He was getting into a discussion of the hidden matter, the reason for taking the Hoatzin on its light-year round-trip. But I couldn’t listen to him, because I was no longer alone. The two men next to Jarver had slid quietly across from the other side of the room and were now by my side.
“Captain Roker?” said the blond-haired man. “I wanted to say hello. I hear we’re going to be shipmates.”
He gazed sincerely into my eyes, took my hand in his big, meaty paw, and held on a few seconds longer than necessary.
“Pleased to meet you,” added his companion, leaning across and taking my hand in turn. “I’m Stefan Parmikan. I’ve heard a lot about you.” His smile was a wet, shapeless version of Van Lyle’s intimate grin. And instead of riveting me like Lyle, his brown eyes would look anywhere but into mine.
“You heard about me?” I was surprised. McAndrew is closer than a clam. “From whom?”
“The boss. Councilor Griss.”
His limp grip was like a lump of wet gristle, much worse than Van Lyle’s intimate clutch; but that wasn’t what bothered me.
Suddenly, I could put it all together. So far my thinking had managed to get everything wrong. Anna Lisa Griss could push her relatives into high places, and no one would be surprised by that. Nepotism never changes. She had arranged for Dorian Jarver to take over the Penrose Institute.
But it was her bad luck that Jarver happened to be genuine, a conscientious scientist with a real feel for physics and science. She couldn’t change his nature. What she could do, though, and had done, was to install as his assistants her chosen few: people with no feeling for science, who would follow the Councilor’s style of operation and do exactly what she said. She had told them to mold the Institute to her own taste, to change it to a copy of the standard Terran bureaucracy that she understood and controlled so well.
And they were doing it. I was now convinced that the real author of the message to me had not been McAndrew. Lyle or Parmikan had structured it, with Anna Griss behind them. Mac had asked for my help, but she had been the manipulator. She wanted me on board the Hoatzin, for a trip that she would control, through Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan, from beginning to end.
What made me so sure? There’s one point that I neglected to mention about the run-in that we had with Anna Griss out in the Oort cloud. McAndrew had cut off her arm, which was bad enough but maybe forgivable since he thought he was doing it to save her life. But before that I had stared her down, overridden her authority, and asserted my own position as ship’s captain. She had been forced to accept it. But knowing Anna, I knew that would never be forgiven, or forgotten. Not even when she had taken an eye for an eye — or an arm for an arm.
I heard the door at the back of the room open. Jarver was coming back in, and Lyle and Parmikan dutifully hurried back to his side. I shivered, and sat up straight in my seat. Something creepy had brushed by me in the past few minutes, and I didn’t yet know what it was.
“So that’s it,” McAndrew was saying from the podium. “The two best candidates for the missing material needed to flatten the universe are hot dark matter — probably energetic neutrinos with a small rest mass, generated soon after the Big Bang; or maybe cold dark matter, particles like the axions needed for charge-parity conservation, or the photinos and other more massive objects required by supersymmetry theories.
“So which should we believe in, the hot or the cold? We don’t know. They both have problems describing the way that the galaxies formed.
“Worse than that, we aren’t measuring nearly enough of either kind of matter. Add everything together, and we still have less than half the mass density needed to make a flat universe. We must be badly underestimating either the cold dark matter or the hot.
“Which? Theory still can’t provide the answer. Most of the events that decide all this began happening in the first 10-35 seconds after the origin of the universe, when we weren’t around to do experiments; when even the laws of physics may not have been the same.
“We may never know the composition of the missing matter, until we can put our instruments in the right place for observation — deep in interstellar space.”
He halted. Siclaro nodded his appreciation, and Mac came ambling back to his seat.
Naturally, he had missed the whole interaction with Lyle and Parmikan. He’d have missed it even if it had happened under his nose, because he never saw anything when he was talking about physics. He had temporarily forgotten his annoyance at the changes to the Institute, and he seemed quite pleased with life.
I wasn’t. I had been brought to the Institute so that McAndrew and I could fly half a light-year from home with Lyle and Parmikan. Anna Griss had engineered my arrival. It was inconceivable that the surprises were all over.
What little goodies were in store when Anna’s bully-boys and I were flying far off in the Hoatzin?
I lost track of that question in the busy days before departure. The Hoatzin was primed and ready, but I hadn’t performed my engine inspection or any of the other preparations that I like to do. I went over the ship, checking everything, and found nothing worse than a slight imbalance in the drive that would have meant a mid-course correction at ship turn-around, a quarter of a light-year from Sol.
Neither Lyle nor Parmikan gave me any trouble. In fact, I hardly saw them until the four of us assembled for final check-in and departure. Then Stefan Parmikan rolled up with about ten times as much baggage as he was allowed.
He objected strongly when I told him to take it away. “All that space.” He pointed outside, to the Hoatzin with its hundred meter mass disk and the four hundred meter axle sticking out like a great grey spike from its center. “There’s oceans of room for my stuff.”
How could a man reach adulthood today, and know so little about the McAndrew balanced drive?
“The disk you’re pointing at is solid compressed matter,” I said. “Density is twelve hundred tons per cubic centimeter, and surface gravity is a hundred and ten gees. If you want to strap your luggage on the outside of that, good luck to you.”
“What about the axle? I can see that it’s hollow.”
“It is. And it has to stay that way, so the living-capsule can move up and down it. Otherwise we couldn’t balance the gravitational and inertial accelerations. Either we move the capsule in closer to the disk as we increase the acceleration, or you tell me how we’re going to survive a hundred gees.” When he still didn’t show much sign of understanding me, I waved my hand. “The total living accommodation of the Hoatzin is that four-meter sphere. I’m not going to spend the next month falling over your stuff. And I’m not going to waste time arguing. That luggage isn’t going with us. That’s final. Get it out of here, so we can prepare to board.”
Parmikan glowered and grumbled, and finally dragged it away. When he reappeared an hour later with a much smaller package I hustled everyone onto the Hoatzin as quickly as possible to avoid any more hold-ups. Maybe I wasn’t as thorough as I should have been inspecting luggage. But I suspect it would have done no good if I had been. There must be a definite threat before you start opening people’s personal effects. I was anticipating rudeness and arguments and possible discipline problems, but not danger.
Let’s call that my second mistake in Project Missing Matter.
Once we were under way I felt a lot better. With the drive on the perimeter of the mass disk turned on, the Hoatzin is surrounded by a sheath of highly relativistic plasma. Signals won’t penetrate it. Communications with Anna Griss, or anyone else back in the Solar System, were blocked. That suited me fine.