The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  “But what about Manna’s movement in its orbit while we’re on the way there? You’ve ignored that as well.”

  “For two reasons. First, Manna is so far out that it’s not moving very fast in its orbit—only half a kilometer a second. More important, we don’t know how far Lanhoff’s team went in processing Manna. Is the body in its original orbit, or did they start it moving in toward the Sun?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Nor have I. The only thing we can do is fly out there and find out.”

  I looked at the clock. Time to get moving. “Better say your goodbyes,” I went on. “There’ll be plenty of chances for us to talk to each other in the next couple of weeks. Probably too many. Two hours from now we’ll be on our way. Then we’ll be deaf to outside signals until we’re out in the Halo and turn off the drive.”

  “Is that so?” He looked intrigued. “But what about orders that come—”

  “Bayes.” Anna Griss was calling softly from below.

  Will was gone before I could swivel my chair.

  I don’t envy the life of the Downsiders, ten billion of them crawling over each other looking for a little breathing space. But there are certain experiences available on Earth and nowhere else in the Solar System.

  For instance, I’m told that, during the great circular storms that sweep from the Earth tropics to the northern latitudes, there is an area at the very center—the “eye of the hurricane” as the Downsiders call it—where the wind drops to perfect stillness and the sky overhead turns to deep blue. That’s something I’d like to see, just once.

  The eye of the hurricane. That was the area of the living-capsule surrounding McAndrew during the Hoatzin’s flight out to rendezvous with Manna.

  With me, Anna Griss was in constant battle.

  “What are you talking about, no messages?” she said. “I have to be in daily contact with Headquarters.”

  “Then I’ll have to switch off the drive,” I explained. “We can’t get signals through the plasma shell.”

  “But that will slow us down! I told Headquarters that we’d only be away for one month—and it’s a two-week trip each way even if we keep the drive on all the time.”

  We were standing by the robochef and I was programming the next meal. It took a few seconds for her last statement to penetrate.

  “You told Headquarters what? That we’ll only be away for a month?”

  “That’s right. Three days should be long enough to find out what’s happening to Star Harvester. You said that yourself, and McAndrew agreed.”

  I turned to face her, noticing again the care she took to make her appearance as well-groomed and attractive as possible.

  “Three days should be long enough, sure it should. But you’ll be away for a lot more than a month. The trip is two weeks each way in shipboard time. It’s twenty-five days each way in Earth-time. There’s no possible way you can get back home in a month.”

  Her face flushed red and her eyes glowed—she looked more attractive than ever. “How can that happen?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s standard physics. Ask McAndrew.” (I knew well enough, but I’d had more than I wanted of this conversation.)

  It was like that all the time. We found it hard to agree on anything, and it became clear as soon as we were on the way that Anna Griss was used to delegating and not to doing. Poor old Will Bayes did triple duty. Luckily there was not too much that could be done without a communications link to Earth—except shout at Will and keep him on the run.

  Yet McAndrew—I thought at first I was imagining it—McAndrew was the eye of the hurricane. When she was within two yards of him, Anna Griss became all sweetness and light. She humbly asked him questions about the drive and about time dilation; she deferred to his opinions on everything from diet to Dostoevski; and she hung first on his word and then on his arm, blinking her eyelashes at him.

  It was sickening.

  And McAndrew—the great lout—he lapped it up.

  “What’s she doing?” I said to Bayes when the other two were out of earshot. “She’s making a fool of herself.”

  He winked at me. “You think so, and I think so—but does he think so? Before we left she told me to get a full dossier about him and bring it on this trip. She’s been reading it, too. You have to know Anna. What she wants, she gets. Wouldn’t look bad for her personal records, would it, to have a five-year cohab contract with the most famous scientist in the System?”

  “Don’t be silly. She doesn’t even like him.”

  “She does, you know.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I know Anna. She has appetites. She wants him, and I think she’d like a cohab contract.”

