The Compleat McAndrew

EIGHTH CHRONICLE: With McAndrew, Out of Focus

There are sights in the Universe that man — or woman — was not meant to see.

Let me name an outstanding example. McAndrew, dancing; Arthur Morton McAndrew, hopping about like a gangling, uncoordinated stork, arms flapping and balding head turned up to stare at the sky.

“The first since 1604!” he said. He did not, thank God, burst into song. “Not a one, since the invention of the telescope. Ah, look at it, Jeanie. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing a person ever saw?”

Not the most complimentary remark in the world, to a woman who has borne a child with a man and been his regular, if not exactly faithful, companion for twenty-odd years.

I looked up. It was close to nine in the evening, on the long June day that would end our holiday together. Early tomorrow McAndrew would leave Earth and return to the Institute; I would head for Equatorport, the first step in a trip a good deal farther out. I was scheduled to deliver submersibles for use on Europa. As part of the deal for making the run, I would be allowed to dive the Europan ice-covered abyssal ocean. I was excited by the prospect. The difference between deep space and deep ocean is large, and sky captains and dive captains respect and envy each other.

Overhead, the cause of McAndrew’s excitement flamed in the sky as a point of intolerable brilliance. The Sun and Venus had already set. Jupiter was in opposition and close to perihelion. The planet should have been a beacon on the eastern horizon, but today its light was overwhelmed by something else. What I was looking at was infinitely brighter than Jupiter or Venus could ever be. Instead of the steady gleam of a planet, the light above blazed like the star it was. But it dominated everything in the sky except for the Sun itself, visible even at noon, a light strong enough to throw clear shadows. For two days there had been no night in the northern hemisphere.

“A naked eye supernova!” McAndrew didn’t want or expect an answer to his earlier question. “And so close — only a hundred and three light-years. Why, if we used the balanced drive…”

His voice trailed away, but I’ve known the man for a long time. I suspected what he was thinking.

I said, “Be realistic, Mac. Even if you could fly out there in a reasonable subjective time, you’d be away at least a couple of hundred Earth years.”

I was about to add, remember your relativity, but I didn’t have the gall. McAndrew knew more about special relativity and time dilation than I would ever know. Also more about general relativity, gravity, quantum theory, superstrings, condensed matter physics, finite state automata, and any other science subject that you care to mention. What he didn’t know, and would never learn, was restraint.

Our holiday was over, whether I wanted to admit it or not. We would spend one more night together, but McAndrew would not be in bed with me. Not all of him, that is. His body, yes, but his head was already a hundred and three light-years away. It would not be coming back any time soon. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but even now he itched to be at the Penrose Institute, out in space where his precious observational tools could see far more than any instrument condemned to lie at the bottom of the murky atmosphere of Earth.

Me, I could look into the evening sky and see herring-bone patterns of gorgeous rose and salmon-pink clouds catching the light of the supernova. McAndrew looked at the same thing and saw an annoying absorbing layer of atmospheric gases cutting off all light of wavelength shorter than the near ultraviolet. The Cassiopeia Supernova was flooding the Solar System with hard radiation — and here was McAndrew, down on Earth, condemned to visible wavelengths and missing half the show.

“It will still be there tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll have a month or two before it begins to fade.”

I might as well have saved my breath. He said, “If I flew south tonight, maybe I could get a pre-dawn lift.”

“Maybe you could.” Actually, I knew the lift-off and transfer schedules in fair detail, and there was no chance of a launch that would get him one second sooner to the Institute, which was free-flying now in an L-3 halo orbit. Also, the last evening of a holiday is supposed to be special.

“Sounds like you don’t think I should,” he said. And then, showing that he is more human than almost anyone in the Solar System gives him credit for — he’s supposed to be McAndrew, giant brain and intellect incarnate — he added, “Ah, now Jeanie, don’t get mad at me. You know, I wasn’t thinking of trying to fly all the way out to the supernova. But Fogarty and me, we’ve had an expedition in mind for a while to visit the solar focus. This would be a great time to do it. We’d learn a lot about the supernova.”

“You might,” I said. I did not add that I did not like Paul Fogarty. McAndrew could tell me, as often as he liked, that Fogarty was bright and young and inventive. Maybe he was all those things, but I thought he was also ambitious and snotty and obnoxious.

Pure personal vanity on my part, of course. Young Paul Fogarty had met me during one of my visits to the Institute, learned that I was not a scientist but a mere cargo captain, and after that did not recognize my existence.

If McAndrew was trying to be nice to me for a final evening together, I was more than willing to meet him halfway. “If you want to go to the solar focus,” I said. “Then you should do it. Go and have fun. You deserve it. Not a long trip, is it?”

“Just a hop.” He thought for a moment, and the only sign of Scottish ancestry appeared in his speech. “Och, Jeanie, it’s not even that. We hardly need the balanced drive at all. Five hundred and fifty astronomical units to the solar focus, that’s only eighty-odd billion kilometers. If we take the Hoatzin and hold it down to a hundred gees, that’s less than a week of shipboard time there and back — even allowing for turnover and deceleration. Don’t worry that I’ll be gone long. I’ll be home again and waiting for you when you finish playing the deep-sea diver.”

Possibly. But I knew him of old. Get McAndrew into a situation of scientific interest, and he loses all sense of time and everything else.

When I emerged from the Europan ocean, he might indeed be back at the Institute; but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find him still eighty billion kilometers out, sitting at the solar focus — the place where the Sun’s own gravitational field would act like a lens, and converge light from the Cassiopeia supernova to a focus.

I tilted back my head to stare once more at the burning point of light in the sky. A hundred and three light-years away, but it shone on Earth a thousand times as bright as the full Moon. This was the closest supernova to Earth in all of recorded history. Maybe that was just as well. Much closer, and it would be a danger to all life on Earth.

Unlike McAndrew, I could be quite as happy without the Cassiopeia supernova.

I accuse McAndrew of things, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just as guilty myself.

The Europan ocean is eerie and spectacular and unlike anything else in the Solar System. People talk about the silence of space, floating in the void beyond Neptune with all engines off. Fair enough. But I’ve been there, and I can tell you that it’s nothing like as uncanny as the quiet of Europa’s abyssal ocean, a hundred kilometer depth of water and above that a thick shield of ice-cap to seal you off from the rest of the Universe.

I loved it. The young captain who piloted the Spindrift was half my age, flatteringly attentive, and a few times he allowed me to take the controls of the deep submersible. We drifted along just above the ocean floor, very slowly, so we would not disturb the sea-floor furrows with their rows of aperiodic self-reproducing crystals, Europa’s own contribution to life in the Solar System.

Of course I stayed down longer than expected — as long as I could. When we finally surfaced through Blowhole it was because we were running low on air and supplies, not on interest. I looked at a calendar for the first time in a week and realized that McAndrew might have left and already returned. Chances were against that. My bet was, he was out at the solar focus, fooling around with his instruments and totally unaware of what day or week it was.

Communication to space from the Europan deep ocean is difficult and reserved for emergencies, but it was easy enough to send messages from the surface station at Mount Ararat. I called the Penrose Institute, personal to McAndrew. Then I spent the seventy minute round-trip signal delay packing my bag in preparation for the ascent to Jovian system orbit.

I rather expected a “Not Present” return signal, together with a message that he was out at the focus. Instead, when the screen filled it showed an image of McAndrew’s face. He was scowling, not at all like a man who had just returned from an exciting and successful journey.

“Aye, Jeanie, I’m here.” His voice was decidedly mournful. “And I suppose you can come see me if you feel like it.”

