The Compleat McAndrews

“Awake at last,” He made a sort of coughing noise, something that I think was intended to be a laugh. “You’re a cool one, Captain Roker. I couldn’t sleep with that hanging there” — he jerked his thumb at the screen — “even if you doped me up with everything in the robodoc.”

“How long did I sleep?”

“About three hours. Ready to give up now?”

I was. It had been my idea, an insistence that we ought to try and get some sleep before we did the next phase of our maneuver around HC-183. Wenig had opposed it, had wanted to go on at once, but I thought we’d benefit from the rest. So I was wrong.

“I’m ready.” My eyes felt as though they’d been filled with grit, and my throat was dry and sore, but talking about that to Wenig wouldn’t do much for McAndrew or Nina Velez. “Let’s get into position and try the radar.”

While Wenig juggled us over to the best position, sixty thousand kilometers from HC-183 and about the same distance from the Merganser, I wondered again about my companion. They had drawn lots to come with me, and he had won. The other four scientists back at the Institute seemed a little naive and unworldly, but not Wenig. He was tough and shrewd, and I had seen the speed of those hands, dancing over the keyboard. Had he done a bit of juggling when they drew lots, a touch of hand-faster-than-the-eye?

I thought of his look when he spoke about Nina. If McAndrew was infatuated, perhaps Wenig shared the spell. Something strong was driving him along, some force that could keep him awake and alert for days on end. I wouldn’t know if I was right or not unless we could find a way to haul Merganser back out of the field. The ship still hovered over its pendant of blue ionized gases, motionless as ever.

“How about this?” Wenig interrupted my thoughts. “I don’t think I can get the geometry any better than it is now.”

We were hanging there too, farther out from the proto-planet than the Merganser but close enough to see the black disk occulting the star field. We could beam short bursts of microwaves at our sister ship and hope there was enough signal strength to bore through the sheaths of plasma emitted by the drives. It would be touch and go — I had never tried to send a signal to an unma

I nodded, and Wenig sent out our first pulses, the simple ship ID codes. We sent it for a couple of minutes, then waited with our attention fixed on the screen.

After a while Wenig shook his head. “We’re not getting through. It wouldn’t take that long to respond to our signal.”

“Send it with reduced information rate and more redundancy. We have to give McAndrew enough to filter out the noise.”

He was still in send mode when the display screen began to crawl with green patterns of light. Something was coming in. The computer was performing a frequency analysis to pick out the signal content from the background, smoothing it, and speeding it up to standard communication rate. We were looking at the Fourier analysis that preceded signal presentation.

“Voice mode,” said Wenig quietly.

“Merganser.” The computer reconstruction of McAndrew’s voice was slow and hollow. “This is McAndrew from the Merganser. We’re certainly glad to hear from you, Dotterel. Well, Jeanie, what kept you?”

“Roker speaking.” I leaned forward and spoke into the vocal input system — too fast, but the computer would take care of that at the other end. “Mac, we’re hanging about sixty kay out from you. Is everything all right in Merganser?”

“Yes.”

“No,” broke in another voice. “Get us out of here. We’ve been stuck in this damned metal box for sixteen days now.”

“Nina,” said Wenig. “We’d love to get you out — but we don’t know how. Didn’t Dr. McAndrew tell you the problem?”

“He said we couldn’t leave here until the ship you are on came for us.”

Wenig grimaced at me and turned away from the input link. “I ought to have realized that. McAndrew hasn’t told her the problem with the drives — not all of it.”

“Maybe he knows an answer.” I faced back to the microphone. “Mac, as we see it we shouldn’t put the Dotterel up as high as fifty gee thrust. Correct?”

“Of course.” McAndrew sounded faintly surprised at my question. “Why do you think I went to such lengths to get to this holding position out here? When you go to maximum setting for the drive, the electromechanical coupling for moving the life-capsule gets distorted, too.”

“How did we miss it on the design?” Wenig sounded unconvinced.

“Remember the last-minute increase in stabilizing fields for the mass plate?”

“It was my recommendation — I’m not likely to forget it.”

“We recalculated the effects on the drive and on the exhaust region, but not the magnetostrictive effects on the life-support column. We thought they were secondorder changes.”

“And they’re not? I ought to be drawn and quartered — that was my job!” Wenig was sitting there, fists clenched and face red.

“Was it now? Och, your job, eh? And I’ve been sitting here thinking all this time it was my job.” For someone in a hopeless position thirty billion miles from home, McAndrew sounded amazingly cool. “Come on now, we can sort out whose doing it was when we’re all back at the Institute.”

Wenig looked startled, then turned to me again. “Go along with him on this — I’m sure he’s doing it for Nina’s sake. He doesn’t want her worried.”

I nodded — but this time I was unconvinced. Mac must have something hidden away inside his head, or not even Nina Velez would justify his optimistic tone.

“What should we do, Mac?” I said. “We’d get the same effects if we were to accelerate too hard. We can’t get down to you, and you can’t get up to us without accelerating out past us. How are we going to get you out of there?”

“Right.” The laugh that came over the com-link sounded forced and hollow, but that may have been just the tone that the computer filters gave it. “You might guess that’s been on my mind too. The problem’s in the mechanical coupling that moves the life-capsule along the column. It’s easy enough to see, once you imagine that you’ve had a two millimeter decrease in column diameter — that’s the effects of the added field on the mass plate.”

Wenig was already calling the schematics out onto a second display. “I’ll check that. Keep talking.”

“You’ll see that when the drive’s up to maximum, the capsule catches on the side of the column. It’s a simple ratchet effect. I’ve tried varying the drive thrust up and down a couple of gee, but that won’t free it.”

“I see where you mean.” Wenig had a lightpen out and was circling parts of the column for larger scale displays. “I don’t see how we can do anything about it. It would take a lateral impact to free it — you’ll not do it by varying your drive.”

“Agreed. We need some lateral force on us. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll provide.”

“What is all this?” It was Nina’s voice again, and she sounded angry. “Why do you just keep on talking like that? Anybody who knew what he was doing would have us out by now — would never have got us into it in the first place if he had any sense.”

I raised an eyebrow at Wenig. “The voice of infatuation? I think the bloom’s off the rose down there.”

He looked startled, then pleased, then excited — and then tried to appear nonchalant. “I don’t know what McAndrew is getting at. How could we provide any help?” He turned to the input system. “Dr. McAndrew, how’s that possible? We can’t provide a lateral force on Merganser from here, and we can’t come down safely.”

“Of course you can.” McAndrew’s voice sounded pleased, and I was sure he was enjoying making the rest of us try and work out his idea. “It’s very easy for you to come down here.”