All right, I wasn’t being realistic; but I think everyone at the Institute nourished the secret dream that their project would be the one that caught Tallboy’s imagination, occupied his time, and won his approval. Certainly the amount of work that went into preparation supported my idea.
The timing was tight but manageable. Jan would arrive at the Institute at 09:00, with the official parental assignment to take place at 09:50. Tallboy’s grand show-and-tell began at 10:45 and went on for as long as he was willing to look and listen. Jan was scheduled to leave again at 19:50, so I had mixed feelings about Tallboy’s tour. The longer he stayed, the more impressed he was likely to be, and we wanted that. But we also wanted to spend time with Jan before she had to dash back to Luna for graduation and sign-out.
In the final analysis everything went off as well — and as badly — as it could have. At 09:00 exactly Jan’s ship docked at the Institute. I was pleased to see that it was one of the new five-gee mini-versions of the McAndrew Drive, coming into use at last in the Inner System. My bet was that Jan had picked it just to please him. You don’t need the drive at all for pond-hopping from Luna to L-4.
The parental assignment ceremony is traditionally conducted with a lot of formality. It was against custom to step out of the docking area as soon as the doors were opened, march up to the father-to-be, and grab him in a huge and affectionate hug. McAndrew looked startled for a moment, then swelled red as a turkeycock with pleasure. I got the same shock treatment a few moments later. Then instead of letting go Jan and I held each other at arm’s length and took stock.
She was going to be taller than me — already we were eye to eye. In three years she had changed from a super-smart child to an attractive woman, whose bright grey eyes told me something else: if I didn’t take a hand, Jan would twist McAndrew round her little finger. And she knew I knew it. We stood smiling at each other, while a dozen messages passed between us: affection, pride, anticipation, sheer happiness — and challenge. Mac and I were getting a handful.
We gave each other a final hug, then she took my hand and Mac’s and we went on through to meet with Limperis and the others. The official ceremony would not begin for another half hour, but we three knew that the important part was already completed.
“So what about your graduation present?” asked McAndrew, as we were waiting to begin. I had wondered about it myself. It was the first thing that most new children wanted to talk about.
“Nothing expensive,” said Jan. “I think it would be nice just to make a trip — I’ve seen too much of Luna.” Her tone was casual, but the quick sideways look at me told another story.
“Is that all?” said Mac. “Och, that doesn’t sound like much of a present. We thought you’d be wanting a cruise pod, at the very least.”
“What sort of trip?” I asked.
“I’d like to visit Triton Station. I’ve heard about it all my life, but apart from you, Jeanie, I don’t know of anyone who’s ever been there. And you never talk about it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” I said. The words popped out before I could stop them.
“Why not?”
“It’s too far out — too isolated. And there’ll be nothing at all for you to do there. It’s a long way away.” I had reacted before I had rational arguments, and now I was waffling.
Jan knew it. “A long way away! When the two of you have been light-years out. You’ve been on trips thousands of times as far as Triton Station.”
I hesitated and she bore in again. “You’re the one who told me that most people stick around like moles in their own backyard, when the Halo’s waiting for them and there’s a whole Universe to be explored.”
What could I say? That there was one rule for most people, and another for my daughter? Triton Station is in the backyard, in terms of interstellar space; but it’s also out near the edge of the old Solar System, too far away for Inner System comforts. An excellent place for a message relay between the Halo and the Inner System, that’s why it was put there in the first place. But it’s small and spartan. And the station isn’t down on Neptune ’s satellite, the way that most people think. It’s in orbit around Triton, with just a small manned outpost on the surface of the satellite itself for supplies, raw materials, and cryogenics research. There are a few unmanned stations bobbing about in the icy atmosphere of Neptune itself, 350,000 kilometers away, but nobody in her right mind ever goes to visit them.
The sixty Station personnel are a strange mixture of dedicated researchers and psychological loners who find the Inner System and even the Titan Colony much too crowded for them. Some of them love it there, but as soon as the 100-gee balanced drive is in general use, Triton Station will be only a day and a half flight away and well within reach of a weekend vacation. Then I suppose the disgusted staff will curse the crowds, and decide its time to move farther out into the Halo seeking their old peace and quiet.
“You’ll be bored,” I said, trying another argument. “They’re more antisocial than you can imagine, and you won’t know anybody there.”
“Yes, I will. I know Sven Wicklund, and we always got along famously. He’s still there, isn’t he?”
“He is, blast him,” said McAndrew. “But as to what he’s been up to out there for the past six months…”
His voice tailed away and the old slack-jawed, half-witted look crept over his face. He was rubbing his fingers gently along his sandy, receding hairline, and I realized where his thoughts were taking him.
“Don’t be silly, Mac. I hope you’re not even considering it. If Wicklund won’t tell you what he’s doing, you don’t imagine he’ll talk to Jan about it, do you, if she’s just at Triton Station for a short visit?”
“Well, I don’t know,” began McAndrew. “It seems to me there’s a chance—”
“I feel sure he’ll tell me,” said Jan calmly.
Unfortunately, so was I. Wicklund had been bowled over by Jan when she was only fourteen and didn’t have a tenth of her present firepower. If she could lead him around then with a ring through his nose, today with her added wiles it would be no contest.
“Let’s not try to decide this now,” I said. “The ceremony’s starting, and then we have to get ready to meet Tallboy. Let’s talk about it afterwards.”
“Oh, I think we can decide it easily enough now,” said McAndrew.
“No, that’s all right,” said Jan. “It can wait. No hurry.” Sorry, Jeanie, said her smile at me. Game, set and match.
After that I found it hard to keep my mind on Tallboy’s visit. Luckily I wasn’t on center stage most of the time, though I did tag along with the tour, watching that high forehead nodding politely, and his long index finger pointing at the different pieces of equipment on display. I also had a chance to talk to everyone when they completed their individual briefings.
“Impressive,” said Gowers when she came out. She had been first one up, describing her theories and experiments on the focusing of light using arrays of kernels. A tough area of work. To set up a stable array of Kerr-Newman black holes called for solutions to the many-body problem in general relativity. Luckily there was no one in the System better able to tackle that — Emma Gowers had made a permanent niche for herself in scientific history years before, when she provided the exact solution to the general relativistic two-body problem. Now to test her approximations she had built a tiny array of shielded kernels, small enough that all her work was done through a microscope. I had seen Tallboy peering in through the eyepiece, joking with Emma as he did so.