The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  He paused and swallowed. “We know what’s going on. That’s what we were talking about before you shook us to pieces. If we’d been a bit smarter, we could have inferred it ahead of time and none of this would have happened. How much did you hear on the way up?”

  I shook my head. “I tuned you out. I had other things on my mind. Are you telling me you understand that mess down there? I thought you said it made no sense at all.”

  While we spoke I had taken us up to the correct height above Vandell for rendezvous with Hoatzin. Now it would need a steady and simple sweep to find our ship.

  McAndrew wiped his hand across his pale, sweating forehead. He was looking awful, but less like a dying pickle as the minutes passed. “It didn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious. I noticed something odd just before we left Hoatzin to go into the pod—Sven had wondered about the same thing, but neither of us gave it enough significance. Remember the list of physical variables that they recorded for Vandell when they first arrived here? No electric and magnetic fields, negligible rotation rate, no atmosphere, and cold as the pit. Does any one of those observations suggest anything to you?”

  I leaned against the padded seat back. My physical exertions over the past half hour had been negligible, but tension had exhausted me totally. I looked across at him.

  “Mac, I’m in no condition for guessing games. I’m too tired. For God’s sake, get on with it.”

  He peered at me sympathetically. “Aye, you’re right. Let me begin at the beginning, and keep it simple. We know that Vandell was quiet until Merganser’s pod landed on its surface. Within minutes of that, there was massive seismic activity and terrific electric and magnetic disturbances. We watched it, there were waves of activity over the whole planet—but they all had one focus, and one point of origin: where the pod landed.” As McAndrew spoke his voice became firmer, strengthening now that he was back on the familiar ground of scientific explanation. “Remember the dark cone that we followed in to the surface? It was the only anomaly visible over the whole surface of the planet. So it was obvious. The impact of the pod caused the trouble, it was the trigger that set off Vandell’s eruption.”

  I looked around at the others. They all seemed happy with the explanation, but to me it said absolutely nothing. I shook my head. “Mac, I’ve landed on fifty planets and asteroids through the System and the Halo. Never once has one shaken apart when I tried to set foot on it. So why? Why did it happen to Vandell?”

  “Because—”

  “Because Vandell is a rogue world,” interrupted Sven Wicklund. We all stared at him in amazement. Sven usually never said a word about anything (except of course physics) unless he was asked a direct question. He was too shy. Now his blond hair was wet with perspiration, and there was still that distant, mystic look on his face, the look that vanished only when he laughed. But his voice was forceful. Vandell had done something to him, too.

  “A rogue world,” he went on. “And one that does not rotate on its axis. That is the crux of this whole affair. Vandell rotates too slowly for us to measure it. McAndrew and I noticed that, but we thought it no more than a point of academic interest. As Eddington pointed out centuries ago, almost everything in the Universe seems to rotate—atoms, molecules, planets, stars, galaxies. But there is no law of nature that obliges a body to rotate relative to the stars. Vandell did not, but we thought it only a curious accident.”

  He leaned towards me. “Think back to the time—how many million years ago?—when Vandell was first ejected from its stellar system. It had been close to the system’s suns, exposed to great forces. It was hot, and maybe geologically active, and then suddenly it was thrown out, out into the void between the stars. What happened then?”

  He paused, but I knew he was not expecting an answer. I waited.

  He shrugged. “Nothing happened,” he said. “For millions or billions of years, Vandell was alone. It slowly lost heat, cooled, contracted—just as the planets of the Solar System cooled and contracted after they were first formed. But there is one critical difference: the planets circle the Sun, and each other. As tensions inside build up, tidal forces work to release them. Earth and the planets release accumulating internal stresses through sequences of small disturbances—earthquakes, Marsquakes, Jupiterquakes. They can never build up a large store of pent-up energy. They are nudged continuously to internal stability by the other bodies of the system. But not Vandell. It wanders alone. With no tidal forces to work on it—not even the forces caused by its rotation in the galactic gravitational and magnetic fields—Vandell became super-critical. It was a house of cards, unstable against small disturbances. Apply one shock, and all the stored energy would be released in a chain reaction.”

