The Compleat McAndrew
Page 24
But the Institute needed all the impressive material they could find, so Mac continued to send long and futile messages needling Wicklund to tell him something—anything—about his latest work. He got nowhere.
“And he’s the brightest of the lot of us,” said McAndrew. Coming from him that was a real compliment. His colleagues were less convinced.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Wenig when I asked him. “Anyway, it’s a meaningless question. The two of them are quite different. Imagine that Newton and Einstein had lived at the same time. McAndrew’s like Newton, as much at home with experiment as theory. And Wicklund’s all theory, he needs help to change his pants. But it’s still a fool question. Which is better, food or drink?—that makes as much sense. The main thing is that they’re contemporaries, and they can talk to each other about what they’re doing.” Except that Wicklund refused to do so, at least at this stage of his work.
McAndrew finally gave up the effort to draw him out and concentrated on matters closer to home.
My own part in planning the show for Tallboy was a minor one. It had to be. My degrees in Gravitational Engineering and Electrical Engineering wouldn’t get me in as janitor at the Institute. My job was to concentrate on the Hoatzin. Until we started work (budget permitting) on a more advanced model, this ship carried the best available version of the McAndrew drive. It could manage a hundred gee acceleration for months, and a hundred and ten gee for as long as the crew were willing to forego kitchen and toilet facilities.
The Office of External Affairs officially owned the Hoatzin and the Institute operated her, but I secretly thought of the ship as mine. No one else had ever flown her.
I had faint hopes that Tallboy might like a demonstration flight, maybe a short run out to Saturn. We could be there and back in a couple of days. The ship was all ready, for that and more—if he approved it, we were all set for the Alpha Centauri probe (forty-four days of shipboard time; not bad, when you remember that the first manned trip to Mars had taken more than nine months). We could be on our interstellar journey in a week or two.
All right, I wasn’t being realistic; but I think everyone at the Institute nourished the secret dream that their project would be the one that caught Tallboy’s imagination, occupied his time, and won his approval. Certainly the amount of work that went into preparation supported my idea.
The timing was tight but manageable. Jan would arrive at the Institute at 09:00, with the official parental assignment to take place at 09:50. Tallboy’s grand show-and-tell began at 10:45 and went on for as long as he was willing to look and listen. Jan was scheduled to leave again at 19:50, so I had mixed feelings about Tallboy’s tour. The longer he stayed, the more impressed he was likely to be, and we wanted that. But we also wanted to spend time with Jan before she had to dash back to Luna for graduation and sign-out.
In the final analysis everything went off as well—and as badly—as it could have. At 09:00 exactly Jan’s ship docked at the Institute. I was pleased to see that it was one of the new five-gee mini-versions of the McAndrew Drive, coming into use at last in the Inner System. My bet was that Jan had picked it just to please him. You don’t need the drive at all for pond-hopping from Luna to L-4.
The parental assignment ceremony is traditionally conducted with a lot of formality. It was against custom to step out of the docking area as soon as the doors were opened, march up to the father-to-be, and grab him in a huge and affectionate hug. McAndrew looked startled for a moment, then swelled red as a turkeycock with pleasure. I got the same shock treatment a few moments later. Then instead of letting go Jan and I held each other at arm’s length and took stock.
She was going to be taller than me—already we were eye to eye. In three years she had changed from a super-smart child to an attractive woman, whose bright grey eyes told me something else: if I didn’t take a hand, Jan would twist McAndrew round her little finger. And she knew I knew it. We stood smiling at each other, while a dozen messages passed between us: affection, pride, anticipation, sheer happiness—and challenge. Mac and I were getting a handful.
We gave each other a final hug, then she took my hand and Mac’s and we went on through to meet with Limperis and the others. The official ceremony would not begin for another half hour, but we three knew that the important part was already completed.
“So what about your graduation present?” asked McAndrew, as we were waiting to begin. I had wondered about it myself. It was the first thing that most new children wanted to talk about.
“Nothing expensive,” said Jan. “I think it would be nice just to make a trip—I’ve seen too much of Luna.” Her tone was casual, but the quick sideways look at me told another story.
“Is that all?” said Mac. “Och, that doesn’t sound like much of a present. We thought you’d be wanting a cruise pod, at the very least.”
“What sort of trip?” I asked.
“I’d like to visit Triton Station. I’ve heard about it all my life, but apart from you, Jeanie, I don’t know of anyone who’s ever been there. And you never talk about it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” I said. The words popped out before I could stop them.
“Why not?”
“It’s too far out—too isolated. And there’ll be nothing at all for you to do there. It’s a long way away.” I had reacted before I had rational arguments, and now I was waffling.
Jan knew it. “A long way away! When the two of you have been light-years out. You’ve been on trips thousands of times as far as Triton Station.”
I hesitated and she bore in again. “You’re the one who told me that most people stick around like moles in their own backyard, when the Halo’s waiting for them and there’s a whole Universe to be explored.”