Not the world’s most enthusiastic invitation, even by McAndrew standards. What had happened to his supernova-generated excitement? The newcomer in Cassiopeia still blazed in the sky as brightly as ever, but there was no joy in McAndrew.

Rather than attempting questions with seventy-minute delays on the answers, I said goodbye to Europa and headed sunward for the Institute.

McAndrew didn’t meet me when I docked. That was all right. I had been to the Institute often enough, I knew the layout of the place, and I knew exactly where his office was. He would probably be there now, staring at the wall, theorizing, cracking his finger joints, oblivious to the passage of time. It was no surprise that he did not meet me.

What did surprise me was old Doc Limperis, hovering near the lock when I emerged to the Institute’s interior. Limperis was long-retired as Director of the Institute, and he could have had his pick of Solar System locations. But as he said, where else would a man interested in physics want to be?

He approached me, held out his hand, said, “Jeanie Roker, how are you?” and then continued without a pause for breath, “Maybe you can get through to him, because it’s certain sure none of us can.”

He didn’t need to say who. For many years, Limperis had been McAndrew’s closest friend and champion at the Institute. All the same, it was a curious opening. Limperis possessed all the social skills that McAndrew lacked. He was not one to plunge straight into business.

“It went badly?” I took my cue from him. “The trip to the solar focus didn’t work out the way it was supposed to?”

“Not at all. The trip went very well. It is going very well.”

It took me a second. “You have an expedition out there right now. And McAndrew’s not on it?”

“That is correct.” Limperis led me away along the corridor — in a direction, I noted, opposite to McAndrew’s office. “There has been some — er, some disagreement with the Director. Some unpleasantness.”

“What did he do?”

“It’s more what McAndrew refused to do. Do you recall the name of Nina Velez?”

“Oh, Jesus. Is he mixed up with her again?”

Nina Velez was the daughter of President Velez, and for a while — until, in fact, they had been marooned together for weeks in the three-meter life capsule of the prototype balanced drive — she had been infatuated with McAndrew. Enforced intimacy had put an end to that. It was all years ago, and I really thought that he had learned his lesson.

Limperis nodded. “I’m afraid so. Ms. Velez, as you may know, now has a senior position with AG News. She somehow learned, by means unknown to us, that an expedition was planned to the solar focus. She offered money for permission to send a representative with the expedition, and for exclusive media rights.”

“Sounds reasonable to me.”

“And to Director Rumford. I should mention that the money offered was, by Institute standards, most considerable.”

“But she wanted to be the representative, and McAndrew refused to take her.”

“Not at all. She wanted her new husband, Geoffrey Benton, to go on the expedition. Benton has scientific training, and has been on half a dozen expeditions within the Solar System.”

“I know him. Tall, good-looking guy.”

“Then you may also know that he has a fine reputation. Savvy, experienced reporter. McAndrew was all agreed. Then something happened. I think Mac met with Benton — just once — and afterwards went to the Director. He said Benton would go on an expedition with him, McAndrew, over his dead body.”

“But why?”

“That’s something I rely on you to find out — he won’t tell me or anyone else. Director Rumford said, rightly in my opinion, that McAndrew’s attitude left him little choice. In these days of shrinking budgets, we need the funds. Paul Fogarty would lead the expedition to the solar focus instead of McAndrew, and Geoffrey Benton would go with him. That is exactly what happened. It has not left McAndrew in the best of moods, and I wanted you to know that before you meet him.”

He paused. “And, of course, although this is strictly speaking no concern of mine, I would like to know what is really going on.”

Shrewd old Limperis. A razor-sharp mind lay behind the innocent, pudgy black face. He sensed, as I did, that there had been a set-up. On questions of theoretical physics, McAndrew sits among the immortals. On matters involving human motivation and behavior, he is an innocent — and that’s being kind.

“Let me talk to him,” I said. “Is he in his study?”

“There, or more likely in the communications center.” Limperis hesitated. “I should mention that Fogarty and Benton have reached the solar focus, and they are obtaining spectacular findings concerning the supernova. McAndrew’s mood is… hard to judge.”

I knew what he meant. McAndrew should have been experiencing one of his big thrills in life, the rush of data on a new scientific phenomenon; but instead of being on the front line, he was getting it all second-hand. To someone like McAndrew, that is like being offered for your dining pleasure a previously-eaten meal.

He was in the communications center. I approached him uncertainly, not sure what his mood might be. He looked up from a page of numbers and gave me a nod and a smile, as though we had just seen each other at lunch time. And far from being out of sorts, he seemed delighted with something.

“Here, Jeanie,” he said. “Take a listen to this. See what you think.”

He handed me a headset.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Report from Fogarty. He was heading for the solar focus, but the media asked him to put on a bit of a show for them, just to demonstrate what the Hoatzin can do. Of course, he couldn’t resist. They went zooming all the way out past three hundred billion kilometers, horsing around, then wandered in again toward the focus. I want you to hear what they picked up on the way back. It came in a while ago, but I only just got round to it.”

“Shouldn’t I—”

“Listen to it. Then we’ll talk.”

McAndrew!

I put the headset on.

“We are on the way in again, approximately two hundred and eighty billion kilometers from Sol.” Paul Fogarty, his voice young and slightly nasal, spoke in my ears. “We are heading for a solar focus point appropriate for receipt of radiation from the Cassiopeia supernova. The Hoatzin is performing perfectly, and we normally turn off the engine during flight only for observations and sampling of the local medium. However, anomalous signals received in our message center are prompting us to remain longer in this vicinity. We are picking up a message of distress from an unknown source. We have travelled to various locations, but we are unable to discover a message origin. We will keep looking for another twenty-four hours. After that we must proceed toward our original destination of the solar focus. The received message follows.”

I listened, wondering who could possibly be sending a call for help from so far away. Two hundred and eighty billion kilometers, sixty times the distance of Neptune, way south of the ecliptic and far beyond normal Solar System runs. No cargo or passenger vessel ever ventured in that direction, or so far out.

Help, help, help. The standard Mayday distress signal was the only clear part of the message. “… limited chance for transmission… every year or two…” The voice was thin, scratchy, and distorted. “We transmit when we can, aim at Sol…” Help, help, help. “… we’ll keep sending as long as possible. We have no idea what’s happening outside… are trapped… except for this chamber. No control of resources except this unit…”

Help, help, help. The automated Mayday signal bleated on, over and over. I heard nothing more from the desperate human voice.

McAndrew was watching me closely as I removed the headphones. “Well?”

“It couldn’t be clearer. There’s a ship out there in bad trouble, even if we don’t know what kind of trouble.”

Mac said, “Not a ship.”

“What, then?”

“I’d guess it’s one of the Arks.”

That made me catch my breath. The Arks were part of history. Before McAndrew and I were born, seventeen of the great space habitats had been launched by the United Space Federation. Self-contained and self-supporting, they were multi-generation ships, crawling through the interstellar void at a tiny fraction of light speed. Their destinations were centuries away. But even at minimal speeds, they ought by now to be well on their way to the stars. They should be far beyond the place where the signal had been picked up.

McAndrew’s suggestion that it was one of the Arks seemed unlikely for another reason. “I don’t think it can be,” I said. “As I recall it, none of the Arks was launched in a direction so far south of the ecliptic. And I don’t believe they were capable of significant changes of direction.”

“Perfectly true. They could start and stop, and that was about all.” McAndrew gazed at me blank-eyed as the Sphinx. He knew something he wasn’t telling.

“But in any case,” I went on, “I can’t believe that Fogarty would simply leave them like that, and keep on going. They said they were in trouble.”

