The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  “We see things from only one box. Is that your point?”

  “Part of it. But I want to emphasize the symmetry. We have matter coming in from outside—from another box or another universe. And things can run both ways. If matter comes from there to here, it can just as likely go from here to there.”

  “Separate atoms and molecules.”

  “Sure. But maybe more. What we lose must be different from what we gain, or we’d see no entropy change. Maybe bigger things can go the other way. Like the pinnace.”

  “And Abdi.”

  “Right. And the problem is, we have no idea how much energy his arrival might trigger in the other universe.”

  “But we’re going to find out.”

  “I suppose we are. Unless you will let me go alone—”

  As I said, when he gets an idea in his head he never gives up. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to let him act on it.

  The hole in the universe was invisible, but McAndrew had plotted its boundary and knew exactly where it was. A hundred meters from the edge he halted and said over his suit radio, “Can you hear me?”

  “As clear as if you were sitting next to me on board the Hoatzin.” Which I wished was the case. I looked back at the ship, less than ten kilometers away. The central shaft and living-quarters were invisible, but the mass plate hung like a silver coin in space.

  “We stay close, Jeanie. We move forward together, and make sure we can still see and talk to each other.”

  We gripped gloved hands. Side by side we drifted toward the caesura, the nothing, the three-dimensional hole in the wall of the universe. I felt nothing, but without warning the darkness around me disappeared. I moved through a shimmer of light, multicolored and constantly changing. No longer in any place that I could recognize, I suspected I was between universes.

  The display of my inertial guidance system, designed to track position in three-dimensional space, suddenly went blank. It lit again after a few seconds, but its spatial coordinates had reset to zero values. At the same time, everything around me went dark. My suit radio filled with a roar of static.

  “Mac, where are we?” I hoped my voice was calmer than I was.

  “We made it through in one piece.” His voice was a near-unintelligible thread of sound, but I could hear the satisfaction. “So chances are that Abdi is all right. Hold on, and set your suit to roam. I’m going to try different frequencies.”

  Nothing happened for about thirty seconds. While I waited I realized that the space surrounding us was not completely dark. A faint, pearly radiance glimmered in from all directions. It was just enough to show the outline of my arm.

  “How about that? Better?” McAndrew’s voice was much clearer.

  “Lots better. I can hear you now. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Sure. We’ve arrived in a universe where the dominant radiation is at radio frequencies, probably generated by discrete sources. I picked the quietest region I could find and tuned us to it. Visible wavelengths seem to come from a general background. If there are stars, they are radio stars.”

  His words were distinct enough, but there was a curious background echo to them, as though everything was being repeated a fraction of a second later. I turned on my helmet light and directed its beam at McAndrew.

  There he was, clear and unmistakable, but faint shadow images of his suit marched away to left and right, above and below, diminishing ghostly arrays that shrank in size until they merged into the pearly background.

  “Mac, turn on your helmet light and point it at me.”

  Not one light appeared, but a whole constellation of them. They blinded me to anything beyond.

  I said, “What do you see?”

  “Same as you do, I imagine. I’m only guessing, mind, but I’d say this is a spacetime with a totally different structure. It’s built of discrete units on a macro scale, at least so far as optical properties are concerned. I want to try an experiment.” His hand released its hold on mine. “Stay right where you are, Jeanie.”

  I certainly wasn’t going anywhere. I kept my light focused on McAndrew’s suit, and watched uneasily as it receded from me. It was no more than fifty meters away when the structured array of images turned into a bland glow, little brighter than the background.

  “Mac, I’ve lost you. You’ve disappeared.”

  Not a word of reply, only the steady hiss of static. The urge to drive my suit toward the direction where I had last seen him was very strong. I fought it, hovering frozen in space. I could hear my pulse, loud in my ears. I counted the beats. Sixty—eighty—a hundred. On the hundred and twelfth beat, a suited figure popped back in sight, accompanied by its retinue of ghostly images.

  “I’m seeing you again, Jeanie,” Mac said. “And hearing you. Is it two-way?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s reassuring. I was afraid for a minute we might be in a spacetime with asymmetric affine connections, and no metric.”

  He reassured a lot easier than I did. But perhaps not, because his next words came in a voice more serious than I had ever heard before.

  “Here’s the problem, Jeanie, and I must admit it’s not one I’d ever anticipated. We need to find Abdi and the pinnace, but we seem to be stuck with a distance limit of fifty meters for any form of electromagnetic propagation. If the common region is the same size in the two universes, then we’re dealing with a space about three hundred kilometers across. That gives us a finite volume to search, which is good news. The bad news is the length of time it will take us if we’re stuck with traverses that are only a hundred meters wide. We’ll run out of air and fuel for our suit drives, long before we’re done.”

  “That would only be in the worst case, Mac. Don’t we expect Abdi to stay close to the place he came in?” Something had gone dreadfully awry, when I was the optimist and McAndrew the pessimist. “We have to look for him. What else can we do?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think for a minute.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. McAndrew’s “minute” for thinking could sometimes last for days. But after only a few moments he said, “You’ve spent more time with Abdi than I have. How smart is he?”

