The Compleat McAndrew Read online

  I would like to have skipped it myself. Since I was stuck with it, I separated the Sections of the Assembly as much as I could, put everything onto automatic, and devoted myself to consoling one of the losers, a smooth-skinned armful from one of the larger asteroids.

  We finally got there. On that day of rejoicing, the whole ghastly gaggle connected with the contest left the Assembly, I said a lingering farewell to my friend from Vesta—a most inappropriate origin for that particular contestant—and settled back for a needed rest.

  It lasted for about eight hours. As soon as I called into the Com Center for news and messages, I got a terse summons on the com display: GO TO PENROSE INSTITUTE, L-4 STATION. MACAVITY.

  Not an alarming message, on the face of it, but it worried me. It was from McAndrew, and I doubt if three people knew that I had given him that nickname when I found he was a specialist on theories of gravity (“Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats” didn’t seem to be widely read among Mac’s colleagues).

  Why hadn’t he called me directly, instead of sending a com-link message? The fact that we were back from Titan would have been widely reported. I sat down at the terminal and placed a link to the Institute, person-to-person to McAndrew.

  I didn’t feel any better when the call went through. Instead of Mac’s familiar face, I was looking at the coal-black complexion of Professor Limperis, the head of the Institute. He nodded at me seriously.

  “Captain Roker, your timing is impressive. If we had received no response to Professor McAndrew’s coded message in the next eight hours, we would have proceeded without you. Can you help?”

  He hesitated, seeing my confused expression. “Did your message tell you the background of the problem?”

  “Dr. Limperis, all I’ve had so far is half a dozen words—to go to the L-4 branch of the Institute. I can do that easily enough, but I have no idea what the problem is, or what use I could possibly be on it. Where’s Mac?”

  “I wish to God I could answer that.” He sat silent for a moment, chewing on his lower lip, then shrugged. “Professor McAndrew insisted that we send for you—left a message specifically for you. He told us that you were the stimulus for beginning the whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?”

  He looked at me in even greater surprise. “Why, the high acceleration drive—the balanced drive that McAndrew has been developing for the past year. McAndrew has disappeared testing the prototype. Can you come at once to the Institute?”

  The trip out to the Institute, creeping along in the Space Tug from Luna Station, was one of the low points of my life. There was no particular logic to it—after all, I’d done nothing wrong. But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I’d wasted a critical eight hours after the passengers had left the Assembly. If I hadn’t been obsessed with sex on the trip back, maybe I would have gone straight to the com-link instead of taking a sleep break. And maybe then I would have been on my way that much earlier, and that would have been the difference between saving Mac and failing to save him…

  You can see how my mind was running. Without any real facts, you can make bears out of bushes just as well in space as you can on Earth. All I had been told by Limperis was that McAndrew had left a week earlier on a test of the prototype of a new ship. If he was not back within a hundred and fifty hours, he had left that terse coded message for me, and instructions—orders might be a better word—to take me along on any attempted search for him.

  Dr. Limperis had been very apologetic about it. “I’m only quoting Professor McAndrew, you understand. He said that he didn’t want any rescue party setting out in the Dotterel if you weren’t part of it. He said”—Limperis coughed uncomfortably—“we had a real need for your common sense and natural cowardice. We’ll be waiting for you here as soon as you can arrange passage. The least we can do for Professor McAndrew in the circumstances is to honor his wishes on this.”

  I couldn’t decide if I was being complimented or not. As L-4 Station crept into view on the forward screen, I peered at it on highest magnification, trying to see what the rescue ship looked like. I could see the bulk of the Institute structure but no sign of anything that ought to be a ship. I had visions of a sort of super-Assembly, a huge cluster of electromagnetically linked spheres. All I could see were living quarters and docking facilities, and, as we came in to dock, a peculiar construction like a flat, shiny plate with a long thin spike protruding from the center. It looked nothing like any USF ship, passenger or cargo.

