I wasn’t so sure of that. On the other hand, it sounded unreasonable to refuse anyone’s request to see the remains of a loved one when a team from the Institute had trailed all the way out to the Asteroid Belt to recover the compressed matter asteroid, and as an incidental had brought back the Fafner plus Heinrich Grunewald and a couple of bits of McAndrew’s fingers.
“Come on,” I said.
I led the way from the auditorium, out along a rarely-used corridor to an annex far removed from the main body of the Institute, and into a small chamber. The Mighty Mote sat in the middle of it, magnetically suspended to prevent it coming anywhere near other matter. A sphere of glass, three feet across, surrounded the exhibit to provide added security.
Mary advanced and stared in through the curved window.
“Where is he?” She turned to me in bewilderment. “You don’t understand. I wanted to see Heinrich, no matter how bad he was mashed up in the accident. I don’t see anything in there at all.”
She had just sat through a series of explanations, especially simplified for the media, about the significance of the work done by Grunewald and McAndrew. The emphasis had been on the inexpensive creation of compressed matter and the successful recovery of the prototype experiment on strong force enhancement. Apparently Mary had understood not a word.
I intensified the light level and adjusted the angle of the beam, so that the speck of compressed matter appeared as a tiny bright-blue spark.
“There,” I said, “is Heinrich Grunewald.”
“That?” Mary stepped close to the window.
“That.” I resisted the urge to add, And most of what you see isn’t even him. He’s squeezed in there along with the Fafner and eighteen thousand tons of rock.
“Oh dear.” Mary pressed her nose to the glass. “That little fly-speck of stuff? Heinrich wouldn’t be pleased at all, not with him always going on about size — though I told him, over and over, it’s what you do with it that counts. Is there any way of bringing him back the way he used to be?”
“McAndrew’s working on it. He has ideas, but it’s too soon to say if they’ll work. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I don’t have that much to remember Heinrich by, and they don’t look like they’re doing anything for him up here. And it’s terribly lonely in this little room. So I was wondering, I don’t suppose I could take the whole thing down to Earth with me, could I, and look after him there?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. What you’re looking at is small, but it’s enormously dense. That little sphere with Heinrich’s remains weighs—” I caught myself in time. She’d wonder about eighteen thousand tons. I finished ” — a lot more than you’d think. There would be no way to stop it sinking right down to the center of the planet.”
“Oh dear. Then, no. I’m sure Heinrich would like it there even less than being up here.” She turned away. “They should have left him out where he was, among the stars. He’d have preferred that. I’m going to say goodbye to Artie, and then I’m leaving.”
I trailed along behind, waited while she had a private few minutes with McAndrew, and the three of us went along to the loading dock. She waved, and was gone.
Next day I was gone, too, on a routine delivery of a kernel assembly to Umbriel. I was away for a month. On the way back I dropped by the Institute, now free-orbiting beyond the Moon.
McAndrew was in his office. It was as crowded and cluttered as ever, with one important difference. Over in a clear corner sat a three-foot ball of glass. Within it sat the grain of compressed matter, and alongside that blue speck stood a small hologram of a smiling Mary McAndrew.
“Mac! I thought you told me the compressed matter was unstable. If it changes back to its original form—”
“It won’t.” The buds of his finger and thumb joints were already growing nicely. “I worked all that out when you left. It will stay like that as long as we want it to.”
“And you moved it in here.”
“Well, yes. My mother didn’t seem to like him being off by himself. I thought the two of them ought to be together.”
“Does she know about this?”
He looked surprised. “Why, no. Or if she does, I didn’t tell her.”
But I did. After McAndrew and I had agreed to meet for dinner and a long catch-up evening, I left him and placed a call to Mary McAndrew. I tracked her down in Cap d’Antibes, at one of Fazool’s mansions.
She listened in silence while I told her about the glass sphere and the hologram in McAndrew’s office. Then she said, “I still miss him, you know. Look after him, won’t you.”
She had mixed two different hims in one sentence, but I had no trouble sorting them out. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you know your son.”
“I do indeed. Just like his father. Come and see me, Jeanie. Fazool won’t mind. You and Artie both.”
“I will.”
“In fact, Fazool will probably make a pass at you.”
“I can stand that.”
“I hope Artie can. Goodbye, Jeanie. Look after him, and give him my love.”
“I will. Goodbye, Mary.”
We hung up. Look after him. I’d spent twenty years trying to look after McAndrew and it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
I went to find the man to tell him that I had spoken with his mother and we needed to plan another visit to her.
McAndrew thinks he understands what the strong force is in the universe, and I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with him. But Mary McAndrew and I, we know better.
APPENDIX: Science Science Fiction
Writers, readers and critics of science fiction often seem unable to produce a workable definition of the field, but one of the things they usually agree on is the existence of a particular branch that is usually termed “hard” science fiction. People who like this branch will tell you it is the only subdivision that justifies the word science, and that everything else is simple fantasy; and they will use words like “authentic,” “scientifically accurate,” “extrapolative,” and “inventive” to describe it. People who don’t like it say it is dull and bland, and use words like “characterless,” “mechanical,” “gadgetry,” or “rockets and rayguns” to describe it. Some people can’t stand hard SF, others will read nothing else.
Hard science fiction can be defined in several different ways. My favorite definition is an operational one: if you can take the science and scientific speculation away from a story, and not do it serious injury, then it was not hard SF to begin with. Here is another definition that I like rather less welclass="underline" in a hard SF story, the scientific techniques of observation, analysis, logical theory, and experimental test must be applied, no matter where or when the story takes place. My problem with this definition is that it would classify many mystery and fantasy stories as hard science fiction.
Whatever the exact definition, there is usually little difficulty deciding whether a particular story is “hard” or “soft” science fiction. And although a writer never knows quite what he or she has written, and readers often pull things out of a story that were never consciously put in, I certainly think of the book you are holding as probably the hardest SF that I write. Each story revolves around some element of science, and without that element the story would collapse. If the stories reflect any common theme, it is my own interest in science, particularly astronomy and physics. Because of this, and because the science is what I have elsewhere termed “borderland science” (Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like A Scientist and Write Science Fiction; Baen Books, 1999), I feel a responsibility to the reader. It is one that derives from my own early experiences with science fiction.