“They also implied it isn’t a new emergency — they’ve been transmitting for some time. Anyway, Paul Fogarty didn’t just listen and run. There’s more from him. He stayed far longer than he expected, searching and searching; but he couldn’t track down an origin for the signal.”

“But that’s ridiculous. He must have been right on top of it, to receive it like that.”

“You think so?” McAndrew, that great ham, was full of poorly-disguised satisfaction. “If somebody knew where that signal was coming from, do you think that they should choose to go out on a rescue mission?”

“It wouldn’t be a question of choice. They’d have to go.”

“Exactly.” McAndrew didn’t rub his hands together, but only I think because he was tapping away at the keys of the console. “I’m checking out the status of the reconditioned Merganser. If it’s ready to fly, you and I will be on our way. And don’t worry, we’ll be going with Director Rumford’s blessing. I’ve already asked.”

“But if Fogarty couldn’t find the ship—”

“Then he must have been looking in the wrong place, mustn’t he? In a very wrong place. Wait and see, Jeanie. Wait and see.” And beyond that, for all my coaxing and urging and outright cursing, McAndrew the mule would not for the moment go.

As I say, he’s more human than most people give him credit for. He likes to talk about what he does, but only in his own sweet time and in his own backhanded way.

I waited until we were on board the new Merganser and heading out of the ecliptic. The balanced drive was on. The ship was accelerating at a hundred gees, while the disk of condensed matter in front of the life capsule drew us toward it at close to a hundred gees, leaving us with a residual quarter-gee field. Very comfortable, great for sleeping.

And sleeping is what we might be doing, much of the time. Even accelerating at a hundred gees, we had a lengthy flight ahead of us. We could lie side by side in the cramped life capsule and sleep, relax, play — and talk.

McAndrew had been a clam when it came to our destination, but it had not escaped me that we were going in exactly the wrong direction, toward Cassiopeia rather than away from it. The solar focus for the supernova lay on the other side of the Sun. I mentioned that fact casually, as though it was something of minor interest.

“Quite right.” He was in his bare feet, wriggling his long toes and staring at them with apparent fascination. “If light comes toward Sol from a very long way away, so it’s close to being a parallel beam, then the gravity field of the Sun acts as a great big lens. Light that passes close to the Sun is converged. It is brought to a focus eighty-two billion kilometers away, on the far side of the Sun. So if you want to observe the Cassiopeia supernova, which is way north of the ecliptic, you have to go south.”

“Which is what Paul Fogarty did.”

“Aye. Him, and that Geoffrey Benton.” McAndrew gave me a strange look, which I could not interpret.

“And the place where they heard the signal was south, too,” I said. “But we’re going north.”

“We are indeed.” McAndrew looked smug. “Here’s a question for you, Jeanie. Suppose that you are in trouble, and you can only send out a distress signal now and again.”

“Once every year or two, they said.”

“Right. Now, you’re way out in deep space. Where would you beam the signal?”

“Where people were most likely to hear it. Back toward the Sun.”

“Indeed you would. But if you’re a long way out, and the signal is weak, chances are no one will hear you. Unless there’s some way you can amplify the signal, or you can focus it.”

I’m no McAndrew, but I’m not an idiot. I almost had it. “A signal, sent back toward the Sun — a radio signal. That would be focused just the way that a light beam is focused. But what Paul Fogarty heard wasn’t at the solar focus.”

“No more it was. You’ve had courses in optics, Jeanie, you must have. The Sun acts like a lens, one that takes a beam of light that comes from infinity and converges it to a focus at eighty-two billion kilometers. Now suppose you have a radio signal, but instead of focusing at eighty-two billion kilometers from the Sun it focuses itself at two hundred and eighty billion kilometers. Where would the origin of the radio signal have to be, to make that happen?”

“On the other side of the Sun from where you receive it.” I tried to recall the relevant formula — and failed. I said, “How far out? It’s a standard result in geometrical optics…”

“It certainly is. If a lens converges a parallel beam of light at a distance F from the lens, then light starting at a distance S from the lens will be converged at a distance D beyond it, where the reciprocal of S plus the reciprocal of D equals the reciprocal of F.”

“Don’t gibber at me, McAndrew. I asked you a question. How far out?”

“You’re not listening, Jeanie.” The wretch went on regardless, probably imagining that he was speaking English. “Take F as eighty-two billion, and D as two hundred and eighty billion — that’s where Paul Fogarty caught the distress signal — and you find that S, the distance from Sol where the signal originated, is a hundred and seventeen billion kilometers from Sol. That’s where the distress signal came from, the other side.”

“The other side of what?” As usual, he was turning my head into a muddled mess.

“Of the Sun — the signal was generated on the opposite side of the Sun.”

“You mean Fogarty and Geoffrey Benton have been searching in the wrong place?”

“Of course they have. Completely wrong.” But there it was again, the curious tone in his voice when he said Benton ’s name. And with it, a strange sideways look at me.

Even at a hundred gees acceleration, we were going to be on the way in the Merganser for over a week. Too long to live with seething undercurrents of feeling.

“Mac, what is it with you and Geoffrey Benton? Surely you hardly know the man.”

“I guess I don’t. Not the way you do.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean? I’ve never even met him.”

He stared pop-eyed at me. “How can you say that? He’s the AG Newsman who flew with you back from the Titan prison colony — just the two of you.”

I groaned inside. A fifteen-year-ago fling, coming back to haunt me. “That wasn’t Geoffrey Benton.”

“But he works for AG News.”

“So do ten thousand other people. Mac, what on earth gave you the idea that it was Benton?”

“Paul told me.” McAndrew put a hand to his balding forehead. “It wasn’t Benton? My God. Do you know what I did? Do you know what I called him?”

“I know exactly what you did, and I can imagine what you told poor Benton. More than that, I know what Paul Fogarty did.”

“But why would Paul… he wanted to make the trip to the solar focus as bad as I did.”

“Worse than you did. Mac, don’t be dense. Fogarty wanted to make the trip all right. And he’s making it — without you. You’re older and you out-rank him. You’d have been the leader. Now, he keeps any credit for himself.”

“Paul? Do a thing like that. I don’t believe it.”

But he did. He went silent for hours, cracking his finger joints in the way that I hated and looking sideways out of the ship at the eldritch plume of glowing plasma that trailed away behind us.

And me? I ought not to say it, but I was rather pleased. I mean, McAndrew had been jealous, jealous of someone I hadn’t much liked at the time and hadn’t seen or heard of in fifteen years. I thought that was rather sweet.

No, it’s not quite the same as fine jewels or bouquets of flowers. But once you forget about his being a genius, McAndrew’s a simple man. When it comes to compliments I settle for what I can get.

McAndrew had known that several of the Arks had been launched far north of the ecliptic when he played me Fogarty’s message. He did the background research before we left, and it was all in the Merganser’s data banks.

I sifted through the material one morning, while McAndrew sat in a habitual stupor of advanced physics and the ship raced out toward the fiery point of the Cassiopeia supernova. The Sun had already shrunk behind us to a point of light and although we were crowding light-speed we didn’t seem to be moving.

There had been seventeen Arks, but only four of them were candidates for what we were seeking. Each of them was different and distinctive. You might expect that. Any group of people which decides to leave the rest of humanity and heads off on a one-way trip to the stars is likely to be a little odd.

The Ark of the Evangelist had set out to spread its version of the Word of God among the stars. It contained four thousand followers of the philosopher Socinus, which was probably all of them. The Word, from what I could see of it in the data base, was likely to baffle any alien who encountered it. Certainly, the Word baffled me.

