The Compleat McAndrew

SEVENTH CHRONICLE: Rogueworld

The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

I was sitting in the pilot’s chair with McAndrew at my shoulder. Neither of us had spoken for a long time. We were in low polar orbit, sweeping rapidly across the surface of Vandell with all pod sensors wide open. I don’t know what McAndrew was thinking, but my mind was not fully on the displays. Part of me was far away — one and a quarter light-years away, back on Earth.

Why not? Our attention here was not necessary. The surveillance sensors were linked to the shipboard main computer, and the work was done automatically. If anything new turned up we would hear of it at once. But nothing new could happen — nothing that mattered.

For the moment, I needed time to myself. Time to think about Jan; to remember her seventeen years, as a baby, as a slender child, as a fierce new intelligence, as a young woman; time to resent the chain of circumstance that had brought her and Sven Wicklund here, to die. Somewhere below these opalescent clouds, down on the cold surface of the planet, our sensor systems were seeking two corpses. Nothing else mattered.

I knew that McAndrew shared my sorrow, but he handled it in a different way. His attention was focused on the data displays, in a concentration so intense that my presence didn’t matter at all. His eyes lacked all expression. Every couple of minutes he shook his head and muttered to himself: “This makes no sense — no sense at all.”

I stared at the screen in front of me, where the dark vortex had again appeared. It came and went, clearly visible on some passes, vanished on others. Now it looked like a funnel, a sooty conical channel down through the glowing atmosphere, the only break in the planet’s swirling cloud cover. We had passed right over it twice before, the first time with rising hopes; but the sensors had remained quiet. It was not a signal. It had to be a natural feature, something like Jupiter’s Red Spot, some random coincidence of twisting gas streams.

Coincidence. Again, coincidence. “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.”

I couldn’t get McAndrew’s words out of my head.

He had spoken them months ago, on a day that I would never forget. It was Jan’s seventeenth birthday, the first time of choice. I was down on Earth, choking on the dense air, meeting with the new head of External Affairs.

McAndrew was at his office at the Penrose Institute. We were both trying to work, but I for one wasn’t succeeding too well. I wondered what was going through Jan’s head, waiting for graduation from the Luna System.

“Naturally, there will have to be some changes,” Tallboy was saying. “That’s to be expected, I’m sure you’ll agree. We are reviewing all programs, and though I am sure that my predecessor and I” — for the third time he had avoided using Woolford’s name — “agree on overall objectives, we may have slightly different priorities.”

Dr. Tallboy was a tall man, with a lofty brow and a keen, intellectual eye. Although we had shaken hands and muttered the conventional greetings a couple of times before, this was our first working meeting.

I pulled my wandering attention back to him. “When will the program review be finished?”

He shook his head and smiled broadly (but there were no laugh lines around his eyes). “As I’m sure you know very well, Captain Roker, these things take time. There has been a change of Administration. We have many new staff to train. There have been new Budget cuts, too, and the Office of External Affairs has suffered more than most. We will continue all the essential programs, be assured of that. But it is also my mandate to expend public funds wisely, and that cannot be done in haste.”

“What about the Penrose Institute’s experimental programs?” I said — a bit abruptly, but so far Tallboy had offered nothing more than general answers. I knew I couldn’t afford to seem impatient, but my meeting wouldn’t last much longer.

He hesitated, then sneaked a quick look at the crib sheets of notes in front of him on the desk. It didn’t seem to help, because when he looked up the fine and noble brow was wrinkled in perplexity.

“I’m thinking particularly of the Alpha Centauri expedition,” I prompted him. “Dr. Tallboy, a quick go-ahead on that means a great deal to us.”

“Of course.” He was nodding at me seriously. “A great deal. Er, I’m not completely familiar with that particular activity, you understand. But I assure you, as soon as my staff review is completed…”

Our meeting lasted fifteen more minutes, but long before that I felt I had failed. I had come here to push for a decision, to persuade Tallboy that the program should go ahead as planned and approved by Woolford; but bureaucratic changes had changed everything. Forget the fact that McAndrew and I had been planning the Alpha Centauri expedition for a year; forget the fact that the Hoatzin had been provisioned, fuelled, and inspected, and the flight plans filed long since with the USF. Forget the masses of new observational equipment that we had loaded onto the ship with such loving care. That had been under the old Administration. When the new one came in everything had to start again from scratch. And not one damned thing I could do about it.

I did manage to extract one promise from Tallboy before he ushered me out with polite assurances of his interest and commitment to the Institute’s work. He would visit the Institute personally, as soon as his schedule permitted. It wasn’t anything to celebrate, but it was all I could squeeze out of him.

“He’ll visit here in person?” said McAndrew — I had run for the phone as soon as I cleared the Office of External Affairs. “Do you think he’ll do it?”

I nodded. “I didn’t leave it up to him. I saw his secretary on the way out, and made sure that we’re in the book. He’ll do it.”

“When?” McAndrew had been in Limperis’ office when I called, and it was the older man who leaned forward to ask the question.

“Eight days from now. That was the first gap in his schedule. He’ll spend most of the day at the Institute.”

“Then we’re home free,” said McAndrew. He was cracking his finger joints — a sure sign of high excitement. “Jeanie, we can put on an all-day show here that’ll just blow him away. Wenig has a new E-M field stabilizer, Macedo says she can build a cheap detector for small Halo collapsars, and I’ve got an idea for a better kernel shield. And if we can ever get him to talk about it, Wicklund’s cooking up something new and big out on Triton Station. Man, I’m telling you, the Institute hasn’t been this productive in years. Get Tallboy here, and he’ll go out of his mind.”

Limperis shot a quick sideways glance at McAndrew, then looked back at the screen. He raised his eyebrows. I could read the expression on that smooth, innocent-looking face, and I agreed with him completely. If you wanted a man to quantize a nonlinear field, diagonalize a messy Hamiltonian, or dream up a delicate new observational test for theories of kernel creation, you couldn’t possibly do better than McAndrew. But that would be his downfall now. He could never accept that the rest of the world might be less interested in physics than he was.

Limperis started that way, but years of budget battles as head of the Institute had taught him to play in a different league, “So what do you think, Jeanie?” he said to me, when Mac had finished babbling.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t read Tallboy. He’s an unknown quantity. We’d better look up his background, see if that gives us some clue to what makes him tick. As it is, you’ll have to try it. Show him everything you’ve got at the Institute, and hope for the best.”

“What about the expedition?”

“Same for that. Tallboy acted as though he’d never heard of Alpha Centauri. The Hoatzin’s just about ready to go, but we need Tallboy’s blessing. External Affairs controls all the—”

“Call from Luna,” cut in a disembodied voice. “Central Records for Professor McAndrew. Level Two priority. Will you accept interrupt, or prefer reschedule?”

“Accept,” said McAndrew and I together — even though it wasn’t my call. It had to be from Jan.

“Voice, tonal, display or hard copy output?”

“Voice,” replied McAndrew firmly. I was less sure of that. He had done it so that I could receive the message, too, but we would have to witness each other’s disappointment if it was bad news.

“Message for Arthur Morton McAndrew,” went on the neutral voice. “Message begins. January Pelham, ID 128-129-001176, being of legal age of choice, will file for parental assignment as follows: Father: Arthur Morton McAndrew, ID 226-788-44577. Mother: Jean Pelham Roker, ID 547-314-78281. Name change filed for January Pelham Roker McAndrew. Parental response and acceptance is required. Reply via Luna free circuit 33, link 442. Message ends.”

I had never seen McAndrew look so pleased. It was doubly satisfying to him to have me on the line when the word came through — I was sure that the Communications Group were trying to track me now through Tallboy’s office, not knowing I was tapped into Mac’s line.

“What’s the formal date for parental assignment?” I asked.

There was a two second pause while the computer made confirmation of identity from my voiceprint, sent that information over the link from L-4 to Luna, decided how to handle the situation, and connected us all into one circuit.

“Message for Jean Pelham Roker. Message begins: January Pelham, ID 128—”

“No need to repeat,” I said. “Message received. Repeat, what is the formal date for parental assignment?”

“Two hundred hours U.T., subject to satisfactory parental responses.”

“That’s too soon,” said McAndrew. “We won’t have enough time for chromosomal confirmation.”

“Chromosomal confirmation waived.”

On the screen in front of me McAndrew blushed bright with surprise and pleasure. Not only had Jan filed for us as official parents as soon as legally permitted, she had done so without knowing or caring what the genetic records showed. The waiver was a definite statement: whether or not McAndrew was her biological father would make no difference to her; she had made her decision.

For what it was worth, I could have given my own assurance. Some evidence is just as persuasive to me as chromosomal mapping. No one who had seen that blind, inward look on Jan’s face when she was tackling an abstract problem would ever doubt that she was McAndrew’s flesh and blood. I had cursed that expression a hundred times, as McAndrew left me to worry alone while he disappeared on a voyage of exploration and discovery inside his own head.

Never mind; McAndrew had his good points. “Parental acceptance by Jean Pelham Roker,” I said.

“Parental acceptance by Arthur Morton McAndrew,” said Mac.

Another brief pause, then: “Acceptance received and recorded. Formal assignment confirmed for two hundred hours U.T. Arrange location through Luna link 33-442. Hard copy output follows. Is there additional transfer?”

“No.”

“Link terminated.” While the computer initiated hard copy output to the terminal at the Institute, I did a little calculation.

“Mac, we have a problem — Jan’s acceptance ceremony is set for the same time as Tallboy’s visit.”

“Of course.” He looked surprised that I hadn’t seen it immediately. “We can handle it. She’ll come out here. She’ll want to visit — she hasn’t been to the Institute since Wicklund went out to Triton Station.”

“But you’ll be too tied up with Tallboy to spend much time with her. What rotten luck.”

McAndrew shrugged, and it was enough to start him talking. “Whenever a set of independent events occur randomly in time or space, you’ll notice event-clusters. They’re inevitable. That’s all there is to coincidences. If you assume that event arrival times follow a Poisson distribution, and just go ahead and calculate the probability that a given number will occur in some small interval of time, you’ll find—”

“Take him away,” I said to Limperis.

He slapped McAndrew lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. Coincidence or not, this is a day for celebration. You’re a father now, and thanks to Jeanie we’ve got Tallboy coming out here to see the show.” He winked at me. “Though maybe Jan will change her mind when she hears Mac talk for a few hours, eh, Jeanie? Poor girl, she’s not used to it, the way you are.”