What could I say? That there was one rule for most people, and another for my daughter? Triton Station is in the backyard, in terms of interstellar space; but it’s also out near the edge of the old Solar System, too far away for Inner System comforts. An excellent place for a message relay between the Halo and the Inner System, that’s why it was put there in the first place. But it’s small and spartan. And the station isn’t down on Neptune’s satellite, the way that most people think. It’s in orbit around Triton, with just a small manned outpost on the surface of the satellite itself for supplies, raw materials, and cryogenics research. There are a few unmanned stations bobbing about in the icy atmosphere of Neptune itself, 350,000 kilometers away, but nobody in her right mind ever goes to visit them.
The sixty Station personnel are a strange mixture of dedicated researchers and psychological loners who find the Inner System and even the Titan Colony much too crowded for them. Some of them love it there, but as soon as the 100-gee balanced drive is in general use, Triton Station will be only a day and a half flight away and well within reach of a weekend vacation. Then I suppose the disgusted staff will curse the crowds, and decide it’s time to move farther out into the Halo seeking their old peace and quiet.
“You’ll be bored,” I said, trying another argument. “They’re more antisocial than you can imagine, and you won’t know anybody there.”
“Yes, I will. I know Sven Wicklund, and we always got along famously. He’s still there, isn’t he?”
“He is, blast him,” said McAndrew. “But as to what he’s been up to out there for the past six months…”
His voice tailed away and the old slack-jawed, half-witted look crept over his face. He was rubbing his fingers gently along his sandy, receding hairline, and I realized where his thoughts were taking him.
“Don’t be silly, Mac. I hope you’re not even considering it. If Wicklund won’t tell you what he’s doing, you don’t imagine he’ll talk to Jan about it, do you, if she’s just at Triton Station for a short visit?”
“Well, I don’t know,” began McAndrew. “It seems to me there’s a chance—”
“I feel sure he’ll tell me,” said Jan calmly.
Unfortunately, so was I. Wick
lund had been bowled over by Jan when she was only fourteen and didn’t have a tenth of her present firepower. If she could lead him around then with a ring through his nose, today with her added wiles it would be no contest.
“Let’s not try to decide this now,” I said. “The ceremony’s starting, and then we have to get ready to meet Tallboy. Let’s talk about it afterwards.”
“Oh, I think we can decide it easily enough now,” said McAndrew.
“No, that’s all right,” said Jan. “It can wait. No hurry.” Sorry, Jeanie, said her smile at me. Game, set and match.
After that I found it hard to keep my mind on Tallboy’s visit. Luckily I wasn’t on center stage most of the time, though I did tag along with the tour, watching that high forehead nodding politely, and his long index finger pointing at the different pieces of equipment on display. I also had a chance to talk to everyone when they completed their individual briefings.
“Impressive,” said Gowers when she came out. She had been first one up, describing her theories and experiments on the focusing of light using arrays of kernels. A tough area of work. To set up a stable array of Kerr-Newman black holes called for solutions to the many-body problem in general relativity. Luckily there was no one in the System better able to tackle that—Emma Gowers had made a permanent niche for herself in scientific history years before, when she provided the exact solution to the general relativistic two-body problem. Now to test her approximations she had built a tiny array of shielded kernels, small enough that all her work was done through a microscope. I had seen Tallboy peering in through the eyepiece, joking with Emma as he did so.
“So he seems sympathetic?” I said.
“More than that.” She took a deep breath and sat down. She was still hyper after her presentation. “I think it went very well. He listened hard and he asked questions. I was only scheduled for ten minutes, and we took nearly twenty. Keep your fingers crossed.”
I did, as one by one the others went in. When they came out most of them echoed her optimism. Siclaro was the only questioning voice. He had described his system for kernel energy extraction, and Tallboy had given him the same attentive audience and nodded understandingly.
“But he asked me what I meant by ‘spin-up,’” Siclaro said to me as we stood together outside the main auditorium.
“That’s fair enough—you can’t expect him to be a specialist on this stuff.”
“I know that.” He shook his head in a worried fashion. “But that came at the end of the presentation. And all the time I was talking, he was nodding his head at me as though he understood everything—ideas a lot more advanced than simple spin-up and spin-down of a Kerr black hole. But if he didn’t know what I meant at the end, how could he have understood any of the rest of it?”
Before I had time to answer, my own turn arrived. I came last of all, and though I had prepared as hard as anyone I was not a central part of the show. If Tallboy had to leave early I would be cut. If he had time, I was to show him over the Hoatzin, and make it clear to him that we were all ready for a long trip, as soon as his office gave us permission.
His energy level was amazing. He was still cordial and enthusiastic after seven hours of briefing, with only one short food break. We took a pod, just the two of us, and zipped over to the Hoatzin. I gave him a ten-minute tour, showing how the living area was moved closer to the mass disk as the acceleration of the ship was increased, to provide a net one-gee environment for the crew. He asked numerous polite general questions: how many people could be accommodated in the ship, how old was it, why was it called the inertia-less drive? I boggled a little at the last one, because McAndrew had spent large parts of his life explaining impatiently to anyone who would listen that, damn it, it wasn’t inertia-less, that all it did was to balance off gravitational and inertial accelerations. But I went over it one more time, for Tallboy’s benefit.