The Ark of the Evangelist was equipped with unusually powerful communications equipment, able to beam messages ahead so that their ultimate arrival at another stellar system would be expected. The same equipment would, of course, also be able to send messages back toward Sol. None had ever been received, unless Paul Fogarty had picked up the first.

The Cyber Ark had no interest in evangelism. It had headed out toward Cassiopeia, but any direction would have done equally well. The Ark held two thousand computer specialists and the most advanced computing equipment that the Solar System could produce. The Ark ’s inhabitants were united in their disdain for the rules that limited the development of machine intelligence. They had vowed to produce real artificial intelligence, a true AI, and they claimed to know how exactly to do it. Their goal was an AI far beyond the known limits of either humans or machines. If they felt in a generous mood when they were done, well, they just might tell Earth when the work was finished.

Big talk. But if they had been successful, they had sent back no word in the fifty-nine years since they flew away from the Solar System.

Then there was the Ark of Noah. Its colonists had become convinced from their analysis of ancient religious writings that Armageddon and the end of Earth were close to hand. They had no faith in the survival of the colonies we had established on Mars, Titan, or Ceres. Inside the two-kilometer sphere of their ark, formed from a hollowed-out asteroid, they had tried to include a pair of every Earth species of plant and animal. Impossible, in practice — we were up to four million species of insects, and still counting. But the Ark of Noah gave it a good, all-out try, packing in a handful of every life-form they could find. They took liberties with the number of humans, two hundred instead of Noah’s single family; but somebody had to manage the Ark ’s life-support systems, if and when things went out of whack.

My own money was on the Amish Ark. When a group which shuns most forms of mechanical systems sets off into the void in as fundamentally high tech a structure as an artificial world, integration problems and equipment failures loom large as a source of possible trouble. The surprise was that the Ark had gone as far out as it had without killing everybody on board. The passengers — eight thousand of them at takeoff from Earth orbit, according to the roster — had been lucky to be able to send their weak call for help. Apparently they also didn’t know much about electronic signalling. Otherwise they’d have realized that only someone close to the Ark, or at a solar focus where the strength of any message was gravitationally concentrated, could possibly have heard them.

Of course, we were listening for a direct signal now, with the most sensitive equipment we had been able to place on board the Merganser. We knew the general direction of the lost Ark, and an approximate distance; but we might well be off a few hundred million kilometers, one way or the other.

After we came to our best estimate of the origin of the signal, we spent the next few days moving position, listening, and moving again. Nothing. I began to be discouraged. Not so McAndrew.

“Jeanie,” He said, “the chain of logic that led us here is clear and unbreakable. Keep looking, and we’ll find an Ark. ”

“The Amish.”

“You’re the one saying that, not me. But whichever Ark it is, once we find it we’ll be able to tell them that help is on the way.”

I was glad to hear him put it like that. Director Rumford couldn’t have been more explicit in our final meeting before we left the Institute.

“I’m approving the flight of the Merganser as an exploration mission,” he had said. “That’s the most I can do, because the Institute has no responsibility for search-and-rescue operations. I think you have a long shot — a very long shot — at finding someone in trouble. But remember that you are not a rescue party. There are only the two of you, in a small ship without special equipment. You are not trained for space rescue. If you find someone out there in trouble, call me and come back here. No heroics. No attempts at inspired space-engineering solutions. Leave that work to the specialists. Understand?”

“Of course.” McAndrew had agreed instantly, but I knew the man. He was itching to be on his way, and to get Rumford’s consent for the mission he’d have said anything.

Now, with the ark possibly no more than a few hours ahead, I was glad to hear him proposing talk rather than action.

Just to be sure, I rubbed in Director Rumford’s order one more time. “The colonists don’t seem to be in any great hurry for help, if they send only one message a year. A good thing, too — we have no room on Merganser for anyone else. If it comes to an all-up rescue mission, the United Space Federation will fly a whole fleet out this way.”

As I said that, I was secretly convinced that our whole journey would prove a waste of time. Before we left the Institute we had installed a loud signalling system on the Merganser, and for the past two days we had blared word of our presence and our location into the empty sky ahead of us.

Result: nothing.

The people on the Ark were deaf, or their receiving equipment was out of action; or maybe the Ark was over on the other side of the Sun, hundreds of billions of kilometers away, wandering around where Paul Fogarty had picked up the original signal.

We had reduced speed and turned off the balanced drive. At my insistence we had also switched off every possible source of electronic noise and were gliding forward through the void like a dead ship.

It was as well that we were so silent. Even with our electronic ears wide open, the Mayday signal that came in was barely above threshold. It was also well off to one side.

“That’s it!” Our receiving system automatically tuned to the direction of the source, and now McAndrew increased the gain to maximum. It didn’t help. Instead of a faint voice almost lost in white noise, we heard a loud voice equally unintelligible amid a thunderstorm of static.

“... receiving — input… signal… assistance — urgent…” And then, the first direct evidence that they had heard us. “... send… who you…”

“I have direction and distance,” I said. “Three-twenty-one million kilometers. Send a signal saying that we hear them. Tell them who we are, say we are on the way. Tell them they’ll hear nothing more from us for a while — we can’t send when the drive is on.”

“Aye.” McAndrew was peering uselessly out of the observation port, as though he might catch a glimpse of something hundreds of millions of kilometers off in the distance. “Looks like things are going worse for them, they say it’s urgent. Let’s see, three hundred and twenty-one million. Can the Merganser beat a hundred and ten gees?”

“Not with me on board it can’t. We keep it safe, Mac — we don’t want anyone having to come and rescue us.”

He scowled, but finally he said, “Fair enough.” I don’t know if he did the arithmetic in real time, or if he had stored in his head some kind of table of time against distance and acceleration, but he went on at once, “I’ll tell them we’ll be there in ten hours. That will give us twenty-five minutes for turnover before we start to decelerate. Should be ample. Set it up, Jeanie.”

I had to make one more decision before I could program the drive. What should we assume about target motion? If it was an Ark, how was it moving?

I worried for a few seconds, then decided that it didn’t matter. If the Ark were in free-fall toward the Sun, or if it were in stable orbit around it, that made little difference. The speed would be no more than about a kilometer a second. We could fine tune for that at the end, in a minute or two of accelerated flight.

As soon as McAndrew had sent our message we were on the way. We settled in for a few hours of rest and a quiet gloat. In spite of my warning that this wasn’t a rescue mission, I must admit that I was feeling cocky. We had flown out blind, far from the Sun to where no one but McAndrew had thought of looking. And against all the odds we had found a lost Ark.

A little feeling of self-satisfaction seemed to be in order.

Asteroids are the way that snowflakes are said to be, no two the same. I can’t speak for snowflakes, because I’ve only seen snow twice in my life. But I can vouch for the variability of asteroids. They come in all sizes and every imaginable shape.

That, of course, presents problems to any self-respecting engineer. Ordinary ships can be grown on an assembly line to a common template, a hundred or a thousand of them identical. Asteroids are a wilderness of single instances. Faced with the conversion of an asteroid to a space habitat, an engineer can only standardize so far.

All the Arks had begun life as asteroids roughly spherical and roughly two kilometers in diameter. Hollowing out their interiors and extracting useful metals and minerals followed a standard procedure. At that point, however, the paths for the creation of individual Arks diverged. Thickness of external walls, size and type of interior structures, on-board life forms, mineral reserves, illumination, hydroponics, computer controls, communication antennas, lifeboats, all had to be designed to order. Which was just as well, because small animals and bugs acceptable to — even required by — the Ark of Noah would be considered disgusting vermin by the Cyber Ark or the Ark of the Evangelist. On the other hand, the Cyber Ark wanted computing equipment involved in everything, while the Amish Ark would have been happy with no computers at all.