McAndrew just grinned. He was riding too high for a little gentle joshing to have any effect. “If you pity the poor lass at all,” he said. “It should be for the Philistine space-jock of a mother she’ll be getting. If I wanted to talk to Jan about probability distributions, she’d listen to me.” She probably would, too. I’d seen her math profiles.

Limperis was reaching out to cut the connection, but Mac hadn’t quite finished. “You know, the laws of probability not only permit coincidences,” he said. “They—”

He was still talking when the screen went blank.

I had no more official business down on Earth, but I didn’t head out at once. Limperis was quite right, it was a time for celebration; you didn’t become a parent every day. I went over to the Asgard restaurant, up at the very top of Mile High, and ordered the full panoramic dinner. In some ways I wasted my money, because no matter what the sensories threw at me I hardly noticed. I was thinking back seventeen years, to the time when Jan was born, so small she could put her whole fist in the old silver thimble that McAndrew’s friends gave her as a birthgift.

It was a few years later that I realized we had something exceptional on our hands — Jan had breezed through every test they could give her. I felt as though I had a window to McAndrew’s own past, because I was sure he had been the same way thirty years earlier. The mandatory separation years hadn’t been bad at all, because McAndrew and I had spent most of them on long trips out, where the Earth-years sped by in months of shipboard time. But I was very glad they were over now. In a few more days, McAndrew, Jan and I would be officially and permanently related.

By the time I finished my meal I probably wore the same foolish smile as I had seen on Mac’s face before Limperis cut the video. Neither or us could see beyond the coming ceremony to a grimmer future.

The next few days were too busy for much introspection. The Penrose Institute had been in free orbit, half a million miles out, but to make it more convenient for Tallboy’s visit Limperis moved us back to the old L-4 position. In a general planning meeting we decided what we would show off, and how much time could be spared for each research activity. I’d never heard such squabbling. The concentration of brain power found at the Institute meant that a dozen or more important advances were competing for Tallboy’s time. Limperis was as impartial and diplomatic as ever, but there was no way he could smooth Macedo’s feelings when she learned that she would have less than ten minutes to show off three years of effort on electromagnetic coupling systems. And Wenig was even worse — he wanted to be in on all the presentations, and still have time to promote his own work on ultra-dense matter.

At the same time McAndrew was having problems of quite a different kind with Sven Wicklund. That young physicist was still out on Triton Station, where he had gone complaining that the Inner System was all far too crowded and cluttered and he needed some peace and quiet.

“What the devil’s he up to out there?” grumbled McAndrew. “I need to know for the Tallboy briefing, but a one-way radio signal out to Neptune takes four hours — even if he wanted to talk, and he doesn’t. And I’m sure he’s on to something new and important. Blast him, what am I supposed to report?”

I wasn’t sympathetic. To me it seemed no more than poetic justice. McAndrew had annoyed me and others often enough in the past, when he refused to talk about his own ideas while they were in development — “half-cooked,” to use his phrase. Apparently Sven Wicklund was just the same, and it served Mac right.

But the Institute needed all the impressive material they could find, so Mac continued to send long and futile messages needling Wicklund to tell him something — anything — about his latest work. He got nowhere.

“And he’s the brightest of the lot of us,” said McAndrew. Coming from him that was a real compliment. His colleagues were less convinced.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Wenig when I asked him. “Anyway, it’s a meaningless question. The two of them are quite different. Imagine that Newton and Einstein had lived at the same time. McAndrew’s like Newton, as much at home with experiment as theory. And Wicklund’s all theory, he needs help to change his pants. But it’s still a fool question. Which is better, food or drink? — that makes as much sense. The main thing is that they’re contemporaries, and they can talk to each other about what they’re doing.” Except that Wicklund refused to do so, at least at this stage of his work.

McAndrew finally gave up the effort to draw him out and concentrated on matters closer to home.

My own part in planning the show for Tallboy was a minor one. It had to be. My degrees in Gravitational Engineering and Electrical Engineering wouldn’t get me in as janitor at the Institute. My job was to concentrate on the Hoatzin. Until we started work (budget permitting) on a more advanced model, this ship carried the best available version of the McAndrew drive. It could manage a hundred gee acceleration for months, and a hundred and ten gee for as long as the crew were willing to forego kitchen and toilet facilities.

The Office of External Affairs officially owned the Hoatzin and the Institute operated her, but I secretly thought of the ship as mine. No one else had ever flown her.

I had faint hopes that Tallboy might like a demonstration flight, maybe a short run out to Saturn. We could be there and back in a couple of days. The ship was all ready, for that and more — if he approved it, we were all set for the Alpha Centauri probe (forty-four days of shipboard time; not bad, when you remember that the first manned trip to Mars had taken more than nine months). We could be on our interstellar journey in a week or two.

All right, I wasn’t being realistic; but I think everyone at the Institute nourished the secret dream that their project would be the one that caught Tallboy’s imagination, occupied his time, and won his approval. Certainly the amount of work that went into preparation supported my idea.

The timing was tight but manageable. Jan would arrive at the Institute at 09:00, with the official parental assignment to take place at 09:50. Tallboy’s grand show-and-tell began at 10:45 and went on for as long as he was willing to look and listen. Jan was scheduled to leave again at 19:50, so I had mixed feelings about Tallboy’s tour. The longer he stayed, the more impressed he was likely to be, and we wanted that. But we also wanted to spend time with Jan before she had to dash back to Luna for graduation and sign-out.

In the final analysis everything went off as well — and as badly — as it could have. At 09:00 exactly Jan’s ship docked at the Institute. I was pleased to see that it was one of the new five-gee mini-versions of the McAndrew Drive, coming into use at last in the Inner System. My bet was that Jan had picked it just to please him. You don’t need the drive at all for pond-hopping from Luna to L-4.

The parental assignment ceremony is traditionally conducted with a lot of formality. It was against custom to step out of the docking area as soon as the doors were opened, march up to the father-to-be, and grab him in a huge and affectionate hug. McAndrew looked startled for a moment, then swelled red as a turkeycock with pleasure. I got the same shock treatment a few moments later. Then instead of letting go Jan and I held each other at arm’s length and took stock.

She was going to be taller than me — already we were eye to eye. In three years she had changed from a super-smart child to an attractive woman, whose bright grey eyes told me something else: if I didn’t take a hand, Jan would twist McAndrew round her little finger. And she knew I knew it. We stood smiling at each other, while a dozen messages passed between us: affection, pride, anticipation, sheer happiness — and challenge. Mac and I were getting a handful.

We gave each other a final hug, then she took my hand and Mac’s and we went on through to meet with Limperis and the others. The official ceremony would not begin for another half hour, but we three knew that the important part was already completed.

“So what about your graduation present?” asked McAndrew, as we were waiting to begin. I had wondered about it myself. It was the first thing that most new children wanted to talk about.

“Nothing expensive,” said Jan. “I think it would be nice just to make a trip — I’ve seen too much of Luna.” Her tone was casual, but the quick sideways look at me told another story.

“Is that all?” said Mac. “Och, that doesn’t sound like much of a present. We thought you’d be wanting a cruise pod, at the very least.”

“What sort of trip?” I asked.

“I’d like to visit Triton Station. I’ve heard about it all my life, but apart from you, Jeanie, I don’t know of anyone who’s ever been there. And you never talk about it.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” I said. The words popped out before I could stop them.

“Why not?”

“It’s too far out — too isolated. And there’ll be nothing at all for you to do there. It’s a long way away.” I had reacted before I had rational arguments, and now I was waffling.

Jan knew it. “A long way away! When the two of you have been light-years out. You’ve been on trips thousands of times as far as Triton Station.”

I hesitated and she bore in again. “You’re the one who told me that most people stick around like moles in their own backyard, when the Halo’s waiting for them and there’s a whole Universe to be explored.”

What could I say? That there was one rule for most people, and another for my daughter? Triton Station is in the backyard, in terms of interstellar space; but it’s also out near the edge of the old Solar System, too far away for Inner System comforts. An excellent place for a message relay between the Halo and the Inner System, that’s why it was put there in the first place. But it’s small and spartan. And the station isn’t down on Neptune ’s satellite, the way that most people think. It’s in orbit around Triton, with just a small manned outpost on the surface of the satellite itself for supplies, raw materials, and cryogenics research. There are a few unmanned stations bobbing about in the icy atmosphere of Neptune itself, 350,000 kilometers away, but nobody in her right mind ever goes to visit them.

The sixty Station personnel are a strange mixture of dedicated researchers and psychological loners who find the Inner System and even the Titan Colony much too crowded for them. Some of them love it there, but as soon as the 100-gee balanced drive is in general use, Triton Station will be only a day and a half flight away and well within reach of a weekend vacation. Then I suppose the disgusted staff will curse the crowds, and decide its time to move farther out into the Halo seeking their old peace and quiet.

“You’ll be bored,” I said, trying another argument. “They’re more antisocial than you can imagine, and you won’t know anybody there.”

“Yes, I will. I know Sven Wicklund, and we always got along famously. He’s still there, isn’t he?”

“He is, blast him,” said McAndrew. “But as to what he’s been up to out there for the past six months…”

His voice tailed away and the old slack-jawed, half-witted look crept over his face. He was rubbing his fingers gently along his sandy, receding hairline, and I realized where his thoughts were taking him.

“Don’t be silly, Mac. I hope you’re not even considering it. If Wicklund won’t tell you what he’s doing, you don’t imagine he’ll talk to Jan about it, do you, if she’s just at Triton Station for a short visit?”

“Well, I don’t know,” began McAndrew. “It seems to me there’s a chance—”

“I feel sure he’ll tell me,” said Jan calmly.

Unfortunately, so was I. Wicklund had been bowled over by Jan when she was only fourteen and didn’t have a tenth of her present firepower. If she could lead him around then with a ring through his nose, today with her added wiles it would be no contest.

“Let’s not try to decide this now,” I said. “The ceremony’s starting, and then we have to get ready to meet Tallboy. Let’s talk about it afterwards.”

“Oh, I think we can decide it easily enough now,” said McAndrew.

“No, that’s all right,” said Jan. “It can wait. No hurry.” Sorry, Jeanie, said her smile at me. Game, set and match.

