to tell it otherwise.

  Then McAndrew started up again.

  “Jeanie. You really wouldn’t have killed her, would you? No matter what.”

  I reached out and stroked his cheek. “Of course not. But can we drop it now? You and I ought to be celebrating our survival. Maybe we ought to act on Ernesto Kugel’s suggestion—his first one.”

  It came out as flat and artificial as it sounds, and it didn’t fool McAndrew for one moment. He gave me a wary, weary look, and leaned back in his seat. But it did accomplish my objective. It shut off a line of conversation that I was afraid to pursue.

  Because one thing I’ve learned in life is that a person never knows her own invariants. I thought I knew the answer to McAndrew’s question, but I wasn’t positive. That terrible rage, the all-consuming fury that I felt when Anna Griss was poised on the edge of the pit…if she had been a little more resistant, just a little tougher and more defiant—then who knows what I would have done?

  Not I.

  But one thing I did know for sure. I was not going to discuss that sort of thing with McAndrew. Ever.

  He’s a dear, and he’s super-smart, and in almost every way I can think of he is wonderful. But he’s also like most people who spend their lives studying the nature of the Universe.

  He can only take a tiny little bit of reality.

  SEVENTH CHRONICLE:

  Rogueworld

  The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

  I was sitting in the pilot’s chair with McAndrew at my shoulder. Neither of us had spoken for a long time. We were in low polar orbit, sweeping rapidly across the surface of Vandell with all pod sensors wide open. I don’t know what McAndrew was thinking, but my mind was not fully on the displays. Part of me was far away—one and a quarter light-years away, back on Earth.

  Why not? Our attention here was not necessary. The surveillance sensors were linked to the shipboard main computer, and the work was done automatically. If anything new turned up we would hear of it at once. But nothing new could happen—nothing that mattered.

  For the moment, I needed time to myself. Time to think about Jan; to remember her seventeen years, as a baby, as a slender child, as a fierce new intelligence, as a young woman; time to resent the chain of circumstance that had brought her and Sven Wicklund here, to die. Somewhere below these opalescent clouds, down on the cold surface of the planet, our sensor systems were seeking two corpses. Nothing else mattered.

  I knew that McAndrew shared my sorrow, but he handled it in a different way. His attention was focused on the data displays, in a concentration so intense that my presence didn’t matter at all. His eyes lacked all expression. Every couple of minutes he shook his head and muttered to himself: “This makes no sense—no sense at all.”

  I stared at the screen in front of me, where the dark vortex had again appeared. It came and went, clearly visible on some passes, vanished on others. Now it looked like a funnel, a sooty conical channel down through the glowing atmosphere, the only break in the planet’s swirling cloud cover. We had passed right over it twice before, the first time with rising hopes; but the sensors had remained quiet. It was not a signal. It had to be a natural feature, something like Jupiter’s Red Spot, some random coincidence of twisting gas streams.

  Coincidence. Again, coincidence. “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.”

  I couldn’t get McAndrew’s words out of my head.

  He had spoken them months ago, on a day that I would never forget. It was Jan’s seventeenth birthday, the first time of choice. I was down on Earth, choking on the dense air, meeting with the new head of External Affairs.

  McAndrew was at his office at the Penrose Institute. We were both trying to work, but I for one wasn’t succeeding too well. I wondered what was going through Jan’s head, waiting for graduation from the Luna System.

  “Naturally, there will have to be some changes,” Tallboy was saying. “That’s to be expected, I’m sure you’ll agree. We are reviewing all programs, and though I am sure that my predecessor and I”—for the third time he had avoided using Woolford’s name—“agree on overall objectives, we may have slightly different priorities.”

  Dr. Tallboy was a tall man, with a lofty brow and a keen, intellectual eye. Although we had shaken hands and muttered the conventional greetings a couple of times before, this was our first working meeting.

  I pulled my wandering attention back to him. “When will the program review be finished?”

  He shook his head and smiled broadly (but there were no laugh lines around his eyes). “As I’m sure you know very well, Captain Roker, these things take time. There has been a change of Administration. We have many new staff to train. There have been new Budget cuts, too, and the Office of External Affairs has suffered more than most. We will continue all the essential programs, be assured of that. But it is also my mandate to expend public funds wisely, and that cannot be done in haste.”

  “What about the Penrose Institute’s experimental programs?” I said—a bit abruptly, but so far Tallboy had offered nothing more than general answers. I knew I couldn’t afford to seem impatient, but my meeting wouldn’t last much longer.

  He hesitated, then sneaked a quick look at the crib sheets of notes in front of him on the desk. It didn’t seem to help, because when he looked up the fine and noble brow was wrinkled in perplexity.

  “I’m thinking particularly of the Alpha Centauri expedition,” I prompted him. “Dr. Tallboy, a quick go-ahead on that means a great deal to us.”

