The Compleat McAndrew

THIRD CHRONICLE: All the Colors of the Vacuum

As soon as the ship got back from the midyear run to Titan, I went down to Earth and asked Woolford for a leave of absence. I had been working hard enough for six people, and he knew it. He nodded agreeably as soon as I made the formal request.

“I think you’ve earned it, Captain Roker, no doubt about that. But don’t you have quite a bit of leave time saved up? Wouldn’t that be enough?” He stopped staring out of the window at the orange-brown sky and called my records onto the screen in front of him.

“That won’t do it,” I said, while he was still looking.

Woolford frowned and became less formal. “It won’t? Well, according to this, Jeanie, you’ve got at least…” He looked up. “Just how long do you want to take off?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere between nine and sixteen years, I think.”

I would have liked to break the news more gently, but maybe there was no graceful way.

It had taken McAndrew a while to deliver on his promise. The design of the more advanced ship contained no new theory, but this time he intended that the initial tests would be conducted more systematically. I kept pushing him along, while he tried to wriggle out of the commitment. He had been full of drugs and painkillers at the time, he said — surely I didn’t consider it fair, to hold him to what he’d been silly enough to promise then?

Fair or not, I wouldn’t listen. I had called him as soon as we were on the final leg of the Titan run.

“Yes, she’s ready enough to go.” He had a strange expression on his face, somewhere between excitement and perplexity. “You’ve still got your mind set on going, then, Jeanie?”

I didn’t dignify that question with a reply. Instead I said, “How soon can I come out to the Institute?”

He cleared his throat, making that odd sound that spoke to me of his Scots ancestry. “Och, if you’re set on it, come as soon as you please. I’ll have things to tell you when you get here, but that can wait.”

That was when I went down and made my request to Woolford for a long leave of absence. McAndrew had been strangely reluctant to discuss our destination, but I couldn’t imagine that we’d be going out past Sirius. Alpha Centauri was my guess, and that would mean we would only be away about nine Earth years. Shipboard time would be three months, allowing a few days at the other end for exploration. If I knew McAndrew, he would have beaten the hundred gee acceleration that he projected for the interstellar prototype. He was never a man to talk big about what he was going to do.

The Penrose Institute had been moved out to Mars orbit since the last time I was there, so it took me a couple of weeks of impatient ship-hopping to get to it. When we finally closed to visible range I could see the old test ships, Merganser and Dotterel, floating a few kilometers from the main body of the Institute. They were easy to recognize from the flat mass disc with its protruding central spike. And floating near them, quite a bit bigger, was a new ship of gleaming silver. That had to be the Hoatzin, McAndrew’s newest plaything. The disc was twice the size, and the spike three times as long, but Hoatzin was clearly Merganser’s big brother.

It was Professor Limperis, the head of the Institute, who greeted me when I entered. He had put on weight since I last saw him, but that pudgy black face still hid a razor-sharp mind and a bottomless memory.

“Good to see you again, Captain Roker. I haven’t told McAndrew this, but I’m very glad you’ll be going along to keep an eye on him.” He gave what he once described as his “hand-clapping minstrel-show laugh” — a sure sign he was nervous about something.

“Well, I don’t know that I’ll be much use. I’m expecting to be just a sort of passenger. Don’t worry. If my instincts are anything to go by there won’t be much danger in a simple stellar rendezvous and return.”

“Er, yes.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “That was my own reaction. I gather that Professor McAndrew has not mentioned to you his change of target?”

“Change of target? He didn’t mention any target at all.” Now my own worry bead was beginning to throb. “Are you suggesting that the trip will not be to a stellar rendezvous?”

He shrugged and waved his hands, pointing along the corridor. “Not if McAndrew gets his way. Come along, he’s inside at the computer. I think it’s best if he is present when we talk about this further.”

Pure evasion. Whatever the bad news was, Limperis wanted me to hear it from McAndrew himself.

We found him staring vacantly at a completely blank display screen. Normally I would never interrupt him when he looks as imbecilic as that — it means that he is thinking with a breadth and depth that I’ll never comprehend. I often wonder what it would be like to have a mind like that. Humans, with rare exceptions, must seem like trained apes, with muddied thoughts and no ability for abstract analysis.

Tough luck. It was time one of the trained apes had some of her worries put to rest. I walked up behind McAndrew and put my hands on his shoulders.

“Here I am. I’m ready to go — if you’ll tell me where we’re going.”

He turned in his chair. After a moment his slack jaw firmed up and the eyes brought me into focus.

“Hello, Jeanie.” No doubt about it, as soon as he recognized me he had that same shifty look I had noticed in Limperis. “I didn’t expect you here so soon. We’re still making up a flight profile.”

“That’s all right. I’ll help you.” I sat down opposite him, studying his face closely. As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses work harder than anyone else, not less hard. His face was thinner, and he had lost a little more hair from that sandy, receding mop. My argument with him over that was long in the past.

“Why don’t you grow it back?” I’d said. “It’s such a minor job, a couple of hours with the machines every few months and you’d have a full head of hair again.”

He had sniffed. “Why don’t you try and get me to grow a tail, or hair all over my body? Or maybe make my arms a bit longer, so they’ll let me run along with them touching the ground. Jeanie, I’ll not abuse a bio-feedback machine to run evolution in the wrong direction. We’re getting less hairy all the time. I know your fondness for monkeys” — a nasty crack about an engineering friend of mine on Ceres, who was a bit hairy for even my accommodating tastes — “but I’ll be just as happy when I have no hair at all. It gets in the way, it grows all the time, and it serves no purpose whatsoever.”

McAndrew resented the time it took him to clip his fingernails, and I’m sure that he regarded his fondness for food as a shameful weakness. Meanwhile, I wondered who in the Penrose Institute cut his hair. Maybe they had a staff assistant, whose job it was to shear the absent-minded once a month.

“What destination are you planning for the first trip out?” If he was thinking of chasing a comet, I wanted that out in the open.

McAndrew looked at Limperis. Limperis looked at McAndrew, handing it back to him. Mac cleared his throat.

“We’ve discussed it here and we’re all agreed. The first trip of the Hoatzin won’t be to a star system.” He cleared his throat again. “It will be to pursue and rendezvous with the Ark of Massingham. It’s a shorter trip than any of the star systems,” he added hopefully. He could read my expression. “They are less than two light-years out. With the Hoatzin we can be there and docked with the Ark in less than thirty-five ship days.”

If he was trying to make me feel better, McAndrew was going about it in quite the wrong way.

Back in the twenties, the resources of the Solar System must have seemed inexhaustible. No one had been able to catalog the planetoids, still less analyze their composition and probable value. Now we know everything out to Neptune that’s bigger than a hundred meters across, and the navigation groups want that down to fifty meters in the next twenty years. The idea of grabbing an asteroid a couple of kilometers across and using it how you choose sounds like major theft. But it hadn’t merely been permitted — it had been encouraged.

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go. How do I know? Look, you don’t pilot to Titan without learning a lot about your own personality. Before we found the right way to use people like me, I would probably have been on one of the Arks.

