Was this scraggy unwashed specimen of humanity also my longtime companion and the father of my child, the man to whom I had been faithful (mostly) for over twenty years? Apparently it was. McAndrew is not the only one who needs to have his head examined.
“Jeanie.” He greeted me with the vague pleasure of a man reacting to an Institute minion who has brought him an unexpected cup of tea.
“All right, that’s enough.” I have my limits. “Arthur Morton McAndrew, I traveled four hundred and eighty million kilometers to see you. Either you give me a proper hello, or you’re a dead man.”
That got through. Mac stood up and enfolded me in an awkward embrace. Twenty years of hard work was paying off. With luck, in twenty more he might start acting close to human.
I plunged right in, because on my trip to the Institute it had occurred to me that young Fazool, rather than McAndrew, might well be Limperis’s biggest source of worry. An unsuccessful expedition was one thing. An unsuccessful expedition that killed off a child of the super-rich was quite another. Rich men tend to have powerful friends, and that could hurt the Institute—Limperis’s baby.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked.
McAndrew frowned at me. “Who?”
I said slowly, “Mac, I am not here to play games. I am referring to Abdi el-Fazool, the son of Fazool el-Fazool. Where is he?”
“Ah. He’s not here yet. He’s flying in on a private vessel, right behind yours. Be here within the hour.”
“And you agreed with his father that you would take him with you?”
“Well, yes. I did do that.”
“I assume he doesn’t have two seconds of space experience?”
“Actually, you’re right. He doesn’t.”
Mac was being a clam. I might have to wait until we were heading out, when with a more intimate environment I could wheedle anything out of the man. I changed tack.
“This expedition of yours. How many people will be going on it, and what roles will they play?”
“Ah. That’s a very good question. There’s me and you, of course.”
“Me?” I should have known what was coming from the minute that Limperis sat down with me at the dinner table, but now I had absolute proof.
“Sure. I don’t know why, but approval for the use of the ship—it’s going to be the Hoatzin, because we’ll need something with the balanced drive—was conditional upon you coming as well. Didn’t Limperis tell you that?”
“He did not.”
“I guess he overlooked it.”
“I guess he must have.” Trying to explain certain aspects of reality to McAndrew is a waste of time. “Who else is going?”
“Well, we don’t have much extra capacity, because the Hoatzin has to take along a lot of special equipment including a space pinnace designed to withstand high accelerations. The only other person will be young Abdi.”
“That’s it? Me, you, and Abdi el-Fazool?”
“That’s it.”
I felt the worry-knot in my stomach loosen. In many ways McAndrew is like an eleven-year-old himself, and I’ve dealt with him for long enough. If I couldn’t handle two of them, I deserved whatever was coming.
“Can we go along and meet Abdi’s ship when it docks? I’d like you to introduce me.”
“We can go to where he’ll be docking. But I can’t introduce you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never met him.”
“Mac, he’s the son of your mother’s friend.”
“He is that. The son by another woman, and he lives with her. But we’ll go meet him.”
“Might you consider dressing first?”
He glanced down at himself, and seemed surprised by what he saw. “Oh, aye. I suppose I could use a bit of a wash and brush up.”
“And a shirt, and a pair of trousers. Maybe shoes.”
“Right. Give me a couple of minutes.”
As he washed and dressed I learned what Mac knew about Abdi. It was not encouraging. The information came from Mac’s mother, whose information came from Fazool el-Fazool, who apparently spent almost no time with his son. Chain those together, add distortion or misinterpretation at each link, and our knowledge of Abdi el-Fazool consisted of three items: he was male; he was eleven; and he had recently been expelled, for reasons unknown, from the most expensive school on Earth.
Given McAndrew’s reference to a private vessel, I expected that Abdi el-Fazool would arrive aboard some expensive space yacht. However, the ship that floated in to dock at the Institute was a tired-looking charter vessel. The umbilical between the ship and the Institute’s airlock established itself, it seemed to me, unusually quickly.
The lock began to open. As it did so a brown-skinned boy, small for eleven years and with short hair and dark-brown eyes, popped through the half-open hatch. He wore a red shirt and short tan pants, and carried a knapsack on his back. Almost before he was inside he was glancing about him, as though taking in everything with one rapid sweep. A crewman followed, more slowly, and fixed a dull eye on McAndrew.
“Arthur Morton McAndrew?”
“That’s me.”
The crewman nodded and sighed heavily. “Abdi el-Fazool, delivered according to contract. All yours, and welcome to him.”
He thrust a yellow sheet into McAndrew’s hand, backed away into the umbilical, and had the hatch closing before McAndrew and I had time to speak.
Abdi looked up at Mac. “I could have flown that ship, you know, but he wouldn’t let me try. He kept throwing me out of the control room.” Then, without a pause, “My father says that you are the greatest scientist in the solar system but he’s wrong about a lot of things. And you”—those alert brown eyes turned to me—“you must be Captain Jeanie Roker. You don’t look like a spaceship captain. My father says that you’re McAndrew’s keeper. Is that true?”
