“I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere between nine and sixteen years, I think.”
I would have liked to break the news more gently, but maybe there was no graceful way.
It had taken McAndrew a while to deliver on his promise. The design of the more advanced ship contained no new theory, but this time he intended that the initial tests would be conducted more systematically. I kept pushing him along, while he tried to wriggle out of the commitment. He had been full of drugs and painkillers at the time, he said — surely I didn’t consider it fair, to hold him to what he’d been silly enough to promise then?
Fair or not, I wouldn’t listen. I had called him as soon as we were on the final leg of the Titan run.
“Yes, she’s ready enough to go.” He had a strange expression on his face, somewhere between excitement and perplexity. “You’ve still got your mind set on going, then, Jeanie?”
I didn’t dignify that question with a reply. Instead I said, “How soon can I come out to the Institute?”
He cleared his throat, making that odd sound that spoke to me of his Scots ancestry. “Och, if you’re set on it, come as soon as you please. I’ll have things to tell you when you get here, but that can wait.”
That was when I went down and made my request to Woolford for a long leave of absence. McAndrew had been strangely reluctant to discuss our destination, but I couldn’t imagine that we’d be going out past Sirius. Alpha Centauri was my guess, and that would mean we would only be away about nine Earth years. Shipboard time would be three months, allowing a few days at the other end for exploration. If I knew McAndrew, he would have beaten the hundred gee acceleration that he projected for the interstellar prototype. He was never a man to talk big about what he was going to do.
The Penrose Institute had been moved out to Mars orbit since the last time I was there, so it took me a couple of weeks of impatient ship-hopping to get to it. When we finally closed to visible range I could see the old test ships, Merganser and Dotterel, floating a few kilometers from the main body of the Institute. They were easy to recognize from the flat mass disc with its protruding central spike. And floating near them, quite a bit bigger, was a new ship of gleaming silver. That had to be the Hoatzin, McAndrew’s newest plaything. The disc was twice the size, and the spike three times as long, but Hoatzin was clearly Merganser’s big brother.
It was Professor Limperis, the head of the Institute, who greeted me when I entered. He had put on weight since I last saw him, but that pudgy black face still hid a razor-sharp mind and a bottomless memory.
“Good to see you again, Captain Roker. I haven’t told McAndrew this, but I’m very glad you’ll be going along to keep an eye on him.” He gave what he once described as his “hand-clapping minstrel-show laugh” — a sure sign he was nervous about something.
“Well, I don’t know that I’ll be much use. I’m expecting to be just a sort of passenger. Don’t worry. If my instincts are anything to go by there won’t be much danger in a simple stellar rendezvous and return.”
“Er, yes.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “That was my own reaction. I gather that Professor McAndrew has not mentioned to you his change of target?”
“Change of target? He didn’t mention any target at all.” Now my own worry bead was beginning to throb. “Are you suggesting that the trip will not be to a stellar rendezvous?”
He shrugged and waved his hands, pointing along the corridor. “Not if McAndrew gets his way. Come along, he’s inside at the computer. I think it’s best if he is present when we talk about this further.”
Pure evasion. Whatever the bad news was, Limperis wanted me to hear it from McAndrew himself.
We found him staring vacantly at a completely blank display screen. Normally I would never interrupt him when he looks as imbecilic as that — it means that he is thinking with a breadth and depth that I’ll never comprehend. I often wonder what it would be like to have a mind like that. Humans, with rare exceptions, must seem like trained apes, with muddied thoughts and no ability for abstract analysis.
Tough luck. It was time one of the trained apes had some of her worries put to rest. I walked up behind McAndrew and put my hands on his shoulders.
“Here I am. I’m ready to go — if you’ll tell me where we’re going.”
He turned in his chair. After a moment his slack jaw firmed up and the eyes brought me into focus.
“Hello, Jeanie.” No doubt about it, as soon as he recognized me he had that same shifty look I had noticed in Limperis. “I didn’t expect you here so soon. We’re still making up a flight profile.”
“That’s all right. I’ll help you.” I sat down opposite him, studying his face closely. As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses work harder than anyone else, not less hard. His face was thinner, and he had lost a little more hair from that sandy, receding mop. My argument with him over that was long in the past.
“Why don’t you grow it back?” I’d said. “It’s such a minor job, a couple of hours with the machines every few months and you’d have a full head of hair again.”
He had sniffed. “Why don’t you try and get me to grow a tail, or hair all over my body? Or maybe make my arms a bit longer, so they’ll let me run along with them touching the ground. Jeanie, I’ll not abuse a bio-feedback machine to run evolution in the wrong direction. We’re getting less hairy all the time. I know your fondness for monkeys” — a nasty crack about an engineering friend of mine on Ceres, who was a bit hairy for even my accommodating tastes — “but I’ll be just as happy when I have no hair at all. It gets in the way, it grows all the time, and it serves no purpose whatsoever.”
McAndrew resented the time it took him to clip his fingernails, and I’m sure that he regarded his fondness for food as a shameful weakness. Meanwhile, I wondered who in the Penrose Institute cut his hair. Maybe they had a staff assistant, whose job it was to shear the absent-minded once a month.
“What destination are you planning for the first trip out?” If he was thinking of chasing a comet, I wanted that out in the open.
McAndrew looked at Limperis. Limperis looked at McAndrew, handing it back to him. Mac cleared his throat.
“We’ve discussed it here and we’re all agreed. The first trip of the Hoatzin won’t be to a star system.” He cleared his throat again. “It will be to pursue and rendezvous with the Ark of Massingham. It’s a shorter trip than any of the star systems,” he added hopefully. He could read my expression. “They are less than two light-years out. With the Hoatzin we can be there and docked with the Ark in less than thirty-five ship days.”
If he was trying to make me feel better, McAndrew was going about it in quite the wrong way.
Back in the twenties, the resources of the Solar System must have seemed inexhaustible. No one had been able to catalog the planetoids, still less analyze their composition and probable value. Now we know everything out to Neptune that’s bigger than a hundred meters across, and the navigation groups want that down to fifty meters in the next twenty years. The idea of grabbing an asteroid a couple of kilometers across and using it how you choose sounds like major theft. But it hadn’t merely been permitted — it had been encouraged.
The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go. How do I know? Look, you don’t pilot to Titan without learning a lot about your own personality. Before we found the right way to use people like me, I would probably have been on one of the Arks.