The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  Finally he paused, and said, “There you have it!”

  “There you have what?” I, only a meter behind him, saw nothing at all.

  “The body—the eighteen-thousand ton body—that Heinrich used to test his strong force modifier. If he compressed it down to three billion tons per cubic centimeter, the radius would be a fraction of a millimeter—just about right.”

  Finally, I saw a mote of reflected light. When I moved my head within the suit helmet, I realized that the object was tiny and just a few feet in front of us.

  “That thing?” I said. “That’s what the mass detector picked up?”

  “Of course. What I expected, and what I hoped we’d find.”

  He reached out with his gloved left hand. Before I could stop him he gripped the tiny particle between his thumb and forefinger. “As you’d expect,” he said. “It’s tiny, but it should have all the inertia of the original body. Let’s see.”

  I saw him pull, but all that did was move his position. “Doesn’t budge,” he said. And then, in a different tone, “This is the damnedest thing. Jeanie, I can’t let go. My finger and thumb won’t come apart—and they hurt.”

  He was wearing a tough, insulated suit. Cold or heat could not get through it, nor could radiation. If the suit had somehow developed a hole at finger or thumb, air would be jetting out into space. I saw no tell-tale sign of chilled vapor.

  McAndrew turned on his suit jets. It changed his body position only by the length of his own outstretched arm. He was stuck, locked in place by an invisible mote.

  I heard his grunt of pain and effort. Suddenly I imagined his father, floating outside the Fafner and with no one to help him, reaching out to touch the mote of compressed matter and held as McAndrew was held.

  I still had no idea what was going on, so my next actions were pure instinct. I said, “Grit your teeth, Mac, this is going to hurt worse than it hurts already,” and I took a metal shearing tool from the belt of my suit. Before McAndrew could do anything about it I moved to his suit and severed the top joint of his thumb and first finger.

  He cried out in pain as a foam of blood and air spurted from his suit glove. In less than a second the suit sensors reacted and tightened a seal on the fingers. I used the thrusters on my own suit to pull us away toward the Driscoll. As we backed up I saw the first joints of the finger and thumb, still firmly attached to each other. In my over-stimulated condition they seemed to be moving closer to each other and shrinking at the ends.

  McAndrew’s suit had decided that he would be better off with a shot of anesthetic. He was still conscious when I hauled us both through the air lock of the Driscoll and peeled off our suits. I put him on a bunk and anxiously examined his left hand.

  “How is it, Jeanie?” he said. The painkillers left him rational and quite calm.

  “Not too bad. The cuts are clean. But there’s no way to regrow the joints before we’re back home.”

  “I’ll manage,” he said. “My own fault. That’s what you get when you don’t think before you act.”

  “We’ll be home in less than a week.” I was already at the controls of the Driscoll. “I’ll keep you as comfortable as I can until we get there.”

  “Hey, we can’t leave.” He had been lying down, but now he sat suddenly upright. “Not without what we found.”

  “We’re certainly not leaving with it. That thing, whatever it is, is lethal.”

  “It isn’t, unless you were as careless as I was. Look, I’ll tell you what happened. Then see what you think.”

  I paused in setting up our flight home. I looked at the mass detector readings, and confirmed that we were still a full kilometer away from the particle of compressed matter.

  “Five minutes to persuade me,” I said.

  “It won’t take that long. But you’ll have to take my word on the numbers.”

  “I’ll give you that much.” When it comes to calculations, McAndrew doesn’t know how to make mistakes.

  “All right.” He lay down again on the bunk and stared up at nothing. “You take a natural body, floating around here in the Asteroid Belt. You go to it, and you place in position there a piece of equipment that locally increases the strong force. Then you turn on the equipment—remotely, from a safe distance. The increase in the strong force makes the body collapse, until it has a density of three billion tons per cubic centimeter. That’s what he claimed he could do, so let’s believe him. If the body you started out with massed eighteen thousand tons, the one you end up with will be minute. About a quarter of a millimeter across.”