After that I found it hard to keep my mind on Tallboy’s visit. Luckily I wasn’t on center stage most of the time, though I did tag along with the tour, watching that high forehead nodding politely, and his long index finger pointing at the different pieces of equipment on display. I also had a chance to talk to everyone when they completed their individual briefings.

“Impressive,” said Gowers when she came out. She had been first one up, describing her theories and experiments on the focusing of light using arrays of kernels. A tough area of work. To set up a stable array of Kerr-Newman black holes called for solutions to the many-body problem in general relativity. Luckily there was no one in the System better able to tackle that — Emma Gowers had made a permanent niche for herself in scientific history years before, when she provided the exact solution to the general relativistic two-body problem. Now to test her approximations she had built a tiny array of shielded kernels, small enough that all her work was done through a microscope. I had seen Tallboy peering in through the eyepiece, joking with Emma as he did so.

“So he seems sympathetic?” I said.

“More than that.” She took a deep breath and sat down. She was still hyper after her presentation. “I think it went very well. He listened hard and he asked questions. I was only scheduled for ten minutes, and we took nearly twenty. Keep your fingers crossed.”

I did, as one by one the others went in. When they came out most of them echoed her optimism. Siclaro was the only questioning voice. He had described his system for kernel energy extraction, and Tallboy had given him the same attentive audience and nodded understandingly.

“But he asked me what I meant by `spin-up,’ ” Siclaro said to me as we stood together outside the main auditorium.

“That’s fair enough — you can’t expect him to be a specialist on this stuff.”

“I know that.” He shook his head in a worried fashion. “But that came at the end of the presentation. And all the time I was talking, he was nodding his head at me as though he understood everything — ideas a lot more advanced than simple spin-up and spin-down of a Kerr black hole. But if he didn’t know what I meant at the end, how could he have understood any of the rest of it?”

Before I had time to answer, my own turn arrived. I came last of all, and though I had prepared as hard as anyone I was not a central part of the show. If Tallboy had to leave early I would be cut. If he had time, I was to show him over the Hoatzin, and make it clear to him that we were all ready for a long trip, as soon as his office gave us permission.

His energy level was amazing. He was still cordial and enthusiastic after seven hours of briefing, with only one short food break. We took a pod, just the two of us, and zipped over to the Hoatzin. I gave him a ten-minute tour, showing how the living area was moved closer to the mass disk as the acceleration of the ship was increased, to provide a net one-gee environment for the crew. He asked numerous polite general questions: how many people could be accommodated in the ship, how old was it, why was it called the inertia-less drive? I boggled a little at the last one, because McAndrew had spent large parts of his life explaining impatiently to anyone who would listen that, damn it, it wasn’t inertia-less, that all it did was to balance off gravitational and inertial accelerations. But I went over it one more time, for Tallboy’s benefit.

He listened closely, nodded that deep-browed head, and watched attentively as I moved us a little closer to the mass disk, so that we could feel the net acceleration on us increase from one to one-and-a-half gees.

“One more question,” he said at last. “And then we must return to the Institute. You keep talking about accelerations, and making accelerations balance out. What does that have to do with us, with how heavy we feel?”

I stared at him. Was he joking? No, that fine-boned face was as serious as ever. He stood there politely waiting for my answer, and I felt that sinking feeling. I’m not sure what I told him, or what we talked about on the way back to the Institute. I handed him on to McAndrew for a quick look at the Control Center, while I hurried off to find Limperis. He was in his office, staring at a blank wall.

“I know, Jeanie,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I had to sit in on every briefing except yours.”

“The man’s an idiot,” I said. “I think he means well, but he’s a complete, boneheaded moron. He has no more idea than Wenig’s pet monkey what goes on here in the Institute.”

“I know. I know.” Limperis suddenly showed his age, and for the first time it occurred to me that he was long past official retirement. “I hoped at first that it was just my paranoia,” he said. “I wondered if I was seeing something that wasn’t there — some of the others were so impressed.”

“How could they be? Tallboy had no idea what was going on.”

“It’s his appearance. That sharp profile. He looks intelligent, so we assume he must be. But take the people here at the Institute. Wenig looks like a mortician, Gowers could pass as a dumb-blonde hooker, and Siclaro reminds me of a gorilla. And each of them a mind in a million. We accept it that way round easily enough, but not in reverse.”

He stood up slowly. “We’re like babies out here, Jeanie; each of us with our own playthings. If anybody seems to be interested in what we’re doing, and nods their head now and again, we assume they understand. At the Institute, you interrupt if you don’t follow an argument. But that’s not the way Earthside government runs. Nod, and smile, and don’t rock the boat — that’s the name of the game, and it will take you a long way. You’ve seen how well it works for Dr. Tallboy.”

“But if he doesn’t understand a thing, what will his report say? The whole future of the Institute depends on it.”

“It does. And God knows what will happen. I thought his background was physics or engineering, the way he kept nodding his head. Did you know his degree is in sociology and he has no hard scientific training at all? No calculus, no statistics, no complex variables, no dynamics. I bet the real quality of our work won’t make one scrap of difference to his decision. We’ve all wasted a week.” He sniffed, and muttered, “Well, come on. Tallboy will be leaving in a few minutes. We must play it to the end and hope he leaves with a positive impression.”

He was heading for the door with me right behind when McAndrew hurried in.

“I’ve been wondering where you two had gone,” he said. “Tallboy’s at the departure dock. What a show, eh? I told you we’d do it, we knocked him dead. Even without Wicklund’s work, we showed more new results today than he’ll have seen in the past ten years. Come on — he wants to thank us all for our efforts before he goes.”

He went bounding away along the corridor, full of enthusiasm, oblivious to the atmosphere in Limperis’ office. We followed slowly after him. For some reason we were both smiling.

“Don’t knock it,” said Limperis. “If Mac were a political animal he’d be that much less a scientist. He’s not the man to present your budget request, but do you know what Einstein wrote to Born just before he died? `Earning a living should have nothing to do with the search for knowledge.’ ”

“You should tell that to Mac.”

“He was the one who told it to me.”

There didn’t seem much point in hurrying as we made our way to the departure dock. Tallboy had seen the best that we could offer. And who could tell? — perhaps McAndrew’s enthusiasm would be more persuasive than a thousand hours of unintelligible briefings.

The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow. Long before we had an official report from Tallboy’s office, the argument over Jan’s visit to Triton Station was over.

I had lost. She was on her way to Neptune. She had finagled a ride on a medium-acceleration supply ship, and anytime now we should have word of her arrival. And McAndrew couldn’t wait — Wicklund was still frustratingly coy about his new work.

By a second one of those coincidences that McAndrew insisted were inevitable, Tallboy’s pronunciamento on the future of the Penrose Institute zipped in to the Message Center at the same time as Jan’s first message from Triton Station. I didn’t know about her spacegram until later, but Limperis directed the Tallboy message for general Institute broadcast. I was outside at the time, working near the Hoatzin, and the news came as voice-only on my suit radio,

The summary: Siclaro’s work on kernel energy extraction would proceed, and at a higher level (no surprise there, with the pressure from the Food and Energy Council for more compact power sources); Gowers would have her budget reduced by forty percent, as would Macedo. They could continue, but with no new experimental work. McAndrew had his support chopped in half. And poor Wenig, it seemed, had fared worst of all. The budget for compressed matter research was down by eighty percent.

I wasn’t worried about McAndrew. If they cut his research budget to zero, he would switch to straight theory and manage very well with just a pencil and paper. But everyone else would suffer.

And me? Tallboy wiped me out at the very end of the report, almost as an afterthought: experimental use of the Hoatzin was to be terminated completely, and the ship decommissioned. There would be no expedition to Alpha Centauri or anywhere else beyond the Halo. Worst of all, the report referred to “previous unauthorized use of the balanced drive, and high-risk treatment of official property” — a direct knock at me and McAndrew. We had enjoyed free use of the ship under the previous Administration, but apparently Woolford had never thought to put it in writing.

I switched my suit to internal propulsion and headed back for the Institute at top speed. McAndrew knew I was outside, and he met me at the lock waving a long printout sheet. His mop of sandy hair was straggling into his eyes, and a long streak of orange stickiness ran down the front of his shirt. I guessed he had been at dinner when the report came in.

“Did you see it?” he said.

“Heard it. I was on voice-only.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“Horrible. But I’m not surprised. I knew Tallboy hadn’t understood a thing.”

“Eh?” He stood goggling at me. “Are you trying to be funny? It’s the most exciting news in years. I knew she’d find out. What a lass!”

I may not be as smart as McAndrew but I’m no fool. I can recognize a breakdown in communications when I see one. When Mac concentrates, the world isn’t there any more. It seemed to me odds-on that he had been thinking of something else and hadn’t registered the Tallboy decision.

“Mac, stand still for a minute” — he was jiggling up and down with excitement — “and listen to me. The report from External Affairs is here, on the future of your programs.”

He grunted impatiently. “Aye, I know about it — I heard it come in.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. “Never mind that now, it’s not important. This is what counts.”

He shook the printout, stared at part of it, and went off into a trance. I finally reached out, removed it from his hand, and scanned the first few lines.

“It’s from Jan!”

“Of course it is. She’s on Triton Station. Do you realize what Wicklund’s done out there?”

With Mac in this kind of mood, I’d never get his mind on to Tallboy. “No. What has he done?”

“He’s solved it.” He grabbed the spacegram back from me. “See, it’s right here, can’t you read? Jan didn’t get the details, but she makes it clear enough. Wicklund has solved Vandell’s Fifth Problem.”

“Has he really?” I gently took the paper back from him. If it was news from Jan, I wanted to read it in full. “That’s wonderful. It only leaves one question.”

He frowned at me. “Many questions — we’ll have to wait for more details. But which one are you thinking of?”

“Nothing you can’t answer. But what in Heaven is Vandell’s Fifth Problem?”

He stared at me in disgust.

I got an answer — eventually. But before I had that answer we had been on a rambling tour of three hundred years of mathematics and physics. “In the year 1900—” he began.

“Mac!”

“No, listen to me. It’s the right place to begin.”