  Limperis may have spent his whole life in pure research, but he knew how to organize for emergency action. There were just five people in our meeting inside the Institute. I had never met them in person, but they were all familiar to me through McAndrew’s descriptions, and from media coverage. Limperis himself had made a life study of high-density matter. He knew every kernel below lunar mass out to a couple of hundred astronomical units—many of them he had visited, and a few of the small ones he had shunted back with him to the Inner System, to use as power supplies.

  Siclaro was the specialist in kernel energy extraction. The Kerr-Newman black holes were well-understood theoretically, but efficient use of them was still a matter for experts. When the USF wanted to know the best way to draw off power, for drives or for general use, Siclaro was usually called in. His name on a recommendation was like a stamp of approval that few would think to question.

  With Gowers there as an expert in multiple kernel arrays, Macedo as the System authority in electromagnetic coupling, and Wenig the master of compressed matter stability, the combined intellect in that one room in the Institute was overpowering. I looked at the three men and two women who had just been introduced to me, and felt like a gorilla in a ballet. I might make the right movements, but I wouldn’t know what was going on.

  “Look, Dr. Limperis,” I said, “I know what Professor McAndrew wants, but I’m not sure he’s right.” Might as well hit them with my worries at the beginning, and not waste everybody’s time. “I can run a ship, sure—it’s not hard. But I’ve no idea how to run something with a McAndrew drive on it. Any one of you could probably do a better job.”

  Limperis was looking apologetic again. “Yes and no, Captain Roker. We could all handle the ship, any one of us. The concepts behind it are simple—a hundred and fifty years old. And the engineering has been kept simple, too, since we are dealing with a prototype.”

  “Then what do you want me for?” I won’t say I was angry, but I was uneasy and unhappy, and there’s a fine line between irritation and discomfort.

  “Dr. Wenig will drive the Dotterel, he has handled it before in an earlier test. Actually, he handled the Merganser, the ship that Dr. McAndrew has disappeared in, but the Dotterel has identical design and equipment. Controlling the ship is easy—if everything behaves as we expected. If something goes wrong—and something must have gone wrong, or McAndrew would be back before this—then neither Dr. Wenig, nor any of the rest of us, has the experience that will be needed. We want you to tell Dr. Wenig what not to do. You’ve been through dangerous times before.” He looked pleading. “Will you observe our actions, and use your experience to advise us?”

  Uninvited, I flopped down into a seat and stared at the five of them. “You want me to be a bloody canary!”

  “A canary?” Wenig was small and slight, with a luxuriant black mustache. He had a strong accent, and I think he was suspecting himself of a translation error.

  “Right. Back when people used to go down deep in the earth to mine coal, they used to take a canary along with them. It was more sensitive to poisonous gases than they were. When it fell off the perch, they knew it was time to leave. The rest of you will fly the ship, and watch for me to fall off my seat.”

  They looked at each other, and finally Limperis nodded. “We need a canary, Captain Roker. None of us here knows how to sing at the right time. Will you do it?”

  I had no choice. Not after Mac’s personal cry for help. I could see one problem—I’d be telling them ev
erything they did was dangerous. When you have a new piece of technology, it is risky, whatever you do with it.

  “You mean you’ll let me overrule all the rest of you, if I don’t feel comfortable?”

  “We would.” Limperis was quite firm about it. “But the question will not arise. The Merganser and the Dotterel are both two-person ships. We saw no point in making them larger. Dr. Wenig will fly the Dotterel, and you will be the only other person aboard. It just takes one person to handle the controls. You will be there to advise of hidden problems.”

  I stood up. “Let’s go. I don’t think I can see danger any better than you can, but I may be wrong. If Mac’s on his own out there, wherever he is, we’d better get moving. I’m ready when you are, Dr. Wenig.”

  Nobody moved. Maybe McAndrew and Limperis were right about my antennae, because at that moment I had a premonition of new problems. I looked around at the uncomfortable faces.

