Hidden Variables (36 page)

"If they don't use the interior material to extend the surface of the Ark?" he said. "Give them the same room as we'd allow on Earth, six meters by six meters by two meters. They could hold nearly sixty million. Halve that, maybe, to allow for recycling and maintenance equipment."

"But that is not our aim," said Kleeman. She had overheard my question. "We are stabilized at ten thousand. We are not like the fools back on Earth. Quality is our aim, not mindless numbers."

She had that tone in her voice again, the one that had made me instinctively avoid the question of how long we would be staying on the Ark. Heredity is a potent influence. I couldn't speak about Jules Massingham, the founder of this Ark, but his daughter was a fanatic. I have seen others like her over the years. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with the prime objective: build the Ark's population on sound eugenic principles. Kleeman was polite to me—I was "prime stock"—but she had her eye mainly on McAndrew. He would be a wonderful addition to her available gene pool.

Well, the lady had taste. I shared some of that attitude myself. "Father unknown" was literally true and Mac and I had not chosen to elaborate. Our daughter had rights, too, and Jan's parentage would not be officially known unless she chose after puberty to take the chromosome matching tests.

Over the next six days, McAndrew and I worked our way into the life pattern aboard the Ark. The place ran like a clock, everything according to a schedule and everything in the right position. I had a good deal of leisure time, which I used to explore the less-popular corridors, up near the Hub. McAndrew was still obsessed with his search for physicists.

"No sense here," he growled to me, after a meal in the central dining area out on the Ark's equator. As I had guessed, effective gravity there was about a tenth of a gee. "I've spoken to a couple of dozen of their scientists. There's not one of them would last a week at the Institute. Muddled minds and bad experiments."

He was angry. Usually McAndrew was polite to all scientists, even ones who couldn't understand what he was doing, still less add to it.

"Have you seen them all? Maybe Kleeman is keeping some of them from us."

"I've had that thought. She's talked to me every day about the Council of Intellects, and I've seen some of the things they've produced. But I've yet to meet one of them, in person." He shrugged, and rubbed at his sandy, receding hairline. "After we've slept I'm going to try another tack. There's a schoolroom over on the other side of the Ark, where I gather Kleeman keeps people who don't seem quite to fit into her ideas. Want to take a look there with me, tomorrow?"

"Maybe. I'm wondering what Kleeman has in mind for me. I think I know her plans for you, she sees you as another of her senior brains." I saw the woman herself approaching us across the wide room, with its gently curving floor. "You'd like it, I suspect. It seems to be like the Institute, but members of the Council have a lot more prestige."

I had immediate proof that I was right. Kleeman seemed to have made up her mind. "We need a commitment from you now, McAndrew," she said. "There is a coming vacancy on the Council. You are the best person to fill it."

McAndrew looked flattered but uncomfortable. The trouble was, it really
did
interest him, I could tell that. The idea of a top-level brains trust had appeal.

"All right," he said after a few moments. He looked at me, and I could tell what he was thinking. If we were going to be on our way back home soon, it would do no harm to help the Ark while he was here. They could use all the help available.

Kleeman clapped her hands together softly; plump white hands that pointed out her high position—most people on the Ark had manual duties to keep the place running, with strict duty rosters.

"Wonderful! I will plan for your induction tomorrow. Let me make the announcement tonight, and we can speed up the proceedings for the outgoing member."

"You always have a fixed number of members?" asked McAndrew.

She seemed slightly puzzled by his question. "Of course. Exactly twelve. The system was designed for that number."

She nodded at me and hurried away across the dining area, a determined little woman who always got her way. Since we first arrived she had never ceased to tell McAndrew that he must become the father of many children; scores of children; hundreds of children. He looked more and more worried as she increased the number of his future progeny.

The next morning I went on with my own exploration of the Ark, while McAndrew made a visit to the Ark's oddities, the people who didn't seem to fit Kleeman's expectations. We met to eat together, as usual, and I had a lot on my mind. I had come across an area in the center of the Ark where power supply lines and general purpose tube inputs increased enormously, but it did not seem to be a living area. Everything led to one central area, but one accessible only with a suitable code. I puzzled over it while I waited for McAndrew to appear.

The whole Ark was bustling with excitement. Kleeman had made the announcement of McAndrew's coming incorporation to the Council of Intellects. People who had scarcely spoken to him before stopped us and shook his hand solemnly, wishing him well and thanking him for his devotion to the welfare of the Ark. While I drank an aperitif of glucose and dilute ascorbic acid, preparations for a big ceremony were going on around me. A new Council member was a big event.

When I saw McAndrew threading his way towards me past a network of new scaffolding, I knew his morning had been more successful than mine. His thin face was flushed with excitement and pleasure. He slid into the seat opposite me.

"You found your physicist?" I hardly needed to ask the question.

He nodded. "Up on the other side, in a maximum gravity segment right across from here. He's—you have no idea—he's—" McAndrew was practically gibbering in his excitement.

"Start from the beginning." I leaned across and took his hands in mine.

"Yes. I went out on the other side of the Ark, where there's a sort of tower built out from the surface. We must have passed it on the way over from the
Hoatzin
but I didn't notice it then. Kleeman never took us there—never mentioned it to me."

He reached out with one hand across the table, grabbed my drink and took a great gulp of it. "Och, Jeanie, I needed that. I've not stopped since I first opened my eyes. Where was I? I went on up to that tower, and there was nobody to stop me or to say a word. And I went on inside, farther out, to the very end of it. The last segment has a window all the way round, so when you're there you can see the stars and the nebulae wheeling round past your head." McAndrew was unusually stirred and his last sentence proved it. The stars were normally considered fit subjects only for theory and computation.