The United Space Federation had assisted in the launch of seventeen of them, between ninety and forty years ago. Each of them was self-supporting, a converted asteroid that would hold between three and ten thousand people at departure time. The idea was that there would be enough raw materials and space to let the Ark grow as the population grew. A two-kilometer asteroid holds five to twenty billion tons of material, total life-support system for one human needs less than ten tons of that.

The Arks had left long before the discovery of the McAndrew balanced drive, before the discovery of even the Mattin Drive. They were multi-generation ships, bumbling along into the interstellar void with speeds that were only a few percent of light speed.

And who was on-board them when they left? Any fairly homogeneous group of strange people, who shared enough of a common philosophy or delusion to prefer the uncertainties of star travel to the known problems within the Solar System. It took courage to set out like that, to sever all your ties with home except occasional laser and radio communication. Courage, or an overpowering conviction that you were part of a unique and chosen group.

To put that another way, McAndrew was proposing to take us out to meet a community about which we knew little, except that by the usual standards they were descended from madmen.

“Mac, I don’t remember which one was the Ark of Massingham. How long ago did it leave?”

Even mad people can have sane children. Four of the Arks, as I recalled, had turned around and were on their way back to the System.

“About seventy-five years ago. It’s one of the earlier ones, with a final speed a bit less than three percent of light speed.”

“Is it one of the Arks that has turned back?”

He shook his head. “No. They’re still on their way. Target star is Tau Ceti. They won’t get there for another three hundred years.”

“Well, why pick them out? What’s so special about the Ark of Massingham?” I had a sudden thought. “Are they having some problem that we could help with?”

We had saved two of the Arks in the past twenty years. For one of them we had been able to diagnose a recessive genetic element that was appearing in the children, and pass the test information and sperm filter technique over the communications link. The other had needed the use of an unmanned high-acceleration probe, to carry a couple of tons of cadmium out to them. They had been unlucky enough to choose a freak asteroid, one that apparently lacked the element even in the tiniest traces.

“They don’t report any problem,” said Mac. “We’ve never had a response to any messages we’ve sent to them, so far as the records on Triton Station are concerned. But we know that they are doing all right, because every three or four years a message has come in from them. Never anything about the Ark itself, it has always been… scientific information.”

McAndrew had hesitated as he said that last phrase. That was the lure, no doubt about it.

“What kind of information?” I said. “Surely we know everything that they know. We have hundreds of thousands of scientists in the System, they can’t have more than a few hundred of them.”

“I’m sure you’re right on the numbers.” Professor Limperis spoke when McAndrew showed no inclination to do so. “I’m not sure it’s relevant. How many scientists does it require to produce the work of one Einstein, or one McAndrew? You can’t just sit down and count numbers, as though you were dealing with — with bars of soap, or poker chips. You have to deal with individuals.”

“There’s a genius on the Ark of Massingham,” said McAndrew suddenly. His eyes were gleaming. “A man or woman who has been cut off from most of physics for a whole lifetime, working alone. It’s worse than Ramanujan.”

“How do you know that?” I had seldom seen McAndrew so filled with feeling. “Maybe they’ve been getting messages from somebody in the System here.”

McAndrew laughed, a humorless bark. “I’ll tell you why, Jeanie. You flew the Merganser. Tell me how the drive worked.”

“Well, the mass plate at the front balanced the acceleration, so we didn’t get any sensation of fifty gee.” I shrugged. “I didn’t work out the math for myself, but I’m sure I could have if I felt like it.”

I could have, too. I was a bit rusty, but you never lose the basics once you have them planted deep enough in your head.

“I don’t mean the balancing mechanism, that was just common sense.” He shook his head. “I mean the drive. Didn’t it occur to you that we were accelerating a mass of trillions of tons at fifty gee? If you work out the mass conversion rate you will need, you find that even with an ideal photon drive you’ll consume the whole mass in a few days. The Merganser got its drive by accelerating charged particles up to within millimeters a second of light speed. That was the reaction mass. But how did it get the energy to do it?”

I felt like telling him that when I had been on Merganser there had been other details — such as survival — on my mind. I thought for a few moments, then shook my head.

“You can’t get more energy out of matter than the rest mass energy, I know that. But you’re telling me that the drives on Merganser and Hoatzin do it. That Einstein was wrong.”

“No!” McAndrew looked horrified at the thought that he might have been criticizing one of his senior idols. “All I’ve done is build on what Einstein did. Look, you’ve done a fair amount of quantum mechanics. You know that when you calculate the energy for the vacuum state of a system you don’t get zero. You get a positive value.”

I had a hazy recollection of a formula swimming back across the years. What was it? h/4?w, said a distant voice.

“But you can set that to zero!” I was proud at remembering so much. “The zero point of energy is arbitrary.”

“In quantum theory it is. But not in general relativity.” McAndrew was beating back my mental defenses. As usual when I spoke with him on theoretical subjects, I began to feel I would know less at the end of the conversation than I did at the beginning.

“In general relativity,” he went on, “energy implies space-time curvature. If the zero-point energy is not zero, the vacuum self-energy is real. It can be tapped, if you know what you are doing. That’s where Hoatzin draws its energy. The reaction mass it needs is very small. You can get that by scooping up matter as you go along, or if you prefer it you can use a fraction — a very small fraction — of the mass plate.”

“All right.” I knew McAndrew. If I let him get going he would talk all day about physical principles. “But I don’t see how that has anything to do with the Ark of Massingham. It has an old-fashioned drive, surely. You said it was launched seventy-five years ago.”

“It was.” This was Limperis again, gently insistent. “But you see, Captain Roker, nobody outside the Penrose Institute knows how Professor McAndrew has been able to tap the vacuum self-energy. We have been very careful not to broadcast that information until we were ready. The potential for destructive use is enormous. It destroys the old idea that you cannot create more energy at a point than the rest mass of the matter residing there. There was nothing known in the rest of the System about this use until two weeks ago.”

“And then you released the information?” I was beginning to feel dizzy.

“No. The basic equations for accessing the vacuum self-energy were received by laser communication. They were sent, with no other message, from the Ark of Massingham.”

Suddenly it made sense. It wasn’t just McAndrew who was itching to get in and find out what there was on the Ark — it was everyone at the Penrose Institute. I could sense the excitement in Limperis, and he was the most guarded and politically astute of all the Members. If some physicist, working out there alone two light-years from Sol, had managed to parallel McAndrew’s development, that was a momentous event. It implied a level of genius that was difficult to imagine.

I knew Hoatzin would be on the way in a few days, whether I wanted to go or stay. But there was one more key question.

“I can’t believe that the Ark of Massingham was started by a bunch of physicists. What was the original composition of the group that colonized it?”

“Not physicists.” Limperis had suddenly sobered. “By no means physicists. That is why I am glad you will be accompanying Professor McAndrew. The leader of the original group was Jules Massingham. In the past few days I have taken the time to obtain all the System records on him. He was a man of great personal drive and convictions. His ambition was to apply the old principles of eugenics to a whole society. Two themes run through all his writings: the creation of the superior human, and the idea of that superior being as an integrated part of a whole society. He was ruthless in his pursuit of those ends.”