He listened closely, nodded that deep-browed head, and watched attentively as I moved us a little closer to the mass disk, so that we could feel the net acceleration on us increase from one to one-and-a-half gees.
“One more question,” he said at last. “And then we must return to the Institute. You keep talking about accelerations, and making accelerations balance out. What does that have to do with us, with how heavy we feel?”
I stared at him. Was he joking? No, that fine-boned face was as serious as ever. He stood there politely waiting for my answer, and I felt that sinking feeling. I’m not sure what I told him, or what we talked about on the way back to the Institute. I handed him on to McAndrew for a quick look at the Control Center, while I hurried off to find Limperis. He was in his office, staring at a blank wall.
“I know, Jeanie,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I had to sit in on every briefing except yours.”
“The man’s an idiot,” I said. “I think he means well, but he’s a complete, boneheaded moron. He has no more idea than Wenig’s pet monkey what goes on here in the Institute.”
“I know. I know.” Limperis suddenly showed his age, and for the first time it occurred to me that he was long past official retirement. “I hoped at first that it was just my paranoia,” he said. “I wondered if I was seeing something that wasn’t there—some of the others were so impressed.”
“How could they be? Tallboy had no idea what was going on.”
“It’s his appearance. That sharp profile. He looks intelligent, so we assume he must be. But take the people here at the Institute. Wenig looks like a mortician, Gowers could pass as a dumb-blonde hooker, and Siclaro reminds me of a gorilla. And each of them a mind in a million. We accept it that way round easily enough, but not in reverse.”
He stood up slowly. “We’re like babies out here, Jeanie; each of us with our own playthings. If anybody seems to be interested in what we’re doing, and nods their head now and again, we assume they understand. At the Institute, you interrupt if you don’t follow an argument. But that’s not the way Earthside government runs. Nod, and smile, and don’t rock the boat—that’s the name of the game, and it will take you a long way. You’ve seen how well it works for Dr. Tallboy.”
“But if he doesn’t understand a thing, what will his report say? The whole future of the Institute depends on it.”
“It does. And God knows what will happen. I thought his background was physics or engineering, the way he kept nodding his head. Did you know his degree is in sociology and he has no hard scientific training at all? No calculus, no statistics, no complex variables, no dynamics. I bet the real quality of our work won’t make one scrap of difference to his decision. We’ve all wasted a week.” He sniffed, and muttered, “Well, come on. Tallboy will be leaving in a few minutes. We must play it to the end and hope he leaves with a positive impression.”
He was heading for the door with me right behind when McAndrew hurried in.
“I’ve been wondering where you two had gone,” he said. “Tallboy’s at the departure dock. What a show, eh? I told you we’d do it, we knocked him dead. Even without Wicklund’s work, we showed more new results today than he’ll have seen in the past ten years. Come on—he wants to thank us all for our efforts before he goes.”
He went bounding away along the corridor, full of enthusiasm, oblivious to the atmosphere in Limperis’ office. We followed slowly after him. For some reason we were both smiling.
“Don’t knock it,” said Limperis. “If Mac were a political animal he’d be that much less a scientist. He’s not the man to present your budget request, but do you know what Einstein wrote to Born just before he died? ‘Earning a living should have nothing to do with the search for knowledge.’”
“You should tell that to Mac.”
“He was the one who told it to me.”
There didn’t seem much point in hurrying as we made our way to the departure dock. Tallboy had seen the best that we could offer. And who could tell?—perhaps McAndrew’s enthusiasm would be more persuasive than a thousand hours of unintelligible briefings.
I had lost. She was on her way to Neptune. She had finagled a ride on a medium-acceleration supply ship, and anytime now we should have word of her arrival. And McAndrew couldn’t wait—Wicklund was still frustratingly coy about his new work.
By a second one of those coincidences that McAndrew insisted were inevitable, Tallboy’s pronunciamento on the future of the Penrose Institute zipped in to the Message Center at the same time as Jan’s first message from Triton Station. I didn’t know about her spacegram until later, but Limperis directed the Tallboy message for general Institute broadcast. I was outside at the time, working near the Hoatzin, and the news came as voice-only on my suit radio,
The summary: Siclaro’s work on kernel energy extraction would proceed, and at a higher level (no surprise there, with the pressure from the Food and Energy Council for more compact power sources); Gowers would have her budget reduced by forty percent, as would Macedo. They could continue, but with no new experimental work. McAndrew had his support chopped in half. And poor Wenig, it seemed, had fared worst of all. The budget for compressed matter research was down by eighty percent.
I wasn’t worried about McAndrew. If they cut his research budget to zero, he would switch to straight theory and manage very well with just a pencil and paper. But everyone else would suffer.
And me? Tallboy wiped me out at the very end of the report, almost as an afterthought: experimental use of the Hoatzin was to be terminated completely, and the ship decommissioned. There would be no expedition to Alpha Centauri or anywhere else beyond the Halo. Worst of all, the report referred to “previous unauthorized use of the balanced drive, and high-risk treatment of official property”—a direct knock at me and McAndrew. We had enjoyed free use of the ship under the previous Administration, but apparently Woolford had never thought to put it in writing.