  He paused and looked around. Then he blushed and seemed surprised at his own sudden eloquence. We all waited. Nothing else was forthcoming.

  I had followed what he said without difficulty, but accepting it was another matter. “You’re telling me that everything on Vandell came from the pod’s landing,” I said. “But what about the dust clouds? And why the intense fields? And how could they arise from an internal adjustment—even a violent one? And why were there peaks in the disturbance, like the one when we lifted off?”

  Sven Wicklund didn’t answer. He had apparently done his speaking for the day. He looked beseechingly for support to McAndrew, who coughed and rubbed at his head.

  “Now, Jeanie,” he said, “you could answer those questions for yourself if you wanted to give it a minute’s thought. You know about positions of unstable equilibrium as well as I do. Make an infinitesimal displacement, and produce an unbounded change, that’s the heart of it. Compared with the disturbances on Vandell for the past few eons, the landing of a pod was a super-powerful shock—more than an infinitesimal nudge. And you expect a set of spherical harmonics—with a pole at the source of energy—when you distribute energy over a sphere. As for the fields, I’ll bet that you’re not enough of a student of science to know what a Wimshurst machine is; but I’ve seen one. It was an old way of generating tremendous electromagnetic fields and artificial lightning using simple friction of plates against each other. Vandell’s crustal motion could generate fields of billions of volts, though of course they’d only last a few hours. We were there right at the worst time.”

  We looked back at the planet. To my eye it was maybe a little less visible, the lightning flashes less intense across the dusty clouds.

  “Poor old Vandell,” said Jan. “Peaceful for all these years, then we come and ruin it. And we wanted to study a rogue planet, a place of absolute quiet. It’ll never be the way it was before we got here. Well, never mind, there should be others. When we get back we’ll tell people to be more careful.”

  When we get back.

  At those words, the world snapped into a different focus. For twelve hours I had been completely absorbed by the events of the moment. Earth, the Office of External Affairs, the Institute, they had not existed for me two minutes ago. Now they were present again, still far away—I looked out of the port, seeking the bright distant star of the Sun—but real.

  “Are you all right, Jeanie?” asked Jan. She had observed my sudden change of expression.

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was time we told her everything. About Tallboy’s decision on the future of the Institute, about the cancellation of the Alpha Centauri expedition, the proposed decommissioning of the Hoatzin, and the way we had disobeyed official orders to follow them to Vandell. It all came rolling out like a long-stored fury.

  “But you saved our lives,” protested Jan. “If you hadn’t taken the ship we’d be dead. Once they know that, they won’t care if you ignored some stupid regulation.”

  McAndrew and I stared at her, then at each other. “Child, you’ve got a lot to learn about bureaucracy,” I said. “I know it all sounds ridiculous and trivial out here—damn it, it is ridiculous and trivial. But once we get back
we’ll waste weeks of our time, defending what we did, documenting everything, and writing endless reports on it. The fact that you would have died won’t make one scrap of difference to Tallboy. He’ll follow the rule book.”

  There was a moment of silence, while Mac and I pondered the prospect of a month of memoranda.

  “What happened to the old Administrator?” asked Jan at last. “You know, the one you always talked about before. I thought he was your friend and understood what you were doing?”

  “You mean Woolford? There was a change of Administration, and he went. The top brass change with the party, every seven years. Woolford left, and Tallboy replaced him.”

  “Damn that man,” said McAndrew suddenly. “Everything ready for the Alpha Centauri expedition, heaps of supplies and equipment all in place; and that buffoon signs a piece of paper and kills it in two seconds.”