“I—”
“Did you once take a circus troupe out to the prison colony on Titan, and the prisoners and circus performers got all mixed up with each other, and it was a horrible mess? It must have been really neat.”
“That’s one word for it.” I glanced at McAndrew. He had the dropped-jaw half-wit expression that often said he was deep in thought. This time, I didn’t think so.
“Abdi,” I said, “if you like we can give you a tour of the Institute. We’ll show you where you’ll be staying until the expedition is ready to leave.”
“No need for that. On the way here, I downloaded complete plans of the Institute. To get to my room you go that way.” He pointed up and to the left. “Before I go there, though, I want to have a good look round this place.”
“If you would like someone to come with you—”
“No. More fun if I find things out for myself. Maybe I’ll see you at dinner.”
And he was gone.
I glared at McAndrew. No one would call him a man sensitive to nuances, but apparently he read something in my look.
“Jeanie,” he said anxiously, “this expedition is going to cost an awful lot of money, and Abdi is the key to getting it. If we don’t take him along, his father won’t come up with two cents. Fazool isn’t much interested in science.”
“If you want my opinion, Fazool is much interested in having his son out of the way while they try to find another school that’s fool enough to take him.”
I was wasting my breath. McAndrew went right on, “But with Fazool’s support we can fly the Hoatzin out beyond the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt and the Kernel Ring. Without that support—and that means taking Abdi along—I don’t have a prayer.”
“I suppose you have a good reason to want to be out beyond the Kernel Ring? It’s not a place I’d choose for a vacation.”
He stared at me. Finally he decided that I was joking about the vacation part, and said, “Don’t you want to know what’s out there, Jeanie?”
“Mostly nothing, I thought.”
“Aye, mostly nothing. But something strange, too. We seem to have discovered a region that’s
locally negentropic—a place with negative entropy. That’s why we have to go out there, to make sure it’s what it seems to be.”
I didn’t scream, though I rather felt like it. If you want to pick one word in science that makes me uncomfortable, “entropy” will do fine. I have degrees in gravitational engineering and electrical engineering, and I know all the thermodynamic and information theory formulas. But still I don’t have a satisfying feel for what entropy means.
The glare that I gave McAndrew would have melted lead. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but haven’t you often told me that the whole of life is negentropic? It builds up from a state of disorder, to one with a high degree of organization and order.”
“Quite right.”
“So aren’t you, and I, and everyone at the Institute, and every living thing, negentropic by definition? We decrease entropy, because we turn disorder into order.”
“Aye. We are. But surely you understand how that’s possible?” And, at my shake of the head, “Och!”—the strongest trace I could find in him of his Scots ancestry, other than an unyielding obstinacy. “Jeanie, entropy can decrease locally, of course it can. Don’t you remember the laws of thermodynamics?”
“I thought I did. Law Number One: energy is conserved. Law Number Two: in any closed system, energy always must proceed from an organized to a less organized form. In other words, entropy, which is a measure of the degree of disorganization of energy, must always increase.”
“There! You said it yourself. Just what I was saying.”
“I did? It seems to me I said the exact opposite.” As usual in a technical conversation with McAndrew, my head was beginning to spin and I was convinced that I would come out knowing less than when I went in. “Mac, I said that entropy must always increase.”
“In a closed system, Jeanie. You said that. In a closed system. You and me, we don’t live in a closed system. We get energy from outside—from the Sun, from power kernels, from radioactivity.”
“So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is wrong?”
“No!” McAndrew sounded horrified. “The Second Law of Thermodynamics, wrong? Never. It’s the most important and best-established law we know. In physics, it’s THE LAW. Do you know what Eddington said?”
“No.” I had the feeling I was about to find out.
“He said.” McAndrew paused, and his eyes went vacant. It’s one of life’s mysteries that a man who has trouble remembering what he ate for lunch can recall, verbatim, whole pages of text and thousands of formulae that he has not seen for thirty years. “Eddington said: ‘The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.’” McAndrew came back to life. “Jeanie, the second law of thermodynamics isn’t just a law of physics. It’s the law.”
“So it can’t be violated. This place you want to go, out beyond the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt; is it receiving a flux of energy from somewhere outside, the way the rest of the solar system does from the Sun?”
“No.”
“Is there a power kernel nearby, or radioactive materials?”
“Not a sign of either.”
“Then, according to what you yourself just said, it can’t be a region of negative entropy. Otherwise the second law of thermodynamics would be violated.”
“You might think so.”
“But you have some other explanation?”
“Aye. I think I do.” His face took on a furtive and secretive expression. I’d seen it many times before, and I wasn’t sure how much more I would get out of him today. He didn’t like to talk about his ideas when they were “half-cooked,” as he put it.
I took the initiative. “This place you want to go. How far away is it?”
“It’s local, well within the Sun’s gravitational sphere of influence. About a twentieth of a light-year—the Hoatzin will take us there comfortably in sixteen days of shipboard time.”
“And there’s a source of energy there, right? Energy coming in from nowhere?” I took a jump in the dark based on what Limperis and McAndrew had told me. “It’s as though there’s a hole in the universe.”