  “Of course.” He was nodding at me seriously. “A great deal. Er, I’m not completely familiar with that particular activity, you understand. But I assure you, as soon as my staff review is completed…”

  Our meeting lasted fifteen more minutes, but long before that I felt I had failed. I had come here to push for a decision, to persuade Tallboy that the program should go ahead as planned and approved by Woolford; but bureaucratic changes had changed everything. Forget the fact that McAndrew and I had been planning the Alpha Centauri expedition for a year; forget the fact that the Hoatzin had been provisioned, fueled, and inspected, and the flight plans filed long since with the USF. Forget the masses of new observational equipment that we had loaded onto the ship with such loving care. That had been under the old Administration. When the new one came in everything had to start again from scratch. And not one damned thing I could do about it.

  I did manage to extract one promise from Tallboy before he ushered me out with polite assurances of his interest and commitment to the Institute’s work. He would visit the Institute personally, as soon as his schedule permitted. It wasn’t anything to celebrate, but it was all I could squeeze out of him.

  “He’ll visit here in person?” said McAndrew—I had run for the phone as soon as I cleared the Office of External Affairs. “Do you think he’ll do it?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t leave it up to him. I saw his secretary on the
way out, and made sure that we’re in the book. He’ll do it.”

  “When?” McAndrew had been in Limperis’ office when I called, and it was the older man who leaned forward to ask the question.

  “Eight days from now. That was the first gap in his schedule. He’ll spend most of the day at the Institute.”

  “Then we’re home free,” said McAndrew. He was cracking his finger joints—a sure sign of high excitement. “Jeanie, we can put on an all-day show here that’ll just blow him away. Wenig has a new E-M field stabilizer, Macedo says she can build a cheap detector for small Halo collapsars, and I’ve got an idea for a better kernel shield. And if we can ever get him to talk about it, Wicklund’s cooking up something new and big out on Triton Station. Man, I’m telling you, the Institute hasn’t been this productive in years. Get Tallboy here, and he’ll go out of his mind.”

  Limperis shot a quick sideways glance at McAndrew, then looked back at the screen. He raised his eyebrows. I could read the expression on that smooth, innocent-looking face, and I agreed with him completely. If you wanted a man to quantize a nonlinear field, diagonalize a messy Hamiltonian, or dream up a delicate new observational test for theories of kernel creation, you couldn’t possibly do better than McAndrew. But that would be his downfall now. He could never accept that the rest of the world might be less interested in physics than he was.

  Limperis started that way, but years of budget battles as head of the Institute had taught him to play in a different league, “So what do you think, Jeanie?” he said to me, when Mac had finished babbling.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t read Tallboy. He’s an unknown quantity. We’d better look up his background, see if that gives us some clue to what makes him tick. As it is, you’ll have to try it. Show him everything you’ve got at the Institute, and hope for the best.”

  “What about the expedition?”

  “Same for that. Tallboy acted as though he’d never heard of Alpha Centauri. The Hoatzin’s just about ready to go, but we need Tallboy’s blessing. External Affairs controls all the—”

  “Call from Luna,” cut in a disembodied voice. “Central Records for Professor McAndrew. Level Two priority. Will you accept interrupt, or prefer reschedule?”

  “Accept,” said McAndrew and I together—even though it wasn’t my call. It had to be from Jan.

  “Voice, tonal, display or hard copy output?”

  “Voice,” replied McAndrew firmly. I was less sure of that. He had done it so that I could receive the message, too, but we would have to witness each other’s disappointment if it was bad news.

  “Message for Arthur Morton McAndrew,” went on the neutral voice. “Message begins. January Pelham, ID 128-129-001176, being of legal age of choice, will file for parental assignment as follows: Father: Arthur Morton McAndrew, ID 226-788-44577. Mother: Jean Pelham Roker, ID 547-314-78281. Name change filed for January Pelham Roker McAndrew. Parental response and acceptance is required. Reply via Luna free circuit 33, link 442. Message ends.”

  I had never seen McAndrew look so pleased. It was doubly satisfying to him to have me on the line when the word came through—I was sure that the Communications Group were trying to track me now through Tallboy’s office, not knowing I was tapped into Mac’s line.

  “What’s the formal date for parental assignment?” I asked.

  There was a two second pause while the computer made confirmation of identity from my voiceprint, sent that information over the link from L-4 to Luna, decided how to handle the situation, and connected us all into one circuit.

  “Message for Jean Pelham Roker. Message begins: January Pelham, ID 128—”

  “No need to repeat,” I said. “Message received. Repeat, what is the formal date for parental assignment?”

  “Two hundred hours U.T., subject to satisfactory parental responses.”

  “That’s too soon,” said McAndrew. “We won’t have enough time for chromosomal confirmation.”

  “Chromosomal confirmation waived.”

  On the screen in front of me McAndrew blushed bright with surprise and pleasure. Not only had Jan filed for us as official parents as soon as legally permitted, she had done so without knowing or caring what the genetic records showed. The waiver was a definite statement: whether or not McAndrew was her biological father would make no difference to her; she had made her decision.