He looked at me, black face impassive. “From the evidence available, Captain, one might suggest that he succeeded in his aims.”

Hoatzin was a step up from Merganser and Dotterel. Maximum acceleration was a hundred and ten gees, and the living-capsule was a four-meter sphere. I had cursed the staff of the Institute, publicly and privately, but I had got nowhere. They were obsessed with the idea of the lonely genius out there in the void, and no one would consider any other first trip for Hoatzin. So at least I would check out every aspect of the system before we went, while McAndrew was looking at the rendezvous problem and making a final flight plan. We sent a message to the Ark, telling them of our trip and estimated arrival time. It would take two years to get there, Earth-time, but we would take even longer. They would be able to prepare for our arrival however they chose, with garlands or gallows.

On the trip out, McAndrew tried again to explain to me his methods for tapping the vacuum self-energy. The available energies made up a quasi-continuous “spectrum,” corresponding to a large number of very high frequencies of vibration and associated wavelengths. Tuned resonators in the Hoatzin drive units selected certain wavelengths which were excited by the corresponding components in the vacuum self energy. These “colors,” as McAndrew thought of them, could feed vacuum energy to the drive system. The results that had come from the Ark of Massingham suggested that McAndrew’s system for energy extraction could be generalized, so that all the “colors” of the vacuum self-energy should become available.

If that were true, the potential acceleration produced by the drive could go up by a couple of orders of magnitude. He was still working out what the consequences of that would be. At speeds that approached within a nanometer per second of light speed, a single proton would mass enough to weigh its impact on a sensitive balance.

I let him babble on to his heart’s content. My own attention was mostly on the history of the Ark of Massingham. It was an oddity among oddities. Six of the Arks had disappeared without trace. They didn’t respond to signals from Earth, and they didn’t send signals of their own. Most people assumed that they had wiped themselves out, with accidents, wars, strange sexual practices, or all three. Four of the Arks had swung back towards normalcy and were heading in again for the System. Six were still heading out, but two of them were in deep trouble if the messages that came back to Triton Station were any guide. One was full of messianic ranting, a crusade of human folly propagating itself out to the stars (let’s hope they never met anyone out there whose good opinion we would later desire). Another was quietly and peacefully insane, sending messages that spoke only of new rules for the interpretation of dreams. They were convinced that they would find the world of the Norse legends when they finally arrived at Eta Cassiopeia, complete with Jotunheim, Niflheim, and all the assembly of gods and heroes. It would be six hundred years before they arrived there, time enough for moves to rationality or to extinction.

Among this set, the Ark of Massingham provided a bright mixture of sanity and strangeness. They had sent messages back since first they left, messages that assumed the Ark was the carrier of human hopes and a superior civilization. Nothing that we sent — questions, comments, information, or acknowledgements — ever stimulated a reply. And nothing that they sent ever discussed life aboard the Ark. We had no idea if they lived in poverty or plenty, if they were increasing or decreasing in numbers, if they were receiving our transmissions, if they had material problems of any kind. Everything that came back to the solar system was science, delivered in a smug and self-satisfied tone. From all that science, the recent transmission on physics was the only one to excite more than a mild curiosity from our own scientists. Usually the Ark sent “discoveries” that had been made here long ago.

Once the drive of the Hoatzin was up to full thrust there was no way that we could see anything or communicate with anyone. The drive was fixed to the mass plate on the front of the ship, and the particles that streamed past us and out to the rear were visible only when they were in collision with the rare atoms of hydrogen drifting in free space. We had actually settled for less than a maximum drive and were using a slightly dispersed exhaust. A tightly focused and collimated beam wouldn’t harm us any, but we didn’t want to generate a death ray behind us that would disintegrate anything in its path for a few light-years.

Six days into the trip, our journey out shared the most common feature of all long distance travel. It was boring. When McAndrew wasn’t busy inside his head, staring at the wall in front of him and performing the mental acrobatics that he called theoretical physics, we talked, played and exercised. I was astonished again that a man who knew so much about so much could know nothing about some things.

“You mean to tell me,” he said once, as we lay in companionable darkness, with the side port showing the eldritch and unpredictable blue sparks of atomic collision. “You mean that Lungfish wasn’t the first space station. All the books and records show it that way.”

“No, they don’t. If they do, they’re wrong. It’s a common mistake. Like the idea back at the beginning of flight itself, that Lindbergh was the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. He was more like the hundredth.” I saw McAndrew turn his head towards me. “Yes, you heard me. A couple of airships had been over before him, and a couple of other people in aircraft. He was just the first person to fly alone. Lungfish was the first truly permanent space station, that’s all. And I’ll tell you something else. Did you know that in the earliest flights, even ones that lasted for months, the crews were usually all men? Think of that for a while.”

He was silent for a moment. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. It would simplify some of the plumbing, maybe some other things, too.”

“You don’t understand, Mac. That was at a time when it was regarded as morally wrong for men to form sexual relationships with men, or women with women.”

There was what I might describe as a startled silence.

“Oh,” said McAndrew at last. Then, after a few moments more, “My God. How much did they have to pay them? Or was coercion used?”

“It was considered an honor to be chosen.”

He didn’t say any more about it; but I don’t think he believed me, either. Politeness is one of the first things you learn on long trips.

We cut off the drive briefly at crossover, but there was nothing to be seen and there was still no way we could receive messages. We were crowding light speed so closely that anything from Triton Station would scarcely be catching up with us. The Institute’s message was still on its way to the Ark of Massingham, and we would be there ourselves not long after it. The Hoatzin was behaving perfectly, with none of the problems that had almost done us in on the earlier test ships. The massive disc of dense matter at the front of the ship protected us from most of our collisions with stray dust and free hydrogen. If we didn’t come back, the next ship out could follow our path exactly, tracking our swath of ionization.

During deceleration I began to search the sky beyond the Hoatzin every day, with an all-frequency sweep that ought to pick up signals as soon as our drive went to reduced thrust. We didn’t pick up the Ark until the final day and it was no more than a point on the microwave screen for most of that. The image we finally built up on the monitor showed a lumpy, uneven ball, pierced by black shafts. Spiky antennas and angled gantries stood up like spines on its dull grey surface. I had seen the images of the Ark before it left the Solar System, and all the surface structures were new. The colonists had been busy in the seventy-seven years since they accelerated away from Ganymede orbit.

We moved in to five thousand kilometers, cut the drive, and sent a calling sequence. I don’t remember a longer five seconds, waiting for their response. When it came it was an anti-climax. A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman appeared on our screen.

“Hello,” she said cheerfully. “We received a message that you were on your way here. My name is Kleeman. Link in your computer and we’ll dock you. There will be a few formalities before you can come inside.”

I put the central computer into distributed mode and linked a navigation module through the com-net. She sounded friendly and normal but I didn’t want her to have override control of all the Hoatzin’s movements. We moved to a position about fifty kilometers away from the Ark, then Kleeman appeared again on the screen.

“I didn’t realize your ship had so much mass. We’ll hold there, and you can come in on a pod. All right?”