  “Very. But Mac, he’s just a kid.”

  “Aye. But children often think clearer than older people. They have fewer falsehoods cluttering up their brains. He’s sure to have looked outside the pinnace, and he’ll have made no more sense of that than we have. Less, because he doesn’t have the physics to let him interpret what he sees. So what does he do, Jeanie, assuming he’s bright and he’s logical?”

  I said slowly, “He knows he can’t rely on anything he sees outside the pinnace. So all he can rely on is—”

  “—what’s inside. He won’t learn anything from sensors that record external conditions. But the readouts that tell him his absolute position in inertial space should be working, because they’re working in our own suits. And mine reset to count from zero when we transferred here.”

  “So did mine. I saw it happen. But we’ve been drifting ever since.”

  “We have indeed. But we can reverse course and take ourselves back to zero position coordinates. That will place us on the edge of the region. Abdi insisted that he could fly the pinnace. Assume that he’s right, and that he’s smart. Then he can take himself back to zero coordinates, too. That will be where he entered this region.”

  “But Mac, we have no idea whereabouts he was on the edge when he did that. It could be a long way from where we came in.”

  “True enough. But it has to be on the boundary of the three-dimensional space. That changes the problem, replacing a three-dimensional search by a two-dimensional one. All we have to do is set up a systematic procedure to cover the boundary.”

  I knew he would already be working out a plan to search a spherical shell rather than the whole interior. In fact he apparently had one already, because he was zooming off in what seemed to me like an arbitrary direction. Without arguing, I followed McAndrew a
nd his attendant arrays of ghost images. Every wasted breath decreased Abdi’s chances.

  “Of course,” he said as we flew along through nothing, “our strategy for finding Abdi relies on there being a peak probability with respect to his intelligence.”

  He would philosophize at the gates of Hell, and I knew from experience that there was no point in trying to stop him.

  “If Abdi’s not smart enough,” he went on, “he’ll never think to go back to the origin of his inertial coordinates. On the other hand, if he is super-smart he will head back to and through that origin of coordinates, to take himself right through the transition zone and into the universe from which he came. For all we know, Abdi could be safely back on board the Hoatzin, wondering where we are. Maybe we should have taken a quick look there ourselves, before trying this search. Or maybe we had it right the first time, and only one of us should have come here while the other stayed behind in case Abdi returned.”

  Or maybe we should never have agreed to take a hyperactive eleven-year-old with us into the unknown.

  Before I could do more than frame that thought, all discussion of alternatives became academic. If time is Nature’s way of stopping everything from happening at once, it failed to fulfill its function. The digits on my suit’s inertial coordinate readout, which had been ticking steadily toward zero, became an unreadable blur. I felt an acceleration stronger than the suit was designed to provide. McAndrew said, “What the devil,” in a tone somewhere between excitement and astonishment; and in that same single moment, the pinnace sprang into view straight ahead. The hatch was open. Before I had time to think of aiming for it, I was through. McAndrew followed, to sprawl beside me on the deck. A split-second later the pinnace itself was darting off at high acceleration in a new direction. Everything around me became a dazzling whirl of rainbow hues.

  The colors faded and vanished at the same moment as the acceleration ceased. I was given no time to catch my breath. McAndrew grabbed hold of my arm. I saw Abdi on his other side, also being towed toward the still-open hatch.

  Toward, and through.

  We were outside the pinnace again. I recognized familiar star patterns, but had no chance to savor them. The Hoatzin was a few hundred meters away, and McAndrew was dragging all three of us single-mindedly toward it.

  “Mac!” It was both a question and a protest.

  He said one word: “Inside.” Then he was pushing us through the Hoatzin’s lock, cycling it at maximum speed before we had cleared the opening.

  As the lock filled with air I said, “What’s the hurry? We’re back in our own space, in our own ship. We’re safe.”

  “Aye. Now we are. But look.” He reached a gloved hand down to the waist of his suit, grabbed a handful of material, and pulled. The suit—made to withstand a pressure of up to fifty atmospheres, impervious to radiation, and tougher than the most hardened composites—ripped away to show McAndrew’s unzipped tunic and bare belly.

  I gripped the left arm of my own suit in my right hand and tugged. Half the sleeve ripped away like wet paper. If that had happened a few minutes earlier, while we floated in vacuum…

  “Abdi?” I said.

  “I’m—I’m—” His teeth were chattering. “I’m…”

  Either he was trying to tell me that he was alive, which I already knew; or that he was all right, which he certainly wasn’t. I stripped off my useless suit and helped him out of his. He was close to catatonic, nothing like the inquisitive and self-confident lad of yesterday.

  “When did you realize, Mac?” I gestured at the remnants of my suit, which had disintegrated as I removed it.

  “That they would soon be good for nothing?” His own tattered and discarded suit was on the floor and he was at the Hoatzin’s control panel. “Soon after we made the transition. My suit’s condition monitors suggested it was protecting me, but destroying itself in order to do it. The physical parameters of the neighboring universe may be close to our own, but they’re not close enough for long-term survival.”

  “And you didn’t mention that to me?”