  Ahead of us, I saw a faint blink against the starry background. It had to be Hoatzin’s pulsed beacon, sending a brief flash of light outward every two seconds. I made a first adjustment to our orbit to take us to rendezvous, and pointed out the distant ship to the others. Mac and Sven moved closer to the port, but Jan surprised me by remaining in her seat.

  “Seven years?” she said to me thoughtfully. “The Administration will change again in seven years. Jeanie, what was the shipboard travel time you planned to Alpha Centauri?”

  I frowned. “From Earth? One way, standing start to standing finish, would take Hoatzin about forty-four days.”

  “So from here it would be even less.” She had a strange gleam in her eyes. “I noticed something before we set out. Vandell sits in Lupus, and that’s a neighboring constellation to Centaurus. I remember thinking to myself before we started, it’s an odd coincidence, but we’ll be heading in almost the same direction as Mac and Jeanie. So Alpha Centauri would take less time from here, right? Less than forty-four days.”

  I nodded. “That’s just in shipboard time, of course. In Earth time we would have been away—” I stopped abruptly. I had finally reached the point where Jan had started her thinking.

  “At least eight and a half years,” she said. “Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years from Earth, right? So by the time we get back home, we’ll find a new Administration and Tallboy will be gone.”

  I stared at her thoughtfully. “Jan, do you know what you’re saying? We can’t do that. And as for that ‘we’ you were using, I hope you don’t think that Mac and I would let you and Sven take the risk of a trip like that. It’s out of the question.”

  “Can’t we at least talk about it?” She smiled. “I’d like to hear what Mac and Sven have to say.”

  I hesitated. “Oh, all right.” I said at last. “But not now. Let’s at least wait until we’re back on board Hoatzin. And don’t think I’ll let you twist those two around, the way you usually do.”

  I frowned, she smiled.

  And then I couldn’t help smiling back at her.

  That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.

  We were going to have a mammoth argument about all this, I just knew it. One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.

  Would I win the argument? I didn’t know. But it did occur to me that when the history of the first Alpha Centauri expedition was written, it might look quite different from what anyone had expected.

  EIGHTH CHRONICLE:

  With McAndrew,

  Out of Focus

  There are sights in the Universe that man—or woman—was not meant to see.

  Let me name an outstanding example. McAndrew, dancing; Arthur Morton McAndrew, hopping about like a gangling, uncoordinated stork, arms flapping and balding head turned up to stare at the sky.

  “The first since 1604!” he said. He did not, thank God, burst into song. “Not a one, since the invention of the telescope. Ah, look at it, Jeanie. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing a person ever saw?”

  Not the most complimentary remark in the world, to a woman who has borne a child with a man and been his regular, if not exactly faithful, companion for twenty-odd years.

  I looked up. It was close to nine in the evening, on the long June day that would end our holiday together. Early tomorrow McAndrew would leave Earth and return to the Institute; I would head for Equatorport, the first step in a trip a good deal farther out. I was scheduled to deliver submersibles for use on Europa. As part of the deal for making the run, I would be allowed to dive the Europan ice-covered abyssal ocean. I was excited by the prospect. The difference between deep space and deep ocean is large, and sky captains and dive captains respect and envy each other.

  Overhead, the cause of McAndrew’s excitement flamed in the sky as a point of intolerable brilliance. The Sun and Venus had already set. Jupiter was in opposition and close to perihelion. The planet should have been a beacon on the eastern horizon, but today its light was overwhelmed by something else. What I was looking at was infinitely brighter than Jupiter or Venus could ever be. Instead of the steady gleam of a planet, the light above blazed like the star it was. But it dominated everything in the sky except for the Sun itself, visible even at noon, a light strong enough to throw clear shadows. For two days there had been no night in the northern hemisphere.

  “A naked eye supernova!” McAndrew didn’t want or expect an answer to his earlier question. “And so close—only a hundred and three light-years. Why, if we used the balanced drive…”

  His voice trailed away, but I’ve known the man for a long time. I suspected what he was thinking.

