“I’m sorry, Jeanie,” he said, as he helped me ease out of my suit. “I know I put us in danger, warning them the way I did. If Parmikan had stopped in time we might have been killed. But I couldn’t let them go on moving into that line singularity, without giving them at least a chance to stop. I just couldn’t do that. You’d have done the same thing, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would.”
Like hell. If it had been up to me, Lyle would be floating around in two halves, the same as Stefan Parmikan. But then, compared with McAndrew I’m a barbaric, vengeful throwback. “Don’t worry about it, Mac. What you did was the right thing.”
I winced, as the suit came free from my calf and caught on crusted blood. “So whose idea was it, Van Lyle?” I said. “Who decided that on this expedition, McAndrew and I wouldn’t be going back?”
He had been sitting slumped over, staring at the floor. He looked up, opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind. He shook his head.
I didn’t blame him. When we arrived home he would be charged and surely convicted; but nothing the system authorities could do to him was half as bad as Anna Lisa Griss’s vengeance if he betrayed her.
McAndrew had gone across to the capsule’s medical center and was returning with two spray syringes. “I’m going to put you under, Jeanie, while I dress your leg,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until we’re home for a full repair. But first, to be safe…”
He went to Van Lyle and pressed the loaded syringe against the back of the stooped man’s neck. Lyle tried to stand up, with a startled expression on his face. It was already too late.
“Better if we keep him under all the way back,” Mac said, as after a few struggling seconds Lyle slid forward and fell face-down on the floor. “That way we don’t have to worry.”
I wasn’t worrying. I was going to be next, and physically I was ready for it. My calf was beginning to throb mercilessly. Still I held up my hand in protest. “Mac, wait a minute. We shouldn’t head back until you’ve finished your experiments. And you’ve hardly started.”
He moved behind me. “Don’t be daft, Jeanie. I can come here anytime. And I surely will. There’s big questions to be answered. I need to map the structure of those shadow matter objects in more detail. And now we’ve got another candidate for the hidden matter. How much is cold dark matter, how much hot dark matter, how much shadow matter?”
The cool nozzle of the syringe touched the back of my neck, and the spray diffused through my skin. I felt the effect at once as a pleasant, relaxing warmth that spread through my whole body.
“Mac,” I said, as the capsule of the Hoatzin began to blur around me. “You saved us, but I don’t know how you did it. How did you know where to go, to put that gravity singularity right between us and those two?”
“Easy enough,” he said. “I had the measurements from the mass detectors. That made it a standard problem of inverse potential theory: Given the field, where are the masses needed to generate it? I already felt sure that there were line singularities of shadow matter, ones that would work — gravitationally — on anything in our universe that encountered them. But just where were they? I worked that out while you were inside the lock, playing your fun and games with Lyle and Parmikan. Of course, I had to make simplifying assumptions and hope they wouldn’t affect the answer. And it would have been really nice to have a computer. But there was no time for that. I did what I could.”
I did what I could. What he had done, in the few minutes before I was blown out of the lock in a gust of freezing air, was to solve, mentally, a problem that would have taken me half a day to set up, and a computer to solve. And he had done it while knowing that the next half hour might end his own life.
Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, Shadow Matter. The words spun through my mind as the world darkened, and McAndrew’s earnest face faded before my eyes. Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, Shadow Matter.
Which one had dominated our past, to create the present structure of the Universe?
I had no idea. All I knew for sure as I slid into unconsciousness was that the future of our Universe was going to be dominated by cool grey matter; the sort that McAndrew and a few rare others like him have between their ears.
SIXTH CHRONICLE: The Invariants of Nature
“I must say it was a surprise to me that you came here at all,” Van Lyle said pleasantly. “You really have to hand it to the Director. Anna Griss predicted all of this, you know — the effect of the announcement, McAndrew’s arrival, and then yours. Very perceptive of her. But, then, isn’t that exactly why she has the job of Administrator, and we do not?”
He was standing in front of a huge pair of metal doors, checking a set of dials built into the frame. On the other side of them lay the processing vats, where all organic tissues — muscles, bones, nails, skin and hair — were dissolved to basic biotic molecules. Warning signals were splashed all over the chamber, and on both the doors: CONTROLLED ACCESS — DANGER, CORROSIVE GASES AND LIQUIDS — DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT PROTECTIVE SUITS — OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT REPRESENTATIVES ONLY PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT.
Van Lyle turned to me questioningly. “Impressive, wouldn’t you say? Don’t be coy, Captain. I’d really like to hear your opinions on all this.”
I rolled my eyes at him. I was sitting upright in a metal wheelchair. My wrists and elbows were bound to the chair arms with broad fiber tape, the sort that is hard to unstick and just about impossible to break. My lower legs were lashed to the chair’s metal struts with the same material. A broad sticky strip of it covered my face, from just below my nose to the point of my chin.
“Ah, I see the problem,” Lyle went on. “But are you ready to talk nicely now, and not make a fuss?”
I nodded — one of the few degrees of freedom available to me.
Van Lyle nodded back. “Very good! And just in case you feel tempted to change your mind, let me point out that it would be quite pointless. This part of the installation is all automated. No one is here but the two of us.”
He came across to me and touched one end of the tape that covered my mouth. But instead of pulling it loose, he paused to run his fingers along one side of my nose, and back down the other.
“What a nice, shapely adornment,” he said. “Not at all like mine, eh? Before we finish, we’ll have to do something about that.”
I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much he hated me. His nose was bent and slightly flattened, detracting from his rugged blond good looks. The mouth beneath the crooked nose twisted with anger as he ripped the tape away from my mouth.
I worked my lips against each other, wincing. A layer of skin had been torn away by the super-adhesive tape, along with every fine hair on my face. I felt a trickle of blood down my chin.
The less discussion of noses, though, the better. I had broken Van Lyle’s, half a light-year away from Sol, when he wouldn’t take his lecherous hands off me. That had been long ago, but unfortunately he didn’t seem willing to forget it.
“You know McAndrew,” I said. “All it took was the right word, and he was ready to head for Earth. Nothing that I said could stop him from coming.”
“So I understand.” Lyle nodded. “But you, Jeanie — surely you’re much more sophisticated than that? I would have bet money against you following him down here.”
Van Lyle’s calling me Jeanie made my flesh crawl, but he was right. I didn’t have the excuse that Mac had, the siren song, the magic words that had left him helpless: a new invariant of nature.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve spent half my life chasing after Mac when he got into trouble. By now it’s second nature. But usually it’s to some place halfway to the stars — not a trip down to Earth.”