  I snorted. “With Mac? That’s ridiculous! He belongs to—to science.” And I fully believed it, until one morning I found myself applying a pheromonal amplifier behind my ears, and dressing in a new lime-green uniform that fitted a lot closer than my standard garb.

  And McAndrew—the great lout—he never noticed or said one word.

  While this was going on, we were hurtling outward away from the Sun. With our acceleration at a hundred gee, the living-capsule was snuggled in close to the massplate. The plate’s gravitational attraction just about balanced the body force on us produced by the ship’s acceleration, leaving us in a comfortable and relaxing half-gee environment. The tidal forces caused by the gravity gradient were noticeable only if you looked for them. McAndrew’s vacuum drive worked flawlessly, as usual, tapping the zero point energy—“sucking the marrow out of spacetime,” as one of Mac’s colleagues put it.

  “I don’t understand,” I’d once said to him. “It gets energy out of nothing.”

  McAndrew looked at me reproachfully. “That’s what they used to say in 1910, when mad scientists thought you might get energy from the nucleus of an atom. Jeanie, I thought better of you.”

  All right, I was squelched—but I didn’t understand the drive one bit better.

  At the halfway mark we rotated the ship to begin deceleration and I cut the drive while we did it. Anna Griss had an opportunity to send her backlog of messages, and finally gave Will Bayes a few hours of peace. I was amused to see that her communications gave the impression that she was running everything on the Hoatzin. Her increased absence from Headquarters she attributed to delays on the trip. If the level of scientific expertise in the Food Department matched her own, she would probably get away with it.

  For me, this should have been the best part of the mission, the reason I remain in space and never look for a Downside job. With the drive off we flew starward in perfect silence. I stayed by the port, watching the wheel of heaven as the ship turned.

  The Hoatzin was within five percent of light-speed. As we performed our end-over-end maneuver, the colors of the starscape Doppler-shifted slowly from red to blue. I caught a last glimpse of Sol and its attendants before the massplate shielded them from view. Jupiter was visible through the optical telescope, a tiny point of light a fifth of a degree away from the Sun’s dazzling disk. Earth was gone. Its reflected photons had been lost on their hundred-and-fifty-billion mile outward journey.

  I turned the telescope ahead, in a hopeless search for Manna. It was a speck in the star-sea, as far ahead of us as the Sun was behind. We would not detect its presence for another two weeks. I looked for it anyway. Then the shield came on to protect us from the sleet of hard radiation and particles caused by our light-chasing velocity. The stars blinked out. I could pay attention again to events inside the Hoatzin.

  With little else to occupy her attention, Anna delegated her chores to Will Bayes and concentrated everything on charming McAndrew. Will and I received the disdain and the dog work. I sat on my anger and bided my time.

  As for Mac, he had disappeared again inside his head. We had loaded a library of references on Lanhoff and the organic materials of the Halo into the computer before we left the Institute. He spent many hours absorbing that information and processing it in the curiously stru
ctured personal computer he carries inside his skull. I knew better than to interrupt him. After just a couple of futile attempts to divert him, Anna learned the same lesson. No doubt about it: she was quick. No scientist, but when it came to handling people she did instinctively what I had taken years to learn. Instead of social chit-chat, she studied the same data that McAndrew had been analyzing and asked him questions about it.

  “I can see why there ought to be a lot of prebiotic organic stuff out in the Halo,” she said during one of our planned exercise sessions. She was dressed in a tight blue leotard and pedaling hard at the stationary cycle. “But I never did follow Lanhoff’s argument that there may be primitive life there, too. Surely the temperature’s far too cold.”

  It was still the “Griss-Lanhoff” Theory for official records, but with us Anna had dropped her pretense of detailed knowledge of Lanhoff’s ideas. She had been the driving force to carry his ideas to practical evaluation. We all knew it; for the moment that was enough for her. I had no doubt that we would see another change when we arrived back in the Inner System.

  McAndrew was idly lifting and lowering a weighted bar. He hated exercise, but he grudgingly went along with general USF orders for spaceborne personnel.

