“Dead?” I realized that I had never heard McAndrew speak of his father, not even once.
“By all the logic, he is.” She smiled sweetly. “But a son-of-a-bitch like that is awful hard to kill.”
The arrival of a chattering half-dozen scientists saved me from fielding that remark. Mary McAndrew made an instant survey, checked the line of her skirt to make sure that plenty of leg was showing, and headed for the tallest and most distinguished-looking of the group. It was Plimpton, who according to McAndrew had not had an original thought since he started to grow facial hair and possibly not before. On the other hand, I don’t think Mary was seeking original thought. Original sin, maybe.
I followed her toward the tea and sweetmeats. Apparently I had been weighed in the balance and found reasonably adequate. But I suspected that Mary McAndrew employed an unusual scale.
A mother, and now a father, too. I couldn’t wait to hear McAndrew’s side of the story.
But wait I had to. McAndrew arrived at last from the seminar with half a dozen other scientists. He headed toward his mother. Before they could exchange more than two words, Emma Gowers came sashaying over toward them.
A word about Emma. She is the Institute’s expert on multiple kernel arrays and a formidable brain. She is also blond and beautiful, with a roving eye, a lusty temperament, and a taste for big, hairy men of diminished mental capacity.
I was standing only a step away. I saw Mary McAndrew and Emma size each other up, and I realized that neither knew who the other was. But like called to like, and they straightened and preened like two fighting cocks.
“Come on, Mac,” Emma said. “You and I have a date.”
The wording was provocative, but I knew that Emma had no possible sexual interest in McAndrew. His mother didn’t. So far as she could tell, Emma was cutting in.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
McAndrew made a feeble gesture from one to the other. “Mother, this is one of my professional colleagues, Emma Gowers. Emma, this is my mother.”
Mary McAndrew extended a slim and delicate hand. “And which profession would that be, my dear?” Her tone couldn’t have been warmer.
Emma gave her a friendly smile. “Not the one you are most familiar with, I’m sure.” She had been making a close inspection of Mary McAndrew’s neck and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “But it’s encouraging to know that a person doesn’t have to change her line of work, just because she’s old. Come on, Mac.”
She gripped McAndrew firmly by the arm and pulled him away toward the door. I was left to face his mother.
I said, “It’s not the way it looks. She’s not chasing him. There’s a problem with the balanced drive on one of the ships, and he and Emma have an appointment to take a look at it.”
Mary McAndrew seemed not in the least upset. She said thoughtfully, “Well, I certainly underestimated that one. She and I must have a cozy chat when they get back. Where do you say they’re going?”
It was easier to show than to tell. I put down my cup and led her across to one of the room’s small observation ports. “They’ll be going outside the Institute and over to one of the ships. You can see it from here. That’s the Flamingo, the Institute’s smallest experimental vessel.”
She followed my pointing finger. The Flamingo was berthed about four kilometers away. We had a profile view of the circular flat disk of condensed matter at the front, with the long column jutting away from the center and the small sphere of the life capsule sitting out near the end of it.
“What a strange-looking object!” Mary said. “Why, it’s not in the least like a ship.”
I stared at her. Was she joking?
“You’re looking at a ship that uses the McAndrew balanced drive,” I said. “Mac says it’s a trivial idea, but it’s the most famous thing he’s ever done. He’s known everywhere in the Solar System because of it.”
“Is he now?” She peered at it with a bit more interest. “But it’s ugly. That plate, and the long spike. And where do the people sit?”
She didn’t know, she really didn’t. Her own son’s most celebrated invention, and she had no idea.
“The crew and passengers go in the life capsule.” I pointed. “That’s the little ball you can see at the end of the spike.”
“But it’s teeny. All that big ship, and such a small space for people. What a waste.”
“It has to be that way. That plate on the front is a hundred-meter disk of compressed matter, electromagnetically stabilized. If you put people in the middle of the disk while the ship is at rest, they’d feel a gravitational pull of fifty gees — enough to flatten anybody. But in the life capsule out at the end of the spike, a person feels a pull of just one gee. Now when you turn the drive on and the acceleration grows, the life capsule automatically moves closer to the disk. The acceleration and the gravitational force pull in opposite directions. The life capsule position is chosen so the total force inside it, the difference of gravity and acceleration, stays at one gee. A lot of people call it `the McAndrew inertia-less drive,’ but Mac hates that. He says inertia is still there, and the right name is the balanced drive.”
I should have more sense. Predictably, I had lost her. In the middle of my explanation she had turned away from the window and she again had her eye on the mentally nulliparous Plimpton.
“Gravity, acceleration, compressed matter,” she said. “Oh, how that carries me back. Like father, like son. McAndrew’s father, he’d drive a woman mad with talk of compressed matter, when what she was needing was a little personal attention.”
“McAndrew Senior was a physicist, too?” If I couldn’t get family information from Mac, maybe his mother would provide it.
“Och, Artie’s father wasn’t a McAndrew.” She arched plucked eyebrows at me. “Perish the thought. I would never dream of marrying a dreadful man like that.”
That’s the point, right there, where I ought to have changed the subject. Instead I said, “Not a McAndrew. Then who was he?”
“His name was Heinrich Grunewald. If he’s alive it still is, though I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him for over thirty years. He’d come visit for a while, then before you knew it he’d be running off. The last time he breezed in from nowhere, just as usual, and we had a lively couple of days. When the two of us weren’t busy in private he talked Artie’s ears off. I asked him, what was he doing, filling the lad’s head with nonsense? Force fields, and quarks, and that sort of rubbish. He laughed, and said that although nobody knew who Heinrich Grunewald was now, Artie needed to get used to the fact that he was going to have a very famous father. Next time he came to see me, he said, his face would be all over the media and we’d be hard put to find private time what with people camping out on the doorstep of the house.”
“I’ve never heard of Heinrich Grunewald.”
“No more you will. Isn’t that like a man, all blather and big talk? I flat out told him I didn’t believe him. I said, now what is it you’ll be doing to make you so famous? He got mad, the way men do when you talk straight to them. He gave me a bunch of notes and a video recording he’d made that very day, and he said the evidence was all there. He was going off to prove it, and I and the rest of the Solar System would treat him with a lot more respect when he came back.”
“But he never came back?”
“No more he did. Dead, you’d think, but off with some other woman is just as likely. Heinrich was a cocky devil, and a good-looking man. Good in bed, too, I’ll give him that.” At the words “good in bed,” she roused herself and stared around the room.
“What about the papers and the recording?” I asked.
“Gibberish.” She was perking up. Plimpton was giving her the eye and Monty Siclaro, restored to relatively normal condition, had entered the room. “I took a look at the stuff he left, but it was nothing but the same old babble. Strong forces, weak forces, compressed matter, quarks and squarks and blarks. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”