And while Lyle talked, I struggled to remember where Patagonia was. Southern hemisphere? Definitely. South America? Probably. It occurred to me that although I could quote the size and approximate orbital parameters for every major body from Mercury to the edge of the Oort cloud, I did not know the geography of Earth.
We were flying near the edge of the atmosphere. I stared up at the familiar black sky, with the brightest stars showing, then turned my eyes down to wisps of white cloud, with far below them the alien sea.
I felt, as usual when I was on Earth, a long way from home.
Our descent to the Geotron did nothing to ease my feeling of alienation. I had not realized that our aircar was amphibious, until we were skimming a few feet above long, rolling waves. We touched down, planing across the surface in a cloud of spray. Lyle took his hands off the controls.
And instead of bobbing on the rollers, we kept descending. After a few moments of panic, while the water level rose past the windows and plunged us into a green gloom, I realized that the aircraft was not only an amphibian, it was also a submersible. I could hear the thrum of engines aft, and see the yellow beams of light that lit the way ahead and behind us for many meters.
“Lights for passenger viewing only,” explained Lyle. “Just so you can enjoy the sights. I haven’t been controlling the craft since we touched down on the waves. We’ll be homed in to the Geotron facility automatically — sonic control, of course, not radio. Radio signals won’t travel through water.”
“How far is it?”
“Just a couple of kilometers. There was no point in landing too far away, but the final approach is interesting.”
We had been angling steadily downward. The natural sunlight was vanishing, breaking to cloudy patches of darkening green. Shoals of silver-green fish and what looked like endless thousands of purple squids darted through the beams of our headlights. Then they too were gone, and I had my first sight of Earth’s sea-floor, a smooth grey-brown carpet of fine sediments that swirled up like an ominous mist behind us in the wake of our propulsion jets.
That alien fog made me uneasy. I was much comforted when the huge silver wall of the outer Geotron ring appeared ahead, and we moved to an underwater docking. That felt quite familiar to me. An inward pressure of seawater replaced the space environment’s outward pressure against vacuum, but the same sort of locks were needed. And once we were inside, we could have been in any controlled one-gravity environment between the Vulcan Nexus and the Hyperion Deep Vault.
Van Lyle led the way through the set of connected chambers that formed the control nexus for the Geotron. Other maintenance areas were spaced all around the rim of the main rings, a couple of kilometers apart. After a final up-and-down ride over the top of the inner ring, we were finally spilled by a moving stairway into a big square room, partitioned off into dozens of small work cubicles.
McAndrew sat in one of them with a man and a woman in their early twenties. His shoes and socks were off and he was staring at a listing that filled the whole of the cubicle wall. He looked well, was obviously unrestrained, and gave every impression of a man totally at home and thoroughly enjoying himself.
“There he is,” said Lyle. “I was wondering, why does he take his shoes and socks off when he’s working?”
“In case he needs to count to more than ten.” But I didn’t know the real answer, any more than Lyle did, and I had known Mac for a long time. At least he wasn’t cracking his toe joints at the moment.
We walked forward. Mac saw me first, and stood up. “Jeanie! This is Merle Thursoe and Tom O’Dell. We’re setting up a really great experiment.”
He nodded to me, almost dismissively, and turned back to the display. Then something — maybe my snort of anger — must have told him that this wouldn’t quite do for someone who had come so far to see him.
“Tom, Merle,” he said, “would you carry on without me for a few minutes?” And then, turning back to me and standing up, “Jeanie, I don’t think you know Ernesto Kugel. Come on. You have to meet him.”
He walked me right through the complicated center of the room, to a cubicle no bigger or better furnished than any of the others. Sitting at a desk there, facing outward, was a serious little man wearing a formal black suit, white shirt, and dark blue neckerchief. A matching blue rose adorned his lapel.
“Director Ernesto Kugel.” McAndrew was at his most formal. “May I present Captain Jeanie Roker.”
Kugel stood, came around his desk, and bowed, giving me a splendid view of the top of a hairless scalp as smooth and white and round as an ostrich egg. His whole head was free of hair, except for the neatly trimmed black moustache on his upper lip. I decided that nature could never have created the effect. Ernesto Kugel had worked on it.
I was all set to dislike the man, when he straightened up and took my hand.
“I am delighted to meet you, Captain Roker,” he said, in a deep, smooth voice. “Professor McAndrew told me that you are most competent. What he did not mention is that you are also elegant and beautiful.”
I stared at him. “Does that line work often?”
He gazed back, unblinking and unashamed, his brown eyes as bright and lively as a bird’s. “Not so often.” He suddenly smiled, and it transformed his face. “But let us say, it works often enough.”
“And I suppose that joking about it works, too?”
“Sometimes. Most times. And if it does not” — he shrugged — “what harm has been done? God made two sexes, Captain Jeanie — and luckily that was exactly the right number.”
I suddenly found it impossible to dislike him at all. We stood grinning at each other, until McAndrew said, “I want a word in private. Just the three of us.”
“Of course.” Kugel nodded his head toward the cubicle. “But this is as private as we get. I believe it is bad if I hide myself away from where the real work is done. Bad for my staff — and worst of all for me.” Kugel waved to us to sit down. His desk was as neat and organized as Mac’s was usually messy.
McAndrew didn’t waste any time. “Ernesto, I could explain our discussions to Captain Roker — to Jeanie. But I would feel much more comfortable if you were to do that.”
“Of course.” Kugel leaned toward me, and spoke in his low, confidential voice. “You should sleep with him, you know. You two should have children.”
I turned on McAndrew. “You brought me in here, just to hear a proposition on your behalf? You ought to be old enough to handle your own public relations.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Mac waved at the other man. “Keep going, Ernesto.”
“Of course.” Kugel was chuckling to himself. “What I mean, Captain Jeanie, is that the man standing before you, Arthur Morton McAndrew, is a great genius. His genes, and your genes, should be preserved and cherished. I knew his reputation long before he came here, but now I realize that he is one of the immortals.”
“But I’m not fit to carry Dr. Kugel’s coat, when it comes to large-scale engineering,” McAndrew added. Praise of his abilities makes him terribly uncomfortable.
I sighed. It was obviously a mutual admiration society. Apparently I had travelled the distance from Moon to Earth, just to hear the two of them compliment each other.
“But to be specific,” Kugel said, after a long pause in which they sat nodding and smiling. “Before Professor McAndrew’s arrival, I and my staff had operated the Geotron for three months. In all that time, we had observed an inexplicable loss of neutrinos. We know how many the machine produces. And we know how many we are finding, in each of our mobile detectors. From that it is a simple calculation to estimate the total number escaping over the whole of the Earth’s surface. There were too few of them, less than we were creating — and not by a number within the reasonable bounds of statistical error. There were far too few. For a long time we thought that it must be a matter of phase changes, or instrument calibration. Finally we decided that could not be the case.