“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.
I discovered the field for myself as a teenager (as did almost everyone else I knew — in school we were tormented with Wordsworth and Bunyan, while Clarke and Heinlein had to be private after-school pleasures). Knowing at the time a negligible amount of real science, I swallowed whole and then regurgitated to my friends everything presented as science in the SF magazines. That quickly built me a reputation as a person stuffed with facts and theories — many of them wrong and some of them decidedly weird. The writers didn’t bother to distinguish the scientific theories that they borrowed, from the often peculiarly unscientific theories that they made up for the story. Neither did I.
I knew all about the canals on Mars, the dust pools on the Moon, and the swamps on Venus, about the Dean drive and dianetics and the Hieronymus machine. I believed that men and pigs were more closely related than men and monkeys; that atoms were miniature solar systems; that you could shoot men to the moon with a cannon (a belief that didn’t survive my first course in dynamics); that the pineal gland was certainly a rudimentary third eye and probably the seat of parapsychological powers; that Rhine’s experiments at Duke University had made telepathy an unquestioned part of modern science; that with a little ingenuity and a few electronic bits and pieces you could build in your backyard a spacecraft to take you to the moon; and that, no matter what alien races might have developed on other worlds and be scattered around the Galaxy, humans would prove to be the smartest, most resourceful, and most wonderful species to be found anywhere.
That last point may even be true. As Pogo remarked long ago, true or false, either way it’s a mighty sobering thought.
What I needed was a crib sheet. We had them in school for the works of Shakespeare. They were amazingly authoritative, little summaries that outlined the plot, told us just who did what and why, and even informed us exactly what was in Shakespeare’s head when he was writing the play. If they didn’t say what he had for lunch that day, it was only because that subject never appeared on examination papers. Today’s CliffsNotes are less authoritative, but only I suspect because the changing climate of political correctness encourages commentators to be as bland as possible.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the crib sheets were what I was missing in science fiction. Given the equivalent type of information about SF, I would not have assured my friends (as I did) that the brains of industrial robots made use of positrons, that the work of Dirac and Blackett would lead us to a faster-than-light drive, or that the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci gave all the details needed to construct a moon rocket.
As Mark Twain remarked, it’s not what we don’t know that causes the trouble, it’s the things we know that ain’t so. (This is an example of the problem. I was sure this was said by Mark Twain, but when I looked it up I found it was a Josh Billings line. Since then I have seen it as attributed to Artemus Ward.) What follows, then, is my crib sheet for this book. This Appendix sorts out the real science, based on and consistent with today’s theories (but probably not tomorrow’s), from the “science” that I made up for these stories. I have tried to provide a clear dividing line, at the threshold where fact stops and fiction takes over. But even the invented material is designed to be consistent with and derived from what is known today. It does not contradict current theories, although you will not find papers about it in the Physical Review or the Astrophysical Journal.
The reader may ask, which issues of these publications? That’s a very fair question. After all, these stories were written over a twenty-year period. In that time, science has advanced, and it’s natural to ask how much of what I wrote still has scientific acceptance.