The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  “What about Mac’s father?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be a beneficiary?”

  “Ah, yes.” Her face took on a look of wistful sadness.

  “Dead?” I realized that I had never heard McAndrew speak of his father, not even once.

  “By all the logic, he is.” She smiled sweetly. “But a son-of-a-bitch like that is awful hard to kill.”

  The arrival of a chattering half-dozen scientists saved me from fielding that remark. Mary McAndrew made an instant survey, checked the line of her skirt to make sure that plenty of leg was showing, and headed for the tallest and most distinguished-looking of the group. It was Plimpton, who according to McAndrew had not had an original thought since he started to grow facial hair and possibly not before. On the other hand, I don’t think Mary was seeking original thought. Original sin, maybe.

  I followed her toward the tea and sweetmeats. Apparently I had been weighed in the balance and found reasonably adequate. But I suspected that Mary McAndrew employed an unusual scale.

  A mother, and now a father, too. I couldn’t wait to hear McAndrew’s side of the story.

  But wait I had to. McAndrew arrived at last from the seminar with half a dozen other scientists. He headed toward his mother. Before they could exchange more than two words, Emma Gowers came sashaying over toward them.

  A word about Emma. She is the Institute’s expert on multiple kernel arrays and a formidable brain. She is also blond and beautiful, with a roving eye, a lusty temperament, and a taste for big, hairy men of diminished mental capacity.

  I was standing only a step away. I saw Mary McAndrew and Emma size each other up, and I realized that neither knew who the other was. But like called to like, and they straightened and preened like two fighting cocks.

  “Come on, Mac,” Emma said. “You and I have a date.”

  The wording was provocative, but I knew that Emma had no possible sexual interest in McAndrew. His mother didn’t. So far as she could tell, Emma was cutting in.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  McAndrew made a feeble gesture from one to the other. “Mother, this is one of my professional colleagues, Emma Gowers. Emma, this is my mother.”

  Mary McAndrew extended a slim and delicate hand. “And which profession would that be, my dear?” Her tone couldn’t have been warmer.

  Emma gave her a friendly smile. “Not the one you are most familiar with, I’m sure.” She had been making a close inspection of Mary McAndrew’s neck and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “But it’s encouraging to know that a person doesn’t have to change her line of work, just because she’s old. Come on, Mac.”

  She gripped McAndrew firmly by the arm and pulled him away toward the door. I was left to face his mother.

  I said, “It’s not the way it looks. She’s not chasing him. There’s a problem with the balanced drive on one of the ships, and he and Emma have an appointment to take a look at it.”

  Mary McAndrew seemed not in the least upset. She said thoughtfully, “Well, I certainly underestimated that one. She and I must have a cozy chat when they get back. Where do you say they’re going?”

  It was easier to show than to tell. I put down my cup and led her across to one of the room’s small observation ports. “They’ll be going outside the Institute and over to one of the ships. You can see it from here. That’s the Flamingo, the Institute’s smallest experimental vessel.”

  She followed my pointing finger. The Flamingo was berthed about four kilometers away. We had a profile view of the circular flat disk of condensed matter at the front, with the long column jutting away from the center and the small sphere of the life capsule sitting out near the end of it.

  “What a strange-looking object!” Mary said. “Why, it’s not in the least like a ship.”

  I stared at her. Was she joking?

  “You’re looking at a ship that uses the McAndrew balanced drive,” I said. “Mac says it’s a trivial idea, but it’s the most famous thing he’s ever done. He’s known everywhere in the Solar System because of it.”

  “Is he now?” She peered at it with a bit more interest. “But it’s ugly. That plate, and the long spike. And where do the people sit?”

  She didn’t know, she really didn’t. Her own son’s most celebrated invention, and she had no idea.

  “The crew and passengers go in the life capsule.” I pointed. “That’s the little ball you can see at the end of the spike.”

  “But it’s teeny. All that big ship, and such a small space for people. What a waste.”