In the year 1900, at the second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, David Hilbert proposed a series of twenty-three problems to challenge the coming century. He was the greatest mathematician of his day, and his problems drew from a wide range of topics — topology, number theory, transfinite sets, and the foundations of mathematics itself. Each problem was important, and each was tough. Some were solved early in the century, others were shown to be undecidable, a few hung on for many decades; but by the year 2000 most of them had been wrapped up to everyone’s reasonable satisfaction.

In the year 2020, the South African astronomer and physicist Dirk Vandell had followed Hilbert’s precedent, and posed a series of twenty-one problems in astronomy and cosmology. Like Hilbert’s problems they covered a wide range of topics, theoretical and observational, and every one was a skull-cruncher.

McAndrew had solved Vandell’s Eleventh Problem when he was a very young man. From that work had emerged the whole theory for the existence and location of the kernel ring, the torus of Kerr-Newman black holes that circles the sun ten times as far out as Pluto. Nine years later, Wenig’s partial solution of the Fourteenth Problem had given McAndrew the clue that led him to the vacuum-energy drive. Now, assuming that Jan’s report was correct, the Fifth Problem had fallen to Wicklund’s analysis.

“But why is it so important?” I asked McAndrew. “The way you describe it, I don’t see practical uses. It’s just a way of amplifying an observed signal without amplifying background noise — and it only applies when the original signal is minute.”

He shook his head in vigorous disagreement. “It has a thousand applications. Vandell already proposed one when he first set the problem, and I’m sure Wicklund will tackle it as soon as his experimental equipment is working. He’ll use the technique to look for solitaries — rogue planets.”

Rogue planets.

With those last two words, McAndrew brought the explanation along to the point where it made sense to me. I could draw on my own formal training in classical celestial mechanics.

The possible existence of rogues went back a long way, farther than 1900. Probably all the way to Lagrange, who in his analysis of the three-body problem set up a mathematical framework to look at the motion of a planet moving in the gravitational fields of a binary star system. By 1880, that case was known to be “stable against ejection.” In other words, the planet could have close approaches to each of the stars, and might suffer extremes of temperature, but it would never be completely expelled from the stellar system.

But suppose you have a system with three or more stars in it? That’s not at all uncommon. Then the situation changes completely. A planet can pick up enough energy through a series of gravitational swing-bys past the stellar components to hurl it right out of the system. Once this happened it would become a sun-less world, travelling alone through the void. Even if it later encountered another star, the chance of capture was minute. The planet would be a solitary, a rogue world. Astronomers had speculated for centuries about the existence and possible numbers of such planets, but without a scrap of observational evidence.

Vandell had defined the problem: An Earth-sized planet shines only in reflected light. If it gives off radiation in the thermal infrared or microwave regions, the signal is swamped by the stellar background. Devise a technique that will permit the detection of a rogue planet as small as the Earth.

Now it seemed that Wicklund had done it, and McAndrew was happy as a pig, while everybody else at the Institute gloomed about in reaction to Tallboy’s effects on their work.

I sympathized with them. Rogue planets are fine, but I could see no way in which they could make any practical difference to me. Mac and Sven Wicklund could have my share of them. I spent a lot of time over on the Hoatzin wondering what to do next. I didn’t belong at the Penrose Institute, the only thing I offered there was the ability to pilot the long trips out. Once that was over, I might as well go back to the Titan run.

Jan’s next message back gave me mixed feelings, but at least it cheered me up.

“Not much to do out here,” she wrote — she was the only person I have ever met who could chat in a spacegram. “You were right, Jeanie. Wicklund’s as bad as McAndrew, totally wrapped up in the work he’s doing and won’t take much notice of me. And the rest of them hate company so much they run and hide when we meet in the corridors. I’ve been spending a lot of time over on Merganser. I got the impression from you that she’s an old hulk, but she’s not. She may be an antique, but everything’s still in good working shape. I’ve even been spinning-up the drive. If I can talk Wicklund into it maybe we can go off on a little bit of a trip together. He needs a rest (from physics!).”

That brought back some exciting memories. Merganser was one of the two original prototypes of the balanced drive, and McAndrew and I had ironed the bugs out of her personally. She was limited to a 50-gee acceleration, but still in good working order. I’d fly her anywhere. Mac seemed much less happy when he read the letter.

“I hope she knows what she’s doing,” he said. “That ship’s not a toy. Do you think it’s safe?”

“Safe as anything in the System. Jan won’t have any trouble. We used the Merganser for training before they mothballed her, don’t you remember?”

He didn’t, of course. He carries physics and mathematics in his head at an astonishing level of detail, but useful everyday information is another matter. He nodded at me vaguely, and wandered off to send more messages to Wicklund (who had to date provided no replies).

We heard from Jan again, just as the explicit order was coming in from Tallboy’s office to decommission Hoatzin and remove the supplies for the Alpha Centauri mission.

I screwed up Tallboy’s order into a tight ball and threw it across the room.

Then I sat down to read what Jan had to say.

No preamble this time: “Wicklund says it works! He’s already found three rogues, and expects a lot more. They must be a lot more common than anybody thought. Now sit back for the big news: there’s one only a light-year away! Isn’t it exciting?”

Well, maybe — less so to me than to Mac, I was sure of that. I assumed that solitary planets would be rather rare, so one closer than the nearest star was a bit surprising. But it was her next words that shot me bolt upright and sent a tingle through my spine.

“Merganser is working perfectly, all ready for a trip. I’ve persuaded Wicklund to take her out for a look at Vandell — that’s his name for the planet. I’m sure you don’t approve, so I won’t ask. Lots of love, and see you when we get back.”

Even as I screamed inside, I wasn’t completely surprised. She was McAndrew’s daughter all right — it was exactly the harebrained sort of thing he would have done.

Mac and I both played it very cool. That boneheaded pair, we said to each other. We might have guessed it, the follies of youth. They’ll be in trouble when they get back, even though the Merganser is an old ship that Triton Station can do what they like with.

But deep inside we both had other feelings. Wicklund had sent the coordinates of Vandell to us before they left, and as Jan said it was close, less than a light-year and a quarter away. Easily in Merganser’s range, and a lure that any scientist worth his salt would find hard to resist, even without Jan’s coaxing. Where had it come from, what was it made of, how long since it had been ejected from its parent star? — there were a hundred questions that could never be answered by remote observations, not even with the super-sensitive methods that Wicklund had developed.

But it was those same questions that made me so uneasy. If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility — if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in.

For a week after Jan’s message I monitored the messages closely that came in from the outer relay stations. And every day I would ride over to the Hoatzin and potter about there, sometimes with Mac, sometimes alone. I was supposed to be working on the decommissioning, but instead I would sit in the pilot’s chair, check all the status flags, and think my own thoughts. Until finally, ten days after Jan and Wicklund had left, I went over to visit the Hoatzin late one sleep period.

And found that the lock had been cycled since I left.

McAndrew was sitting in the pilot’s chair, staring at the controls. I came quietly up behind him, patted him on the shoulder, and slipped into the copilot’s seat. He turned toward me, straggly eyebrows raised.

“It’s now or never,” he said at last. “But what about Tallboy? What will he do to the Institute?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Not if we make it clear that it’s our fault.”

I reached out and called for a destination reading. When I left, the coordinates had all been set to zero. Now they carried precise values.

“Do you think that anyone else suspects?” I said. “I checked the experimental logs in your lab today, and they were all current up to this afternoon — and you’re always months behind. If I noticed that, maybe one of the others will.”

He looked surprised. “Why should they? We’ve been careful not to talk about this when anyone else could hear.”

There was no point in telling Mac that he was probably the world’s worst person you’d want to keep a secret. I tapped him on the shoulder. “No point in worrying about it once we’re on our way. Come on, Mac, move over — you’re sitting in my chair. And think positively. We’ll have a nice, long trip, just the two of us.”

He stood up, rubbing at the back of his head the way he always did when he was embarrassed. “Och, Jeanie,” he said. But he was smiling to himself as we changed seats.

The calculations were elementary, and I could do them as well as he could. The Merganser would reach the rogue planet in about sixty days of shipboard time if they kept close to maximum acceleration all the way. We could be there in thirty-five days of shipboard time, but that would pick up only ten days of inertial time. We would reach Vandell a couple of days after them. For me, that was two days too late.

Our drive wake left an ionization track across the whole width of the Solar System. Mac checked that there were no ships directly behind for us to burn a hole through, and while he was doing it I had a new idea and sent a message back to External Affairs. I said that we were about to perform a brief high-gee test of the Hoatzin’s drive before we took her in and decommissioned her. With luck, Tallboy’s group would assume we had been the unhappy victims of a nasty accident, shooting out of the Solar System on a one-way journey when some control element of the drive unit had failed. Limperis and friends at the Institute wouldn’t believe that, not as soon as they checked our destination coordinates — but they would never tell their suspicions to Tallboy. Maybe they could even get some mileage from our disappearance, pointing out the need for more funds for reliability and system maintenance. Limperis could play that game with his eyes closed.

Perhaps everything would work out fine — until McAndrew and I came back. Then the truth would come out, and we’d be roasted for sure.

Neither of us could get too worried about that possibility. We had other things on our minds. As we raced out along the invisible scintillation of the Merganser’s drive, Mac dumped the data bank for information about Vandell’s rogueworld. He didn’t get much. We had coordinates relative to the Sun, and velocity components, but all they did was make sure we could find our way to the planet. Wicklund had been able to put an upper limit on its diameter using long base line interferometry, and estimated that we were dealing with a body no bigger than Earth. But we were missing the physical variables — no mass, internal structure, temperature, magnetic field, or physical composition, not even an estimate of rotation rate. Mac fumed, but at least I’d have a lot more information for him as soon as we got close. In the week before we left the Institute, I had put on board the Hoatzin every instrument that wasn’t nailed down, anything that might tell us something useful about Vandell without having to go down there and set foot on its surface.

At a hundred gees acceleration you head out of the Solar System on a trajectory that’s very close to a straight line. The gravitational accelerations produced by the Sun and planets are negligible by comparison, even in the Inner System. We were bee-lining for a point in the constellation Lupus, the Wolf, where Vandell lay close in apparent position to an ancient supernova fragment. That explosion had lit up the skies of Earth more than a millennium ago; an interesting object, but we wouldn’t be going even a thousandth of the way out to it. Wicklund was right; Vandell’s rogueworld sat in Sol’s backyard.

