Charles Sheffield - The Compleat McAndrews

Wenig took his hands off the controls and turned to me, palms spread. “But then what can we do? We don’t know where they were going, all we can do is try and follow the same track.”

“I’m not sure. All I know is what we’re not going to do — and we’re not trying for top acceleration. Didn’t you say you’d flown Merganser at twenty gee?”

“Several times.”

“Then take us out along Mac’s trajectory at twenty gee until we’re outside the System. Then cut the drive. I want to use our sensors, and we won’t be able to do that from the middle of a ball of plasma.”

Wenig looked at me. I know he was mentally accusing me of cowardice. “Captain Roker,” he said quietly. “I thought we were in a hurry. We may be weeks following Merganser the way you are proposing.”

“Yeah. But we’ll get there. Can Mac’s support system last that long?”

“Easily.”

“Then don’t let’s kick it around any more. Let’s do it. Twenty gee, as soon as you can give it to us.”

The Dotterel worked like a dream. At twenty gee acceleration relative to the Solar System, we didn’t feel anything unusual at all. The disk pulled us towards it at twenty-one gee, the acceleration of the ship pulled us away from it at twenty gee, and we sat there in the middle at a snug and comfortable standard gravity. I couldn’t even feel the tidal forces, though I knew they were there. We had poor communications with the Penrose Institute, but we’d known that and expected to make up for it when we cut the drive.

Oddly enough, the first phase of the trip wasn’t scary — it was boring. I wanted to get up to a good cruise speed before we coasted free. It gave me the chance to probe another mystery — one that seemed at least as strange as the disappearance of the Merganser .

“What were you doing at the Institute, allowing Nina Velez aboard the ship?”

“She heard that we were developing a new drive — don’t ask me how. Maybe she saw the Institute’s budget.” Wenig sniffed. “I don’t trust the security at the USF Headquarters.”

“And you let her talk her way in, and you forced McAndrew to take her with him on a test flight ?”

If I sounded mad, I felt madder. Mac’s life meant more than the dignity of some smooth-assed bureaucrat in the Institute’s front office.

Dr. Wenig looked at me coldly. “I think you misunderstand the situation. Nina Velez was not forced onto Professor McAndrew by the “front office” — for one thing, we have no such thing. The Institute is run by its members. You want to know why Miss Velez is on board the Merganser ? I’ll tell you. McAndrew insisted that she go with him.”

“Bullshit!” There were some things I couldn’t believe. “Why the hell would Mac let himself go along with that? I know him, even if you don’t. Over his dead body.”

Wenig sighed. He was leaning on a couch across from me, sipping a glass of white wine — no hardship tours for him.

“Four weeks ago I’d have echoed your comments exactly,” he said. “Professor McAndrew would never agree to such a thing, right? But he did. Putting this simply, Captain Roker, it is a case of infatuation. A bad one. I think that—”

He stopped, outraged. I had started to laugh, in spite of the seriousness of our situation.

“What’s so funny, Captain?”

“Well.” I shrugged. “The whole thing’s funny. Not funny, it’s preposterous. McAndrew is a great physicist, and Nina Velez may be the President’s daughter, but she’s just a young newswoman. Anyway, he and I — he wouldn’t—”

Now I stopped. I wondered if Wenig was going to get up and hit me, he looked so mad.

“Captain Roker, I don’t like your insinuation,” he said. “McAndrew is a physicist — so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study , not a surgical operation. Castration isn’t part of the Ph.D. exams, you know.” His tone dripped sarcasm. I wouldn’t have liked a two-month trip to Titan with young Dr. Wenig.

“Anyway,” he went on. “You have managed to jump to a wrong conclusion. It was not Professor McAndrew who suffered the initial infatuation. It was Nina Velez. She thinks he is wonderful. She came to do an interview, and before any of us knew what was going on she was in his office all day. All night, too, after the first week.”

I was wrong. I know that now, and I think I knew it then, but I was too peeved to make an immediate apology to Wenig. Instead, I said, “But if she was the one that wanted him, couldn’t he just throw her out?”

“Nina Velez?” Wenig gave a bark of laughter. “You’ve never met her, I assume? She’s a President’s daughter, and whatever Nina wants, Nina gets. She started it, but inside a couple of days she had Professor McAndrew behaving like a true fool. It was disgusting, the way he went on.”

( You’re jealous, Wenig , I said, jealous of Mac’s good luck — but I said it to myself.)

“And she persuaded McAndrew to let her go out on the Merganser ? What were the rest of you doing?”

He reddened. “Professor McAndrew was not the only one behaving like a fool. Why do you think Limperis, Siclaro and I feel like murderers? The two women on the team, Gowers and Macedo, insisted that Nina Velez should not go near the ships. We overruled them. Now, Captain Roker, maybe you see why each of us wanted to come after McAndrew. We drew lots, and I was the winner.

“And maybe you should think of one other thing. While you are looking at our motives, and laughing at them, maybe you ought to look at your own. You look angry. I think you are jealous — jealous of Nina Velez.”

It’s a good thing that we had to follow our flight plan at that point, and prepare to cut the drive, or I don’t know what I would have done to Dr. Wenig. I’m a shade taller than he is, and I outweigh him by maybe ten pounds, but he looked fit and wiry. It wouldn’t have been a foregone conclusion, not at all.

Our descent into savagery was saved by the insistent buzzer of the computer, telling us to be ready for the drive reduction. We sat there, furious and not looking at each other, as the acceleration was slowly throttled back and the capsule moved away from the disk to resume its free-flight position two hundred and fifty meters behind it. The move took ten minutes. By the time it was over we had cooled off. I managed a graceless apology for my implied insults, and Wenig just as uncomfortably accepted it and said that he was sorry for what he had been saying and thinking.

I didn’t ask him what he had been thinking — there was a hint that it was much worse than anything that he had said.

We had cut the drive at a little more than one hundred astronomical units from the Sun and were coasting along at a quarter of the speed of light. The computer gave us automatic Doppler compensation, so that we could hold an accurate communication link back to the Institute, through Triton Station. Conversation wasn’t easy, because the round-trip delay for signals was almost twenty-eight hours — all we expected to be able to do was send “doing fine” messages to Limperis and the others.

Our forward motion was completely imperceptible, though I fancied that I could see a reddening of stars astern and a bluer burn to stars ahead of us. We were well beyond the edge of the planetary part of the System, out where only the comets and the kernels lived. I put all our sensors onto maximum gain and Wenig and I settled in to a quiet spell of close watching. He had asked me what we were looking for. I had told him the truth: I had no idea, of what or when.

We crept on, farther and farther out. I don’t know if you can actually creep at a quarter of light speed, but that’s the way it felt; blackness, the unchanging stars, and a dwarfed Solar System far behind us.