  “It has to be that way. That plate on the front is a hundred-meter disk of compressed matter, electromagnetically stabilized. If you put people in the middle of the disk while the ship is at rest, they’d feel a gravitational pull of fifty gees—enough to flatten anybody. But in the life capsule out at the end of the spike, a person feels a pull of just one gee. Now when you turn the drive on and the acceleration grows, the life capsule automatically moves closer to the disk. The acceleration and the gravitational force pull in opposite directions. The life capsule position is chosen so the total force inside it, the difference of gravity and acceleration, stays at one gee. A lot of people call it ‘the McAndrew inertia-less drive,’ but Mac hates that. He says inertia is still there, and the right name is the balanced drive.”

  I should have more sense. Predictably, I had lost her. In the middle of my explanation she had turned away from the window and she again had her eye on the mentally nulliparous Plimpton.

  “Gravity, acceleration, compressed matter,” she said. “Oh, how that carries me back. Like father, like son. McAndrew’s father, he’d drive a woman mad with talk of compressed matter, when what she was needing was a little personal attention.”

  “McAndrew Senior was a physicist, too?” If I couldn’t get family information from Mac, maybe his mother would provide it.

  “Och, Artie’s father wasn’t a McAndrew.” She arched plucked eyebrows at me. “Perish the thought. I would never dream of marrying a dreadful man like that.”

  That’s the point, right there, where I ought to have changed the subject. Instead I said, “Not a McAndrew. Then who was he?”

  “His name was Heinrich Grunewald. If he’s alive it still is, though I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him for over thirty years. He’d come visit for a while, then before you knew it he’d be running off. The last time he breezed in from nowhere, just as usual, and we had a lively couple of days. When the two of us weren’t busy in private he talked Artie’s ears off. I asked him, what was he doing, filling the lad’s head with nonsense? Force fields, and quarks, and that sort of rubbish. He laughed, and said that although nobody knew who Heinrich Grunewald was now, Artie needed to get used to the fact that he was going to have a very famous father. Next time he came to see me, he said, his face would be all over the media and we’d be hard put to find private time what with people camping out on the doorstep of the house.”

  “I’ve never heard of Heinrich Grunewald.”

  “No more you will. Isn’t that like a man, all blather and big talk? I flat out told him I didn’t believe him. I said, now what is it you’ll be doing to make you so famous? He got mad, the way men do when you talk straight to them. He gave me a bunch of notes and a video recording he’d made that very day, and he said the evidence was all there. He was going off to prove it, and I and the rest of the Solar System would treat him with a lot more respect when he came back.”

  “But he never came back?”

  “No more he did. Dead, you’d think, but off with some other woman is just as likely. Heinrich was a cocky devil, and a good-looking man. Good in bed, too, I’ll give him that.” At the words “good in bed,” she roused herself and stared around the room.

  “What about the papers and the recording?” I asked.

  “Gibberish.” She was perking up. Plimpton was giving her the eye and Monty Siclaro, restored to relatively normal condition, had entered the room. “I took a look at the stuff he left,
but it was nothing but the same old babble. Strong forces, weak forces, compressed matter, quarks and squarks and blarks. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “Oh. I stuck it away in a lockbox at the old family house. He’d told me not to lose it, and at the time I expected he’d be coming back.” Plimpton and Siclaro were standing a yard apart from each other. Drawn by some invisible force, Mary headed for the space between them. “Of course, he never did,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve not looked for it for years, but I suppose it’s sitting there still.”

  End of story. Except that I, in my folly, later repeated to McAndrew his mother’s words.

  He stared at me and through me and past me. “Mother never told me that,” he said. “He talked about the strong force, and compressed matter, I remember that. But old notes, and a video…”

  Mary McAndrew stayed at the Institute for two more days. When she returned to Earth, McAndrew went with her.

