“Mac, that proves my point. If Jarver’s losing high-caliber people like that, he must know that he won’t last another three months. Unless he’s too dumb even to realize what he’s driving away?”
I saw a change in McAndrew’s expression. He’s the system’s most honest man, even when it undermines his own arguments. Now he looked guilty.
“That’s maybe the worst of it,” he said. “Jarver’s not stupid at all. He got the job here, likely, because he’s a relative of Anna Griss. She’s no lover of the Institute after what I did to her. But Jarver didn’t come here wanting to destroy the place. He’s a good physicist, see, with a real sense for what’s important.”
“That’s not what I thought when I looked at his publication record. Not many papers to his credit, and all written a long time ago.”
“Jeanie.” McAndrew stared at me with the disappointed expression of a man whose dog has slipped back into non-housebroken ways. “How many times have I told you, a publication record tells you nothing. Any clod can spew out words and equations, year in and year out, and push them into print. Papers don’t count for anything, unless other people use ’em. You should have looked at the Citation Index, to see how often Jarver’s work is given as a reference by other people. If you’d done that, you’d have seen hundreds of them. He’s not publishing now, true enough, but when he did, he was good.”
Poor old McAndrew. I was beginning to see the real problem. Here was a new director who did everything that Mac disliked, a man whom he would love to hate and disparage. But he couldn’t do that. Jarver was a good physicist, and therefore almost beyond censure.
“But if he’s that bright, you ought to be able to work with him. Persuade him.”
“Damn it, I have persuaded him. That’s what the new expedition is all about. I’ve got Jarver convinced that we have to go out a long way from Sol. Then we stop, and sit still, and do our measurements, and learn more than anyone has ever known about the distribution of missing matter.”
I had to find out more about that, but this wasn’t the time for it. Half a light-year from Sol was a long trip, even with a hundred gees of continuous acceleration and the relativity squeeze that our high speed would provide us. We’d have weeks to talk about missing matter, Mac’s experiments, and everything else in the Universe. But it would be nice to know why we had to go out there at all.
“Why not do your experiments here at the Institute?”
“Because it’s too damned noisy near in.” McAndrew became more like his old self as the conversation turned closer to physics. I decided there was hope — maybe he wasn’t a broken man after all. “It’s the Sun’s fault,” he went on. “Sol generates such an infernal din, gravitationally and in almost every electromagnetic wavelength you can think of, that you can’t do a decently sensitive experiment closer than half a light-year. It’s like listening for a pin drop, when somebody’s banging a bass drum right next to your ear. We have to go out, out where the interstellar medium is nice and quiet.”
“But that’s exactly what you will be doing. You’ll be flying out on the Hoatzin, and as far from the Institute as you want to be. So why aren’t you pleased?” I had a horrible thought. “Unless you’re telling me that Jarver proposes to go along with us.”
“No, no, no.” McAndrew went right back to being gloomy. “He says he’d like to, but he’s far too busy running the Institute. He’s not going. But he’s sending his aunt’s pet bully-boys, Lyle and Parmikan, along to keep an eye on things and report back. Now that’s what really has me going, Jeanie. That’s the reason I sent you the letter.”
I got very annoyed with McAndrew. He was taking a perfectly natural decision, from Jarver’s point of view, and blowing it up out of all proportion.
Of course, this was before I met Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan.
The doubtful pleasure of that meeting was not long delayed. It came the same afternoon, when McAndrew dragged me along to the weekly seminar, a tradition of the Penrose Institute for as long as I had been visiting it.
The old meeting room, with its poor air circulation and white plastic hard-backed chairs, had vanished. In its place was a hall with tiers of plushy seats running in banks up towards the rear. It could hold maybe three hundred. The seminars that I remembered might draw fifty if they were on a really hot subject.
Today there were no more than thirty people in the room. McAndrew and I took seats at the end of the last occupied row. I tried to recognize the people I knew from the look of the backs of their heads. I did pretty well, over half the audience. Wenig and Gowers and Macedo might be gone, but most of the other old-timers at the Institute hadn’t given up yet.
The lecturer, Siclaro — another Institute perennial — was already in position and raring to go.
“The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting than the entire rest of the history of the Universe.” That was his first sentence. I couldn’t tell you what his second sentence was. I didn’t expect to understand the seminar, you see, because I never had in the past. But I might still enjoy it. Like the psychologist at the burlesque show I concentrated on the audience, examining the newcomers to try to guess their specialties and how good they were at them.
A futile exercise, of course. Emma Gowers, the System’s top expert on multiple kernel arrays, looks and dresses like a high-class whore. Wenig could be her pimp, and McAndrew himself resembles an accountant in need of a haircut and a good meal.
You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.
Over to the far left of our row sat a group of three. I saw Dorian Jarver. He was leaning forward, intent on the presentation. To his immediate right were two men of particular interest to me — because they too were taking no notice of the lecture and showing a lot of interest in the audience. I nudged McAndrew, just as someone hurried in from the back of the room and leaned over to whisper in Jarver’s ear. He sighed, shook his head, and followed the woman quickly out of the hall.
“What?” said McAndrew at last. He had missed the whole episode with Jarver.
“Those two men. Who are they?”
He snorted. “Them two? Van Lyle. Stefan Parmikan.”
I stared with redoubled curiosity. Van Lyle (I found out later which was which) was a big, broad-shouldered fellow with curly blond hair and a handsome, craggy profile. He made no pretence of listening to the lecture, but he observed the audience with open interest. At his side the little, round-shouldered figure of Stefan Parmikan was far more discreet. To a casual observer he was following everything that Siclaro said — but every few seconds his head would turn for a moment and his eyes would flicker over everyone. When they met mine he at once turned away.
“Mac,” I said. And paused.
He had slipped away from my side. I saw him down by the lecturer’s podium next to Siclaro, one hand pointed at the screen.
“You know the problem,” he was saying. “We all believe that the amount of matter in the universe is just enough to keep it expanding forever. That gives asymptotically flat spacetime, an idea we have half a dozen good theoretical reasons for wanting to believe. But the bright matter — the stuff we can see — only accounts for maybe a hundredth of what’s needed to close spacetime. So, where’s the rest of it? Where’s the missing matter?
“I agree with Siclaro, it’s the devil to answer that question from any experiments we’ve been able to do so far. I wouldn’t propose to try. But we’ve designed a whole new set of crucial experiments that we can do if we are far out from Sol, where there’s not so much interference.”