  “It is cold in the Halo,” he said. “Just a few degrees above absolute zero, in most of the bodies. But it may not be too cold.”

  “It’s much too cold for us.”

  “Certainly. That’s Lanhoff’s point. We know only about the enzymes found on Earth. They allow chemical reactions to proceed in a certain temperature regime. Why shouldn’t there be other life-supporting enzymes that can operate at far lower temperatures?”

  Anna stopped pedaling, and I paused in my toe-touching. “Even at the temperatures here in the Halo?” she said.

  “I think so.” McAndrew paused in his leisurely bar-lifting. “Lanhoff argues that with plenty of complex organic molecules and with a hundred billion separate bodies available, a lot of things might develop in four billion years. He expected to find life somewhere out here—primitive life, probably, but recognizable to us. He was prepared to find it, and the Star Harvester was equipped to bring back samples.”

  We dropped the subject there, but it went running on in my mind while Anna took McAndrew off to program an elaborate meal. I could hear her giggling from the next room, while visions of a Halo civilization ran wild through my brain. Life had appeared there, evolved to intelligence. The Halo society had been disturbed by the arrival of our exploring ship. Lanhoff was a prisoner. His ship had been destroyed. The Inner System and the Halo would go to war…

  All complete rubbish. I knew that even as I fantasized, and McAndrew pointed out why when we discussed it later.

  “We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago. The Halo isn’t like that—everything will be part of the food supply. How much evolving would we have done if it rained soup every day and the mountains of Earth had been made of cheese? We’d still be single-celled organisms, happy as clams.”

  It sounded plausible. McAndrew was so bright that you tended not to question him after a while. But an hour or two later I was worrying again. It occurred to me that Mac was a physicist—when it came to biology he was way outside his field. And something had happened to Lanhoff and his ship. What could it have been?

  I didn’t mention it again, but I worried and fretted, while McAndrew and Anna Griss talked and laughed in the sleeping area and Will Bayes sat next to me in the control area, miserable with his own thoughts. He was so dominated by Anna that I often lost sight of him as an independent person when she was around. Now I found out what made him tick—security.

  Poor Will. Looking for security he had joined the safest, most stable organization in Earth’s government: the Food Department. That was the place for a solid, Earthbound, risk-free job. He had no desire for adventure, no wish to travel more than a mile from his little apartment. He had been in space only once before, as part of a meeting between the Council and the United Space Federation. Now he was embarked on a mission so far from home that he might survive even if the Sun went nova.

  How had it happened? He didn’t know. It didn’t occur to him to blame Anna. He sat about, uncertain and unhappy. I kept him company, my own worry bump throbbing randomly until at last it was time to throttle the drive and begin final search and rendezvous. Manna should be less than ten million kilometers ahead of us.

  “QUERY DISTANCE FOR STAR HARVESTER APPROACH? DEFAULT VALUE: ZERO.”

  Our computer began talking to us while we were still scanning ahead for first visual contact. No matter what had happened to the vessel’s crew, Star Harvester’s guidance and control system was still working. Automatic communication for identification and position-matching had begun between the two ships as soon as drive interference was low enough to permit signal transfer.

  “Fifty thousand kilometers.” I didn’t want an immediate rendezvous. “Manual control.”

  “FIFTY THOUSAND KILOMETERS. CONTROL TRANSFERRED.”

  “We’ll see nothing from that distance.” Anna was impatiently watching the hi-mag viewing screen. “We’re wasting time. Take us in closer.”

  We could now see the rough-cut oblong of Manna on the imaging radar. A bright cluster of point reflections at one end had to be the Star Harvester’s assembly of sections. I suddenly had a new feel for the size of the body we were approaching. Lanhoff’s ship was of the largest class in the USF fleet. Next to Manna it looked like specks of dust.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Anna spoke more loudly. “I don’t want a view from a million miles away—take us in closer. That’s an order.”

  I turned to face her. “I think we should be cautious until we know what’s going on. We can do a lot of overall checking from this distance. It’s safer.”

