My livelihood wasn’t hurt by the cancellation of a food supply contract with Earth; but my ego was, and I spent a good deal of time fuming. Was it Anna Griss, getting at me in a remarkably indirect way? I knew she was capable of subtle malice. But I still looked for a more logical explanation. I couldn’t see even Anna risking Earth’s food supply just to get at me.
I had no intention of going to Earth, or wasting another minute thinking of Ernesto Kugel and his mysterious invariant. So when we arrived at the Colony drop-off point, where the Assembly would be moored until its next trip out, McAndrew and I went our own ways. He headed down on a shuttle, as excited as a child on his way to a birthday party. I mothballed the ship, and handed it over to the local USF maintenance crew.
That took me three days. And then on the fourth morning, without thinking about what I was doing, I found myself aboard a shuttle vessel.
Heading for Earth.
I had been given a number to reach McAndrew, and I forwarded a message to tell him that I was on the way, and when and where I would arrive. I didn’t ask, but I rather hoped he might be waiting for me.
He wasn’t. And it was one of life’s less pleasant experiences to pass through entry formalities, search for Mac’s face, and see Van Lyle waiting for me on the other side of the barrier.
“Captain Jeanie Roker.” He reached out and took my hand. “It’s been a while.”
I shook his hand, but my feelings must have showed on my face, because he laughed and said, “Don’t say anything. You did what you did, and I thoroughly deserved it. Let bygones be bygones.”
But he touched his fingertips to his bent nose.
I said, “McAndrew—”
“Is having too much fun, Captain, to tear himself away from the Geotron facility. He asked me to come to the port, and take you there to join him.”
It sounded awfully plausible. But I couldn’t put the past behind me as easily as he claimed to have done. “Professor McAndrew asked you to come and meet me?”
Instead of answering, Lyle took a palm-sized phone from his pocket and tapped in a string of numbers. “Four one seven,” he said into the unit. After a few seconds’ pause he handed me the phone.
I found myself staring into the tiny screen at a familiar high-cheekboned face. His wispy hair was sticking up in little random spikes, and his color was a fraction ruddier than usual. I couldn’t see his fingers, but I could bet that he was cracking the joints.
“Jeanie,” he said, as soon as he saw me. “I didn’t expect to hear from you until you arrived at the Geotron. What’s wrong? Are you having problems getting underwater?”
Underwater? But it was McAndrew, without a doubt. McAndrew live, healthy, unrestrained, and by the look of it having the time of his life. He actually did not sound too thrilled by the news of my arrival.
“No problems,” I said. “I touched down just a few minutes ago.”
“Right then. I’ll have to go. We’re very busy here.” And his picture promptly vanished. The phone link disconnected.
That was the genuine McAndrew, without a doubt, and he was clearly all right. The smart thing to have done at that point would have been to apologize to Van Lyle for my rudeness, plead prior job commitments off Earth, and turn right around and head back to space. Instead I handed the little phone back, sighed, and said, “Before I make a complete fool of myself, tell me one thing. What is a Geotron, and where is a Geotron?”
Van Lyle stared at me. I think I had actually managed to surprise him.
“You’re asking me what a Geotron is?”
“I am.”
“But didn’t Professor McAndrew explain to you?”
“He would have done — if I had given him half a chance.”
“Well… I’m not a scientist, as you know very well.”
“Nor am I. That ought to make things easier for both of us.” We started walking toward a sleek high-speed aircar, as Van Lyle said, “Well, you know what neutrinos are, don’t you?”
“Yes. They’re elementary particles, with no charge, and a tiny rest mass. Their discovery was predicted by Pauli in 1931, because they were needed to preserve the laws of conservation of energy and angular momentum.”
That was gross intellectual dishonesty, and I knew it. But Lyle didn’t. He looked quite impressed.
“Right,” he said. “All they have are spin and energy. And they don’t interact much with ordinary matter, uness they have very high energy. That makes them the devil to detect. A free neutrino can easily pass right through the Earth. But sometimes that can be an advantage. Like if you want to do down-deep exploration. And you decide to build a Geotron.”
He explained the rest of it as we took off and he flew us west at Mach Ten. The staff of Earth’s Food and Energy Council had done all the easy exploration of Earth’s interior that they could do — which meant prospecting to about twenty kilometers down. Now they were forced to search deeper, or else be dependent on off-planet resources. The Geotron was nothing more than a huge kind of X-ray machine, for examining the inner structure of the Earth. But instead of X-ray radiation, which would penetrate no more than a few feet, the machine generated tight beams of high-energy neutrinos. They could be sent in any direction. They passed right through the middle of the Earth, scattering off structures in the interior, and emerged at points around the world where their numbers were measured. Then a very fancy set of computer programs took the information on the detected neutrinos and used that to deduce the interior structures that they had encountered in their path from the Geotron to the detection chambers.
“Looking for primordial methane, as the primary target,” Lyle explained. “Pockets of compressed methane left over from the time of the Earth’s formation, and still trapped deep inside.”
“To use as fuel?”
“Lord, no. Methane’s far too valuable an organic material to burn — even if the laws permitted it. We use it for complex hydrocarbon synthesis.”
“Have you been finding any?”
“More than you would believe.”
It occurred to me that I had an explanation to offer Hermann Jaynsie for Earth’s lack of interest in the food supply contracts. There would never be a shortage of nitrogen on Earth, with an atmosphere that was nearly eighty percent that gas. If they now had enough hydrocarbons, and enough energy, elemental food synthesis would be a snap.
The most surprising thing was Van Lyle’s willingness to tell all this to me, an outsider. Didn’t Earth’s Food and Energy Council care any more who knew what? Or were there missing pieces that were not being mentioned?
“I understand the Geotron,” I said. “But what was that about being underwater?”
“Well, you don’t think we’d put it on land, do you? Solid surface is too precious. We put it on the seabed.” And then, when I looked puzzled. “Captain Roker, just how big do you think the Geotron is?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Then I’ll tell you. The main ring is forty kilometers across.”
Forty kilometers. A long day’s walk. Or in this case, a long day’s swim.
“So it was built on the Malvinas’ continental shelf,” he went on. “Where there’s a lot of available seabed, and the water is only fifty to a hundred meters deep.”
“Malvinas?”
“Off the east coast of Patagonia. We’ll be there in half an hour. Then you can see it for yourself.”
In the next few minutes I learned that the Malvinas’ coastal zone was now Earth’s hottest development area, site not only of the Geotron but also of the world’s most modern food facilities and genetic laboratories; all, naturally, off-shore, in the shallow seas that ran for hundreds of kilometers east of the mainland.