Heinrich Grunewald spoke. His voice was slow, deeper than Mac’s, and slightly accented. “This recording contains its own time-line, giving the date and hour that it is being made. I’ll be away for a little while, so I want there to be no arguments regarding priority of invention when I return. I have developed a modified theory of the strong interaction, with huge and various commercial potentials. Among the near-term applications are cheap forms of compressed matter, the ability to make shipment of diffuse materials in much smaller containers, induced radioactivity, more compact forms of existing commercial fusion devices, and low-temperature proton-proton fusion.”
McAndrew was awake after all. I heard him gasp at that last item. Grunewald went on, “I am not talking theory alone. The technical details permitting each of these developments can be found here.” He raised a blue notebook, like a bigger version of the one in the lockbox.
I glanced at Mary McAndrew, who shook her head. “Nothing like that, not left with me. It’s been a long time, but I think maybe I saw it.”
McAndrew said, “Then where is it? We have no other lead.”
“It went with him.” I was surprised that the two of them were slow to catch on. “If it gives the practical details it’s worth an enormous fortune. He didn’t want to risk anyone else getting their hands on it.”
“We have to find it, and him.” McAndrew sounded unusually forceful. He saw my expression. “Oh, not the inventions, Jeanie. You know I don’t give a damn about them. We need the theory.”
Mary McAndrew turned to me. “I told you. He hasn’t changed a bit. He needs a keeper.”
I asked, “But where did he go?”
McAndrew snapped at us. “If the pair of you would stop blathering, maybe we’d have a chance to find out.”
Heinrich Grunewald was still talking. Mac reversed the video to the point where his father was hefting the blue book.
“…developments can be found here.” Grunewald flourished the notebook in a self-satisfied way and finally placed it back out of sight. “With industrial sabotage so common, I do not wish to perform my final validation experiments where others might find a way to steal or even to interfere.”
Mary McAndrew said, “Och, he’s crazy suspicious. He was always paranoid. I’ve never known another man look under every bed before he’d get in it, no matter who he was with and what he had to look forward to.”
McAndrew and I both shushed her, as Grunewald went on, “So to do the validation I’m taking the Fafner out, away from the main shipping lanes—”
“Got him,” I said.
“Keep quiet,” McAndrew snapped. But I’m a seasoned cargo captain, and for a change I knew something he didn’t. It didn’t matter whether or not Heinrich Grunewald told us anything else. If he had taken his ship out, as he said, then his flight plan would be on file. So would any firing of the ship’s engines.
The man was gone, but not forgotten and not untraceable. It might take a while, but I felt sure we would be able to track down McAndrew’s long-lost father.
Like many things in life, the problem I had been so sure I could solve proved more difficult than it sounded.
We headed for the Penrose Institute to perform the calculations. Mary McAndrew told us that she could not come, she had to pay some attention to “poor neglected Fazool.” But I was to let her know what we found.
“I know he’s surely dead,” she said to me as we left for Equatorport. “He was a wicked, obstinate, reckless man. But the two of us had some great times, and I was awful fond of Heinrich. Why, I was even faithful to him.”
It would have been unkind to ask for how long.
Mac and I headed for the Institute, and at first everything went according to plan. I delved into the old data bases and found the flight plan of the Fafner. Among the listed on-board equipment, tantalizingly, the manifest included the enigmatic item, “strong field modifier, prototype.”
I learned the exact second of the ship’s departure. I found its nominal destination, though that could change through subsequent course corrections or changes of mind. I obtained a complete list of subsequent engine firings, which even without the record sent back from the Fafner’s inertial navigation system would allow us to pinpoint the ship’s last known location. After all the engine firings, a certain stochastic element affected the Fafner’s movements depending on the vagaries of gravitational perturbation by small bodies and variations in solar wind. But natural body positions for anything substantial were in the data banks on an hour-by-hour basis, and the programs to compensate for their effects were routine.
The calculations took a while, even with McAndrew’s talent for instant shortcuts. Once we had answers we borrowed the synthetic aperture distributed observation system for a few days and surveyed the sky sector where the Fafner should be found.
Result: nothing. Not a sign. No Fafner, not in the region we had defined as most probable or in one ten times as big in all directions. The ship had disappeared.
I checked the calculations, redoing everything the long way. The Fafner was not a big ship, nothing to compare with a cargo carrier or even a large passenger vessel, but it was thirty meters long and almost fifteen across. Anything that size would stand out prominently on the observations made by the big scope, especially when you used a time exposure to sort out moving objects within the Solar System from the fixed celestial background. Comparison with known natural bodies ought to do the rest.
I found nothing wrong with McAndrew’s calculations. He checked my checking. That took two more days. Finally we were ready to admit defeat. By this time a dozen others at the Institute were taking an interest. McAndrew phrased the dilemma for all of us. “Objects just can’t disappear. Here are the possibilities: The Fafner might have totally disintegrated. It might have hidden away inside another object. Or it might be deliberately covered with nonreflective material at the wavelengths used by the Institute scopes.”
