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.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Oh. I stuck it away in a lockbox at the old family house. He’d told me not to lose it, and at the time I expected he’d be coming back.” Plimpton and Siclaro were standing a yard apart from each other. Drawn by some invisible force, Mary headed for the space between them. “Of course, he never did,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve not looked for it for years, but I suppose it’s sitting there still.”
End of story. Except that I, in my folly, later repeated to McAndrew his mother’s words.
He stared at me and through me and past me. “Mother never told me that,” he said. “He talked about the strong force, and compressed matter, I remember that. But old notes, and a video…”
Mary McAndrew stayed at the Institute for two more days. When she returned to Earth, McAndrew went with her.
And I? Of course, I went along, too. I have to take care of McAndrew. He can be such a dim-wit.
Plenty of people live on Earth, but when you go there you have to wonder why. The air feels heavy and too dense. In the cities it’s dirty and full of fumes and sits in your lungs like thick soup. In the countryside there’s the stink of dead plants and animals wafted around on every breeze. Earth people are so used to the smell of rot, they don’t even notice. And after a day or two you’re just as bad. Apparently your brain can’t stand continuous stench, so after a while it cuts off the signal and you don’t smell a thing.
Other things, though, you don’t get used to so easily. Mary McAndrew lived most of the time in Paris or Rome, but the “family house” that she referred to, where Mac had spent his early years lay on a small island. It was part of a group known as the Shetlands.
Once we got there I could see why she preferred Paris or Rome. Or anywhere. The island sits far beyond the north coast of Scotland, up at latitude sixty degrees. The house was built of solid stone, with great wooden rafters across the ceiling of each room. Mary told me that the building was over two hundred years old, and her family had lived in it for as long as it had been there.
Nothing wrong with that, but I soon learned that the McAndrews were not the house’s only residents. Mac and I were shown to a bedroom off on the north side of the building. It was only two in the afternoon, but it was winter for Earth’s northern hemisphere and we were so far up toward the pole that it was already getting dark. I stepped into the room and went to place my bag on the bed. As I did so, something small and brown jumped off the counterpane and streaked away toward a gloomy corner.
I gasped and clutched my bag to my chest. “Mac! What the hell was that?”
“Och, that’s nothing.” He walked forward and peered down at the wainscotting. “Just a wee mouse, and now it’s gone. You can bet it’s a lot more frightened of you than you are of it.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that.”
“I’m tellin’ ye. You’ll not see a sign of the beastie once we’re moved into the room.”
I noticed something odd about his speech. Back on the home territory of his childhood, a Scottish accent was creeping in.