We usually called it a capsule these days, but I knew what she meant. I made McAndrew put on a suit, to his disgust, and we entered the small transfer vessel. It was just big enough for four people, with no air lock and a simple electric drive. We drifted in to the Ark, with the capsule’s computer slaved through the Hoatzin. As we got nearer I had a better feel for size. Two kilometers is small for an asteroid, but it’s awfully big compared with a human. We nosed into contact with a landing tower, like a fly landing on the side of a wasp’s nest. I hoped that would prove to be a poor analogy.

We left the capsule open and went hand-over-hand down the landing tower rather than wait for an electric lift. It was impossible to believe that we were moving at almost nine thousand kilometers a second away from Earth. The stars were in the same familiar constellations, and it took a while to pick out the Sun. It was a bright star, but a good deal less bright than Sirius. I stood at the bottom of the tower for a few seconds, peering about me before entering the air lock that led to the interior of the Ark. It was a strange, alien landscape, with the few surface lights throwing black angular shadows across the uneven rock. My trips to Titan suddenly felt like local hops around the comfortable backyard of the Solar System.

“Come on, Jeanie.” That was McAndrew, all brisk efficiency and already standing in the air lock. He was much keener than I to penetrate that unfamiliar world of the interior.

I took a last look at the stars, and fixed in my mind the position of the transfer capsule — an old habit that pays off once in a thousand times. Then I followed McAndrew down into the lock.

A few formalities before you can come inside. Kleeman had a gift for understatement. We found out what she meant when we stepped in through the inner lock, to an office-cum-schoolroom equipped with a couple of impressive consoles and displays. Kleeman met us there, as pleasant and rosy-faced in the flesh as she had seemed over the com-link.

She waved us to the terminals. “This is an improved version of the equipment that was on the original ship, before it left your system. Please sit down. Before anyone can enter our main Home, they must take tests. It has been that way since Massingham first showed us how our society could be built.”

We sat at the terminals, back-to-back. McAndrew was frowning at the delay. “What’s the test, then?” he grumbled.

“Just watch the screen. I don’t think that either of you will have any trouble.”

She smiled and left us to it. I wondered what the penalty was if you failed. We were a long way from home. It seemed clear that if they had been improving this equipment after they left Ganymede, they must apply it to their own people. We were certainly the first visitors they had seen for seventy-five years. How had they been able to accept our arrival so calmly?

Before I could pursue that thought the screen was alive. I read the instructions as they appeared there, and followed them as carefully as possible. After a few minutes I got the knack of it. We had tests rather like it when I first applied to go into space. To say that we were taking an intelligence test would be an oversimplification — many other aptitudes were tested, as well as knowledge and mechanical skills. That was the only consolation I had. McAndrew must be wiping the floor with me on all the parts that called for straight brain-power, but I knew that his coordination was terrible. He could unwrap a set of interlocking, multiply-connected figures mentally and tell you how they came apart, but ask him to do the same thing with real objects and he wouldn’t be able to start.

After three hours we were finished. Both screens suddenly went blank. We swung to face each other.

“What’s next?” I said. He shrugged and began to look at the terminal itself. The design hadn’t been used in the System for fifty years. I took a quick float around the walls — we had entered the Ark near a pole, where the effective gravity caused by its rotation was negligible. Even on the Ark ’s equator I estimated that we wouldn’t feel more than a tenth of a gee at the most.

No signs of what I was looking for, but that didn’t mean much. Microphones could be disguised in a hundred ways.

“Mac, who do you think she is?”

He looked up from the terminal. “Why, she’s the woman assigned to…” He stopped. He had caught my point. When you are two light-years from Sol and you have your first visitors for seventy-five years, who leads the reception party? Not the man and woman who recycle the garbage. Kleeman ought to be somebody important on the Ark.

“I can assist your speculation,” said a voice from the wall. So much for our privacy. As I expected, we had been observed throughout — no honor system on this test. “I am Kal Massingham Kleeman, the daughter of Jules Massingham, and I am senior member of Home outside the Council of Intellects. Wait there for one more moment. I will join you with good news.”

She was beaming when she reappeared. Whatever they were going to do with us, it didn’t seem likely they would be flinging us out into the void.

“You are both prime stock, genetically and individually,” she said. “I thought that would be the case when first I saw you.”

She looked down at a green card in her hand. “I notice that you both failed to answer one small part of the inquiry on your background. Captain Roker, your medical record indicates that you bore one child. But what is its sex, condition, and present status?”

I heard McAndrew suck in his breath past his teeth, while I suppressed my own shock as best I could. It was clear that the standards of privacy in the System and on the Ark had diverged widely in the past seventy-seven years.

“It is a female.” I hope I kept my voice steady. “Healthy, and with no neuroses. She is in first level education on Luna.”

“The father?”

“Unknown.”

I shouldn’t have been pleased to see that now Kleeman was shocked, but I was. She looked as distressed as I felt. After a few seconds she grabbed control of her emotions, swallowed, and nodded.

“We are not ignorant of the unplanned matings that your System permits. But hearing of such things and encountering them directly are not the same.” She looked again at her green card. “McAndrew, you show no children. Is that true?”

He had taken his lead from me and managed a calm and literal reply. “No recorded children.”

“Incredible.” Kleeman was shaking her head. “That a man of your talents should be permitted to go so long without suitable mating…”

She looked at him hungrily, the way that I have seen McAndrew eye an untapped set of experimental data from out in the Halo. I could imagine how he had performed on the intellectual sections of the test.

“Come along,” she said at last, still eyeing McAndrew in a curiously intense and possessive way. “I would like to show you some of Home, and arrange for you to have living quarters for your use.”

“Don’t you want more details of why we are here?” burst out Mac. “We’ve come nearly two light-years to get to the Ark. ”

“You have been receiving our messages of the advances that we have made?” Kleeman’s manner had a vast self-confidence. “Then why should we be surprised when superior men and women from your system wish to come here? We are only surprised that it took you so long to develop a suitably efficient ship. Your vessel is new?”

“Very new.” I spoke before McAndrew could get a word in. Kleeman’s assumption that we were on the Ark to stay had ominous overtones. We needed to know more about the way the place functioned before we told her that we were planning only a brief visit.

“We have been developing the drive for our ship using results that parallel some of those found by your scientists,” I went on. I gave Mac a look that kept him quiet for a little while longer. “When we have finished with the entry preliminaries, Professor McAndrew would very much like to meet your physicists.”

She smiled serenely at him. “Of course. McAndrew, you should be part of our Council of Intellects. I do not know how high your position was back in your system, but I feel sure you have nothing as exalted — and as respected — as our Council. Well,” — she placed the two green cards she was holding in the pocket of her yellow smock — “there will be plenty of time to discuss induction to the Council when you have settled in here. The entry formalities are complete. Let me show you Home. There has never been anything like it in the whole of human history.”

Over the next four hours we followed Kleeman obediently through the interior of the Ark. McAndrew was itching to locate his fellow-physicists, but he knew he was at the mercy of Kleeman’s decisions. From our first meeting with others on the Ark, there was no doubt who was the boss there.