“Or stolen away by aliens,” I added. I was tired.
McAndrew nodded as though that was a serious possibility. “In any case,” he said, “we’ve gone as far as we can just sitting and looking.”
“The ship can’t be far away from where we calculated,” I said. I could see where the discussion was heading, and I knew that we faced a very tough job. “It’s in the Inner System, and near the plane of the ecliptic. In the Asteroid Belt, almost certainly.”
McAndrew nodded and looked gloomy. “Aye. Wouldn’t you just know it’d be that way?”
The others muttered vague expressions of sympathy.
To see why, imagine that you are asked to look for something small. Would you rather search a large volume or a small one?
The answer to that question depends where you are and what you are seeking. The region of the Solar System that includes the Sun, planets, moons, asteroids, and the odd collection of misfit bodies forming the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt is a substantial volume; it is shaped like a flat pillbox, about thirty billion kilometers across and maybe forty million deep. Say, a billion billion cubic kilometers of volume altogether. But that’s infinitesimal compared with the space bounded by the inner edge of the Oort cloud. There, we are talking a spherical region with a radius of a twentieth of a light-year. The volume in cubic kilometers is a number with thirty-five zeroes, too many for me to be comfortable with. You can subtract the volume of the pillbox, and it makes no noticeable difference.
The odd thing, though, is that inside the pillbox it’s much harder to find something. And if you had to pick one place where the search is more difficult than any other, the Inner Belt of the asteroids is where you’d least like to be.
The key word is clutter. There are far too many natural bodies in orbit. The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size.
The data bases at the Institute keep dynamic track of every body of any size, down to ten meters across. The Fafner was much bigger than that, so it ought to have been picked up in our search. Recognize that it hadn’t been, and where does that leave you? You know there are countless millions of objects near where the missing ship ought to be, and you have no idea at all why your original search failed.
So we would fly out there and take a look for ourselves, and hope that our human brains could spot an anomaly able to fool the smartest computers in the Solar System.
How? I had no idea.
McAndrew did. “If it’s been blown apart to its component atoms,” he said, “we’ll never find it. But if it’s still in one piece, there’s a way that can’t fail.”
We were preparing to leave, and we were not using a ship with McAndrew’s balanced drive. Instead he had picked out an old touring pinnace with a one-gee acceleration limit. After my initial surprise I decided that I knew why (it would turn out later that I was wrong). McAndrew, it seemed to me, wanted time to think. He’d never admit it, but his pride was hurt. It was bad enough that somebody would come up with a basic idea that he had missed, in an area of theoretical physics where he had thought longer and harder than any person alive. That the somebody was his own father—the father who had run off and deserted him and his mother—was even worse.
As the Driscoll eased away from the institute, I compared travel times. Even the most minimal ship equipped with the balanced drive was capable of continuous forty-gee acceleration. With that performance, our destination would have been a mere seventeen hours, standing start to standing finish. On the other hand, at the leisurely half-gee best suited to the Driscoll’s engines, we faced a journey of close to a week.
All right for McAndrew, perhaps; he was sitting barefoot, staring vacantly at the cabin wall and cracking his finger and toe joints in a way that I always found infuriating. I knew from experience that he was likely to sit for days, eating his meals like a zombie and washing only at my insistence. Meanwhile, what was I supposed to do, here in a ship that flew itself?
I reviewed everything we had learned so far. Heinrich Grunewald’s paranoia had not ended when he left Mary McAndrew. The Fafner required a crew of three when it flew in cislunar space. Upon leaving that controlled region, Heinrich as soon as possible had the other two men ferried back to Earth station. He continued alone. His last recorded engine burn placed him in stable orbit in the middle of the Asteroid Belt. Any new engine burn would have been detected. None had been recorded. Any explosion in that location powerful enough to destroy a ship would have been seen. No instruments, on Earth or elsewhere, had seen such evidence.
The ship must be there. The ship was not there. I sat and wondered. Where’s Heinrich?
McAndrew emerged from his trance when we still had a full day of flight time ahead. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Or at least, part of it.”
“Well, isn’t that nice.” I should have known better. Sarcasm is wasted on the man. He smiled at me. I went on, “So you know how changing the strong force would allow somebody to do the things that your father claimed?”
He stopped smiling. “Och, I’ve always known that. It’s obvious.”
“Not to me it isn’t. I don’t suppose you’d consider explaining?”
“The strong force holds nuclei together. So suppose you could make it more powerful and act over a longer range, for an indefinitely long period. That would lead to stable compressed matter, and you’d be able to squeeze anything you like into a smaller space. If you used the strong force to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between protons, you’d also be on the road to easy proton-proton fusion at room temperature.
“Now suppose you work the other way round, and know how to weaken the strong force. Then nuclei will be less strongly bound, and a lot of naturally stable elements will become unstable. That gives you induced radioactivity.”
“But that’s everything.” It seemed to me he had covered everything on Heinrich Grunewald’s list. “Why do you say you only have part of it?”
