For what it was worth, I could have given my own assurance. Some evidence is just as persuasive to me as chromosomal mapping. No one who had seen that blind, inward look on Jan’s face when she was tackling an abstract problem would ever doubt that she was McAndrew’s flesh and blood. I had cursed that expression a hundred times, as McAndrew left me to worry alone while he disappeared on a voyage of exploration and discovery inside his own head.
Never mind; McAndrew had his good points. “Parental acceptance by Jean Pelham Roker,” I said.
“Parental acceptance by Arthur Morton McAndrew,” said Mac.
Another brief pause, then: “Acceptance received and recorded. Formal assignment confirmed for two hundred hours U.T. Arrange location through Luna link 33-442. Hard copy output follows. Is there additional transfer?”
“No.”
“Link terminated.” While the computer initiated hard copy output to the terminal at the Institute, I did a little calculation.
“Mac, we have a problem — Jan’s acceptance ceremony is set for the same time as Tallboy’s visit.”
“Of course.” He looked surprised that I hadn’t seen it immediately. “We can handle it. She’ll come out here. She’ll want to visit — she hasn’t been to the Institute since Wicklund went out to Triton Station.”
“But you’ll be too tied up with Tallboy to spend much time with her. What rotten luck.”
McAndrew shrugged, and it was enough to start him talking. “Whenever a set of independent events occur randomly in time or space, you’ll notice event-clusters. They’re inevitable. That’s all there is to coincidences. If you assume that event arrival times follow a Poisson distribution, and just go ahead and calculate the probability that a given number will occur in some small interval of time, you’ll find—”
“Take him away,” I said to Limperis.
He slapped McAndrew lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. Coincidence or not, this is a day for celebration. You’re a father now, and thanks to Jeanie we’ve got Tallboy coming out here to see the show.” He winked at me. “Though maybe Jan will change her mind when she hears Mac talk for a few hours, eh, Jeanie? Poor girl, she’s not used to it, the way you are.”
McAndrew just grinned. He was riding too high for a little gentle joshing to have any effect. “If you pity the poor lass at all,” he said. “It should be for the Philistine space-jock of a mother she’ll be getting. If I wanted to talk to Jan about probability distributions, she’d listen to me.” She probably would, too. I’d seen her math profiles.
Limperis was reaching out to cut the connection, but Mac hadn’t quite finished. “You know, the laws of probability not only permit coincidences,” he said. “They—”
He was still talking when the screen went blank.
I had no more official business down on Earth, but I didn’t head out at once. Limperis was quite right, it was a time for celebration; you didn’t become a parent every day. I went over to the Asgard restaurant, up at the very top of Mile High, and ordered the full panoramic dinner. In some ways I wasted my money, because no matter what the sensories threw at me I hardly noticed. I was thinking back seventeen years, to the time when Jan was born, so small she could put her whole fist in the old silver thimble that McAndrew’s friends gave her as a birthgift.
It was a few years later that I realized we had something exceptional on our hands — Jan had breezed through every test they could give her. I felt as though I had a window to McAndrew’s own past, because I was sure he had been the same way thirty years earlier. The mandatory separation years hadn’t been bad at all, because McAndrew and I had spent most of them on long trips out, where the Earth-years sped by in months of shipboard time. But I was very glad they were over now. In a few more days, McAndrew, Jan and I would be officially and permanently related.
By the time I finished my meal I probably wore the same foolish smile as I had seen on Mac’s face before Limperis cut the video. Neither or us could see beyond the coming ceremony to a grimmer future.
The next few days were too busy for much introspection. The Penrose Institute had been in free orbit, half a million miles out, but to make it more convenient for Tallboy’s visit Limperis moved us back to the old L-4 position. In a general planning meeting we decided what we would show off, and how much time could be spared for each research activity. I’d never heard such squabbling. The concentration of brain power found at the Institute meant that a dozen or more important advances were competing for Tallboy’s time. Limperis was as impartial and diplomatic as ever, but there was no way he could smooth Macedo’s feelings when she learned that she would have less than ten minutes to show off three years of effort on electromagnetic coupling systems. And Wenig was even worse — he wanted to be in on all the presentations, and still have time to promote his own work on ultra-dense matter.
At the same time McAndrew was having problems of quite a different kind with Sven Wicklund. That young physicist was still out on Triton Station, where he had gone complaining that the Inner System was all far too crowded and cluttered and he needed some peace and quiet.
“What the devil’s he up to out there?” grumbled McAndrew. “I need to know for the Tallboy briefing, but a one-way radio signal out to Neptune takes four hours — even if he wanted to talk, and he doesn’t. And I’m sure he’s on to something new and important. Blast him, what am I supposed to report?”
I wasn’t sympathetic. To me it seemed no more than poetic justice. McAndrew had annoyed me and others often enough in the past, when he refused to talk about his own ideas while they were in development — “half-cooked,” to use his phrase. Apparently Sven Wicklund was just the same, and it served Mac right.
But the Institute needed all the impressive material they could find, so Mac continued to send long and futile messages needling Wicklund to tell him something — anything — about his latest work. He got nowhere.
“And he’s the brightest of the lot of us,” said McAndrew. Coming from him that was a real compliment. His colleagues were less convinced.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Wenig when I asked him. “Anyway, it’s a meaningless question. The two of them are quite different. Imagine that Newton and Einstein had lived at the same time. McAndrew’s like Newton, as much at home with experiment as theory. And Wicklund’s all theory, he needs help to change his pants. But it’s still a fool question. Which is better, food or drink? — that makes as much sense. The main thing is that they’re contemporaries, and they can talk to each other about what they’re doing.” Except that Wicklund refused to do so, at least at this stage of his work.
McAndrew finally gave up the effort to draw him out and concentrated on matters closer to home.
My own part in planning the show for Tallboy was a minor one. It had to be. My degrees in Gravitational Engineering and Electrical Engineering wouldn’t get me in as janitor at the Institute. My job was to concentrate on the Hoatzin. Until we started work (budget permitting) on a more advanced model, this ship carried the best available version of the McAndrew drive. It could manage a hundred gee acceleration for months, and a hundred and ten gee for as long as the crew were willing to forego kitchen and toilet facilities.
The Office of External Affairs officially owned the Hoatzin and the Institute operated her, but I secretly thought of the ship as mine. No one else had ever flown her.
I had faint hopes that Tallboy might like a demonstration flight, maybe a short run out to Saturn. We could be there and back in a couple of days. The ship was all ready, for that and more — if he approved it, we were all set for the Alpha Centauri probe (forty-four days of shipboard time; not bad, when you remember that the first manned trip to Mars had taken more than nine months). We could be on our interstellar journey in a week or two.