How can I describe the interior of the Ark? Imagine a free-space beehive, full of hard-working bees that had retained an element of independence of action. Everyone on the Ark of Massingham seemed industrious, cooperative, and intelligent. But they were missing a dimension, the touch of orneriness and unpredictability that you would find on Luna or on Titan. Nobody was cursing, nobody was irrational. Kleeman guided us through a clean, slightly dull Utopia.

The technology of the Ark was simpler to evaluate. Despite the immense pride with which Kleeman showed off every item of development, they were half a century behind us. The sprawling, overcrowded chaos of Earth was hard to live with, but it provided a constant pressure towards innovation. New inventions come fast when ten billion people are there to push you to new ideas. In those terms, life on the Ark was spacious and leisurely. The colony had constructed its network of interlocking tunnels to a point where it would take months to explore all the passages and corridors, but they were nowhere near exhausting their available space and resources.

“How many people would the Ark hold?” I asked McAndrew as we trailed along behind Kleeman. It would have taken only a minute or two to work it out for myself, but you get lazy when you live for a while with a born calculator.

“If they don’t use the interior material to extend the surface of the Ark?” he said. “Give them the same room as we’d allow on Earth, six meters by six meters by two meters. They could hold nearly sixty million. Halve that, maybe, to allow for recycling and maintenance equipment.”

“But that is not our aim,” said Kleeman. She had overheard my question. “We are stabilized at ten thousand. We are not like the fools back on Earth. Quality is our aim, not mindless numbers.”

She had that tone in her voice again, the one that had made me instinctively avoid the question of how long we would be staying on the Ark. Heredity is a potent influence. I couldn’t speak about Jules Massingham, the founder of this Ark, but his daughter was a fanatic. I have seen others like her over the years. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with the prime objective: build the Ark ’s population on sound eugenic principles. Kleeman was polite to me — I was “prime stock” — but she had her eye mainly on McAndrew. He would be a wonderful addition to her available gene pool.

Well, the lady had taste. I shared some of that attitude myself. “Father unknown” was literally true and Mac and I had not chosen to elaborate. Our daughter had rights, too, and Jan’s parentage would not be officially known unless she chose after puberty to take the chromosome matching tests.

Over the next six days, McAndrew and I worked our way into the life pattern aboard the Ark. The place ran like a clock, everything according to a schedule and everything in the right position. I had a good deal of leisure time, which I used to explore the less-popular corridors, up near the Hub. McAndrew was still obsessed with his search for physicists.

“No sense here,” he growled to me, after a meal in the central dining area out on the Ark ’s equator. As I had guessed, effective gravity there was about a tenth of a gee. “I’ve spoken to a couple of dozen of their scientists. There’s not one of them would last a week at the Institute. Muddled minds and bad experiments.”

He was angry. Usually McAndrew was polite to all scientists, even ones who couldn’t understand what he was doing, still less add to it.

“Have you seen them all? Maybe Kleeman is keeping some of them from us.”

“I’ve had that thought. She’s talked to me every day about the Council of Intellects, and I’ve seen some of the things they’ve produced. But I’ve yet to meet one of them, in person.” He shrugged, and rubbed at his sandy, receding hairline. “After we’ve slept I’m going to try another tack. There’s a schoolroom over on the other side of the Ark, where I gather Kleeman keeps people who don’t seem quite to fit into her ideas. Want to take a look there with me, tomorrow?”

“Maybe. I’m wondering what Kleeman has in mind for me. I think I know her plans for you, she sees you as another of her senior brains.” I saw the woman herself approaching us across the wide room, with its gently curving floor. “You’d like it, I suspect. It seems to be like the Institute, but members of the Council have a lot more prestige.”

I had immediate proof that I was right. Kleeman seemed to have made up her mind. “We need a commitment from you now, McAndrew,” she said. “There is a coming vacancy on the Council. You are the best person to fill it.”

McAndrew looked flattered but uncomfortable. The trouble was, it really did interest him, I could tell that. The idea of a top-level brains trust had appeal.

“All right,” he said after a few moments. He looked at me, and I could tell what he was thinking. If we were going to be on our way back home soon, it would do no harm to help the Ark while he was here. They could use all the help available.

Kleeman clapped her hands together softly; plump white hands that pointed out her high position — most people on the Ark had manual duties to keep the place running, with strict duty rosters.

“Wonderful! I will plan for your induction tomorrow. Let me make the announcement tonight, and we can speed up the proceedings for the outgoing member.”

“You always have a fixed number of members?” asked McAndrew.

She seemed slightly puzzled by his question. “Of course. Exactly twelve. The system was designed for that number.”

She nodded at me and hurried away across the dining area, a determined little woman who always got her way. Since we first arrived she had never ceased to tell McAndrew that he must become the father of many children; scores of children; hundreds of children. He looked more and more worried as she increased the number of his future progeny.

The next morning I went on with my own exploration of the Ark, while McAndrew made a visit to the Ark ’s oddities, the people who didn’t seem to fit Kleeman’s expectations. We met to eat together, as usual, and I had a lot on my mind. I had come across an area in the center of the Ark where power supply lines and general purpose tube inputs increased enormously, but it did not seem to be a living area. Everything led to one central area, but one accessible only with a suitable code. I puzzled over it while I waited for McAndrew to appear.

The whole Ark was bustling with excitement. Kleeman had made the announcement of McAndrew’s coming incorporation to the Council of Intellects. People who had scarcely spoken to him before stopped us and shook his hand solemnly, wishing him well and thanking him for his devotion to the welfare of the Ark. While I drank an aperitif of glucose and dilute ascorbic acid, preparations for a big ceremony were going on around me. A new Council member was a big event.

When I saw McAndrew threading his way towards me past a network of new scaffolding, I knew his morning had been more successful than mine. His thin face was flushed with excitement and pleasure. He slid into the seat opposite me.

“You found your physicist?” I hardly needed to ask the question.

He nodded. “Up on the other side, in a maximum gravity segment right across from here. He’s — you have no idea — he’s—” McAndrew was practically gibbering in his excitement.

“Start from the beginning.” I leaned across and took his hands in mine.

“Yes. I went out on the other side of the Ark, where there’s a sort of tower built out from the surface. We must have passed it on the way over from the Hoatzin but I didn’t notice it then. Kleeman never took us there — never mentioned it to me.”

He reached out with one hand across the table, grabbed my drink and took a great gulp of it. “Och, Jeanie, I needed that. I’ve not stopped since I first opened my eyes. Where was I? I went on up to that tower, and there was nobody to stop me or to say a word. And I went on inside, farther out, to the very end of it. The last segment has a window all the way round, so when you’re there you can see the stars and the nebulae wheeling round past your head.” McAndrew was unusually stirred and his last sentence proved it. The stars were normally considered fit subjects only for theory and computation.

“He was out in that last room,” he went on. “After I’d given up hope of finding anybody in this whole place who could have derived those results we got back through Triton Station. Jeanie, he looks no more than a boy. So blond, and so young. I couldn’t believe that he was the one who worked out that theory. But he is. We sat right down at the terminal there, and I started to run over the background for the way that I renormalize the vacuum self-energy. It’s nothing like his way. He has a completely different approach, different invariants, different quantization conditions. I think his method is a good deal more easy to generalize. That’s why he can get multiple vacuum colors out when we look for resonance conditions.