  “And it wastes time.” Her voice was impatient. “I’m the senior officer on this ship. Now, do as I say, and let’s get in closer.”

  “Sorry.” I couldn’t delay this moment any longer. “You’re the senior officer while we’re in free flight, I agree. But when we’re in a rendezvous mode with another ship, the pilot automatically has senior decision authority. Check the manuals. I have final say on our movements until we’re on the way back to Earth.”

  There was a long pause while we sat eyeball to eyeball. Anna’s face took on a touch of higher color on the cheeks. McAndrew and Will Bayes held an uncomfortable silence.

  “You’ve had this in mind all along, haven’t you?” Anna said softly. Her voice was as cold as Charon. “Damn you, you counted on this. You’re going to waste everybody’s time while you play at being the boss.”

  She went through to the other communications department, and I heard the rapid tapping of keys. I didn’t know if she was making an entry into the log, or merely calling out the section of the Manual that defines the transfer of authority to the pilot during approach and rendezvous. I didn’t care. Super-caution has always paid off for me in the past. Why change a winning hand, even for Anna Griss? I concentrated my attention on the incoming data streams.

  Half an hour later Anna came back and sat down without speaking. I was uncomfortably aware of her critical attention over my shoulder. I gestured to the central display screen, where the second series of remotely sensed observations from Manna were now appearing. The computer automatically checked everything for anomalies. One new set was displayed in flashing red for our attention.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to rush. I don’t think we’ve been wasting time at all. Mac, look at those radioactivity readings. What do you think of them?”

  The computer had done its preliminary analysis, taking the ratio of radioactivity measurements from Manna to typical Halo bodies and to the general local background. McAndrew frowned at the smoothed values for a few seconds, then nodded.

  “Uh-uh. They’re high. About six hundred times as big as I would expe
ct.”

  I took a deep breath. “So I think we know what happened to Lanhoff. One of the fusion units must have run wild when they were installing it. See now why I’m cautious, folks?”

  Anna Griss looked stunned. “Then the crew all got a fatal overdose of radiation?”

  “Looks like it.” I had proved my point, but not in a way that gave me any satisfaction. I felt sick inside. When a fusion plant blows, there’s no hope for the crew.

  “No, Jeanie.” McAndrew was frowning and rubbing at his sandy hairline. “You’re jumping to conclusions. I said the radioactivity was six hundred times as big as it should be, and it is. But it’s still low—you could live in it for years, and it wouldn’t do you much harm. If a fusion plant had gone, the reading from Manna would be a hundred thousand times what we’re measuring.”

  “But what else could give us abnormally high values?”

  “I’ve no idea.” He looked at me apologetically. “And we’ll never know from this distance. Seems to me that Anna’s right. We may have to get in a lot closer for a good look if we really want to find out.”

  Perhaps the idea that Lanhoff and his crew were almost certainly dead was hitting Anna hard for the first time. At any rate, there was no triumph in her expression as she watched me ease us gingerly forward until we were only ten thousand kilometers from the planetoid. We went slowly, all our sensor input channels wide open. I set the control system to hold us at a constant distance from the surface of Manna.

  “That’s as far as I’m willing to take us,” I said. “We’re a long way from home, and I won’t risk our only way of getting back. Any closer look will have to be done with the transfer pod. Mac, I’ve not had time to watch the inputs. Is there anything about the ship or about Manna that’s looking out of line?”

  He had been muttering to himself over by a display screen. Now he frowned and pressed a sequence of control keys.

  “Maybe. While you were busy I did a complete data transfer from Star Harvester’s computer to ours. Lanhoff and his crew stopped feeding in new inputs a hundred and fifteen days ago—that’s when the signals to Oberon Station cut off—but the automatic sensors kept right on recording. See, here’s the very first radioactivity reading from Manna when they arrived, and there’s one taken just a few minutes ago. Look at ’em. Identical. And now look at this. This is the thermal profile of a cross-section through Manna’s center.”