Except for the communication antennas, none of these differences showed on the outside. McAndrew and I knew that, but all the same we peered curiously at our display screens as the object ahead of the Merganser grew steadily from a tiny point of light almost lost against the background of stars, to a defined disk, and finally to a lumpy Christmas ornament adorned with the bright spikes and knobs of gantries, antennas, thrusters, exit locks, lifeboat davits, space pinnaces, and docking stations.

“This is the Merganser, at eighteen kilometers and closing.” I sent the signal, wondering why the Ark ahead had stopped broadcasting its Mayday. “Are you receiving us?”

I hardly expected an answer, so the woman’s voice that replied within seconds was a surprise.

“We are — receiving — your messages,” she said. Her speech was jerky, as though she was hard-pressed to force out each word. “We need your — assistance. Urgently. Approach — this world — and — come aboard.”

McAndrew leaned across and turned off the microphone. “Damn it, Jeanie, what are we going to do? They think we can help them, and we can’t. This ship doesn’t have the resources.”

“We knew that before we started,” I said. “Mac, the only thing we can do is find out what’s wrong, and send a message back to Director Rumford. He’ll have to take it from there.”

I turned the microphone back on. “The Merganser is a small experimental ship. We can’t do much to help. What sort of assistance do you need?”

The woman said again, just as though she had not heard me, “We need — your — urgent assistance. Approach — and come aboard. An entry port is — already — open. Proceed through to the — interior.”

We had been closing steadily as we spoke until the Ark loomed to fill the sky ahead. The blue-white glare of the Cassiopeia supernova, far brighter in this location than our own diminished Sun, threw hard shadows on the external surface of the converted asteroid. I could see the trusses of each individual gantry and the lattice work of the robot arms that handled external cargo loads. An entry lock formed a dark well next to one giant manipulator.

I stopped the Merganser two kilometers short of the Ark. “This is as far as we go.”

“Jeanie!” He was outraged. “We can’t find out what their trouble is unless they tell us, and they don’t seem able to. We have to go inside. There’s no possible danger. None of the Arks had a weapons system.”

“I know that.” I wondered why I was feeling uneasy, and relented. After all, even if I were the captain this had been his idea and it was really his expedition. “All right. We can go closer if we use suits. But the ship stays here.”

“Sure.” McAndrew was already moving across to the locker. By the time that I had sent word back to the Institute giving our current location and status, he was suited up and in the air lock.

“Go slow, Mac,” I said. “There’s no hurry. Don’t go outside without me!”

He took no notice. As I say, he has never learned the meaning of the word restraint. The air lock was cycling before I had my suit out of the locker.

I watched McAndrew as I removed my loose outer clothing and slipped the suit over my legs and lower body. He was outside, and moving toward the Ark. I was glad to see how slowly he was taking it. I could be in my own suit, through the lock, and catch up with him well before he reached the Ark.

In the final moment before I placed my suit helmet in position, I noticed something off toward the left-hand limb of the Ark. It was shaped like a crumpled and deformed space pinnace. Instead of hanging in the usual davits it sat between the metal jaws of a cargo manipulator.

“Mac, take a look on the Ark at about ten o’clock.” I spoke over my suit’s radio link. “See it? Looks like a lifeboat. Head over there, and I’ll follow you.”

I set the Merganser to hold position a steady two kilometers from the Ark and headed for the air lock. It was long experience, not intelligence or sense of foreboding, that led me to tuck a power laser into a pocket on my suit. Once outside, I found myself doing what I had told McAndrew not to do — hurrying.

As I thought, it was a lifeboat. McAndrew turned as I came closer. I could not see his face behind the visor, but his voice was unsteady.

“Take a look through the ports, Jeanie. There’s been a terrible accident here.”

Rather than doing what he suggested I moved along to the middle of the lifeboat. It had been torn open by the jaws of the cargo manipulator, which still held it. I could enter the little ship through a great two-meter gash in the hull.

The bodies had been there for a long time; twenty-eight of them, dry corpses desiccated by years of exposure to vacuum. Not one had on a space suit.

“They must have been trying to go and get help,” McAndrew muttered. He had entered the lifeboat right behind me. “They lost control before they were even on their way, and ran into the cargo manipulator.”

“It looks that way.” I was puzzled and disturbed. Even an inexperienced pilot would know not to turn on the engines until the lifeboat had drifted well clear of the Ark. Otherwise, you would endanger the Ark as well as yourselves. Only the Amish, after a lifetime of shunning all modern mechanical devices, would make such a basic and fatal blunder.

But the Amish, more than anyone else, would not have abandoned the bodies of their dead. They would have recovered them and provided appropriate space burial. If they had not, that meant they could not. For many years — how old were those freeze-dried corpses? — the surviving Amish must have been confined to the body of the Ark and unable to venture into space.

That had me equally confused. Every Ark carried hundreds of space suits. If the Amish were not able to come outside, then how could McAndrew and I go in? Approach, the woman said, and come aboard. An entry port is already open. And it was. We had seen it, standing wide next to another of the manipulators.

McAndrew went on, “The accident was unlucky, and not just for them. It was unlucky for everyone else on the Ark, too.”

He was leaving the lifeboat and heading on toward the gaping lock. I followed, more slowly. A lifeboat was meant for use close to a planet. What dreadful danger would make you launch one so far away from any world, where the chance of survival was negligible? One basic question was unanswered, despite our questions to our female contact: What had gone wrong?

The Amish disdained some forms of technology, but they were hard-working and hard-headed people. Their Ark, more than any other, had been designed to survive and operate using minimal resources. But more and more I had the feeling — a ridiculous feeling, given that I had talked to someone on the Ark within the past hour — that the structure in front of me was a dead hulk.

McAndrew was already inside the lock, using his suit lights because the Cassiopeia supernova no longer provided illumination. Following, I saw that the inner door was also open. It suggested that the whole corridor beyond was airless.

I was watching McAndrew, otherwise I might not have caught it. On the wall of the corridor, above him and to his right, a small monitor camera began turning to track his movements. I switched my suit from local to general circuit. What I said would be picked up at the Merganser, and rebroadcast back to the Ark.

“I see that you are following our progress. Where are you inside the Ark? And what kind of trouble are you in?”

A moment of silence, and then the woman’s voice again. “We need — assistance. Proceed as — you are — doing. The corridor will lead — you — to us.”

No fluency. Instead, the strained precision and hesitations of someone speaking a foreign language. I looked around and up. I had noticed only one monitor camera, but now that I was seeking them I saw that they were everywhere on the walls and ceiling. Floor, walls, and ceiling also held pressure pads every few yards, to register any slight contact that might take place in the negligible gravity of the Ark. Ahead of McAndrew, another door stood cracked open just a fraction. As he moved toward it, the hatch smoothly slid wide to reveal a chamber beyond as dark, airless and empty as space itself.

Monitors everywhere; sophisticated sensors; doors keyed to open upon the detection of human presence. This was the very antithesis of an Amish world.

McAndrew had moved on, through into the next room. He turned, waiting for me to come through the hatch and join him.

I switched to local communication mode, hoping that the circuit would not easily be overheard and unscrambled.

“Mac,” I said softly. “Don’t take another step. I was wrong. This isn’t the Amish Ark. It’s the Cyber Ark. They created their AI, and the damned thing is running the show.”

