I carried the schedule I had generated across to Parmikan’s curtained rest area. The little private spaces allotted to each of us were intentionally set as far apart from each other as possible, around the perimeter of the living capsule. I rapped on the curtain rail. “This is my recommended schedule,” I said, when Parmikan’s head poked through. I held it out to him, but he did not take it.
“Is it a simple procedure?” he asked.
“I believe so. I’ve done my best to make it as simple as possible.”
“Good. Then you should have no trouble carrying it out. Notify me when the drive is off, and we are ready for our first communication opportunity with Terra. By then I’ll have another assignment for you.”
His head vanished back through the curtain. I had an insight into Parmikan’s style of command. He would give all the orders. I would do all the work. This was Anna Lisa Griss’s revenge for my asserting my authority over her. I would have to obey Parmikan’s every random whim for two months.
I was still naive enough to think that would be enough to satisfy her. My fourth mistake, was that? I’m beginning to lose count.
I stayed angry at being ordered around, until I remembered Lyle and Parmikan’s general ignorance of shipboard matters. Then I thought, Hey, it’s better like this. How would you feel if Parmikan took over the controls himself? And I went away to set up the program to power down the drive at regular intervals.
Except that McAndrew had heard my exchange with Parmikan, and he was feeling sorry for me. He insisted that he would do the tedious job of changing the drive program schedule. I let him. It was quite safe to do so, because Mac’s such a perfectionist on this sort of thing that he sometimes makes me feel sloppy.
But Mac is only devious in scientific matters. He didn’t catch something in the Hoatzin’s overall mission profile that I would have noticed at once.
I discovered it much later, and almost too late. Call that my fifth mistake, and let’s stop counting.
To me, the interruptions to our outward progress were a useless nuisance. I have no idea what was sent or received by Parmikan and Lyle in their daily communications. I was specifically excluded from them, and in any case Parmikan had me far too busy with a hundred other things to worry much about messages — he had an absolute genius for thinking up demeaning and pointless tasks. I do know, though, that the person sending or receiving at the other end was not Dorian Jarver. The link was set up to a location on Terra, not to the Penrose Institute.
And McAndrew, being McAndrew, contrived to turn the periods when the drive was off into an opportunity. He decided that he could use those few dead minutes every day to perform his first experiments. One morning right after breakfast I went to the rear of the living capsule to escape from Van Lyle — he, and his probing eyes, followed me everywhere. I found McAndrew sitting beside his instrument panel, frowning at the wall.
“Problems?”
He shrugged, and scratched at the back of his balding head. “I’d have said no. Everything passes the internal checks. But look at this.” He pulled up a display. “I’ve got the most sensitive mass detectors ever, lined up on our final destination. All the other instruments confirm that there’s absolutely nothing out there. But see these.”
He pointed to small blips in the output level of the instruments.
“Noise?” I suggested. “Or the result of our high velocity? Or maybe a local effect, something on the Hoatzin?” He had told me that his new instruments were supernaturally sensitive to disturbance.
“No, they’re definitely external, and far-off. And regular. That’s just the signals I’d be getting if massive objects were flying, evenly spaced, across my field of view. Except there’s nothing there. It’s a total mystery.”
“Then you’ll just have to be patient. We’re already past turn-around. In twelve days we’ll be there, and you’ll be able to see for your—”
“Crewman Roker!” It was Parmikan’s voice, ringing through the living capsule. “Come here immediately. I have a task that must be performed at once.”
I took a deep breath, and held it. Another fun-filled day was beginning. Twelve more to go, before we came to rest in the most perfect nothingness known to humans, half a light-year from the Sun.
With the whole habitable space of the Hoatzin only four meters across, I knew before we left the Institute that we’d be living close. But given the lack of privacy, there was one form of closeness I had never expected.
The surprise came late in the evening on the twenty-third day out, when Mac was in the shielded rear of the living capsule muttering over his still-anomalous instrument readings. The blips were growing. With Parmikan’s consent Mac had gradually changed our course, angling the ship’s direction of travel towards the strongest source of signal. We would arrive a tenth of a light-year away from our original destination, but as McAndrew pointed out, the choice of that had been more or less arbitrary. Any place where the matter density was unusually low would serve his purpose equally well.
By eleven o’clock Stefan Parmikan was asleep. I was sitting cross-legged on my bunk, listening to an Institute lecture from my talking library. It was “Modern Physics for Engineers,” by Gowers, Siclaro, and McAndrew, a course designed to be less high-powered than the straight two-hundred-proof Institute seminar presentations. There were three other series available, of rapidly descending levels of difficulty. They each had official names, but inside the Institute they were known as “Physics for Animals,” “Physics for Vegetables,” and “Physics for Football Players.”
I had brought all four, just in case, but I was holding my own with “Physics for Engineers.” I was finally gaining a clearer idea of just why we had to charge off half a light-year from Sol.
Something was absent from the Universe, something that the best brains around thought had to be there: Missing matter.
The “bright stuff” — visible matter — isn’t nearly enough to make the Universe hover on the fine line between expanding forever, and collapsing back one day to the Big Crunch. That’s what the theorists want, but there’s only about one percent of the mass needed in the bright stuff. You can pick up a factor of ten or so from matter that’s pretty much the same as visible matter, but happens to be too cold to see, and that’s all.
This leaves you about a factor of ten short on mass. And there you stick. You have to start laying bets on other, less familiar materials.
Neutrinos moving up close to the speed of light — hot dark matter — are one candidate. There are scads of neutrinos around, generated soon after the Big Bang but damnably difficult to find by experiment. Neutrinos don’t interact much with ordinary matter. They’d slip through light-years of solid lead, if you happened to have light-years of lead available. They’re a candidate for the missing matter, but they’re not the front runner. They don’t give a Universe with the right lumpy structure, and anyway they come up short on total mass.
The other candidates are much slower and heavier than neutrinos. They’re the cold dark matter school, axions and photinos and gravitinos, and they don’t give the right lumpiness to the Universe, either. Even adding them to the neutrino mass, the whole thing still came up too small. McAndrew was saying, in effect, we’ve gone as far as theories can go. Let’s get out there, where the experiments have a chance to succeed, and measure how much hot dark matter and cold dark matter is around. Then we’ll know where we stand.
It was all fairly new to me. I was concentrating deeply, struggling with the theories of WIMPs — Weakly Interacting Massive Particles — when I was interrupted.