  “I didn’t have any numbers,” I said, “but I finally guessed that something like that had to be going on. It’s the only way we’d have a strong signal from the mass detector, and not see anything. But you couldn’t escape when you took hold of it, and the pain you felt—”

  “My own fault entirely. I didn’t do the other half of the calculation. Gravity’s the weakest force in the Universe, but it follows an inverse square law. Take a mass of eighteen thousand tons, and squeeze it down into a quarter millimeter sphere. What’s the gravity at the surface?”

  That sounded like a rhetorical question. I waited.

  “The field at the surface of the sphere is thousands of gees.” He held up his damaged hand. “And I was fool enough to grab hold. I couldn’t get my fingers free. Not only that—the field pulled in anything close enough. The material of my glove, then the tips of my finger and thumb. I could feel the blood sucking out.”

  “But I didn’t notice a thing,” I protested.

  “No more you would. The inverse square law got me, but it saved you. Ten centimeters away from the sphere, the pull is down to a hundredth of a gee—not enough to feel. But close up…good thing you were there to cut me away, or I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  I did. I could see it with awful clarity. The same thing would have happened to McAndrew as had happened to Heinrich Grunewald. Held by the tiny ball of compressed matter, unable to move back to the Fafner because of the immense eighteen-thousand ton inertia. Except that at the time it had been not quite eighteen thousand tons. The ball, slowly and inexorably, would have consumed Heinrich, drawing his body little by little into itself. And then, over a much longer time frame, the Fafner must have suffered the same fate. The gentle force of gravity would have tugged it gradually toward the speck of condensed matter, closer and close until there was finally physical contact. From that moment the Fafner was doomed, just as McAndrew’s father had been doomed. As McAndrew himself, without my intervention…

  I realized that he was speaking again. “But now we know what happened,” he was saying in an unnaturally cheerful voice, “there’s no danger at all. We’ll bring the compressed matter on board, contain it electromagnetically, and take it back with us to the Institute.”

  “Not on this ship you won’t.” The most brilliant mind in the System, but sometimes you wonder if he’s capable of learning anything. Maybe I ought to be charitable and blame the anesthetic. He was starting to sound decidedly woozy. I went on, “Didn’t you tell me, just an hour or two ago, that the compressed matter might be unstable—it could revert unexpectedly to its original condition? Suppose that happened on the way back. Do you want to share your living quarters with an eighteen thousand ton lump of rock?”

  “Ah, but I think I see a way around that. If we build the right piece of equipment—”

  “You mean when you’ve built the right piece of equipment. After that’s done, and it’s been thoroughly tested, and you know it works in every case and there’s no danger of compressed matter instability, then if you like we’ll come back out here and collect your finger and thumb.”

  I wasn’t worried about his finger and thumb, but I didn’t want to say what was really in my mind. Then maybe we’ll be able to give your father a decent burial.

  Ignoring McAndrew, I set the final coordinates for home and turned on the drive. The Mighty Mote we were leaving behind was not going to run away. Heinric
h Grunewald, in his strangest of sarcophagi, would still be waiting if and when we came back.

  When Mary McAndrew left the Penrose Institute for the first time I would have bet good money that she would never return. Scientists like Plimpton and Monty Siclaro were all right for diversion, an occasional snack as it were, but not for her regular diet.

  I would have lost. Mary showed up, one year to the day after her first visit, for the formal ceremony in which an award was made, posthumously, to Heinrich Grunewald for his part in the development of the Grunewald-McAndrew formalism for the modified strong interaction.

  McAndrew had insisted that the names be listed in that order. He said that his own contribution, allowing a generator to amplify the strong field externally so that the equipment itself would not be destroyed, was minor. All the major insights for the theory had been provided by the late Heinrich Grunewald.