Without a complicated trajectory to worry about, I went round and round with a different problem. When the drives were on, both the Merganser and the Hoatzin were blind to incoming messages, and drowned out any of their own transmissions. Thus we had a chance to get a message to Sven Wicklund and Jan only when their drive was turned off, while they were coasting free to rubberneck or study the starscape scenery from a slightly different point of view. Even though they might not be listening for an incoming signal when the drive was off, their computer would, and should notify them of anything important.

But now see my problem: to send a message, we had to switch our drive off, and that would delay our arrival a little bit every time we did it. Our signal would then take days or weeks to reach the Merganser — and to receive it, their ship had to have its drive off at just the right time. DON’T LAND was all I wanted to say. But how would I know when to switch off our drive and send an urgent message, so it would get to them just when their drive was not operating?

I wrestled with that until my brains began to boil, then handed it over to McAndrew. He pointed out that we had knowledge of the occasions when their drive had been switched off, from the gaps in their drive wake. So making a best prediction was a straightforward problem in stochastic optimization. He solved it, too, before we had been on our way for a week. But the solution predicted such a low probability of successful contact that I didn’t even try it — better to leave our drive on full blast, and try to make up some of their lead.

With the shields on to protect us from the sleet of particles and hard radiation induced by our light-chasing velocity, we had no sense of motion at all. But we were really moving. At turnover point we were within one part in ten thousand of light speed.

If I haven’t said it already, I’ll say it now: the 100-gee balanced drive is nice to have, but it’s a son of a bitch — you travel a light-year in just over a month of shipboard time. Two months, and you’ve gone fifty light-years. Four shipboard months, and you’re outside the Galaxy and well on your way to Andromeda.

I calculated that two hundred days would put you at the edge of the Universe, 18 billion light-years out. Of course, by the time you got there, the Universe would have had 18 billion more years to expand, so you wouldn’t be at the new edge. In fact, since the “edge” is defined as the place where the velocity of recession of the galaxies is light-speed, you’d still be 18 billion light-years away from it — and that would remain true, no matter how long you journeyed. Worse still, if you arranged a trajectory that brought you to rest relative to the Earth, when you switched off the drive the Galaxies near you would be rushing away almost at light speed…

An hour or two of those thoughts, and I felt a new sympathy for Achilles in Zeno’s old paradox, trying to catch the tortoise and never quite getting there.

Travel for a year, according to McAndrew, and you’d begin to have effects on the large-scale structure of space-time. The vacuum zero-point energy tapped by the drive isn’t inexhaustible; but as to what would happen if you kept on going…

An academic question, of course, as Mac pointed out. Long before that the massplate would be inadequate to protect the drive, and the whole structure would disintegrate through ablative collision with intergalactic gas and dust. Very reassuring; but Mac’s intrigued and speculative tone when he discussed the possibility was enough to send shivers up my spine.

The position fixes we needed to refine Wicklund’s original position and velocity for Vandell rendezvous were made by our computer during the final three days of flight. Those observations and calibrations were performed in microsecond flashes while the drive was turned off, and at the same time we sent out burst mode messages, prepared and compressed in advance, to the Merganser’s projected position. We told them when to send a return signal to us, but no counter-message came in. There was nothing but the automatic “Signal received” from their shipboard computer.

One day before rendezvous we were close enough to throttle back the drive. We couldn’t see Vandell or Merganser yet, but the ships’ computers could begin talking to each other. It took them only a few seconds to collect the information I was interested in, and spit out a display summary.

No human presence now on board. Transfer pod in use for planetary descent trajectory. No incoming signals from pod.

I keyed in the only query that mattered: When descent?

Seven hours shipboard time.

That was it. We had arrived just too late. By now Jan and Sven Wicklund would be down on the surface of Vandell. Then another part of the first message hit me. No incoming signals from pod.

“Mac!” I said. “No pod signal.”

He nodded grimly. He had caught it too. Even when they were down on the surface, there should be an automatic beacon signal to fix the pod’s position and allow compensation for Doppler shift of communication frequency.

“No pod signal,” I said again. “That means they’re—”

“Aye.” His voice was husky, as though there was no air in his lungs. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jeanie. For all we know…”

But he didn’t finish the sentence. The pod antenna was robust. Only something major (such as impact with a solid surface at a few hundred meters a second) would put it out of action. I had never known a case where the pod’s com-link died and the persons within it lived.

We sat side by side in a frozen, empty silence as the Hoatzin brought us closer to the rogue planet. Soon it was visible to our highest resolution telescopes. Without making a decision at any conscious level, I automatically set up a command sequence that would free our own landing pod as soon as the drive went off completely. Then I simply sat there, staring ahead at Vandell.

For much of our trip out I had tried to visualize what a planet would be like that had known no warming sun for millions or billions of years. It had floated free — for how long? We didn’t know. Perhaps since our kind had descended from the trees, perhaps as long as any life had existed on Earth. For all that time, the planet had moved on through the quiet void, responsive only to the gentle, persistent tug of galactic gravitational and magnetic fields, drifting along where the stars were no more than distant pinpricks against the black sky. With no sunlight to breathe life onto its surface, Vandell would be cold, airless, the frozen innermost circle of hell. It chilled me to think of it.

The planet grew steadily in the forward screens. As the definition of the display improved, I suddenly realized why I couldn’t relate the picture in front of me to my mental images. Vandell was visible, at optical wavelengths. It sat there at the center of the screen, a small sphere that glowed a soft, living pink against the stellar backdrop. As I watched the surface seemed to shimmer, with an evanescent pattern of fine lines running across it.

McAndrew had seen it too. He gave a grunt of surprise, cupped his chin in his hands, and leaned forward. After two minutes of silence he reached across to the terminal and keyed in a brief query.

“What are you doing?” I asked, when after another two minutes he showed no sign of speaking.

“Want to see what’s in Merganser’s memory. Should be some images from their time of first approach.” He grunted and shook his head. “Look at that screen. There’s no way Vandell can look like that.”

“I was amazed to see it at visible wavelengths. But I’m not sure why.”

“Available energy.” He shrugged, but his gaze never left the display. “See, Jeanie, the only thing that can provide energy to that planet’s surface is an internal source. But nothing I’ve ever heard of could give this much radiation at those frequencies, and sustain it over a long period. And look at the edge of the planet’s disk. See, it’s less bright. That’s an atmospheric limb darkening, if ever I’ve seen one — an atmosphere, now, on a planet that should be as cold as space. Doesn’t make any sense at all. No sense at all.”

We watched together as Merganser’s data bank fed across to our ship’s computer and through the displays. The screen to our left flickered through a wild pattern of colors, then went totally dark. McAndrew looked at it and swore to himself.

“Explain that to me, Jeanie. There’s the way that Vandell looked in the visible part of the spectrum when Jan and Sven were on their final approach — black as hell, totally invisible. We get here, a couple of days later, and we find that.” He waved his arm at the central display, where Vandell was steadily increasing in size as we moved closer. “Look at the readings that Wicklund made as they came into parking orbit — no visible emissions, no thermal emissions, no sign of an atmosphere. Now see our readings: the planet is visible, above freezing point, and covered in clouds. It’s as though they were describing one world, and we’ve arrived at a completely different one.”

Mac often tells me that I have no imagination. But as he spoke wild ideas went running through my mind that I didn’t care to mention. A planet that changed its appearance when humans approached it; a world that waited patiently for millions of years, then draped a cloak of atmosphere around itself as soon as it had lured a group of people to its surface. Could the changes on Vandell be interpreted as the result of intention, a deliberate and intelligent act on the part of something on the planet?

While I was still full of my furious fancies, a high-pitched whistle from the navigation console announced that the balanced drive had turned off completely. We had reached our rendezvous position, two hundred thousand kilometers from Vandell. I was moving away from the control panel, heading towards our own transfer pod, before the sound had ended. At the entrance I stopped and turned, expecting that McAndrew would be close on my heels. But he hadn’t left the displays. He had called back the list of Vandell’s physical parameters, showing mass, temperature, mean diameter, and rotation rate, and was staring at it blindly. As I watched he requested a new display of Vandell’s rotation rate, which was small enough to be shown as zero in the standard output format.

“Mac!”

He turned, shook his head from side to side as though to banish his own version of the insane ideas that had crowded my mind when I saw the change in Vandell, and slowly followed me to the pod. At the entrance he turned for a last look at the screens.

There was no discussion of our move into the pod. We didn’t know when, or even quite how, but we both knew that we had to make a descent to the surface of Vandell. Somehow we had to recover the bodies that lay beneath the flickering, pearly cloud shrouding the rogue world.

In another time and place, the view from the pod would have been beautiful. We were close enough now to explain the rosy shimmer. It was lightning storms, running back and forth across the clouded skies of Vandell. Lightning storms that shouldn’t be there, on a world that ought to be dead. We had drained Merganser’s data banks as we went round and round in low orbit. Not much new had come to light, but we had found the last set of instrument readings returned to the main computer when the other landing pod had made its approach to Vandell’s surface: Atmospheric pressure, zero. External magnetic field, less than a millionth of a gauss. Temperature, four degrees absolute. Surface gravity, four-tenths of a gee. Planetary rotation rate, too small to measure.

Then their pod had touched down, with final relative velocity of only half a meter a second — and all transmissions had ceased, instantly. Whatever had killed Jan and Sven Wicklund, direct impact with the surface couldn’t be the culprit. They had landed gently. And if they hadn’t been killed by collision when they landed…

I tried to ignore the tiny bud of hope that wanted to open in my mind. I had never heard of a pod being destroyed without also killing anyone inside it.

Our instruments had added a few new (and odd) facts to that earlier picture. The “atmosphere” we were seeing now was mainly dust, a great swirling storm across the whole of Vandell, littered by lightning flashes through the upper part. It was hot, a furnace breath that had no right to exist. Vandell was supposed to be cold. Goddammit, it should be drained of every last calorie of heat. McAndrew had told me so, there was no way the planet could be warm.

Round and round, orbit after orbit; we went on until I felt that we were a fixed center and the whole universe was gyrating around us, while I stared at that black vortex (it came and went from one orbit to the next, now you see it, now you don’t) and McAndrew sat glued to the data displays. I don’t think he looked at Vandell itself for more than ten seconds in five hours. He was thinking.