“Jeanie, you should have seen his face when I told him that we probably had fifty people at the Institute who would be able to follow his proofs. He’s been completely alone here. There’s not another one who can even get close to following him, he says. When he sent back those equations, he didn’t tell people how important he thought they might be. He says they worry more about controlling what comes in from the System, rather than what goes out from here. I’m awful glad we came. He’s an accident, a sport that shows up only once in a couple of centuries — and he was born out here in the void! Did you know, he’s taken all the old path integral methods, and he has a form of quantum theory that looks so simple, you’d never believe it if you didn’t see it…”

He was off again. I had to break in, or he would have talked without stopping, right through our meal. McAndrew doesn’t babble often, but when he does he’s hard to stop.

“Mac, hold on. Something here doesn’t make sense. What about the Council of Intellects?”

“What about it?” He looked as though he had no possible interest in the Council of Intellects — even though the bustle that was going on all around us, with new structures being erected, was all to mark McAndrew’s elevation to the Council.

“Look, just yesterday we agreed that the work you’re interested in here must have originated with the Council. You told me you hadn’t met one person who knew anything worth discussing. Are you telling me now that this work on the vacuum energy doesn’t come from the people on the Council?”

“I’m sure it doesn’t. I doubted that even before I met Wicklund, up there in the tower.” McAndrew was looking at me impatiently, “Jeanie, if that’s the impression I gave, it’s not what I meant. A thing like this is almost always the work of a single person. It’s not initiated by a group, even though a group may help to apply it to practice. This work, the vacuum color work, that’s all Wicklund — the Council knows nothing of it.”

“So what does the Council do? I hope you haven’t forgotten that you’re going to join it later today. I don’t think Kleeman would take it well if you said you wanted to change your mind.”

He waved an impatient arm at me. “Now, Jeanie, you know I’ve no time for that. The Council of Intellects is some sort of guiding and advising group, and I’m willing to serve on it and do what I can for the Ark. But not now. I have to get back over to Wicklund and sort out some of the real details. Did I mention that I’ve explained all about the drive to him? He mops up new material like a sponge. If we can get him back to the Institute he’ll catch up on fifty years of system science development in a few months. You know, I’d better go and talk to Kleeman about this council of hers. What’s the use of calling it a Council of Intellects, when people like Wicklund are not on it? And I’ll have to tell her we want to take him back with us. I’ve already mentioned it to him. He’s interested, but he’s a bit scared of the idea. This is home to him, the only place he knows. Here, is that Kleeman over there by the scaffolding? I’d better catch her now.”

He was up and out of his seat before I could stop him. He hurried over to her, took her to one side and began to speak to her urgently. He was gesturing and cracking his finger joints, in the way that he always did when he was wound up on something. As I moved to join them I could see Kleeman’s expression changing from a friendly interest to a solid determination.

“We can’t change things now, McAndrew,” she was saying. “The departing member has already been removed from the Council. It is imperative that the replacement be installed as soon as possible. That ceremony must take place tonight.”

“But I want to continue my meetings with—”

“The ceremony will take place tonight. Don’t you understand? The Council cannot function without all twelve members. I cannot discuss this further. There is nothing to discuss.”

She turned and walked away. Just as well, McAndrew was all set to tell her that he was not about to join her precious council, and he was planning to leave the Ark without fathering hundreds, scores, or even ones of children. And he was taking one of her colonists — her subjects — with him. I took his arm firmly and dragged him back to our table.

“Calm down, Mac.” I spoke as urgently as I could. “Don’t fly off wild now. Let’s get this stupid council initiation rite out of the way today, and then let’s wait a while and approach Kleeman on all this when she’s in a more reasonable mood. All right?”

“That damned, obstinate, overbearing woman. Who the hell does she think she is?”

“She thinks she’s the boss of the Ark of Massingham, and she is the boss of the Ark of Massingham. Face facts. Slow down now, and go back to Wicklund. See if he’s interested in leaving when we leave, but don’t push it too hard. Let’s wait a few days, there’s nothing to be lost from that.”

How naive can you get? Kleeman had told us exactly what was going on, but we hadn’t listened. People hear what they expect to hear.

I found out the truth the idiot’s way. After McAndrew had gone off again, calm enough to talk to his new protege, I had about four hours to kill. The great ceremony in which McAndrew would become part of the Council of Intellects would not take place until after the next meal. I decided I would have another look at the closed room that I had seen on my earlier roaming.

The room was still locked, but this time there was a servicewoman working on the pipes that led into it. She recognized me as one of the two recent arrivals on the Ark — the less important one, according to Ark standards.

“Tonight’s the big event,” she said to me, her manner friendly. “You’ve come to take a look at the place your friend will be, have you? You know, we really need him. The Council has been almost useless for the past two years, with one member almost gone. Kleeman knew that, but she didn’t seem happy to provide a new member until she met McAndrew.”

She obviously assumed I knew all about the Council and its workings. I stepped closer, keeping my voice casual and companionable. “I’ll see all this for myself tonight. McAndrew will be in here, right? I wonder if I could take a peek now, I’ve never been inside before.”

“Sure.” She went to the door and keyed in a combination. “There’s been talk for a while of moving the Council to another part of Home, where there’s less vibration from construction work. No sign of it happening yet, though. Here we go. You won’t be able to go inside the inner room, of course, but you’ll find you can see most things from the service area.”

As the door slid open I stepped through into a long, brightly-lit room. It was empty.

My heart began to pound urgently and my mouth was as dry as Ceres. Strange, how the absence of something can produce such a powerful effect on the body.

“Where are they?” I said at last. “The Council. You said they are in this room.”

She looked at me in comical disbelief. “Well, you didn’t expect to find them sitting out in the open, did you? Take a look through the hatch at the end there.”

We walked forward together and peered through a transparent panel at the far end of the room. It led through to another, smaller chamber, this one dimly lit by a soft green glow.

My eyes took a few seconds to adapt. The big, translucent tank in the center of the room slowly came into definition. All around it, equally spaced, were twelve smaller sections, all inter-connected through a massive set of branching cables and optic bundles.

“Well, there they are,” said the servicewoman. “Doesn’t look right, does it, with one of them missing like this? It doesn’t work, either. The information linkages are all built for a set of exactly twelve units, with a twelve-by-twelve transfer matrix.”

Now I could see that one of the small tanks was empty. In each of the eleven others, coupled to a set of thin plastic tubes and contact wires, was a complex shape, a dark-grey ovoid swimming in a bath of green fluid. The surfaces were folded and convoluted, glistening with the sticky sheen of animal tissues. At the lower end, each human brain thinned away past the brain stem to the spinal cord.

I remember asking her just one question: “What would happen if the twelfth member of the Council of Intellects were not connected in today?”

“It would be bad.” She looked shocked. “Very bad. I don’t know the details, but I think all the potentials would run wild in a day or two, and destroy the other eleven. It has never happened. There have always been twelve members of the Council, since Massingham created it. He is the one over there, on the far right.”

