“Puir little thing,” he went on, “there’s been naebody in this room for so lang, it thought it had the rights to it. Don’t you worry, it won’t come a-walking over your face at night.”
I could have lived very well without that thought. I noticed that the window had a spider’s web in the upper left corner, and I wondered how many other animals we were expected to share our space with. I felt a bit more sympathy for Heinrich Grunewald. Given a choice, before you knew it I’d have been running off just as he used to.
I left my bag — tightly closed — on the bed. McAndrew led us back to the long living room of the house. Mary McAndrew was waiting there with a dusty box sitting on the low table in front of her.
“Here it is. And I hope it’s been worth coming all this way for it.” Her voice said that she very much doubted that. She looked at me, as much as to say, Jeanie, I thought you had more sense. We could all be in Paris. Couldn’t you talk him out of it?
If she knew McAndrew at all, she knew the answer. When it’s new science, or even a sniff of new science, McAndrew is the most obstinate human in the Solar System. He lifted the box as reverently as though it contained the Crown Jewels, blew off dust, and wiped at the top with a yellow cloth.
“It’s not locked,” I said.
“And why should it be?” Mary said as McAndrew eased the top open with a creak of rusting hinges. “Nothing here that anybody in his right mind would pay a brass farthing for.”
At first glance I was inclined to agree. What Mac lifted out of the box was a small notebook with a faded blue cover, a dozen sheets of yellow paper with dirty brown edges, and a video recording of a design that had gone out of use thirty or forty years ago.
“Can you play that?” I asked.
“Oh, surely.” Mary took the video container and wiped the top with the duster. “Artie will tell you how it is on the islands. Things don’t get thrown away so quick here as in other places.”
McAndrew had meanwhile picked up the sheets of paper. He flipped through them in a few seconds.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Nothing I didn’t know already.” He put the sheets down. “Standard results on the stabilization of compressed matter with electromagnetic fields. Same as we do with the balanced drive plates.”
“Nothing,” said his mother. “Didn’t I tell you so?”
McAndrew did not answer, but picked up the blue notebook. He began to leaf through it, and this time he was occupied for much longer.
I didn’t speak, either. I had learned long ago that when McAndrew had that look on his face it was a waste of time to try to gain his attention. He was off in a different universe. Mary McAndrew must have learned the same thing, long ago in McAndrew’s childhood. She went off to the kitchen without a word and appeared a few minutes later with a loaded tea-tray.
McAndrew finally laid the notebook carefully back on the table.
“Well?” I asked.
“I dinna ken. It’s a thing a man has to sleep on.”
“That’s all you can tell us?”
“I can tell you what he — my father — wrote.” Mac said “my father” awkwardly, as though the words came hard to his tongue. “What I can’t tell you is whether what he wrote is true. That needs some hard thinking.”
“Nothing there,” Mary said. She calmly poured tea. “Nothing, just as I told you.”
It occurred to me that after leaving the contents of the box to rot for all these years she wanted there to be nothing.
McAndrew spoke again, slowly and carefully. “What Heinrich Grunewald says — what he says” — there was a slight emphasis on he — “is that there’s another way to produce compressed matter, and if ye do it his way there’s no need of electromagnetic stabilization. The compressed matter will be naturally stable. If he’s right, you can also achieve far higher densities than we have at present. Up to three billion tons per cubic centimeter.”
Mary did not react, but I did. The compressed matter used in the balanced drive plates averaged three thousand tons per cubic centimeter, and that was considered phenomenal.
“Does he say how to do it?” I asked.
“Aye. But that’s the hard bit to swallow. He says that it involves a local modification and enhancement of the strong force.”
“What strong force?” Mary asked.
I waited for someone to answer. Then I realized that unlike at the Institute, where bulging super-brains stood ready to lecture on any conceivable topic in physics, McAndrew and I were the only two available; and from the look on his face he was gone again, off to some unimaginable place where I could never follow.
“What strong force?” Mary said again. “Have the two of you gone deaf?”
“I’ll explain,” I said. I should have added, or try to. Make me your authority on physics and you run a considerable risk. “There are four basic forces in the universe.” That much I was sure of. “There’s gravity, that’s the one everybody knows even if they don’t understand it. There’s the electromagnetic force, that powers electrical motors and everything else to do with electricity and magnetism. There’s a thing called the weak force, which causes radioactivity.” (At that point McAndrew should have awakened and roasted me for a simplistic explanation. The fact that he didn’t meant he wasn’t really there). “And then there’s the strong force, which holds nuclei together when electromagnetic forces want them to fly apart.”
I was about to add that unified theories explained all four as part of a single generalized force, and that all were mediated through the exchange of virtual particles with names like photons and gluons. I didn’t. I could see Mary’s face.
I finished, a bit lamely, “What your husb — what McAndrew’s father claims to have done is find a way to change the way the strong force operates. If he was right, and he could make it stronger, then there could be a better way to form compressed matter.”
Mary sniffed. “If I’d known that was all I had in the box all this time, I wouldna have bothered to keep it all this time.” She picked up the video recording. “And here we have more of the same?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“So let’s take a wee look, and find out.” She went over to a corner of the living room and pulled back a drape to reveal a playback unit so antiquated that I’d have accepted the idea that it was steam driven. “Artie, are you awake? Artie! Och, the lad’s hopeless.”
“Play it,” I said. “Maybe it will bring him back into the real universe.”
“I have doubts of that. I never found anything that would when he’s got that face on him.” But she inserted the video recording.
The overhead lights, coupled to the playback unit, dimmed. The wall display flashed a brief kaleidoscope of color, then settled to show the figure of a standing man. It zoomed to a close-up of his face and I had a sudden and startling feeling of recognition. The long jaw and thin-lipped mouth were different, but the distant eyes and high, balding forehead were pure McAndrew.
Heinrich Grunewald spoke. His voice was slow, deeper than Mac’s, and slightly accented. “This recording contains its own time-line, giving the date and hour that it is being made. I’ll be away for a little while, so I want there to be no arguments regarding priority of invention when I return. I have developed a modified theory of the strong interaction, with huge and various commercial potentials. Among the near-term applications are cheap forms of compressed matter, the ability to make shipment of diffuse materials in much smaller containers, induced radioactivity, more compact forms of existing commercial fusion devices, and low-temperature proton-proton fusion.”
McAndrew was awake after all. I heard him gasp at that last item. Grunewald went on, “I am not talking theory alone. The technical details permitting each of these developments can be found here.” He raised a blue notebook, like a bigger version of the one in the lockbox.
I glanced at Mary McAndrew, who shook her head. “Nothing like that, not left with me. It’s been a long time, but I think maybe I saw it.”