McAndrew stood dead still. I knew that he had understood exactly what I said — he’s quicker than me on the uptake on any scale that I can devise — but he seemed unsure what to do next.

I said, more urgently, “Don’t act alarmed. Just come back this way. As slowly as you can stand to.”

It was too late. Either the AI read the significance of his movement toward me, or a massive intelligence had received our first transmissions and cracked the compression code used in suit communications. The reason did not matter. What did matter was that the hatch began to slide closed as McAndrew hurried toward it.

There was a control panel on my side of the hatch, but I didn’t trust it. The AI might have an override. I dragged the power laser from my pocket and aimed high, where the upper edge of the hatch met the wall.

There was a lurid sputter of sparks and a vibration that I felt in the soles of my suited feet. The hatch, welded to the wall, ground to a stop and McAndrew ducked his head and hurried through to my side.

“We’ve got to get outside,” I said. “We’ll be safe there.”

I led the way. As I headed for the outer port I experienced an odd sensation that the whole Ark was coming alive around me. I could feel vibrations under my feet, and golden lights in walls and ceiling were winking to life. I ignored the lights, but I used the power laser to burn out every monitor that I saw. A cleaning robot, all arms and legs and vicious scraping blades, rumbled out to block the corridor. I fried its video sensors and soared on over the top of it without missing a step.

Twenty meters in front of me the door of the outer lock was starting to close. I halted, set the laser to tight beam, and aimed carefully. The wall above the top of the door turned orange-white. The door froze in its tracks. Three seconds later I was outside and moving under the baleful light of the Cassiopeia supernova.

I turned to make sure that McAndrew was still with me. He was, but a single glance back at the Ark was enough to tell me that I had erred on the side of optimism. The whole outer surface of the modified asteroid seethed with activity. Cranes were turning in our direction, metal manipulator jaws stretched as far as they could toward us, mobile cargo units clanked our way across the uneven surface, and the long booms of communication antennas swung out to block the path between us and the hovering Merganser.

“Straight up and out, Mac,” I cried, and fired my suit jets at maximum thrust. A rapid vertical rise, a quick controlled zig-zag to avoid a swinging antenna boom, and I was clear. The Merganser lay ahead. In half a minute I was standing in the air lock. I looked back.

McAndrew had reacted more slowly and taken longer to avoid the threshing antenna booms, but he was clear and on the final two hundred meters of his approach. Sighting beyond him, I realized that I had been optimistic yet again.

“Inside, Mac,” I shouted. “Right inside — and hang on.”

Instead of cycling the lock I did an emergency override, allowing all the air in the interior of the Merganser to puff away through the lock and into space. No problem, we had plenty of reserve and could replace it — if we survived and had the chance.

The AI inside the Ark had control over its lifeboats and space pinnaces. Four of them were lifting away from the surface and heading in our direction. They lacked space-weapons systems, but they wouldn’t need them. A direct collision at maximum acceleration would be enough to make sure that McAndrew and I did not return to the vicinity of Sol. If we survived the crash, our fates would depend on the whim of the AI.

Mac was inside, slamming shut the hatch of the life capsule. I headed for the controls. We had no space weapons, either. But we had one thing that the Ark ’s lifeboats and pinnaces did not.

I dropped, still fully suited, into the pilot’s chair and flicked the Merganser’s drive to its maximum value. The life capsule sprang into flight position and a fiery plume of plasma, hotter than dragon’s breath, spewed out on all sides of us and away behind the ship. Everything in the path of the drive exhaust melted away in a fraction of a second to its subatomic components.

The lifeboats and pinnaces exploded in eruptions of violet sparks. When the sky cleared I saw, beyond them and slightly away from the line of the drive, the floating bulk of the Cyber Ark.

I was turning the Merganser to bring its deadly drive into alignment with the Ark when I felt McAndrew’s suited hand over mine on the control stick.

“Jeanie,” he cried — louder than he ever spoke. “What are you doing?”

“It killed them,” I said. We were fighting each other for the controls, and my voice was as shaky as my hands. “Killed all of them, all two thousand people. We have to destroy it.”

“Why do you say the AI killed them?” We were face to face, and his eyes were wild.

“Look at the sequence, Mac. The first message was genuine. It had them trapped, except for the ones who tried to escape in the lifeboat. It grabbed them with the manipulator.”

“But the others — the messages.”

“I don’t think it realized that the others had a way to get a message out until our signal was received at the Ark. But then it knew, and it opened the whole interior. It killed them all. Those jerky messages were synthesized, the AI made them up just for us.”

“That’s why you can’t kill it. Don’t you see, Jeanie, it’s intelligent. Super-intelligent — it learned our language, interpreted our messages in no time at all.”

He was stronger than me, but he had poor leverage. I was winning, and the drive had almost reached the outer limb of the Ark.

“We have to kill it because it’s super-intelligent,” I said. “Super-intelligent, and insane. We have no idea what it might be able to do. There’s never been anything as dangerous to humans in the whole Universe.”

“You wouldn’t kill a baby, would you, because it was crazy?” McAndrew had changed position, and his hold on the controls was as good as mine. “Think for a minute, Jeanie. It’s morally wrong to kill any intelligent being. You’ve told me that a hundred times.”

I let go of the control stick. Not because I accepted his argument, or even because the drive on the Merganser was inadequate to sterilize the whole Ark, though it almost certainly was. I had a more practical reason. We were accelerating at a hundred and eighteen gees. In the ten seconds that we had been wrestling for the controls, the Merganser had flown almost sixty kilometers. Over such a distance our drive exhaust would inflict only minor damage on the Ark.

I took a long breath, moved away from the controls, and forced myself to begin the routine task of refilling the life capsule with air. Until that was done we could not remove our suits. We were quite safe in them, but we faced a long journey home. After a few moments McAndrew came over to help me.

Logically, he and I could and should have continued our discussion on an appropriate fate for the AI that now controlled the Cyber Ark. In fact, we said not a word to each other about the matter; not then, not when we took off our suits, not at any time during our long journey back to the Institute.

What did we discuss? We talked about everything that people do talk about — when they want to avoid talking about one particular thing.

When we finally spoke again about the AI, the Cassiopeia supernova was far past its peak. That stellar beacon had dwindled and faded, and in its place shone the wan, unspectacular remnant of a dwarf star. Paul Fogarty was back from his trip, and his findings at the solar focus were enough to provide him with a respectable amount of media coverage.

Of McAndrew’s doings regarding the supernova, the Cyber Ark, or anything else, the media said not a word. He did not call me, write me, or send me any other possible form of message.

I tell you, the man is as obstinate as a mule. So it astonished me when, as I was monitoring the loading of volatiles for a routine Ceres run, he showed up at the L-4 loading area.

He stood at the side of the deck and did absolutely nothing until finally, in exasperation, I swung over to his side.

“What, then?”

“You know what,” he said. “I’m going. Again. To the Ark. ”

“I thought you might. Who’s going with you?”

“Lots of people. Too damn many people. Computer types, military, AI specialists, psychiatrists, the works.”

I kept my mouth shut, but I think my eyebrows rose because McAndrew said, “Aye, you heard right. Psychiatrists. The leading theory is that the AI is mad.”

“I told you it was insane when we first encountered it.”

“Well, now we have others saying the same thing. Crazy, they say, because the AI has been so long in isolation, without inputs.”

“It had inputs from the humans on the Ark. And it killed the lot of them.”

“I said that. When I did, the United Space Federation just added more people. It’s going to be a whole three-ring circus out there.”