  For what it was worth, I could have given my own assurance. Some evidence is just as persuasive to me as chromosomal mapping. No one who had seen that blind, inward look on Jan’s face when she was tackling an abstract problem would ever doubt that she was McAndrew’s flesh and blood. I had cursed that expression a hundred times, as McAndrew left me to worry alone while he disappeared on a voyage of exploration and discovery inside his own head.

  Never mind; McAndrew had his good points. “Parental acceptance by Jean Pelham Roker,” I said.

  “Parental acceptance by Arthur Morton McAndrew,” said Mac.

  Another brief pause, then: “Acceptance received and recorded. Formal assignment confirmed for two hundred hours U.T. Arrange location through Luna link 33-442. Hard copy output follows. Is there additional transfer?”

  “No.”

  “Link terminated.” While the computer initiated hard copy output to the terminal at the Institute, I did a little calculation.

  “Mac, we have a problem—Jan’s acceptance ceremony is set for the same time as Tallboy’s visit.”

  “Of course.” He looked surprised that I hadn’t seen it immediately. “We can handle it. She’ll come out here. She’ll want to visit—she hasn’t been to the Institute since Wicklund went out to Triton Station.”

  “But you’ll be too tied up with Tallboy to spend much time with her. What rotten luck.”

  McAndrew shrugged, and it was enough to start him talking. “Whenever a set of independent events occur randomly in time or space, you’ll notice event-clusters. They’re inevitable. That’s all there is to coincidences. If you assume that event arrival times follow a Poisson distribution, and just go ahead and calculate the probability that a given number will occur in some small interval of time, you’ll find—”

  “Take him away,” I said to Limperis.

  He slapped McAndrew lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. Coincidence or not, this is a day for celebration. You’re a father now, and thanks to Jeanie we’ve got Tallboy coming out here to see the show.” He winked at me. “Though maybe Jan will change her mind when she hears Mac talk for a few hours, eh, Jeanie? Poor girl, she’s not used to it, the way you are.”

  McAndrew just grinned. He was riding too high for a little gentle joshing to have any effect. “If you pity the poor lass at all,” he said. “It should be for the Philistine space-jock of a mother she’ll be getting. If I wanted to talk to Jan about probability distributions, she’d listen to me.” She probably would, too. I’d seen her math profiles.

  Limperis was reaching out to cut the connection, but Mac hadn’t quite finished. “You know, the laws of probability not only permit coincidences,” he said. “They—”

  He was still talking when the screen went blank.

  I had no more official business down on Earth, but I didn’t head out at once. Limperis was quite right, it was a time for celebration; you didn’t become a parent every day. I went over to the Asgard restaurant, up at the very top of Mile High, and ordered the full panoramic dinner. In some ways I wasted my money, because no matter what the sensories threw at me I hardly noticed. I was thinking back seventeen years, to the time when Jan was born, so small she could put her whole fist in the old silver thimble that McAndrew’s friends gave her as a birthgift.

  It was a few years later that I realized we had something exceptional on our hands—Jan had breezed through every test they could give her. I felt as though I had a window to McAndrew’s own past, because I was sure he had been the same way thirty years earlier. The mandatory separation years hadn’t been bad at all, because McAndrew and I had
spent most of them on long trips out, where the Earth-years sped by in months of shipboard time. But I was very glad they were over now. In a few more days, McAndrew, Jan and I would be officially and permanently related.

  By the time I finished my meal I probably wore the same foolish smile as I had seen on Mac’s face before Limperis cut the video. Neither of us could see beyond the coming ceremony to a grimmer future.

  The next few days were too busy for much introspection. The Penrose Institute had been in free orbit, half a million miles out, but to make it more convenient for Tallboy’s visit Limperis moved us back to the old L-4 position. In a general planning meeting we decided what we would show off, and how much time could be spared for each research activity. I’d never heard such squabbling. The concentration of brain power found at the Institute meant that a dozen or more important advances were competing for Tallboy’s time. Limperis was as impartial and diplomatic as ever, but there was no way he could smooth Macedo’s feelings when she learned that she would have less than ten minutes to show off three years of effort on electromagnetic coupling systems. And Wenig was even worse—he wanted to be in on all the presentations, and still have time to promote his own work on ultra-dense matter.

  At the same time McAndrew was having problems of quite a different kind with Sven Wicklund. That young physicist was still out on Triton Station, where he had gone complaining that the Inner System was all far too crowded and cluttered and he needed some peace and quiet.

  “What the devil’s he up to out there?” grumbled McAndrew. “I need to know for the Tallboy briefing, but a one-way radio signal out to Neptune takes four hours—even if he wanted to talk, and he doesn’t. And I’m sure he’s on to something new and important. Blast him, what am I supposed to report?”

  I wasn’t sympathetic. To me it seemed no more than poetic justice. McAndrew had annoyed me and others often enough in the past, when he refused to talk about his own ideas while they were in development—“half-cooked,” to use his phrase. Apparently Sven Wicklund was just the same, and it served Mac right.