  “What good would that do? Anyway, who was to say that the readings meant anything over there. I knew that the only way to make a test could be fatal. The only thought in my head was to find Abdi as fast as we could, and then get back here.”

  “And you did it. Mac, no one should ever suggest again that I’m needed on your expeditions to get you out of trouble. This proves it. I couldn’t have saved us. And I still don’t understand how you did it.”

  He had finished work at the controls and the Hoatzin was turning in space, aligning us so that we were set to accelerate back toward Sol. With the rotation completed but the drive still turned off, he swiveled his chair to face me.

  “If I thought for a minute I could get away with that line back at the Institute, Jeanie, I might give it a try. But you know me. I’m the System’s most incompetent liar. I didn’t find Abdi and the pinnace. I didn’t bring us out through the transition zone to our own universe. I didn’t save us. You saw the way that your own suit accelerated. How did you imagine I could make that happen, when I wasn’t even touching you?”

  If McAndrew was the System’s worst liar, sometimes I think I’m the slowest person in the System to catch on. “If you didn’t,” I said. “And I certainly didn’t…”

  I turned to stare at Abdi, who had not moved a millimeter.

  McAndrew said, “No. Of course not.”

  “Then…”

  “Not me, you, or Abdi. We didn’t save ourselves. Somebody knew we were in trouble, and they gave us a hand.”

  “Then there’s life in the other universe? More than life. Intelligence.”

  “It looks that way.” McAndrew initiated the drive. There was no feeling of acceleration, but the living capsule began edging along the axle toward the mass plate. We were on the way home. “I’m wondering if they will believe that there’s intelligence in our universe, given the way we blundered in. We have to return there.”

  He wasn’t looking at me, but he must have sensed my instinctive shake of the head. He went on, “We have to, Jeanie. First contact, and already we owe them. We have to go there again—if only to seek a chance to pay them back.”

  There’s something about youth. I don’t know quite what it is. I only know I don’t have it any more.

  On the fifth day of our return journey to Sol, I was watching Abdi dissect a fragment of the helmet of his ruined suit. He had said not a word regarding his experiences in the neighboring universe, and when I asked him about it he told me he didn’t remember anything that had happened. He didn’t feel that he had nearly been killed, because at eleven the whole concept of mortality is alien. He seemed his old self again.

  Or maybe not quite his old self. I saw a caution that had not been there before, a new look-before-you-leap deliberateness in Abdi’s actions. And he was making notes, something he had never done. Fazool el-Fazool had said he hoped that a trip with McAndrew would be a broadening experience for his son. Against all the odds, it seemed to have worked out that way.

  And McAndrew himself? Well, Abdi may have learned, but Mac certainly hadn’t. He couldn’t wait to get back to the Institute, where he planned to organize and outfit a new expedition better prepared for the unknowns of the other side.

  He didn’t want to hear me play the role of Cassandra, telling him how close he had come to being killed, warning him how next time he might not be so lucky. He wanted to talk to Limperis about his ideas, and he spent most of the return trip sitting impatiently at the communications console.

  Of course, the general cussedness of Nature guaranteed that when the first faint carrier signal reached us from the Institute, McAndrew would be taking a food break and I would be at the communications console.

  “Can you hear me?” I said. “This is the Hoatzin. We are on our way home, and heading straight to the Institute.” At our range it was audio only, and I waited patiently through the round-trip signal delay.

 
; “We are receiving you.” The operator’s voice was weakened and distorted by extreme distance. “Do you need help?”

  “No. We’ve had difficulties, but we’re safe now.” Then my brain caught up with my mouth. We had not been in touch with the Institute since we left. The communications equipment was in perfect working condition. How did they know we had been in trouble? “What makes you think we might have problems?”

  “Well, the flight plan that you filed shows an outward travel time of sixteen days, and a return travel time almost exactly the same. But you’ve only been gone for twelve days.”

  McAndrew had come back to stand behind me after the first exchange. He was holding a huge sandwich and his mouth was crammed too full to speak, but while I sat and gawped at the console, he slapped his knee. As soon as he could swallow, he spluttered, “I knew it! Or I would have known it when I sat down to make drive settings, if only I’d had the sense to believe the evidence of my own eyes!”

  “Mac, in normal speech, please. Not just your idea of normal speech, either—use the sort of language that I can understand.”

  “In a minute, Jeanie.” He leaned over me and said into the console microphone, “Everything here is just fine, and we have results more exciting than you can ever imagine. Contact Professor Limperis. Ask him to organize a conference for senior Institute staff the minute that the Hoatzin docks. And tell everybody that they’ll want to be there.”

  He turned to me, beaming.

  “Mac, I thought we didn’t have anything—unless you count nearly getting killed.”

  “Och, that was nothing.” He dismissed the near miss with death with a wave of his hand. “We found a new universe, with intelligence in it—friendly intelligence, by the look of it, because they saved us. What more could you ask? But there’s more, a whole lot more. Look at that control panel, and tell me what you see.”

  Since there were about four hundred separate readouts and dials, I saw far more than I could take in. I said, “How about a hint?”

  “Start with the chronometer. You can end there, too.”