  “Professor McAndrew isn’t actually alone on the Merganser.” It was Emma Gowers who spoke first. “He has a passenger with him on the ship.”

  “Someone from the Institute?”

  She shook her head. “Nina Velez is with him.”

  “Nina Velez? You don’t mean President Velez’s daughter—the one with AG News?”

  She nodded. “The same.”

  I sat down again in my chair. Hard. Maybe the Body-beautiful run to Titan had been an easier trip than I had realized.

  Wenig may have come to piloting second-hand, but he certainly knew his ship. He wanted me to know it, too. Before we left the Institute, we’d done the lot—schematics, models, components, power, life support, mechanicals, electricals, electronics, controls, and backups.

  When the ship was explained to me, I decided that McAndrew didn’t really see round corners when he thought. It was just that things were obvious to him before they were explained, and obvious to other people afterwards. I had been saying “inertia-less” to Mac, and he had been just as often saying “impossible.” But we hadn’t been communicating very well. All I wanted was a drive that would let us accelerate at multiple gees without flattening the passengers. To McAndrew, that was a simple requirement, one that he could easily satisfy—but there was no question of doing away with inertia, of passengers or ship.

  “Take it back to basics,” said Wenig, when he was showing me how the Dotterel worked. “Remember the equivalence principle? That’s at the heart of it. There is no way of distinguishing an accelerated motion from a gravitational field force, right?”

  I had no trouble with that. It was freshman physics. “Sure. You’d be flattened just as well in a really high gravity field as you would in a ship accelerating at fifty gee. But where does it get you?”

  “Imagine that you were standing on something with a hefty gravity field—Jupiter, say. You’d experience a downward force of about two and a half gee. Now suppose that somebody could accelerate Jupiter away from you, downwards, at two and a half gee. You’d fall towards it, but you’d never reach it—it would be accelerating at the same rate as you are. And you’d feel as though you were in free fall, but so far as the rest of the Universe is concerned you’d be accelerating at two and a half gee, same as Jupiter. That’s what the equivalence principle is telling us, that acceleration and gravity can cancel out, if they’re set up to be equal and opposite.”

  As soon as you got used to Wenig’s accent, he was easy to follow—I doubt if anybody could get into the Institute unless he was more than bright enough to explain concepts in easy terms.

  I nodded. “I can understand that easily enough. But you’ve just replaced one problem with a worse one. You can’t find any drive in the Universe that could accelerate Jupiter at two and a half gee.”

  “We cannot—not yet, at any rate. Luckily, we don’t need to use Jupiter. We can do it with something a lot smaller, and a lot closer. Let’s look at the Dotterel and the Merganser. At McAndrew’s request I designed the mass element for both of them.”

  He went across to the window that looked out from the inside of the Institute to raw space. The Dotterel was floating about ten kilometers away, close enough to see the main components.

  “See the plate on the bottom? It’s a hundred meter diameter disk of compressed matter, electromagnetically stabilized and one meter thick. Density’s about eleven hundred and seventy tons per cubic centimeter—pretty high, but nothing near as high as we’ve worked with here at the Institute. Less than you get in anything but the top couple of centimeters of a neutron star, and nowhere near approaching kernel densities. Now, if you were sitting right at the center of that disk, you’d experience a gravitational acceleration of fifty gee pulling you down to the disk. Tidal forces on you would be one gee per meter—not enough to trouble you. If you stayed on the axis of the disk, and moved away from it, you’d feel an attractive force of one gee when you were two hundred and forty-six meters from the center of the disk. See the column growing out from the disk? It’s four meters across and two hundred and fifty meters long.”

  I looked at it through the scope. The long central spike seemed to be completely featureless, a slim column of grey metal.

  “What’s inside it?”