And me? The pressure inside was growing — tearing me apart. According to Limperis and Wenig, I’m cautious to a fault. Where angels fear to tread, I not only won’t rush in, I don’t want to go near the place. That’s one reason they like to have me around, to exercise my high cowardice quotient. But now I wanted to fire our retro-rockets and get down there, down onto Vandell. Twice I had seated myself at the controls, and fingered the preliminary descent sequence (second nature, I could have done that in my sleep). And twice McAndrew had emerged from his reverie, shook his head, and spoken: “No, Jeanie.”

But the third time he didn’t stop me.

“D’ye know where you’re going to put her down, Jeanie?” was all he said.

“Roughly.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice at all. Too scratchy and husky. “I’ve got the approximate landing position from Merganser’s readings.”

“Not there.” He was shaking his head. “Not quite there. See it, the black tube? Put us down the middle of that funnel — can you do it?”

“I can. But if it’s what it looks like, we’ll get heavy turbulence.”

“Aye, I’ll agree with that.” He shrugged. “That’s where they are, though, for a bet. Can you do it?”

That wasn’t his real question. As he was speaking, I began to slide us in along a smooth descent trajectory. There was nothing to the calculation of our motion, we both recognized that. Given our desired touchdown location, the pod’s computer would have a minimum fuel descent figured in fractions of a second.

I know McAndrew very well. What he was saying — not in words, that wasn’t his style — was simple: It’s going to be dangerous, and I’m not sure how dangerous. Do you want to do it?

I began to see why as soon as we were inside the atmosphere. Visibility went down to zero. We were descending through thick smoke-like dust and flickering lightning. I switched to radar vision, and found I was looking down to a murky, surrealistic world, with a shattered, twisted surface. Heavy winds (without an atmosphere? — what were winds?) moved us violently from side to side, up and down, with sickening free-fall drops arrested by the drive as soon as they were started.

Thirty seconds to contact, and below us the ground heaved and rolled like a sick giant. Down and down, along the exact center of the black funnel. The pod shook and shivered around us. The automatic controls seemed to be doing poorly, but I knew I’d be worse — my reaction times were a thousandfold too slow to compete. All we could do was hold tight and wait for the collision.

Which never came. We didn’t make a featherbed landing, but the final jolt was just a few centimeters a second. Or was it more? I couldn’t say. It was lost in the continuing shuddering movements of the ground that the pod rested on. The planet beneath us was alive. I stood up, then had to hold onto the edge of the control desk to keep my feet. I smiled at McAndrew (quite an effort) as he began an unsteady movement towards the equipment locker.

He nodded at me. Earthquake country.

I nodded back. Where is their ship?

We had landed on a planet almost as big as Earth, in the middle of a howling dust storm that reduced visibility to less than a hundred yards. Now we were proposing to search an area of a couple of hundred million square miles — for an object a few meters across. The needle in a haystack had nothing on this. Mac didn’t seem worried. He was putting on an external support pack — we had donned suits during the first phase of descent.

“Mac!”

He paused with the pack held against his chest and the connectors held in one hand. “Don’t be daft, Jeanie. Only one of us should be out there.”

And that made me mad. He was being logical (my specialty). But to come more than a light-year, and then for one of us go the last few miles… Jan was my daughter too — my only daughter. I moved forward and picked up another of the packs. After one look at my face, Mac didn’t argue.

At least we had enough sense not to venture outside at once. Suited up, we completed the systematic scan of our surroundings. The visual wavelengths were useless — we couldn’t see a thing through the ports — but the microwave sensors let us look to the horizon. And a wild horizon it was. Spikes of sharp rock sat next to crumbling mesas, impenetrable crevasses, and tilted blocks of dark stone, randomly strewn across the landscape.

I could see no pattern at all, no rule of formation. But over to one side, less than a mile from our pod, our instruments were picking up a bright radar echo, a reflection peak stronger than anything that came from the rocky surface. It must be metal — could only be metal — could only be Jan’s ship. But was it intact? Lightning-fused? A scoured hulk? A shattered remnant, open to dust and vacuum?

My thoughts came too fast to follow. Before they had reached any conclusion we had moved to the lock, opened it, and were standing on the broken surface of Vandell. McAndrew automatically fell behind to let me take the lead. Neither of us had any experience with this type of terrain, but he knew my antennae for trouble were better than his. I tuned my suit to the reflected radar signal from our pod and we began to pick our way carefully forward.

It was a grim, tortuous progress. There was no direct path that could be taken across the rocks. Every tenth step seemed to bring me to a dead end, a place where we had to retrace our steps halfway back to our own pod. Beneath our feet, the surface of the planet shivered and groaned, as though it was ready to open up and swallow us. The landscape as our suits presented it to us was a scintillating nightmare of blacks and grays. (Vision in nonvisible wavelengths is always disconcerting — microwave more than most).

Around us, the swirling dust came in shivering waves that whispered along the outside of our helmets. I could detect a definite cycle, with a peak every seven minutes or so. Radio static followed the same period, rising and falling in volume to match the disturbance outside.

I had tuned my set to maximum gain and was transmitting a continuous call signal. Nothing came back from the bright radar blip of the other pod. It was now only a couple of hundred yards ahead but we were approaching agonizingly slowly.

At fifty yards I noticed a lull in the rustle around us. I switched to visible wavelengths, and waited impatiently while the suit’s processor searched for the best combination of frequencies to penetrate the murk. After half a second the internal suit display announced that there would be a short delay; the sensors were covered with ionized dust particles that would have to be repelled. That took another ten seconds, then I had an image. Peering ahead on visible wavelengths I thought I could see a new shape in front of us, a flat oval hugging the dark ground.

“Visible signal, Mac,” I said over the radio. “Tell your suit.”

That was all I could say. I know the profile of a pod, I’ve seen them from every angle. And the silhouette ahead of us looked wrong. It had a twisted, sideways cant, bulging towards the left. I increased pace, stumbling dangerously along smooth slabs and around jagged pinnacles, striding recklessly across a quivering deep abyss. Mac was following, ready to help me if I got in trouble — unless he was taking worse risks himself, which was certainly not beyond him. I could hear his breath, loud on the suit radio.

It was their pod. No doubt at all. And as I came closer I could see the long, gaping hole in one side. It takes a lot to smash a transfer pod beyond repair, but that one would never fly again. Inside it would be airless, lifeless, filled only with the choking dust that was Vandell’s only claim to an atmosphere.

And the people inside? Would Jan or Sven have thought to wear suits before descent? It would make a difference only to the appearance of the corpses. Even with suits, anything that could kill their signal beacon would kill them too.

I took my final step to the pod, stooped to peer in through the split in the side, and stopped breathing. Somewhere deep inside me, contrary to all logic, there still lived a faint ghost of hope. It died as I looked. Two figures lay side by side on the floor of the pod, neither of them moving.

I groaned, saw Mac coming to stand beside me, and switched on my helmet light for a better view or the interior. Then I straightened up so fast that my head banged hard on the pod’s tough metal.

They were both wearing suits, their helmets were touching — and as the light from outside penetrated the interior of the pod, they swung around in unison to face me. They were both rubbing at their suit faceplates with gloved hands, clearing a space in a thick layer of white dust there.

“Jan!” My shout must have blasted Mac rigid. “Sven! Mac, they’re alive!”

“Christ, Jeanie, I see that. Steady on, you’ll burst my eardrums.” He sounded as though he himself was going to burst, from sheer pleasure and relief.

We scrambled around to the main hatch of the pod and I tried to yank it open. It wouldn’t move. Mac lent a hand, and still nothing would budge — everything was too bent and battered. Back we went to the hole in the ship’s side, and found them trying to enlarge it enough to get out.

“Stand back,” I said. “Mac and I can cut that in a minute.”

Then I realized they couldn’t hear me or see me. Their faceplates were covered again with dust, and they kept leaning together to touch helmets.

“Mac! There’s something wrong with their suits.”

“Of course there is.” He sounded disgusted with my stupidity. “Radio’s not working — we already knew that. They’re communicating with each other by direct speech through the helmet contact. Vision units are done for, too — see, all they have are the faceplates, and the dust sticks and covers them unless they keep on clearing it. The whole atmosphere of this damned planet is nothing more than charged dust particles. Our suits are repelling them, or we’d see nothing at visible wavelengths. Here, let me in there.”

He stuck his head through the opening, grabbed the arm of Jan’s suit, and pulled us so that we were all four touching helmets. We could talk to each other.

And for that first ten minutes that’s what we did: talk, in a language that defies all logical analysis. I would call it the language of love, but that phrase has been used too often for another (and less powerful) emotional experience.

Then we enlarged the hole so they could climb out. At that point I thought that we had won, that our troubles and difficulties were all over. In fact, they were just starting.

Their pod was in even worse shape than it looked. The battering from flying boulders that had ruined the hull should have left intact the internal electronics, computers, and communications links, components with no moving parts that ought to withstand any amount of shaking and violent motion. But they were all dead. The pod was nothing but a lifeless chunk of metal and plastics. Worse still, all the computer systems in Jan and Sven’s suits had failed, too. They had no radios, no external vision systems — not even temperature controls. Only the purely mechanical components, like air supply and suit pressure, were still working.

I couldn’t imagine anything that could destroy the equipment so completely and leave Jan and Sven alive, but those questions would have to come later. For the moment our first priority was the return to the other pod. If I had thought it dangerous work coming, going back would be much worse. Jan and Sven were almost blind, they couldn’t step across chasms or walk along a thin slab of rock. Without radios, I couldn’t even tell them to back up if I decided we had to retrace part of our path.

We all four linked hands, to make a chain with Mac on the left-hand end and me on the right, and began a strange crab-like movement back in the direction of the other pod. I daren’t hurry, and it took hours. Four times I had to stop completely, while the ground beneath us went through exceptionally violent paroxysms of shaking and shuddering. We stood motionless, tightly gripping each other’s gloved hands. If it was scary for me, it must have been hell for Jan and Sven. Mac and I were their lifeline, if we lost contact they wouldn’t make twenty meters safely across the broken surface. While the shaking went on, I was picking up faint sounds in my radio. McAndrew and Wicklund had their helmets together, and Wicklund seemed to be doing all the talking. For five minutes I heard only occasional grunts from Mac through his throat mike.

“Right,” he said at last. “Were you able to pick up any of that, Jeanie? We have to get a move on. Go faster.”