  And I? Of course, I went along, too. I have to take care of McAndrew. He can be such a dim-wit.

  Plenty of people live on Earth, but when you go there you have to wonder why. The air feels heavy and too dense. In the cities it’s dirty and full of fumes and sits in your lungs like thick soup. In the countryside there’s the stink of dead plants and animals wafted around on every breeze. Earth people are so used to the smell of rot, they don’t even notice. And after a day or two you’re just as bad. Apparently your brain can’t stand continuous stench, so after a while it cuts off the signal and you don’t smell a thing.

  Other things, though, you don’t get used to so easily. Mary McAndrew lived most of the time in Paris or Rome, but the “family house” that she referred to, where Mac had spent his early years lay on a small island. It was part of a group known as the Shetlands.

  Once we got there I could see why she preferred Paris or Rome. Or anywhere. The island sits far beyond the north coast of Scotland, up at latitude sixty degrees. The house was built of solid stone, with great wooden rafters across the ceiling of each room. Mary told me that the building was over two hundred years old, and her family had lived in it for as long as it had been there.

  Nothing wrong with that, but I soon learned that the McAndrews were not the house’s only residents. Mac and I were shown to a bedroom off on the north side of the building. It was only two in the afternoon, but it was winter for Earth’s northern hemisphere and we were so far up toward the pole that it was already getting dark. I stepped into the room and went to place my bag on the bed. As I did so, something small and brown jumped off the counterpane and streaked away toward a gloomy corner.

  I gasped and clutched my bag to my chest. “Mac! What the hell was that?”

  “Och, that’s nothing.” He walked forward and peered down at the wainscotting. “Just a wee mouse, and now it’s gone. You can bet it’s a lot more frightened of you than you are of it.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  “I’m tellin’ ye. You’ll not see a sign of the beastie once we’re moved into the room.”

  I noticed something odd about his speech. Back on the home territory of his childhood, a Scottish accent was creeping in.

  “Puir little thing,” he went on, “there’s been naebody in this room for so lang, it thought it had the rights to it. Don’t you worry, it won’t come a-walking over your face at night.”

  I could have lived very well without that thought. I noticed that the window had a spider’s web in the upper left corner, and I wondered how many other animals we were expected to share our space with. I felt a bit more sympathy for Heinrich Grunewald. Given a choice, before you knew it I’d have been running off just as he used to.

  I left my bag—tightly closed—on the bed. McAndrew led us back to the long living room of the house. Mary McAndrew was waiting there with a dusty box sitting on the low table in front of her.

  “Here it is. And I hope it’s been worth coming all this way for it.” Her voice said that she very much doubted that. She looked at me, as much as to say, Jeanie, I thought you had more sense. We could all be in Paris. Couldn’t you talk him out of it?

  If she knew McAndrew at all, she knew the answer. When it’s new science, or even a sniff of new science, McAndrew is the most obstinate human in the Solar System. He lifted the box as reverently as though it contained the Crown Jewels, blew off dust, and wiped at the top with a yellow cloth.

  “It’s not locked,” I said.

  “And why should it be?” Mary said as McAndrew eased the top open with a creak of rusting hinges. “Nothing here that anybody in his right mind would pay a brass farthing for.”

  At first glance I was inclined to agree. What Mac lifted out of the box was a small notebook with a faded blue cover, a dozen sheets of yellow paper with dirty brown edges, and a video recording of a design that had gone out of use thirty or forty years ago.

  “Can you play that?” I asked.

  “Oh, surely.” Mary took the video container and wiped the top with the duster. “Artie will tell you how it is on the islands. Things don’t get thrown away so quick here as in other places.”

  McAndrew had meanwhile picked up the sheets of paper. He flipped through them in a few seconds.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  “Nothing I didn’t know already.” He put the sheets down. “Standard results on the stabilization of compressed matter with electromagnetic fields. Same as we do with the balanced drive plates.”

  “Nothing,” said his mother. “Didn’t I tell you so?”