We must have spoken further, but already my mind was winging its way back to the dining area. I was to meet McAndrew one hour before the big ceremony. Incorporation, that was what Kleeman had called it, incorporation into the Council. De-corporation would be a better name for the process. But the Council of Intellects was well-named. After someone has been pared down, flesh, bone and organs, to a brain and a spinal column, intellect is all that can remain. Perhaps the thing that upset me more than anything in that inner room was their decision to leave the eyes intact. They were there, attached to each brain by the protruding stalks of their optic nerves. They looked like the horns of a snail, blue, grey or brown balls projecting from the frontal lobes. Since there were no muscles left to change the focal length of the eye lenses, they were directed to display screens set at fixed distances from the tanks.

The wait in the dining area was a terrible period. I had been all right on the way back from the Council Chamber, there had been movement to make the tension tolerable, but when McAndrew finally appeared my nerves had become awfully ragged. He was all set to burble on about his physics discussions. I cut him off before he could get out one word.

“Mac, don’t speak and don’t make any quick move. We have to leave the Ark. Now.”

“Jeanie!” Then he saw my face. “What about Sven Wicklund? We’ve talked again and he wants to go with us — but he’s not ready.”

I shook my head and looked down at the table top. It was the worst possible complication. We had to move through the Ark and transfer across to the Hoatzin, without being noticed. If Kleeman sensed our intentions, Mac might still make it to the Council. My fate was less certain but probably even worse — if a worse fate is imaginable. It would be hard enough doing what we had to do without the addition of a nervous and inexperienced young physicist. But I knew McAndrew.

“Go get him,” I said at last. “Remember the lock we came in by?”

He nodded. “I can get us there. When?”

“Half an hour. Don’t let him bring anything with him — we’ll be working with a narrow margin.”

He stood up and walked away without another word. He probably wouldn’t have agreed to go without Wicklund; but he hadn’t asked me for any explanation, hadn’t insisted on a reason why we had to leave. That sort of trust isn’t built up overnight. I was scared shitless as I stood up and left the dining area, but in an obscure way I was feeling that warm glow you only feel when two people touch deeply. McAndrew had sensed a life-or-death issue, and trusted me without question.

Back at our sleeping quarters I picked up the com-link that gave me coded access to the computer on the Hoatzin. We had to make sure the ship was still in the same position. I followed my own directive and took nothing else. Kal Massingham Kleeman was a lady whose anger was best experienced from a distance. I had in mind a light-year or two, but at the moment I was concerned only with the first couple of kilometers. I wanted to move out of the Ark in a hurry.

The interior of the Ark was a great warren of connecting tunnels, so there were a hundred ways between any two points. That was just as well. I changed my path whenever I saw anyone else approaching, but I was still able to move steadily in the direction of our entry lock.

Twenty minutes since McAndrew had left. Now the speaker system crackled and came to life.

“Everyone will assemble in Main Hall Five.”

The ceremony was ready to begin. Kleeman was going to produce Hamlet without the Prince. I stepped up my pace. The trip through the interior of the Ark was taking longer than I had expected, and I was going to be late.

Thirty minutes, and I was still one corridor away. The monitors in the passage ceiling suddenly came to life, their red lenses glowing. All I could do was keep moving. There was no way of avoiding those monitors, they extended through the whole interior of the Ark.

“McAndrew and Roker.” It was Kleeman’s voice, calm and superior. “We are waiting for you. There will be punishment unless you come at once to Main Hall Five. Your presence in the outer section has been noted. A collection detail will arrive there at any moment. McAndrew, do not forget that the Council awaits you. You are abusing a great honor by your actions.”

I was at last at the lock. McAndrew stood there listening to Kleeman’s voice. The young man by his side — as Mac had said, so blond, so young — had to be Sven Wicklund. Behind those soft blue eyes lay a brain that even McAndrew found impressive. Wicklund was frowning now, his expression indecisive. All his ideas on life had been turned upside down in the past days, and Kleeman’s latest words must be giving him second thoughts about our escape.

Without speaking, McAndrew turned and pointed towards the wall of the lock. I looked, and felt a sudden sickness. The wall where the line of suits should be hanging was empty.

“No suits?” I said stupidly.

He nodded. “Kleeman has been thinking a move ahead of you.”

“You know what joining the Council would imply?”

He nodded again. His face was grey. “Sven told me as we came over here. I couldn’t believe it at first. I asked him, what about the children Kleeman wanted me to sire? They would drain me for the sperm bank before they…” He swallowed.

There was a long and terrible pause. “I looked out,” he said at last. “Through the viewport there. The capsule is still where we left it.”

“You’re willing to chance it?” I looked at Wicklund, who stood there not following our conversation at all.

Mac nodded. “I am. But what about him? There’s no Sturm Invocation for people here on the Ark. ”

As I had feared, Wicklund was a major complication.

I walked forward and stood in front of him. “Do you still want to go with us?”

He licked his lips, then nodded.

“Into the lock.” We moved forward together and I closed the inner door.

“Do not be foolish.” It was Kleeman’s voice again, this time with a new expression of alarm. “There is nothing to be served by sacrificing yourselves to space. McAndrew, you are a rational man. Come back, and we will discuss this together. Do not waste your potential by a pointless death.”

I took a quick look through the port of the outer lock. The capsule was there all right, it looked just the same as when we left it. Wicklund was staring out in horror. Until Kleeman had spoken, it did not seem to have occurred to him that we were facing death in the void.

“Mac!” I said urgently.

He nodded, and gently took Wicklund by the shoulders, swinging him around. I stepped up behind Wicklund and dug hard into the nerve centers at the base of his neck. He was unconscious in two seconds.

“Ready, Mac?”

Another quick nod. I checked that Wicklund’s eyelids were closed, and that his breathing was shallow. He would be unconscious for another couple of minutes, pulse rate low and oxygen need reduced.

McAndrew stood at the outer lock, ready to open it. I pulled the whistle from the lapel of my jacket and blew hard. The varying triple tone sounded through the lock. Penalty for improper use of any Sturm Invocation was severe, whether you used spoken, whistled, or electronic methods. I had never invoked it before, but anyone who goes into space, even if it is just a short trip from Earth to Moon, must receive Sturm vacuum survival programming. One person in a million uses it. I stood in the lock, waiting to see what would happen to me.

The sensation was strange. I still had full command of my movements, but a new set of involuntary activities came into play. Without any conscious decision to do so I found that I was breathing hard, hyper-ventilating in great gulps. My eye-blinking pattern had reversed. Instead of open eyes with rapid blinks to moisten and clean the eyeball, my lids were closed except for brief instants. I saw the lock and the space outside as quick snapshots.

The Sturm Invocation had the same effect an McAndrew, as his own deep programming took over for vacuum exposure. When I nodded, he swung open the outer lock door. The air was gone in a puff of ice vapor. As my eyes flicked open I saw the capsule at the top of the landing tower. To reach it we had to traverse sixty meters of the interstellar vacuum. And we had to carry Sven Wicklund’s unconscious body between us.

