I was about to add, remember your relativity, but I didn’t have the gall. McAndrew knew more about special relativity and time dilation than I would ever know. Also more about general relativity, gravity, quantum theory, superstrings, condensed matter physics, finite state automata, and any other science subject that you care to mention. What he didn’t know, and would never learn, was restraint.
Our holiday was over, whether I wanted to admit it or not. We would spend one more night together, but McAndrew would not be in bed with me. Not all of him, that is. His body, yes, but his head was already a hundred and three light-years away. It would not be coming back any time soon. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but even now he itched to be at the Penrose Institute, out in space where his precious observational tools could see far more than any instrument condemned to lie at the bottom of the murky atmosphere of Earth.
Me, I could look into the evening sky and see herring-bone patterns of gorgeous rose and salmon-pink clouds catching the light of the supernova. McAndrew looked at the same thing and saw an annoying absorbing layer of atmospheric gases cutting off all light of wavelength shorter than the near ultraviolet. The Cassiopeia Supernova was flooding the Solar System with hard radiation — and here was McAndrew, down on Earth, condemned to visible wavelengths and missing half the show.
“It will still be there tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll have a month or two before it begins to fade.”
I might as well have saved my breath. He said, “If I flew south tonight, maybe I could get a pre-dawn lift.”
“Maybe you could.” Actually, I knew the lift-off and transfer schedules in fair detail, and there was no chance of a launch that would get him one second sooner to the Institute, which was free-flying now in an L-3 halo orbit. Also, the last evening of a holiday is supposed to be special.
“Sounds like you don’t think I should,” he said. And then, showing that he is more human than almost anyone in the Solar System gives him credit for — he’s supposed to be McAndrew, giant brain and intellect incarnate — he added, “Ah, now Jeanie, don’t get mad at me. You know, I wasn’t thinking of trying to fly all the way out to the supernova. But Fogarty and me, we’ve had an expedition in mind for a while to visit the solar focus. This would be a great time to do it. We’d learn a lot about the supernova.”
“You might,” I said. I did not add that I did not like Paul Fogarty. McAndrew could tell me, as often as he liked, that Fogarty was bright and young and inventive. Maybe he was all those things, but I thought he was also ambitious and snotty and obnoxious.
Pure personal vanity on my part, of course. Young Paul Fogarty had met me during one of my visits to the Institute, learned that I was not a scientist but a mere cargo captain, and after that did not recognize my existence.
If McAndrew was trying to be nice to me for a final evening together, I was more than willing to meet him halfway. “If you want to go to the solar focus,” I said. “Then you should do it. Go and have fun. You deserve it. Not a long trip, is it?”
“Just a hop.” He thought for a moment, and the only sign of Scottish ancestry appeared in his speech. “Och, Jeanie, it’s not even that. We hardly need the balanced drive at all. Five hundred and fifty astronomical units to the solar focus, that’s only eighty-odd billion kilometers. If we take the Hoatzin and hold it down to a hundred gees, that’s less than a week of shipboard time there and back — even allowing for turnover and deceleration. Don’t worry that I’ll be gone long. I’ll be home again and waiting for you when you finish playing the deep-sea diver.”
Possibly. But I knew him of old. Get McAndrew into a situation of scientific interest, and he loses all sense of time and everything else.
When I emerged from the Europan ocean, he might indeed be back at the Institute; but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find him still eighty billion kilometers out, sitting at the solar focus — the place where the Sun’s own gravitational field would act like a lens, and converge light from the Cassiopeia supernova to a focus.
I tilted back my head to stare once more at the burning point of light in the sky. A hundred and three light-years away, but it shone on Earth a thousand times as bright as the full Moon. This was the closest supernova to Earth in all of recorded history. Maybe that was just as well. Much closer, and it would be a danger to all life on Earth.
Unlike McAndrew, I could be quite as happy without the Cassiopeia supernova.
I accuse McAndrew of things, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just as guilty myself.
The Europan ocean is eerie and spectacular and unlike anything else in the Solar System. People talk about the silence of space, floating in the void beyond Neptune with all engines off. Fair enough. But I’ve been there, and I can tell you that it’s nothing like as uncanny as the quiet of Europa’s abyssal ocean, a hundred kilometer depth of water and above that a thick shield of ice-cap to seal you off from the rest of the Universe.
I loved it. The young captain who piloted the Spindrift was half my age, flatteringly attentive, and a few times he allowed me to take the controls of the deep submersible. We drifted along just above the ocean floor, very slowly, so we would not disturb the sea-floor furrows with their rows of aperiodic self-reproducing crystals, Europa’s own contribution to life in the Solar System.
Of course I stayed down longer than expected — as long as I could. When we finally surfaced through Blowhole it was because we were running low on air and supplies, not on interest. I looked at a calendar for the first time in a week and realized that McAndrew might have left and already returned. Chances were against that. My bet was, he was out at the solar focus, fooling around with his instruments and totally unaware of what day or week it was.
Communication to space from the Europan deep ocean is difficult and reserved for emergencies, but it was easy enough to send messages from the surface station at Mount Ararat. I called the Penrose Institute, personal to McAndrew. Then I spent the seventy minute round-trip signal delay packing my bag in preparation for the ascent to Jovian system orbit.
I rather expected a “Not Present” return signal, together with a message that he was out at the focus. Instead, when the screen filled it showed an image of McAndrew’s face. He was scowling, not at all like a man who had just returned from an exciting and successful journey.
“Aye, Jeanie, I’m here.” His voice was decidedly mournful. “And I suppose you can come see me if you feel like it.”
Not the world’s most enthusiastic invitation, even by McAndrew standards. What had happened to his supernova-generated excitement? The newcomer in Cassiopeia still blazed in the sky as brightly as ever, but there was no joy in McAndrew.
Rather than attempting questions with seventy-minute delays on the answers, I said goodbye to Europa and headed sunward for the Institute.
McAndrew didn’t meet me when I docked. That was all right. I had been to the Institute often enough, I knew the layout of the place, and I knew exactly where his office was. He would probably be there now, staring at the wall, theorizing, cracking his finger joints, oblivious to the passage of time. It was no surprise that he did not meet me.
What did surprise me was old Doc Limperis, hovering near the lock when I emerged to the Institute’s interior. Limperis was long-retired as Director of the Institute, and he could have had his pick of Solar System locations. But as he said, where else would a man interested in physics want to be?
He approached me, held out his hand, said, “Jeanie Roker, how are you?” and then continued without a pause for breath, “Maybe you can get through to him, because it’s certain sure none of us can.”