  I said, “Be realistic, Mac. Even if you could fly out there in a reasonable subjective time, you’d be away at least a couple of hundred Earth years.”

  I was about to add, remember your relativity, but I didn’t have the gall. McAndrew knew more about special relativity and time dilation than I would ever know. Also more about general relativity, gravity, quantum theory, superstrings, condensed matter physics, finite state automata, and any other science subject that you care to mention. What he didn’t know, and would never learn, was restraint.

  Our holiday was over, whether I wanted to admit it or not. We would spend one more night together, but McAndrew would not be in bed with me. Not all of him, that is. His body, yes, but his head was already a hundred and three light-years away. It would not be coming back any time soon. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but even now he itched to be at the Penrose Institute, out in space where his precious observational tools could see far more than any instrument condemned to lie at the bottom of the murky atmosphere of Earth.

  Me, I could look into the evening sky and see herring-bone patterns of gorgeous rose and salmon-pink clouds catching the light of the supernova. McAndrew looked at the same thing and saw an annoying absorbing layer of atmospheric gases cutting off all light of wavelength shorter than the near ultraviolet. The Cassiopeia Supernova was flooding the Solar System with hard radiation—and here was McAndrew, down on Earth, condemned to visible wavelengths and missing half the show.

  “It will still be there tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll have a month or two before it begins to fade.”

  I might as well have saved my breath. He said, “If I flew south tonight, maybe I could get a pre-dawn lift.”

  “Maybe you could.” Actually, I knew the lift-off and transfer schedules in fair detail, and there was no chance of a launch that would get him one second sooner to the Institute, which was free-flying now in an L-3 halo orbit. Also, the last evening of a holiday is supposed to be special.

  “Sounds like you don’t think I should,” he said. And then, showing that he is more human than almost anyone in the Solar System gives him credit for—he’s supposed to be McAndrew, giant brain and intellect incarnate—he added, “Ah, now Jeanie, don’t get mad at me. You know, I wasn’t thinking of trying to fly all the way out to the supernova. But Fogarty and me, we’ve had an expedition in mind for a while to visit the solar
focus. This would be a great time to do it. We’d learn a lot about the supernova.”

  “You might,” I said. I did not add that I did not like Paul Fogarty. McAndrew could tell me, as often as he liked, that Fogarty was bright and young and inventive. Maybe he was all those things, but I thought he was also ambitious and snotty and obnoxious.

  Pure personal vanity on my part, of course. Young Paul Fogarty had met me during one of my visits to the Institute, learned that I was not a scientist but a mere cargo captain, and after that did not recognize my existence.

  If McAndrew was trying to be nice to me for a final evening together, I was more than willing to meet him halfway. “If you want to go to the solar focus,” I said. “Then you should do it. Go and have fun. You deserve it. Not a long trip, is it?”

  “Just a hop.” He thought for a moment, and the only sign of Scottish ancestry appeared in his speech. “Och, Jeanie, it’s not even that. We hardly need the balanced drive at all. Five hundred and fifty astronomical units to the solar focus, that’s only eighty-odd billion kilometers. If we take the Hoatzin and hold it down to a hundred gees, that’s less than a week of shipboard time there and back—even allowing for turnover and deceleration. Don’t worry that I’ll be gone long. I’ll be home again and waiting for you when you finish playing the deep-sea diver.”

  Possibly. But I knew him of old. Get McAndrew into a situation of scientific interest, and he loses all sense of time and everything else.

  When I emerged from the Europan ocean, he might indeed be back at the Institute; but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find him still eighty billion kilometers out, sitting at the solar focus—the place where the Sun’s own gravitational field would act like a lens, and converge light from the Cassiopeia supernova to a focus.

  I tilted back my head to stare once more at the burning point of light in the sky. A hundred and three light-years away, but it shone on Earth a thousand times as bright as the full Moon. This was the closest supernova to Earth in all of recorded history. Maybe that was just as well. Much closer, and it would be a danger to all life on Earth.