"He was out in that last room," he went on. "After I'd given up hope of finding anybody in this whole place who could have derived those results we got back through Triton Station. Jeanie, he looks no more than a boy. So blond, and so young. I couldn't believe that he was the one who worked out that theory. But he is. We sat right down at the terminal there, and I started to run over the background for the way that I renormalize the vacuum self-energy. It's nothing like his way. He has a completely different approach, different invariants, different quantization conditions. I think his method is a good deal more easy to generalize. That's why he can get multiple vacuum colors out when we look for resonance conditions.

"Jeanie, you should have seen his face when I told him that we probably had fifty people at the Institute who would be able to follow his proofs. He's been completely alone here. There's not another one who can even get close to following him, he says. When he sent back those equations, he didn't tell people how important he thought they might be. He says they worry more about controlling what comes in from the System, rather than what goes out from here. I'm awful glad we came. He's an accident, a sport that shows up only once in a couple of centuries—and he was born out here in the void! Did you know, he's taken all the old path integral methods, and he has a form of quantum theory that looks so simple, you'd never believe it if you didn't see it . . ."

He was off again. I had to break in, or he would have talked without stopping, right through our meal. McAndrew doesn't babble often, but when he does he's hard to stop.

"Mac, hold on. Something here doesn't make sense. What about the Council of Intellects?"

"What about it?" He looked as though he had no possible interest in the Council of Intellects—even though the bustle that was going on all around us, with new structures being erected, was all to mark McAndrew's elevation to the Council.

"Look, just yesterday we agreed that the work you're interested in here must have originated with the Council. You told me you hadn't met one person who knew anything worth discussing. Are you telling me now that this work on the vacuum energy
doesn't
come from the people on the Council?"

"I'm sure it doesn't. I doubted that even before I met Wicklund, up there in the tower." McAndrew was looking at me impatiently, "Jeanie, if that's the impression I gave, it's not what I meant. A thing like this is almost always the work of a single person. It's not initiated by a group, even though a group may help to apply it to practice. This work, the vacuum color work, that's all Wicklund—the Council knows nothing of it."

"So what
does
the Council do? I hope you haven't forgotten that you're going to join it later today. I don't think Kleeman would take it well if you said you wanted to change your mind."

He waved an impatient arm at me. "Now, Jeanie, you know I've no time for that. The Council of Intellects is some sort of guiding and advising group, and I'm willing to serve on it and do what I can for the Ark. But not now. I have to get back over to Wicklund and sort out some of the real details. Did I mention that I've explained all about the drive to him? He mops up new material like a sponge. If we can get him back to the Institute he'll catch up on fifty years of system science development in a few months. You know, I'd better go and talk to Kleeman about this council of hers. What's the use of calling it a Council of Intellects, when people like Wicklund are not on it? And I'll have to tell her we want to take him back with us. I've already mentioned it to him. He's interested, but he's a bit scared of the idea. This is home to him, the only place he knows. Here, is that Kleeman over there by the scaffolding? I'd better catch her now."

He was up and out of his seat before I could stop him. He hurried over to her, took her to one side and began to speak to her urgently. He was gesturing and cracking his finger joints, in the way that he always did when he was wound up on something. As I moved to join them I could see Kleeman's expression changing from a friendly interest to a solid determination.

"We can't change things now, McAndrew," she was saying. "The departing member has already been removed from the Council. It is imperative that the replacement be installed as soon as possible. That ceremony must take place tonight."

"But I want to continue my meetings with—"

"The ceremony will take place tonight. Don't you understand? The Council cannot function without all twelve members. I cannot discuss this further. There is nothing to discuss."

She turned and walked away. Just as well, McAndrew was all set to tell her that he was not about to join her precious council, and he was planning to leave the Ark without fathering hundreds, scores, or even ones of children. And he was taking one of her colonists—her subjects—with him. I took his arm firmly and dragged him back to our table.

"Calm down, Mac." I spoke as urgently as I could. "Don't fly off wild now. Let's get this stupid council initiation rite out of the way today, and then let's wait a while and approach Kleeman on all this when she's in a more reasonable mood. All right?"

"That damned, obstinate, overbearing woman. Who the hell does she think she is?"

"She thinks she's the boss of the Ark of Massingham, and she
is
the boss of the Ark of Massingham. Face facts. Slow down now, and go back to Wicklund. See if he's interested in leaving when we leave, but don't push it too hard. Let's wait a few days, there's nothing to be lost from that."

* * *

How naive can you get? Kleeman had told us exactly what was going on, but we hadn't listened. People hear what they expect to hear.

I found out the truth the idiot's way. After McAndrew had gone off again, calm enough to talk to his new protege, I had about four hours to kill. The great ceremony in which McAndrew would become part of the Council of Intellects would not take place until after the next meal. I decided I would have another look at the closed room that I had seen on my earlier roaming.

The room was still locked, but this time there was a servicewoman working on the pipes that led into it. She recognized me as one of the two recent arrivals on the Ark—the less important one, according to Ark standards.

"Tonight's the big event," she said to me, her manner friendly. "You've come to take a look at the place your friend will be, have you? You know, we really need him. The Council has been almost useless for the past two years, with one member almost gone. Kleeman knew that, but she didn't seem happy to provide a new member until she met McAndrew."

She obviously assumed I knew all about the Council and its workings. I stepped closer, keeping my voice casual and companionable. "I'll see all this for myself tonight. McAndrew will be in here, right? I wonder if I could take a peek now, I've never been inside before."

"Sure." She went to the door and keyed in a combination. "There's been talk for a while of moving the Council to another part of Home, where there's less vibration from construction work. No sign of it happening yet, though. Here we go. You won't be able to go inside the inner room, of course, but you'll find you can see most things from the service area."

As the door slid open I stepped through into a long, brightly-lit room. It was empty.