  Mary sat quietly through the ceremony, though I don’t think it had most of her attention. She looked very serious and smiled only once, when McAndrew held up Heinrich Grunewald’s medal and citation for the visiting media to see. Her dress also seemed odd for the occasion. She wore a long black dress, with a single pearl pinned at the left shoulder. She looked stunning, but she seemed indifferent to the ogling male and female eyes of the media representatives.

  After the ceremony was over McAndrew to his disgust had to submit to questions and an interview—Institute Director Rumford was not willing to give up such a wonderful opportunity for favorable publicity. As McAndrew left, Mary came over to me.

  She got right down to the point. “Do you think you could show me Heinrich’s remains? I want to pay my respects, but Artie refuses. He doesn’t seem to like the idea, even though it’s his own father.”

  “I have to agree with him, I don’t think it’s wise.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…”

  “Look, I heard that Heinrich had some sort of accident, and was squashed real bad. But I’m a grown woman, I won’t turn hysterical on you or anything.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. On the other hand, it sounded unreasonable to refuse anyone’s request to see the remains of a loved one when a team from the Institute had trailed all the way out to the Asteroid Belt to recover the compressed matter asteroid, and as an incidental had brought back the Fafner plus Heinrich Grunewald and a couple of bits of McAndrew’s fingers.

  “Come on,” I said.

  I led the way from the auditorium, out along a rarely-used corridor to an annex far removed from the main body of the Institute, and into a small chamber. The Mighty Mote sat in the middle of it, magnetically suspended to prevent it coming anywhere near other matter. A sphere of glass, three feet across, surrounded the exhibit to provide added security.

  Mary advanced and stared in through the curved window.

  “Where is he?” She turned to me in bewilderment. “You don’t understand. I wanted to see Heinrich, no matter how bad he was mashed up in the accident. I don’t see anything in there at all.”

  She had just sat through a series of explanations, especially simplified for the media, about the significance of the work done by Grunewald and McAndrew. The emphasis had been on the inexpensive creation of compressed matter and the successful recovery of the prototype experiment on strong force enhancement. Apparently Mary had understood not a word.

  I intensified the light level and adjusted the angle of the beam, so that the speck of compressed matter appeared as a tiny bright-blue spark.

  “There,” I said, “is Heinrich Grunewald.”

  “That?” Mary stepped close to the window.

  “That.” I resisted the urge to add, And most of what you see isn’t even him. He’s squeezed in there along with the Fafner and eighteen thousand tons of rock.

  “Oh dear.” Mary pressed her nose to the glass. “That little fly-speck of stuff? Heinrich wouldn’t be pleased at all, not with him always going on about size—though I told him, over and over, it’s what you do with it that counts. Is there any way of bringing him back the way he used to be?”

  “McAndrew’s working on it. He has ideas, but it’s too soon to say if they’ll work. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I don’t have that much to remember Heinrich by, and they don’t look like they’re doing anything for him up here. And it’s terribly lonely in this little room. So I was wondering, I don’t suppose I could take the whole thing down to Earth with me, could I, and look after him there?”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. What you’re looking at is small, but it’s enormously dense. That little sphere with Heinrich’s remains weighs—” I caught myself in time. She’d wonder about eighteen thousand tons. I finished “—a lot more than you’d think. There would be no way to stop it sinking right down to the center of the planet.”

  “Oh dear. Then, no. I’m sure Heinrich would like it there even less than being up here.” She turned away. “They should have left him out where he was, among the stars. He’d have preferred that. I’m going to say goodbye to Artie, and then I’m leaving.”

  I trailed along behind, waited while she had a private few minutes with McAndrew, and the three of us went along to the loading dock. She waved, and was gone.

  Next day I was gone, too, on a routine delivery of a kernel assembly to Umbriel. I was away for a month. On the way back I dropped by the Institute, now free-orbiting beyond the Moon.

  McAndrew was in his office. It was as crowded and cluttered as ever, with one important difference. Over in a clear corner sat a three-foot ball of glass. Within it sat the grain of compressed matter, and alongside that blue speck stood a small hologram of a smiling Mary McAndrew.