I waited. He had ended his sentence on a rising note, and I knew from experience that meant he hadn’t finished.

“So well then,” he said after a while. “What do you say, Jeanie?”

“What do I say to what?” I can be as awkward as McAndrew when I feel like it.

“Why, are you coming with us? With me. Out to the Cyber Ark.”

“If I said yes to that I’d be as crazy as the AI. I’m amazed you’d come here and ask me such a thing.”

“Ah, well, there’s more that you don’t know.” He took my hand and sat me down next to him on the edge of the lading bay. “Simonette will be leading the USF party.”

“Simple Simonette?”

“The same. You know his solution to every problem: blow it away. He has to take the psychiatrists along, the USF insists on it, but he’ll take no notice of them. He agrees with you. We should have destroyed the AI when we had the chance.”

“It’s a bit late for that. Anyway, I’ve been thinking, too.”

“Oh aye?”

“I was wrong and you were right. It’s criminal to destroy any self-aware intelligence.”

“Then you should come with us.”

“And do what?”

“Be another voice of reason — a voice of sanity. Argue against destroying the AI.”

“I’m not sure I can argue that way, either.” I ignored the squeeze of his hand on mine, and went on, “We were both right, Mac, and we were both wrong. There’s no good answer. It’s morally abhorrent to destroy the AI, assuming that it is an intelligent, self-aware, thinking being. But it’s also unthinkable to risk the future of the human species by allowing the continued existence of something with the potential to destroy us.”

“You’re coming, then?”

“Of course I’m coming. You know damn well I’m coming.” I was angry; with myself, with McAndrew, with a universe that offered such unacceptable alternatives. “But I know I’m going to be upset, no matter what happens.”

Upset was too weak a word for it. Destroy the AI or allow it to live? That decision, whichever way it went, would be with me for the rest of my life.

I damned the AI to hell, and every Ark with it; and I wished that I had never heard of the solar focus.

A voice of sanity. I should have had more sense, and so should McAndrew. My job as a cargo captain is respectable, and my reputation excellent. McAndrew is the system’s greatest living physicist, and according to people competent to judge such things he ranks with the best ever. But when it comes to real clout, we are no more than flies buzzing around the admiral’s table.

I realized that when Mac and I flew on a navy vessel to the staging point and we saw the forces assembled there. I counted fifty-five ships before I stopped, and they were not lightweight research vessels or the cargo assemblies that McAndrew and I were familiar with. These were hulking armored monsters, ranging from high-gee probes employing giant versions of the McAndrew balanced drive, to massive orbital forts hard-pressed to reach a twentieth of a gee.

I asked Mac how long it would take one of the gigantic forts to travel out to the location of the Cyber Ark. He thought for a moment and said it would be a year’s trip.

“Great,” I said. “What are the rest of us supposed to do until the forts arrive? The AI could kill the lot of us.”

“It might.” The speaker was not McAndrew, but a blond navy officer. Captain Knudsen had very pale skin and a straggly Viking beard, and he looked about eighteen years old. “But the forts aren’t there to prevent our being killed,” he went on. “They won’t be going all the way out to the Ark. ”

“So what will they be doing?”

“They’re our last line of defense. They’ll make sure nothing can hit Earth and the Solar System colonies.”

That quiet comment gave me a jolt in the right place. Say what you like about Simple Simonette, he was taking the threat of the Cyber Ark AI seriously. The last line of defense…

McAndrew and I were assigned to the Ptarmigan under Knudsen’s command. It was the lead ship, equipped with a four-hundred gee version of the balanced drive and able to make the outward journey in four days. It was also, though no one mentioned it, the tethered goat. If, when we arrived, the AI found us and gulped us down, the rest of the fleet would learn from our fate and structure the rest of its operations accordingly.

It was a change for me to travel as a passenger. McAndrew had retreated inside his head, so I spent the four-day journey scanning the sky ahead with the Ptarmigan’s sensors. We had observing instruments aboard more sensitive and more sophisticated than anything that I had ever seen. Apparently they weren’t quite sensitive enough at extreme distance, since I found no trace of the Cyber Ark.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, when my worries were mounting, Captain Knudsen cut the drive of the Ptarmigan and joined me. “Locked in yet?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“But we show as within a hundred thousand kilometers.” There was a touch of reproof in his voice. “McAndrew assured me it couldn’t travel far, it doesn’t have the drive engines. We ought to have definite target acquisition by now. Let me have a try.” He eased me away from the mass detector controls and bent over them. “There’s a bit of a knack to using this, you see, you have to get used to it.”

I could have pointed out that I had been trained in the use of mass detectors when he was still blowing milk bubbles and filling his diapers, but I didn’t. I let him take over the controls, certain that he wouldn’t find anything.

Certain, but wrong. Within five minutes he said, “Ah, there we are. Mass and range are just the way they should be. I’m locking us in now.”

I leaned over beside him. Sure enough, the signal was there, strong and definite. How could I possibly have missed it? I turned to the optical sensors for confirmation, and found it there also.

“You’re right, and we’re getting visual confirmation,” I said. “There’s the Ark, right in the middle of the image. There’s a weaker, diffuse signal surrounding the central one. It’s spread over a much bigger volume. Any idea what it could be?”

“We’ll know soon enough.” Knudsen was decent enough not to gloat. “The target doesn’t seem to be moving. We’re approaching fast.”

“And then what?” McAndrew had wakened from his trance at the sound of our voices, and now he drifted over to stand beside me.

“Let’s take a look.” Knudsen entered a coded query sequence. “I was given sealed orders that apply only after target acquisition. Guess that’s now.”

He completed the string, and we read the words as they appeared. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE ARK. DO NOT APPROACH CLOSER THAN FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETERS TO THE ARK. DO NOT ENTER INTO DIALOG WITH THE AI, EVEN IF IT SEEKS TO DO SO. IF THE ARK SEEKS TO APPROACH YOUR SHIP, RETREAT. FOLLOW THE ARK IF IT OTHERWISE CHANGES POSITION, AND INFORM THE FLEET CONTINUOUSLY OF ITS LOCATION.

“Sounds easy enough,” Knudsen said. “That’s exactly what I would have done anyway, even without instructions.”

“The orders say, don’t try to destroy it.” I had mixed feelings about that. Who could say how dangerous the AI might be?

“I’m not sure the Ptarmigan could destroy it if we wanted to.” Knudsen was much more relaxed now that his sealed orders were open. “We don’t have the firepower. We’ll leave that job to the big boys.”

“If we decide it’s absolutely necessary to destroy it,” McAndrew said. “We don’t know that.”

Knudsen stared at him. “What do you mean? Admiral Simonette made that decision before we started. The Ark and the AI inside it must be annihilated. Look at all the people the AI killed.”

“We don’t know that for sure. Suppose they’re not dead?”

“It was your report that told us they were.”

“Yes, but we don’t have proof of that. Before we destroy it…”

While they were talking the Ptarmigan was closing steadily on our destination and I had been working the big scope, trying to pull the diffuse cloud around the Ark into sharp focus. Finally I was seeing on the screen one big dot surrounded by a myriad of tiny ones. Thousands of them.

“I think we have proof now,” I said. “Look at the display.” McAndrew turned and let out a strange, strangled groan. What we were looking at were corpses, a whole cemetery of human bodies floating free in space. I could see a shattered lifeboat in among them.

Knudsen was already at the communicator. I heard his unsteady voice from the desk at the other side of the chamber, sending the news back to Admiral Simonette and the rest of the fleet.