“More matter than energy, though of course the two are exactly equivalent. But then, you’d expect—” He stopped and stared at me. “A hole. How did you know that?”
“From Limperis. He’s as excited about this as you are.” I wasn’t making the last part up. You couldn’t read Limperis from his facial expressions, but it was a safe bet that he—along with all the Institute scientists—couldn’t wait to send an expedition to learn what was going on.
To guarantee funding for a trip to a hole in the universe, they would agree for Abdi el-Fazool to be taken anywhere, at any time. In fact, if Fazool el-Fazool had made it a funding condition that his son had to be chopped up on arrival and baked in a pie, I would not take bets on the Institute’s dinner menu.
During the next few days I concluded that my worries had been excessive. We saw Abdi only at mealtimes, and then it was for the few minutes that it took him to wolf down his food and run.
Also, the preparations for our outward flight proceeded at magical speed. Instruments that we needed were produced within an hour of my request. Equipment tests were done in record time, and ship’s supplies seemed to appear almost before we asked for them. In my innocence, I patted myself on the back for my clearly defined and timely requests.
I learned the truth on the day before our scheduled departure. Early that morning, Ulf Wenig and Emma Gowers paid me a visit. Wenig is the master of compressed matter stability, while Emma Gowers is the system’s top expert on multiple kernel arrays. More relevant today than their impressive talents was their appearance. Wenig is small and slight, with a luxuriant and well-groomed black mustache. He is rather vain about his looks, and always well turned out. Emma Gowers dresses like a whore, but a high-class whore, with never a hair or a stocking seam out of place.
This morning a rat had apparently been chewing on Wenig’s moustache. His face was pale. His eyes, like Emma Gowers’s, were bloodshot. She wore thick and patchy makeup, which, together with an ill-matched pink blouse and dark-green striped skirt, was enough to turn her into a clown. I considered, and rejected, the notion that the two had spent the night engaged in some novel and physically demanding form of vice.
“Captain Roker,” Wenig said. “We understand that the Hoatzin will depart tomorrow. However, we have heard that the ship is already fully equipped and tested. We are here to make a formal request. We would like you to advance your time of departure, and leave today.”
“Dr. Wenig, you know I can’t do that. There have to be final inspections.”
“We know. The parties responsible for those inspections have all agreed to perform them today.”
“But why? What’s the rush?”
“Abdi el-Fazool, that’s what the rush is.”
“Why? What has he done?”
“What has he done?” Wenig’s voice rose about two octaves. “You’re asking me, what has he done?”
“Steady, Ulf.” Emma Gowers took over. “You ought to ask, what hasn’t he done. My latest experiment, in which I use a linear array of kernels to reproduce results of classical diffraction: it’s ruined, because that little bugger left a dead frog in the middle of the optical bench and nobody knew it was there until too late. It’s not just the two of us, Captain Roker. Everybody at the Institute wants him gone. He’s been into everything. It’s not that we don’t like kids—though right now, I’ll admit that I hate the guts of anyone who’s eleven years old.”
“That boy is a Child of Sata
n!” Seeming to realize that this statement called for justification, Wenig rushed on, “Two years of work, wasted! Because Abdi el-Fazool wondered what would happen if you turned off a compressed-matter field. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed.”
“We are unlucky that he wasn’t killed.” Emma Gowers ran her hands through her blond curls, adding to her raddled look. “Please, Jeanie, in the name of sanity and for everyone’s sake, get that boy out of here.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
And I would; though it did occur to me that removing Abdi el-Fazool from the Institute would do nothing for me or McAndrew. We were going to be stuck with him in the confined quarters of the Hoatzin for a sixteen-day outward trip; and, unless we were driven to execute him and dispose of the body, Abdi would also be with us during the sixteen-day return.
I’ve flown the Hoatzin and the sister ships that use the McAndrew balanced drive so often that they no longer appear strange to me. Others, seeing one of the vessels for the first time, usually do a double-take. Abdi was no exception.
“That thing?” he said. “We’re supposed to fly in that? Where are the crew’s quarters?”
I could see his point. The object we were drifting toward was nothing like a conventional passenger or cargo ship. From a distance, all you could see was a flat plate like a big solid wheel, with a long axle protruding up from its center.
“Look closely,” I said. “See that thing like a little round bubble out near the far end of the axle shaft? That’s the living quarters—all the living quarters,”
From the blank look on Abdi’s face I realized that I would have to go through the explanation of the way the ship worked. The disk was a hundred meters across, made of compressed matter and stabilized electromagnetically. It was not much more than a meter thick, but with a density of fifteen hundred tons per cubic centimeter the gravitational pull on nearby objects was formidable. A person sitting at the middle of the disk when the ship was at rest would feel a force of more than a hundred gees, enough to flatten any human. However, gravity as a force falls off rapidly with distance. A few hundred meters away, along the axis of the disk, the pull of the disk would be only one gee—a comfortable environment for the crew, sitting in the cramped sphere that constitutes the living quarters.
The Compleat McAndrew Page 41