Shrewd old Limperis. A razor-sharp mind lay behind the innocent, pudgy black face. He sensed, as I did, that there had been a set-up. On questions of theoretical physics, McAndrew sits among the immortals. On matters involving human motivation and behavior, he is an innocent — and that’s being kind.
“Let me talk to him,” I said. “Is he in his study?”
“There, or more likely in the communications center.” Limperis hesitated. “I should mention that Fogarty and Benton have reached the solar focus, and they are obtaining spectacular findings concerning the supernova. McAndrew’s mood is… hard to judge.”
I knew what he meant. McAndrew should have been experiencing one of his big thrills in life, the rush of data on a new scientific phenomenon; but instead of being on the front line, he was getting it all second-hand. To someone like McAndrew, that is like being offered for your dining pleasure a previously-eaten meal.
He was in the communications center. I approached him uncertainly, not sure what his mood might be. He looked up from a page of numbers and gave me a nod and a smile, as though we had just seen each other at lunch time. And far from being out of sorts, he seemed delighted with something.
“Here, Jeanie,” he said. “Take a listen to this. See what you think.”
He handed me a headset.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Report from Fogarty. He was heading for the solar focus, but the media asked him to put on a bit of a show for them, just to demonstrate what the Hoatzin can do. Of course, he couldn’t resist. They went zooming all the way out past three hundred billion kilometers, horsing around, then wandered in again toward the focus. I want you to hear what they picked up on the way back. It came in a while ago, but I only just got round to it.”
“Shouldn’t I—”
“Listen to it. Then we’ll talk.”
McAndrew!
I put the headset on.
“We are on the way in again, approximately two hundred and eighty billion kilometers from Sol.” Paul Fogarty, his voice young and slightly nasal, spoke in my ears. “We are heading for a solar focus point appropriate for receipt of radiation from the Cassiopeia supernova. The Hoatzin is performing perfectly, and we normally turn off the engine during flight only for observations and sampling of the local medium. However, anomalous signals received in our message center are prompting us to remain longer in this vicinity. We are picking up a message of distress from an unknown source. We have travelled to various locations, but we are unable to discover a message origin. We will keep looking for another twenty-four hours. After that we must proceed toward our original destination of the solar focus. The received message follows.”
I listened, wondering who could possibly be sending a call for help from so far away. Two hundred and eighty billion kilometers, sixty times the distance of Neptune, way south of the ecliptic and far beyond normal Solar System runs. No cargo or passenger vessel ever ventured in that direction, or so far out.
Help, help, help. The standard Mayday distress signal was the only clear part of the message. “… limited chance for transmission… every year or two…” The voice was thin, scratchy, and distorted. “We transmit when we can, aim at Sol…” Help, help, help. “… we’ll keep sending as long as possible. We have no idea what’s happening outside… are trapped… except for this chamber. No control of resources except this unit…”
Help, help, help. The automated Mayday signal bleated on, over and over. I heard nothing more from the desperate human voice.
McAndrew was watching me closely as I removed the headphones. “Well?”
“It couldn’t be clearer. There’s a ship out there in bad trouble, even if we don’t know what kind of trouble.”
Mac said, “Not a ship.”
“What, then?”
“I’d guess it’s one of the Arks.”
That made me catch my breath. The Arks were part of history. Before McAndrew and I were born, seventeen of the great space habitats had been launched by the United Space Federation. Self-contained and self-supporting, they were multi-generation ships, crawling through the interstellar void at a tiny fraction of light speed. Their destinations were centuries away. But even at minimal speeds, they ought by now to be well on their way to the stars. They should be far beyond the place where the signal had been picked up.
McAndrew’s suggestion that it was one of the Arks seemed unlikely for another reason. “I don’t think it can be,” I said. “As I recall it, none of the Arks was launched in a direction so far south of the ecliptic. And I don’t believe they were capable of significant changes of direction.”
“Perfectly true. They could start and stop, and that was about all.” McAndrew gazed at me blank-eyed as the Sphinx. He knew something he wasn’t telling.
“But in any case,” I went on, “I can’t believe that Fogarty would simply leave them like that, and keep on going. They said they were in trouble.”
“They also implied it isn’t a new emergency — they’ve been transmitting for some time. Anyway, Paul Fogarty didn’t just listen and run. There’s more from him. He stayed far longer than he expected, searching and searching; but he couldn’t track down an origin for the signal.”
“But that’s ridiculous. He must have been right on top of it, to receive it like that.”
“You think so?” McAndrew, that great ham, was full of poorly-disguised satisfaction. “If somebody knew where that signal was coming from, do you think that they should choose to go out on a rescue mission?”
“It wouldn’t be a question of choice. They’d have to go.”
“Exactly.” McAndrew didn’t rub his hands together, but only I think because he was tapping away at the keys of the console. “I’m checking out the status of the reconditioned Merganser. If it’s ready to fly, you and I will be on our way. And don’t worry, we’ll be going with Director Rumford’s blessing. I’ve already asked.”
“But if Fogarty couldn’t find the ship—”
“Then he must have been looking in the wrong place, mustn’t he? In a very wrong place. Wait and see, Jeanie. Wait and see.” And beyond that, for all my coaxing and urging and outright cursing, McAndrew the mule would not for the moment go.
As I say, he’s more human than most people give him credit for. He likes to talk about what he does, but only in his own sweet time and in his own backhanded way.
I waited until we were on board the new Merganser and heading out of the ecliptic. The balanced drive was on. The ship was accelerating at a hundred gees, while the disk of condensed matter in front of the life capsule drew us toward it at close to a hundred gees, leaving us with a residual quarter-gee field. Very comfortable, great for sleeping.
And sleeping is what we might be doing, much of the time. Even accelerating at a hundred gees, we had a lengthy flight ahead of us. We could lie side by side in the cramped life capsule and sleep, relax, play — and talk.
McAndrew had been a clam when it came to our destination, but it had not escaped me that we were going in exactly the wrong direction, toward Cassiopeia rather than away from it. The solar focus for the supernova lay on the other side of the Sun. I mentioned that fact casually, as though it was something of minor interest.
“Quite right.” He was in his bare feet, wriggling his long toes and staring at them with apparent fascination. “If light comes toward Sol from a very long way away, so it’s close to being a parallel beam, then the gravity field of the Sun acts as a great big lens. Light that passes close to the Sun is converged. It is brought to a focus eighty-two billion kilometers away, on the far side of the Sun. So if you want to observe the Cassiopeia supernova, which is way north of the ecliptic, you have to go south.”