  “Mostly nothing.” Wenig picked up a model of the Dotterel and cracked it open lengthwise, so that I could see the interior structure. “When the drives are off, the living-capsule is out here at the far end, two hundred and fifty meters from the dense disk. Gravity feels like one gee, toward the center of the disk. See the drives here, on the disk itself? They accelerate the whole thing away from the center column, so the disk stays flat and perpendicular to the motion. The bigger the acceleration that the drives produce, the closer to the disk we move the living-capsule up the central column here. We keep it so the total force in the capsule, gravity less acceleration, is always one gee, toward the disk.”

  He slid the capsule along an electromechanical ladder closer to the disk. “It’s easy to compute the right distance for any acceleration—the computer has it built-in, but you could do it by hand in a few minutes. When the drives are accelerating the whole thing at fourteen gee, the capsule is held a little less than fifty meters from the disk. I’ve been on a test run in the Merganser where we got up to almost twenty gee. Professor McAndrew intended to take it up to higher accelerations on this test. To accelerate at thirty-two gee, the capsule must be about twenty meters from the disk to keep effective gravity inside to one gee. The plan was to take the system all the way up to design maximum—fifty gee thrust acceleration, so that the passengers in the capsule would be right up against the disk, and feel as though they were in free fall. Gravity and thrust accelerations will exactly balance.”

  I was getting goose bumps along the back of my neck. I knew the performance of the unmanned med ships. They would zip you from inside the orbit of Mercury out to Pluto in a couple of days, standing start to standing finish. Once in a while you’d get a passenger on them—accident or suicide. The flattened thing that they unpacked at the other end showed what the human body thought of a hundred gee.

  “What would happen if the drives went off suddenly?” I said.

  “You mean when the capsule is up against the disk—at maximum thrust?” Wenig shook his head. “We designed a safeguard system to prevent that, even on the prototypes. If there were a sign of the drive cutting off, the capsule would be moved back up the column, away from the disk. The system for that is built-in.”

  “Yeah. But McAndrew hasn’t come back.” I had the urge to get on our way. “I’ve seen built-in-safe systems before. The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens. Can’t we get moving?”

  “Come on.” Wenig stood up. “Any teacher will tell you, you can’t get much into an impatient learner. I’ll give you the rest of the story as we go. We’ll head out along the same path as McAndrew did—that’s plotted out in the records back here.”

  “You think McAndrew went along with the nominal flight plan?”

  �
��We know he didn’t.” Wenig looked a lot less sure of himself. “You see, when the drives are on maximum the plasma round the living-capsule column interferes with radio signals. Fifty hours after they left the Institute, the Merganser was tracked from Triton Station. McAndrew came back into the Solar System, decelerating at fifty gee. He didn’t cut the drive at all—just went right through the System and accelerated out again in a slightly different direction. We got the log, but we have no idea what he was doing. There was no way to get a signal to him or from him with the drive on.”

  “So they got all the way up to the maximum drive! And they came back here. God, why didn’t Limperis tell me that when we were in the first meeting?” I went to the locker and pulled out a suit. “He took it up all the way, fifty gee or better. Let’s get after him. If he kept that up, he’ll be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now.”

  The living-capsule was about three meters across and simply furnished. I was surprised at the amount of room, until Wenig pointed out to me how equipment and supplies that could take higher accelerations were situated on the outside of the capsule, on the side away from the gravity disk.

  We had started with McAndrew’s flight plan for only a few minutes when I took Limperis at his word that I’d be boss and changed the procedure. If we were to reach McAndrew, the less time we spent shooting off in the wrong direction, the better. He had come right through the System, and we ought to head in the direction that he was last seen to be heading.

  “I’ll take us up to fifty gee,” said Wenig. “That way, we’ll experience the same perturbing forces as the Merganser did. All right?”

  “Christ, no.” My stomach turned over. “Not all right. Look, we don’t know what happened to Mac, but chances are it was some problem with the ship. If we do just what he did, we may finish up with the same trouble.”