  “Mac! I thought you told me the compressed matter was unstable. If it changes back to its original form—”

  “It won’t.” The buds of his finger and thumb joints were already growing nicely. “I worked all that out when you left. It will stay like that as long as we want it to.”

  “And you moved it in here.”

  “Well, yes. My mother didn’t seem to like him being off by himself. I thought the two of them ought to be together.”

  “Does she know about this?”

  He looked surprised. “Why, no. Or if she does, I didn’t tell her.”

  But I did. After McAndrew and I had agreed to meet for dinner and a long catch-up evening, I left him and placed a call to Mary McAndrew. I tracked her down in Cap d’Antibes, at one of Fazool’s mansions.

  She listened in silence while I told her about the glass sphere and the hologram in McAndrew’s office. Then she said, “I still miss him, you know. Look after him, won’t you.”

  She had mixed two different hims in one sentence, but I had no trouble sorting them out. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you know your son.”

  “I do indeed. Just like his father. Come and see me, Jeanie. Fazool won’t mind. You and Artie both.”

  “I will.”

  “In fact, Fazool will probably make a pass at you.”

  “I can stand that.”

  “I hope Artie can. Goodbye, Jeanie. Look after him, and give him my love.”

  “I will. Goodbye, Mary.”

  We hung up. Look after him. I’d spent twenty years trying to look after McAndrew and it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.

  I went to find the man to tell him that I had spoken with his mother and we needed to plan another visit to her.

  McAndrew thinks he understands what the strong force is in the universe, and I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with him. But Mary McAndrew and I, we know better.

  APPENDIX:

  Science & Science Fiction

  Writers, readers and critics of science fiction often seem unable to produce a workable definition of the field, but one of the things they usually agree on is the existence of a particular branch that is usually termed “hard” science fiction. People who like this branch will tell you it is the only subdivision that justifies the word science, and that everything else is si
mple fantasy; and they will use words like “authentic,” “scientifically accurate,” “extrapolative,” and “inventive” to describe it. People who don’t like it say it is dull and bland, and use words like “characterless,” “mechanical,” “gadgetry,” or “rockets and rayguns” to describe it. Some people can’t stand hard SF, others will read nothing else.

  Hard science fiction can be defined in several different ways. My favorite definition is an operational one: if you can take the science and scientific speculation away from a story, and not do it serious injury, then it was not hard SF to begin with. Here is another definition that I like rather less well: in a hard SF story, the scientific techniques of observation, analysis, logical theory, and experimental test must be applied, no matter where or when the story takes place. My problem with this definition is that it would classify many mystery and fantasy stories as hard science fiction.

  Whatever the exact definition, there is usually little difficulty deciding whether a particular story is “hard” or “soft” science fiction. And although a writer never knows quite what he or she has written, and readers often pull things out of a story that were never consciously put in, I certainly think of the book you are holding as probably the hardest SF that I write. Each story revolves around some element of science, and without that element the story would collapse. If the stories reflect any common theme, it is my own interest in science, particularly astronomy and physics. Because of this, and because the science is what I have elsewhere termed “borderland science” (Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like A Scientist and Write Science Fiction; Baen Books, 1999), I feel a responsibility to the reader. It is one that derives from my own early experiences with science fiction.

  I discovered the field for myself as a teenager (as did almost everyone else I knew—in school we were tormented with Wordsworth and Bunyan, while Clarke and Heinlein had to be private after-school pleasures). Knowing at the time a negligible amount of real science, I swallowed whole and then regurgitated to my friends everything presented as science in the SF magazines. That quickly built me a reputation as a person stuffed with facts and theories—many of them wrong and some of them decidedly weird. The writers didn’t bother to distinguish the scientific theories that they borrowed, from the often peculiarly unscientific theories that they made up for the story. Neither did I.