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Her face flushed red and her eyes glowed — she looked more attractive than ever. “How can that happen?”
“I don’t know, but it’s standard physics. Ask McAndrew.” (I knew well enough, but I’d had more than I wanted of this conversation.)
It was like that all the time. We found it hard to agree on anything, and it became clear as soon as we were on the way that A
Yet McAndrew — I thought at first I was imagining it — McAndrew was the eye of the hurricane. When she was within two yards of him, A
It was sickening.
And McAndrew — the great lout — he lapped it up.
“What’s she doing?” I said to Bayes when the other two were out of earshot. “She’s making a fool of herself.”
He winked at me. “You think so, and I think so — but does he think so? Before we left she told me to get a full dossier about him and bring it on this trip. She’s been reading it, too. You have to know A
“Don’t be silly. She doesn’t even like him.”
“She does, you know.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I know A
I snorted. “With Mac? That’s ridiculous! He belongs to — to science.” And I fully believed it, until one morning I found myself applying a pheromonal amplifier behind my ears, and dressing in a new lime-green uniform that fitted a lot closer than my standard garb.
And McAndrew — the great lout — he never noticed or said one word.
While this was going on, we were hurtling outward away from the Sun. With our acceleration at a hundred gee, the living-capsule was snuggled in close to the massplate. The plate’s gravitational attraction just about balanced the body force on us produced by the ship’s acceleration, leaving us in a comfortable and relaxing half-gee environment. The tidal forces caused by the gravity gradient were noticeable only if you looked for them. McAndrew’s vacuum drive worked flawlessly, as usual, tapping the zero point energy — “sucking the marrow out of spacetime,” as one of Mac’s colleagues put it.
“I don’t understand,” I’d once said to him. “It gets energy out of nothing.”
McAndrew looked at me reproachfully. “That’s what they used to say in 1910, when mad scientists thought you might get energy from the nucleus of an atom. Jeanie, I thought better of you.”
All right, I was squelched — but I didn’t understand the drive one bit better.
At the halfway mark we rotated the ship to begin deceleration and I cut the drive while we did it. A
For me, this should have been the best part of the mission, the reason I remain in space and never look for a Downside job. With the drive off we flew starward in perfect silence. I stayed by the port, watching the wheel of heaven as the ship turned.
The Hoatzin was within five percent of light-speed. As we performed our end-over-end maneuver, the colors of the starscape Doppler-shifted slowly from red to blue. I caught a last glimpse of Sol and its attendants before the massplate shielded them from view. Jupiter was visible through the optical telescope, a tiny point of light a fifth of a degree away from the Sun’s dazzling disk. Earth was gone. Its reflected photons had been lost on their hundred-and-fifty-billion mile outward journey.
I turned the telescope ahead, in a hopeless search for Ma
With little else to occupy her attention, A
As for Mac, he had disappeared again inside his head. We had loaded a library of references on Lanhoff and the organic materials of the Halo into the computer before we left the Institute. He spent many hours absorbing that information and processing it in the curiously structured personal computer he carries inside his skull. I knew better than to interrupt him. After just a couple of futile attempts to divert him, A
“I can see why there ought to be a lot of prebiotic organic stuff out in the Halo,” she said during one of our pla
It was still the “Griss-Lanhoff” Theory for official records, but with us A
McAndrew was idly lifting and lowering a weighted bar. He hated exercise, but he grudgingly went along with general USF orders for spaceborne perso
“It is cold in the Halo,” he said. “Just a few degrees above absolute zero, in most of the bodies. But it may not be too cold.”
“It’s much too cold for us.”
“Certainly. That’s Lanhoff’s point. We know only about the enzymes found on Earth. They allow chemical reactions to proceed in a certain temperature regime. Why shouldn’t there be other life-supporting enzymes that can operate at far lower temperatures?”
A
“I think so.” McAndrew paused in his leisurely bar-lifting. “Lanhoff argues that with plenty of complex organic molecules and with a hundred billion separate bodies available, a lot of things might develop in four billion years. He expected to find life somewhere out here — primitive life, probably, but recognizable to us. He was prepared to find it, and the Star Harvester was equipped to bring back samples.”
We dropped the subject there, but it went ru