  McAndrew did not answer, but picked up the blue notebook. He began to leaf through it, and this time he was occupied for much longer.

  I didn’t speak, either. I had learned long ago that when McAndrew had that look on his face it was a waste of time to try to gain his attention. He was off in a different universe. Mary McAndrew must have learned the same thing, long ago in McAndrew’s childhood. She went off to the kitchen without a word and appeared a few minutes later with a loaded tea-tray.

  McAndrew finally laid the notebook carefully back on the table.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I dinna ken. It’s a thing a man has to sleep on.”

  “That’s all you can tell us?”

  “I can tell you what he—my father—wrote.” Mac said “my father” awkwardly, as though the words came hard to his tongue. “What I can’t tell you is whether what he wrote is true. That needs some hard thinking.”

  “Nothing there,” Mary said. She calmly poured tea. “Nothing, just as I told you.”

  It occurred to me that after leaving the contents of the box to rot for all these years she wanted there to be nothing.

  McAndrew spoke again, slowly and carefully. “What Heinrich Grunewald says—what he says”—there was a slight emphasis on he—“is that there’s another way to produce compressed matter, and if ye do it his way there’s no need of electromagnetic stabilization. The compressed matter will be naturally stable. If he’s right, you can also achieve far higher densities than we have at present. Up to three billion tons per cubic centimeter.”

  Mary did not react, but I did. The compressed matter used in the balanced drive plates averaged three thousand tons per cubic centimeter, and that was considered phenomenal.

  “Does he say how to do it?” I asked.

  “Aye. But that’s the hard bit to swallow. He says that it involves a local modification and enhancement of the strong force.”

  “What strong force?” Mary asked.

  I waited for someone to answer. Then I realized that unlike at the Institute, where bulging super-brains stood ready to lecture on any conceivable topic in physics, McAndrew and I were the only two available; and from the look on his face he was gone again, off to some unimaginable place where I could never follow.

  “What strong force?” Mary said again. “Have the two of you gone deaf?”

  “I’ll explain,” I said. I should have added, or try to. Make m
e your authority on physics and you run a considerable risk. “There are four basic forces in the universe.” That much I was sure of. “There’s gravity, that’s the one everybody knows even if they don’t understand it. There’s the electromagnetic force, that powers electrical motors and everything else to do with electricity and magnetism. There’s a thing called the weak force, which causes radioactivity.” (At that point McAndrew should have awakened and roasted me for a simplistic explanation. The fact that he didn’t meant he wasn’t really there). “And then there’s the strong force, which holds nuclei together when electromagnetic forces want them to fly apart.”

  I was about to add that unified theories explained all four as part of a single generalized force, and that all were mediated through the exchange of virtual particles with names like photons and gluons. I didn’t. I could see Mary’s face.

  I finished, a bit lamely, “What your husb—what McAndrew’s father claims to have done is find a way to change the way the strong force operates. If he was right, and he could make it stronger, then there could be a better way to form compressed matter.”

  Mary sniffed. “If I’d known that was all I had in the box all this time, I wouldna have bothered to keep it all this time.” She picked up the video recording. “And here we have more of the same?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “So let’s take a wee look, and find out.” She went over to a corner of the living room and pulled back a drape to reveal a playback unit so antiquated that I’d have accepted the idea that it was steam driven. “Artie, are you awake? Artie! Och, the lad’s hopeless.”

  “Play it,” I said. “Maybe it will bring him back into the real universe.”

  “I have doubts of that. I never found anything that would when he’s got that face on him.” But she inserted the video recording.

  The overhead lights, coupled to the playback unit, dimmed. The wall display flashed a brief kaleidoscope of color, then settled to show the figure of a standing man. It zoomed to a close-up of his face and I had a sudden and startling feeling of recognition. The long jaw and thin-lipped mouth were different, but the distant eyes and high, balding forehead were pure McAndrew.