“Because I slipped something in there at the beginning. I said, suppose you could modify the strong force for an indefinitely long period. That’s the killer, Jeanie. I can see a way to make changes, but they’d be unstable. Worse than that, they’d be unpredictable. You’d never know when the effect would reverse itself and things return to the way they were. And when I try to stabilize the situation over time, I need to assume the existence of isolated quarks. I might find a way around that when I give it a bit more of a think, but I still won’t know what went wrong. Something surely did. There must be a missing piece—some trivial point, some fact that I’ve overlooked…”
He was all set to drift off again. I said, loudly, “Mac, we’d be a lot closer to the something you’re missing if we knew how to find the Fafner. In another twenty-four hours we’ll be sitting out in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, wondering what to do next.”
He stared at me with those pale, vague eyes. “Why, I already know what we’ll do. Why do you think I wanted to take the Driscoll, instead of something with a balanced drive?”
“Because you wanted time to think.”
“Maybe. And I got that. But we’d have a problem if we’d used the balanced drive. The compressed matter plate on any of those ships masses trillions of tons.”
“That’s never given us any difficulty before.”
“Because we’ve never had this situation before. Think about it, Jeanie. If the Fafner’s still in one piece, what’s the one thing about itself it can’t hide?”
“Thermal signature?”
“That’s not a bad answer for a ship that’s alive. Anything with people on board has to generate and give off heat. But the Fafner’s more than likely dead, so there would be no thermal signal. A ship can be at the same temperature as its surroundings, or it can change its size and shape, or it can be coated with an absorbing layer so it’s hard to see. The one thing it still has, no matter what it does, is mass.”
When he spoke that one, final word I could see the rest for myself. We knew from the Fafner’s records the ship’s mass at the time of final engine burn: three hundred and thirty tons. Even if Grunewald had jettisoned material into space, the present value would not be far from that. If we were anywhere close to the ship we could locate it using our mass detector. The instrument was highly sensitive and it could be programmed to correct for every nearby object in the right size range. The trillion-ton mass of a compressed matter plate was something else. On a ship with a balanced drive, the plate’s effects would overwhelm the gravity field of everything in the neighborhood.
It’s my one big complaint with McAndrew. He assumes you understand what he understands. Even when you feel sure you know what goes on inside his head, you don’t. One of his colleagues told me that the difference between McAndrew and other people is that Mac knows how to think around corners. It’s probably true, but it doesn’t help much.
I wondered if he got that talent from his father. I had no idea what Heinrich Grunewald had been doing out here, or why he had disappeared thirty years ago from the face of the Solar System. I thought of Mary McAndrew’s words, “he was a wicked, obstinate, reckless man.” Cut out the wicked part, and you had McAndrew.
I can’t think around corners, but I have excellent instincts for danger. And I was feeling uneasy, more nervous than the situation seemed to justify.
We had arrived, exactly at the place where the Fafner was supposed to be. I cut the drive and used the visible wavelength sensors to scan through a full four-pi solid angle.
Did I see the ship? Of course not. You might say I already knew I wouldn’t, because if it had been there the scopes of the Penrose Institute would have found it before we ever left.
I pointed that out to McAndrew.
“Which is why we had to come out here and take a look for ourselves.” He seemed filled with secret glee, his normal reaction when facing a scientific mystery. “Je
anie, keep the drive off and the displays on, and let’s have a go with the mass detector.”
I took a last look at the screens. The optical sensors would find and highlight any unknown body that subtended more than a fiftieth of a second of arc. That meant I would see something as small as a tenth of a meter across, even if it were a hundred kilometers away.
The displays showed absolutely nothing. The Driscoll sat in the middle of a large volume of emptiness.
Convinced that we were wasting our time, I turned on the mass detector. Instantly, a loud buzz from the instrument made me start upright in my seat.
“There we are.” McAndrew clapped his hands in delight. “What do we show for mass and range?”
“Eighteen thousand tons,” I said. “So that’s not the Fafner, it’s far too massive. It’s at eighteen kilometers.” I took another look at the optical sensor outputs. “But Mac, there’s nothing there.”
“We’ll see. Take us that way—slowly.”
I did as he asked, but at one kilometer away from the invisible target I stopped the Driscoll. “No closer, Mac. That’s as near as we’re going.”
“But there’s no possible danger—”
“This ship has to take us home. If you want a closer look, we use suits.”
“Jeanie—”
“On a ship you can only have one captain.” When I feel a certain way I can be as obstinate as McAndrew.
He knows it, too. He scowled at me, but he didn’t argue. He went over and began to put on a suit. I locked the Driscoll to hold a fixed one-kilometer distance from whatever was exciting the mass detector, and went across to do the same.
Keeping an eye on McAndrew? Sure. But I had my own curiosity to satisfy. Why were the optical sensors and the mass detector at odds with each other?
He went a meter or two in front of me, heading for the place where the mass detector insisted that we would find an invisible eighteen-thousand ton object. The suit displays homed us in the location. McAndrew went slower and slower. He was using the light in his suit to illuminate the space ahead of him.
The Compleat McAndrew Page 34