“Faster? In these conditions? You’re crazy. I know it’s slow going, but we all have plenty of air. Let’s do it right, and get there in one piece.”

“It’s not air I’m worried about.” He was crowding up behind us, so that we were all bumping into each other. “We have to be in the pod and off the surface in less than an hour. Sven’s been tracking the surges of seismic activity and dust speed, ever since they landed and everything went to hell. There’s a bad one coming an hour and a half from now — and I mean bad. Worse than anything we’ve felt so far. A lot of the minor cycles we’ve been feeling since we came out on the surface will all be in phase. They’ll all add together.”

Worse than anything we had felt so far. What would it be like? It wasn’t easy to imagine. Nor was the cause — but something had taken Vandell’s smooth and quiet surface and crumpled it to a wild ruin in the few hours since the other pod had landed.

Against my instincts I began to take more risks, to climb over more jagged rocks and to walk along shelves that might tilt and slide under our weight. I think that at this point it was worse for McAndrew and me than for Sven and Jan. They could walk blind and trust us to keep them safe; but we had to keep our eyes wide open, and study all the dangers around us. I wanted to ask Mac a hundred questions, but I didn’t dare to focus his attention or mine on anything except the immediate task.

At our faster pace we were within a hundred meters of the pod in twenty minutes, with what looked like a clear path the rest of the way. That was when I heard a grunt and curse over the suit radio, and turned to see McAndrew sliding away to one side down a long scree of loose gravel. Last across, he had pushed Sven Wicklund to safety as the surface began to break. He fell, scrabbled at the ground, but couldn’t get hold of anything firm. He rolled once, then within seconds was lost from view behind a black jumble of boulders.

“Mac!” I was glad that Jan couldn’t hear my voice crack with panic.

“I’m here, Jeanie. I’m all right.” He sounded as though he was out on a picnic. “My own fault, I could see it was breaking away when Sven was on it. I should have looked for another path instead of following him like a sheep.”

“Can you get back?”

There was a silence, probably thirty seconds. In my nerved-up state it seemed like an hour. I could hear Mac’s breath, faster and louder over the radio.

“I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s a mess down here, and the slope’s too steep to climb straight up. Damned gravel, I slide right back down with it. It may take me a little while. You three had better keep going and I’ll catch up later. Time’s too short for you to hang around waiting.”

“Forget it. Hold right there, I’m coming back after you.” I leaned to set my helmet next to Jan’s. “Jan, can you hear me?”

“Yes. But speak louder.” Her voice was faint, as though she was many meters away.

“I want you and Sven to stand right here and don’t move — not for anything. Mac’s stuck, and I have to help him. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

That was meant to be reassuring, but then I wondered what would happen if I was too optimistic about how long it would take me. “Give me twenty minutes, and if we’re not back then, you’ll have to get to the pod on your own. It’s straight in front as you’re facing now, about a hundred meters away. If you go in a straight line for fifty paces then clear your faceplates, you should be able to see it.”

I knew she must have questions, but there was no time to answer them. Mac’s tone suggested it would be completely fatal to be on Vandell’s surface, unprotected, when the next big wave of seismic activity hit us.

I knew exactly where Mac had gone, but I had a hard time seeing him. The rock slide had carried with it a mixture of small and large fragments, from gravel and pebbles to substantial boulders. His struggles to climb the slope had only managed to embed him deeper in loose materials. Now his suit was three-quarters hidden. His efforts also seemed to have carried him backwards, so with a thirty degree gradient facing him I didn’t think he’d ever be able to get out alone. And further down the slope lay a broad fissure in the surface, of indeterminate depth.

He was facing my way, and he had seen me too. “Jeanie, don’t come any closer. You’ll slither right down here, the same as I did. There’s nothing firm past the ledge you’re standing on.”

“Don’t worry. This is as far as I’m coming.” I backed up a step, nearer to a huge rock that must have weighed many tons, and turned my head so the chest of Mac’s suit sat on the crosshairs at the exact center of my display. “Don’t move a muscle now. I’m going to use the Walton, and we don’t have time for second tries.”

I lifted the crosshairs just a little to allow for the effects of gravity, then intoned the Walton release sequence. The ejection solenoid fired, and the thin filament with its terminal electromagnet shot out from the chest panel on my suit and flashed down towards McAndrew. The laser at the tip measured the distance of the target, and the magnet went on a fraction of a second before contact. Mac and I were joined by a hair-thin bond. I braced myself behind the big rock. “Ready? I’m going to haul you in.”

“Aye, I’m ready. But why didn’t I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn’t need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.”

I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit’s reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That’s all that the Waltons do. I’d used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that’s why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.

“I don’t think you could have done it, Mac,” I said. “This big rock’s the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn’t look as though it has a high metal content. You’d have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.”

“Maybe.” He snorted. “But I should have had the sense to try. I’m a witless oaf.”

What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two.

They were just where I had left them. They stood, helmets touching, like a frozen and forlorn tableau in Vandell’s broken wilderness. It was more than fifteen minutes since I gone back to Mac, and I could imagine their uneasy thoughts. I leaned my helmet to touch both theirs.

“All present and safe. Let’s go.”

Jan gave my arm a great squeeze. We formed our chain again, and crabbed the rest of the way to the pod. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had looked, or as I suggested to Jan, but in less than fifteen minutes we were opening the outer hatch and bundling Sven and Jan into it.

The lock was only big enough for two at a time. They were out of their useless suits by the time that McAndrew and I could join them inside. Jan looked pale and shaky, ten years older than her seventeen years. Sven Wicklund was as blond and dreamy-looking as ever, still impossibly young in appearance. Like McAndrew, his own internal preoccupations partly shielded him from unpleasant realities — even now he was brandishing a piece of paper covered with squiggles at us. But Jan and Sven had both held together, keeping their composure well when death must have seemed certain. It occurred to me that if you wanted to find a rite of passage to adulthood, you wouldn’t find a tougher one than Jan had been through.

“Just look at this,” Sven said as soon as we were out of the hatch. “I’ve been plotting the cycles—”

“How long before it hits?” I interrupted.

“Four minutes. But—”

“Get into working suits, both of you.” I was already at the controls. “I’m taking us up as soon as I can, but if we’re too late I can’t guarantee that the pod hull will survive. You know what happened to yours.”

The ascent presented no problem of navigation — I had plenty of fuel, and I intended to go straight up with maximum lift. There would be time to worry about rendezvous with Merganser and Hoatzin when we were safely away from Vandell.

I believe in being careful, even on the simplest takeoff, so all my concentration was on the control sequences. I could hear Jan, McAndrew and Wicklund babbling to each other in the background, until I told them to get off my suit frequency and let me think. Vandell was still a complete mystery world to me, but if the others had answers, those, like the problem of ship rendezvous, could wait until we were off the surface.

Wicklund’s predictions for the timing of the next wave of violence proved to be unnecessary. I could see it coming directly, in the values provided by the pod’s field instruments. Every gauge reading in front of me was creeping up in unison as we lifted off; ionization levels, surface vibrations, dust density, electric and magnetic fields — readouts flickered rapidly higher, and needles turned steadily across their dials like the hands of an old-fashioned clock.

Something big was on its way. We lifted into a sky ripped by great lightning flashes, burning their way through the clouds of charged dust particles. The ascent we made was rapid. Within a few seconds we had reached three kilometers. And then, as I was beginning to relax a little and think that we had been just in time, the readings in front of me went mad. External field strengths flickered up so fast in value that the figures were unreadable, then warning lights came on. I heard the screech of a fatal overload in my suit’s radio, and saw the displays in front of me blank out one after another. The computer, after a brief mad flurry of a binary dump across the control screen, went totally dead. Suddenly I was flying blind and deaf. All the electronic tools that every pilot relied on were now totally disabled.

It was useless information, but suddenly I understood exactly what had killed the signal beacon from Jan and Sven’s pod without also killing them. Before the displays in front of me died, the electric and magnetic field strengths had risen to an impossible level. Even with partial shielding from the pod’s hull, their intensity was enough to wipe magnetic storage — that took care of computers, communications equipment, displays, and suit controls. If the suits hadn’t been designed with manual overrides for certain essentials so that Jan and Sven could control their air supply, that would have been the end.

Now our pod had the same problem as theirs. We hadn’t been pelted with boulders, as they had when they were sitting on the surface of Vandell, but we had no computer control of our flight and we were being whipped around the sky by the changing magnetic fields.

It wasn’t necessary for me to change to manual control. When the computer died, it dumped everything in my lap automatically. I gritted my teeth, tried to keep us heading straight up (not easy, the way we were being tilted and rocked) and refused to decrease thrust even though the pod shuddered as though it was getting ready to disintegrate.

I’m blessed with an iron stomach, one that doesn’t get sick no matter how much lurching and spinning it takes. McAndrew isn’t, and Jan takes after him. They couldn’t communicate with me, but I could take their misery for granted.

It was worth the discomfort. We were getting there, rising steadily, while the pink glow around the pod’s ports faded towards black. As our altitude increased I looked at the internal pressure gauge — thank God for a simple mechanical gadget. It was showing normal pressure, which meant that the hull hadn’t been breached on our ascent. I allowed myself the luxury of a quick look around me.

McAndrew was slumped forward in his straps, head down as low as he could get it. Sven and Jan were both leaning back, arms linked. All the faceplates were clear, so that I knew none of them had vomited in their suit — no joke, since the internal cleaning systems that would usually handle the mess were out of action.

The turbulence around the pod grew less. Stars were coming into view outside the ports as I turned us into an orbit that spiralled outward away from Vandell. I was looking for Hoatzin. Our orbit was clumsy and wasteful of fuel compared with what the navigation computer would have provided. But give me some credit, I was receiving no reference signals from the ship. All I had was instinct and experience.

Scooting along over the clouds I could now see a pattern to the lightning. It moved in great waves over the surface, reaching peaks in places, fading elsewhere. We had lifted from a point where all the peaks had converged, but now it was fading to look no different from the rest. Or almost so; the faint shadow of the black funnel still dipped down into the murk.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Mac was gesturing at me, then at the helmet of his suit. I nodded and broke the seal on my own helmet. We were outside the danger zone, and it was important to reestablish contact among the group. The search for Hoatzin and Merganser might take hours, with no assistance from automated scan instruments or radio receipt of homing signals. Meanwhile, I wanted some explanations. It was clear that McAndrew and Wicklund between them had more idea than I did what had been happening.