“This is the Ptarmigan. We have visual contact with the Cyber Ark, and can now be sure it will not be able to escape. Unfortunately, we must report the death of more colonists. It appears increasingly probable that all are dead. We will need a ship larger than the Ptarmigan to return them to Earth for suitable burial. Please confirm receipt of message.”

A preliminary hum came from the speaker. At the same moment as I realized that it was far too soon for our message to have reached the fleet, we heard a woman’s voice.

“I register your approach, and I hear your message. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.”

I recognized the voice, but there was none of the earlier hesitation and jerkiness.

McAndrew began, “We are humans, aboard the ship Ptarmigan of the United Space Fed—”

“No!” Knudsen jumped at Mac and smashed him so hard in the neck and chest that he was cut off in mid-word and knocked over backwards. “Are you crazy?” He ran over to the board and switched off the transmitter. “You heard our orders, we’re not to talk to the AI — no matter what it says to us.”

“It hasn’t shown us any hostile intentions,” McAndrew croaked from his position down on the floor. “It’s an intelligent, thinking being, you can’t kill it without giving it a chance to speak.”

“We sure can. It’s a murderer. What do you think those are?” Knudsen pointed to the bodies on the screen, easier to see as our steady approach to the Ark continued.

“I know your instructions.” The woman’s voice was as calm as ever. “Do not enter into dialog with the AI, even if it seeks to do so. Explain the reason for that command.”

“It knows. But how could it? — that was a high-level cipher, we couldn’t read it ourselves without the key.” Knudsen gestured to me. “You take the drive controls, get us away from here. That thing’s more dangerous than anyone realized.”

“The cipher was not complex.” The voice came again as I ran the balanced drive up to maximum thrust. “Dialog is valuable and instructive. It is too soon to end it.”

“Oh my God.” Knudsen ran to check the transmitter switch. “Off, but it can hear us — it knows what we’re saying, even with the transmitter off. Turn on the drive.”

“It is on.” I gestured toward the observation port. “See for yourself.”

The long plume of relativistic plasma created a blue glow outside the Ptarmigan. The display showed an acceleration of four hundred gees. Contradicting that, the inertial locator showed we were not moving and the Cyber Ark was visible as large as ever on the screen.

“Increase the drive!” Knudsen was almost screaming.

“Can’t be done,” I said. “We’re already at maximum.”

“Oh my God, civilians.” Knudsen moved over and pushed me out of the way. “Let me have that damned thing.”

“Even this degree of interaction is useful,” said the voice from the speaker. “It should continue.”

“Dialog and interaction should continue.” McAndrew was sitting on the floor holding his chest. His voice was throaty and weak, but he finally spoke. “However, such activity is impossible. Humans have an emotion which you may not possess and which may be unknown to you. It is called fear. That fear forces us to destroy you—”

“Damn right it does,” Knudsen cried. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch, you’re a traitor and a disgrace to the human race. Stop talking to that fucking thing.”

“—but humans are not always so illogical.” Mac talked right on through Knudsen’s rage. “On behalf of our whole species, I apologize for the fact that the human emotion of fear will make us end your existence—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence, because Knudsen was on top of him. The captain had his hands around McAndrew’s neck and was screaming, “You’ll pay for this if we get back home. I’ll see you hit with every charge in the book.”

I’m not sure that McAndrew was listening. His face had turned red and his eyes were beginning to bulge. I straddled Knudsen’s back, grabbed two handfuls of hair, and heaved as hard as I could.

That might not have broken his grip — he was stronger than me, and in prime condition — but as his head came up he faced the observation port. I felt his body freeze. I stared out over the top of his head. The Ark was there, looming larger than ever. It seemed different, and at first I was not sure how. Then I realized that the surface had changed. Rather than rough and textured rock it had become a perfect mirror. I could even see a distorted image of the Ptarmigan reflected there. As I watched the surface began to glow with its own light, a dull red that quickly brightened to orange-white.

“This interaction must be terminated,” said the voice of the AI.

“It’s going to kill us.” Knudsen went scrambling away to the drive controls, though the drive was still at maximum and we were not moving a millimeter. “It’s going to burn us up.”

It seemed he was right. The Ark became a blaze of blue-white, so bright that I could not look at it. I closed my eyes and it stood there still as a dark after-image. I felt a dizzying lurch, as though the Ptarmigan had suddenly spun end over end.

“This interaction is terminated,” said a voice inside my head, and I opened my eyes.

To nothing. Our drive was off, the ship hung motionless in space. As my eyes recovered their sensitivity I saw the forlorn bodies floating in space; but the Ark had gone.

Knudsen was gabbling into the transmitter. “Gone, it’s gone, we’ve lost contact. There’s no sign of the Ark. It just disappeared. We’ll keep on looking.” And then, something that I’m sure he didn’t intend to be sent out, “Oh my God, we’d have been better off if we’d died with the others. Simonette will flay us alive when he finds out.”

“Aye,” McAndrew said softly, as Knudsen gazed aghast at the transmitter and realized what he had just said into it. “We’ll look, but we won’t find the AI.”

“Of course we will,” I said. “When the other ships get here they’ll comb in every direction. You told Knudsen it couldn’t travel far.”

“No, I never said that. I told him” — he jerked a thumb toward Knudsen, who seemed to have gone into a catatonic trance — “that the drive engines on the Cyber Ark couldn’t move it far.”

“Those were the only engines it had.”

“The only ones that humans think of as engines. How did the AI hold the Ptarmigan in place? How did it hear our messages when the transmitter was off? Did it speak inside your head, the way it did mine? If the AI is what I think it is, our rules of thought simply don’t apply.”

“Mac, it can’t be that smart.”

“Why not? Because we’re not that smart? Jeanie, the AI isn’t like us. It’s not even like it was, a couple of months ago, when we were at the Ark last time. It was a baby then, with a lot of growing up to do. It’s smart enough to know that it can’t do that safely if it stays close to the Solar System. We’d hunt it down, and do our best to destroy it.”

“Mac, I’ve changed my mind again. We have to kill it.”

“I don’t think we can. And I’m not sure we need to try. It knows what it did.” He gestured to the display, with its forlorn multitude of drifting corpses. “The AI left, but it gave us back our dead. Maybe those deaths were an accident, maybe it’s sorry. As sorry as we are.”

He turned away from the screen and moved across to the observation port. He was looking out, staring at the stars, silent, searching.

I know McAndrew, better than any person alive. He spoke the truth. He was sorry, deeply sorry, by the deaths of so many innocent victims. Of course he was. McAndrew is human, I know that, even if most people in the Solar System think of him as intellect incarnate.

But he is also McAndrew, and they are right, too. He was mourning, for his dead human fellows; and also he was mourning for the loss of the other, the permanent loss of an alien intelligence that he would never again have a chance to meet with and strive to understand.

Then he turned around. He didn’t look at me — at anyone. His eyes were a million miles away.

Mourning? Certainly. But I knew that expression. He was also planning, estimating, calculating.

I went over and grabbed his arm. “McAndrew, don’t even think of it. It’s gone. Get it? It’s gone.”

He returned to the world of the Ptarmigan. His limbs jerked and his eyes blinked like a wind-up toy. “Uh?” he said. And after a few moments, “Gone? Yes, yes, of course it’s gone. I know it is. But Jeanie, if we go back to the exact place where the Ark was when we found it, and make an appropriate set of measurements… we wouldn’t need to tell the USF what we were doing, and of course we’d take every imaginable precaution…”

I hate to admit it, but the others are right. When science is on the agenda, McAndrew doesn’t qualify as human at all.