For some reason I had imagined that the Sturm vacuum programming would make me insensitive to all pain. Quite illogical, since you could permanently damage your body all too easily in that situation. I felt the agony of expansion through my intestines, as the air rushed out of all my body cavities. My mouth was performing an automatic yawning and gasping, emptying the Eustachian tube to protect my ear drums and delicate inner ear. My eyes were closed to protect the eyeballs from freezing, and open just often enough to guide my body movements.

Holding Wicklund between us, McAndrew and I pushed off into the open depths of space. Ten seconds later, we intersected the landing tower about twenty meters up. Sturm couldn’t make a human comfortable in space, but he had provided a set of natural movements that corresponded to a zero-gee environment. They were needed. If we missed the tower there was no other landing point within light-years.

The metal of the landing tower was at a temperature several hundred degrees below freezing. Our hands were unprotected, and I could feel the ripping of skin at each contact. That was perhaps the worst pain. The feeling that I was a ball, over-inflated and ready to burst, was not a pain. What was it? That calls for the same sort of skills as describing sight to a blind man. All I can say is that once in a lifetime is more than enough.

Thirty seconds in the vacuum, and we were still fifteen meters from the capsule. I was getting the first feeling of anoxia, the first moment of panic. As we dropped into the capsule and tagged shut the hatch I could feel the black clouds moving around me, dark nebulae that blanked out the bright star field.

The transfer capsule had no real air lock. When I hit the air supply, the whole interior began to fill with warm oxygen. As the concentration grew to a perceptible fraction of an atmosphere, I felt something turn off abruptly within me. My eye blinking went back to the usual pattern, my mouth closed instead of gaping and gasping, and the black patches started to dwindle and fragment.

I turned on the drive of the transfer vessel to take us on our fifty kilometer trip to the Hoatzin and glanced quickly at the other two. Wicklund was still unconscious, eyes closed but breathing normally. He had come through well. McAndrew was something else. There was blood flowing from the corner of his mouth and he was barely conscious. He must have been much closer to collapse than I when we dropped into the capsule, but he had not loosened his grip on Wicklund.

I felt a moment of irritation. Damn that man. He had assured me that he would replace that damaged lung lobe after our last trip but I was pretty sure he had done nothing about it. This time I would see he had the operation, if I had to take him there myself.

He began to cough weakly and his eyes opened. When he saw that we were in the capsule and Wicklund was between us, he smiled a little and let his eyes close again. I put the drive on maximum and noticed for the first time the blood that was running from my left hand. The palm and fingers were raw flesh, skin ripped off by the hellish cold of the landing tower. I reached behind me and pulled out the capsule’s small medical kit. Major fix-ups would have to wait until we were on the Hoatzin. The surrogate flesh was bright yellow, like a thick mustard, but it took away the pain. I smeared it over my own hand, then reached across and did the same for McAndrew. His face was beginning to blaze with the bright red of broken capillaries, and I was sure that I looked just the same. That was nothing. It was the bright blood dribbling down his blue tunic that I didn’t like.

Wicklund was awake. He winced and held his hands up to his ears. There might be a burst eardrum there, something else we would have to take care of when we got to the Hoatzin.

“How did I get here?” he said wonderingly.

“Across the vacuum. Sorry we had to put you out like that, but I didn’t think you could have faced a vacuum passage when you were conscious.”

His gaze turned slowly to McAndrew. “Is he all right?”

“I hope so. There may be some lung damage that we’ll have to take care of. Want to do something to help?”

He nodded, then turned back to look at the ball of the Ark, dwindling behind us. “They can’t catch us now, can they?”

“They might try, but I don’t think so. Kleeman probably considers anybody who wants to leave the Ark is not worth having. Here, take the blue tube out of the kit behind you and smear it on your face and hands. Do the same for McAndrew. It will speed up the repair of the ruptured blood vessels in your skin.”

Wicklund took the blue salve and began to apply it tenderly to McAndrew’s face.

After a couple of seconds Mac opened his eyes and smiled. “Thank you, lad,” he said softly. “I’d talk more physics with you, but somehow I don’t quite feel that I’m up to it.”

“Just lie there quiet.” There was hero worship in Wicklund’s voice. I had a sudden premonition of what the return trip was going to be like. McAndrew and Sven Wicklund in a mutual admiration society, and all the talk of physics.

After we had the capsule back on board the Hoatzin I felt secure for the first time. We installed McAndrew comfortably on one of the bunks while I went to the drive unit and set a maximum-acceleration course back to the Solar System. Wicklund’s attention was torn between his need to talk to McAndrew and his fascination with the drive and the ship. How would Einstein have felt in 1905, if someone could have shown him a working nuclear reactor just a few months after he had developed the mass-energy relation? It must have been like that for Wicklund.

“Want to take a last look?” I said, my hand on the drive keyboard.

He came across and gazed at the Ark, still set on its long journey to Tau Ceti. He looked sad, and I felt guilty.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m afraid there’s no going back now.”

“I know.” He hesitated. “You found Home a bad place, I could tell from what McAndrew said. But it’s not so bad. To me, it was home for my whole life.”

“We’ll talk to the Ark again. There may be a chance to come here later, when we’ve had more time to study the life that you lived. I hope you’ll find a new life in the System.”

I meant it, but I was having a sudden vision of the Earth we were heading back to. Crowded, noisy, short of all resources. Wicklund might find it as hellish as we had found life on the Ark of Massingham. It was too late to do anything about it now. Fortunately, this sort of problem probably meant less to Wicklund than it would to most people. Like McAndrew, his real life was lived inside his own head, and all else was secondary to that private vision.

I pressed the key sequence and the drive went on. Within seconds, the Ark had vanished from sight.

I turned back and was surprised to see that McAndrew was sitting up in his bunk. He looked terrible, but he must be feeling better. His hands were yellow paws of surrogate flesh, his face and neck a bright blue coating of the ointment that Wicklund had applied to them. The dribble of blood that had come from his mouth had spread its bright stain down his chin and over the front of his tunic, mixing in with the blue fabric to produce a horrible purple splash.

“How are you, Mac?” I said.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.” He forced a smile.

“You know, it’s not good enough. You promised me ages ago that you’d schedule a repair for that lung — and you didn’t do it. If you think I’m prepared to keep dragging you around bleeding and bubbling, you’re wrong. When we get back, you have that lung fixed properly — if I have to drag you to the medics myself.”

“Och, Jeanie.” He gave a feeble shrug. “We’ll see. It takes so much time away from work. Let’s get on home, though, and we’ll see. I’ve learned a lot on this trip, more than I ever expected. It’s all been well worth it.”

He caught my skeptical look. “Honest, now, this is more important than you realize. We’ll make the next trip out together, the way I promised you. Maybe next time we’ll get to the stars. I’m sorry that you got nothing out of this one.”

I stared at him. He looked like a circus clown, all smears and streaks of different clashing colors. I shook my head. “You’re wrong. I got something out of it.”

He looked puzzled. “How’s that?”

“I listen to you and the other physicists all the time, and usually I don’t understand a word of it. This time I know just what you mean. Lie still, and you can see for yourself. I’ll be back in a second.”

All the colors of the vacuum? That was McAndrew. If a picture is worth a thousand words, there are times when a mirror is worth more than that. I wanted to watch Mac’s face when he saw his own reflection.