Three miserable, greenish-yellow faces emerged from the helmets. No one had thrown up, but from the look of them it had been a close thing.

“I thought it was bad when the storm hit us on the surface,” said Jan. “But that was even worse. What did you do to us, Jeanie? I thought the pod was coming apart.”

“So did I.” Suit helmet off, I reached back to massage the aching muscles in my neck and shoulders. “It almost did. We lost the computers, the communications, the displays — everything. What is this crazy planet, anyway? I thought the laws of nature were supposed to be the same all over the universe, but Vandell seems to have a special exemption. What in hell did you two do to the place, Jan? It was quiet as a grave until you got at it.”

“It damn near was one,” said McAndrew. “If you hadn’t…”

He paused and swallowed. “We know what’s going on. That’s what we were talking about before you shook us to pieces. If we’d been a bit smarter, we could have inferred it ahead of time and none of this would have happened. How much did you hear on the way up?”

I shook my head. “I tuned you out. I had other things on my mind. Are you telling me you understand that mess down there? I thought you said it made no sense at all.”

While we spoke I had taken us up to the correct height above Vandell for rendezvous with Hoatzin. Now it would need a steady and simple sweep to find our ship.

McAndrew wiped his hand across his pale, sweating forehead. He was looking awful, but less like a dying pickle as the minutes passed. “It didn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious. I noticed something odd just before we left Hoatzin to go into the pod — Sven had wondered about the same thing, but neither of us gave it enough significance. Remember the list of physical variables that they recorded for Vandell when they first arrived here? No electric and magnetic fields, negligible rotation rate, no atmosphere, and cold as the pit. Does any one of those observations suggest anything to you?”

I leaned against the padded seat back. My physical exertions over the past half hour had been negligible, but tension had exhausted me totally. I looked across at him.

“Mac, I’m in no condition for guessing games. I’m too tired. For God’s sake, get on with it.”

He peered at me sympathetically. “Aye, you’re right. Let me begin at the beginning, and keep it simple. We know that Vandell was quiet until Merganser’s pod landed on its surface. Within minutes of that, there was massive seismic activity and terrific electric and magnetic disturbances. We watched it, there were waves of activity over the whole planet — but they all had one focus, and one point of origin: where the pod landed.” As McAndrew spoke his voice became firmer, strengthening now that he was back on the familiar ground of scientific explanation. “Remember the dark cone that we followed in to the surface? It was the only anomaly visible over the whole surface of the planet. So it was obvious. The impact of the pod caused the trouble, it was the trigger that set off Vandell’s eruption.”

I looked around at the others. They all seemed happy with the explanation, but to me it said absolutely nothing. I shook my head. “Mac, I’ve landed on fifty planets and asteroids through the System and the Halo. Never once has one shaken apart when I tried to set foot on it. So why? Why did it happen to Vandell?”

“Because—”

“Because Vandell is a rogue world,” interrupted Sven Wicklund. We all stared at him in amazement. Sven usually never said a word about anything (except of course physics) unless he was asked a direct question. He was too shy. Now his blond hair was wet with perspiration, and there was still that distant, mystic look on his face, the look that vanished only when he laughed. But his voice was forceful. Vandell had done something to him, too.

“A rogue world,” he went on. “And one that does not rotate on its axis. That is the crux of this whole affair. Vandell rotates too slowly for us to measure it. McAndrew and I noticed that, but we thought it no more than a point of academic interest. As Eddington pointed out centuries ago, almost everything in the Universe seems to rotate — atoms, molecules, planets, stars, galaxies. But there is no law of nature that obliges a body to rotate relative to the stars. Vandell did not, but we thought it only a curious accident.”

He leaned towards me. “Think back to the time — how many million years ago? — when Vandell was first ejected from its stellar system. It had been close to the system’s suns, exposed to great forces. It was hot, and maybe geologically active, and then suddenly it was thrown out, out into the void between the stars. What happened then?”

He paused, but I knew he was not expecting an answer. I waited.

He shrugged. “Nothing happened,” he said. “For millions or billions of years, Vandell was alone. It slowly lost heat, cooled, contracted — just as the planets of the Solar System cooled and contracted after they were first formed. But there is one critical difference: the planets circle the Sun, and each other. As tensions inside build up, tidal forces work to release them. Earth and the planets release accumulating internal stresses through sequences of small disturbances — earthquakes, Marsquakes, Jupiterquakes. They can never build up a large store of pent-up energy. They are nudged continuously to internal stability by the other bodies of the system. But not Vandell. It wanders alone. With no tidal forces to work on it — not even the forces caused by its rotation in the galactic gravitational and magnetic fields — Vandell became super-critical. It was a house of cards, unstable against small disturbances. Apply one shock, and all the stored energy would be released in a chain reaction.”

He paused and looked around. Then he blushed and seemed surprised at his own sudden eloquence. We all waited. Nothing else was forthcoming.

I had followed what he said without difficulty, but accepting it was another matter. “You’re telling me that everything on Vandell came from the pod’s landing,” I said. “But what about the dust clouds? And why the intense fields? And how could they arise from an internal adjustment — even a violent one? And why were there peaks in the disturbance, like the one when we lifted off?”

Sven Wicklund didn’t answer. He had apparently done his speaking for the day. He looked beseechingly for support to McAndrew, who coughed and rubbed at his head.

“Now, Jeanie,” he said, “you could answer those questions for yourself if you wanted to give it a minute’s thought. You know about positions of unstable equilibrium as well as I do. Make an infinitesimal displacement, and produce an unbounded change, that’s the heart of it. Compared with the disturbances on Vandell for the past few eons, the landing of a pod was a super-powerful shock — more than an infinitesimal nudge. And you expect a set of spherical harmonics — with a pole at the source of energy — when you distribute energy over a sphere. As for the fields, I’ll bet that you’re not enough of a student of science to know what a Wimshurst machine is; but I’ve seen one. It was an old way of generating tremendous electromagnetic fields and artificial lightning using simple friction of plates against each other. Vandell’s crustal motion could generate fields of billions of volts, though of course they’d only last a few hours. We were there right at the worst time.”

We looked back at the planet. To my eye it was maybe a little less visible, the lightning flashes less intense across the dusty clouds.

“Poor old Vandell,” said Jan. “Peaceful for all these years, then we come and ruin it. And we wanted to study a rogue planet, a place of absolute quiet. It’ll never be the way it was before we got here. Well, never mind, there should be others. When we get back we’ll tell people to be more careful.”

When we get back.

At those words, the world snapped into a different focus. For twelve hours I had been completely absorbed by the events of the moment. Earth, the Office of External Affairs, the Institute, they had not existed for me two minutes ago. Now they were present again, still far away — I looked out of the port, seeking the bright distant star of the Sun — but real.

“Are you all right, Jeanie?” asked Jan. She had observed my sudden change of expression.

“I’m not sure.”

It was time we told her everything. About Tallboy’s decision on the future of the Institute, about the cancellation of the Alpha Centauri expedition, the proposed decommissioning of the Hoatzin, and the way we had disobeyed official orders to follow them to Vandell. It all came rolling out like a long-stored fury.

“But you saved our lives,” protested Jan. “If you hadn’t taken the ship we’d be dead. Once they know that, they won’t care if you ignored some stupid regulation.”

McAndrew and I stared at her, then at each other. “Child, you’ve got a lot to learn about bureaucracy,” I said. “I know it all sounds ridiculous and trivial out here — damn it, it is ridiculous and trivial. But once we get back we’ll waste weeks of our time, defending what we did, documenting everything, and writing endless reports on it. The fact that you would have died won’t make one scrap of difference to Tallboy. He’ll follow the rule book.”

There was a moment of silence, while Mac and I pondered the prospect of a month of memoranda.

“What happened to the old Administrator?” asked Jan at last. “You know, the one you always talked about before. I thought he was your friend and understood what you were doing?”

“You mean Woolford? There was a change of Administration, and he went. The top brass change with the party, every seven years. Woolford left, and Tallboy replaced him.”

“Damn that man,” said McAndrew suddenly. “Everything ready for the Alpha Centauri expedition, heaps of supplies and equipment all in place; and that buffoon signs a piece of paper and kills it in two seconds.”

Ahead of us, I saw a faint blink against the starry background. It had to be Hoatzin’s pulsed beacon, sending a brief flash of light outward every two seconds. I made a first adjustment to our orbit to take us to rendezvous, and pointed out the distant ship to the others. Mac and Sven moved closer to the port, but Jan surprised me by remaining in her seat.

“Seven years?” she said to me thoughtfully. “The Administration will change again in seven years. Jeanie, what was the shipboard travel time you planned to Alpha Centauri?”

I frowned. “From Earth? One way, standing start to standing finish, would take Hoatzin about forty-four days.”

“So from here it would be even less.” She had a strange gleam in her eyes. “I noticed something before we set out. Vandell sits in Lupus, and that’s a neighboring constellation to Centaurus. I remember thinking to myself before we started, it’s an odd coincidence, but we’ll be heading in almost the same direction as Mac and Jeanie. So Alpha Centauri would take less time from here, right? Less than forty-four days.”

I nodded. “That’s just in shipboard time, of course. In Earth time we would have been away—” I stopped abruptly. I had finally reached the point where Jan had started her thinking.

“At least eight and a half years,” she said. “Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years from Earth, right? So by the time we get back home, we’ll find a new Administration and Tallboy will be gone.”

I stared at her thoughtfully. “Jan, do you know what you’re saying? We can’t do that. And as for that `we’ you were using, I hope you don’t think that Mac and I would let you and Sven take the risk of a trip like that. It’s out of the question.”

“Can’t we at least talk about it?” She smiled. “I’d like to hear what Mac and Sven have to say.”

I hesitated. “Oh, all right.” I said at last. “But not now. Let’s at least wait until we’re back on board Hoatzin. And don’t think I’ll let you twist those two around, the way you usually do.”

I frowned, she smiled.

And then I couldn’t help smiling back at her.

That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.

We were going to have a mammoth argument about all this, I just knew it. One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.

Would I win the argument? I didn’t know. But it did occur to me that when the history of the first Alpha Centauri expedition was written, it might look quite different from what anyone had expected.