Hidden Variables (38 page)

His gaze turned slowly to McAndrew. "Is he all right?"

"I hope so. There may be some lung damage that we'll have to take care of. Want to do something to help?"

He nodded, then turned back to look at the ball of the Ark, dwindling behind us. "They can't catch us now, can they?"

"They might try, but I don't think so. Kleeman probably considers anybody who wants to leave the Ark is not worth having. Here, take the blue tube out of the kit behind you and smear it on your face and hands. Do the same for McAndrew. It will speed up the repair of the ruptured blood vessels in your skin."

Wicklund took the blue salve and began to apply it tenderly to McAndrew's face.

After a couple of seconds Mac opened his eyes and smiled. "Thank you, lad," he said softly. "I'd talk more physics with you, but somehow I don't quite feel that I'm up to it."

"Just lie there quiet." There was hero worship in Wicklund's voice. I had a sudden premonition of what the return trip was going to be like. McAndrew and Sven Wicklund in a mutual admiration society, and all the talk of physics.

After we had the capsule back on board the
Hoatzin
I felt secure for the first time. We installed McAndrew comfortably on one of the bunks while I went to the drive unit and set a maximum-acceleration course back to the Solar System. Wicklund's attention was torn between his need to talk to McAndrew and his fascination with the drive and the ship. How would Einstein have felt in 1905, if someone could have shown him a working nuclear reactor just a few months after he had developed the mass-energy relation? It must have been like that for Wicklund.

"Want to take a last look?" I said, my hand on the drive keyboard.

He came across and gazed at the Ark, still set on its long journey to Tau Ceti. He looked sad, and I felt guilty.

"I'm sorry," I said. "But I'm afraid there's no going back now."

"I know." He hesitated. "You found Home a bad place, I could tell from what McAndrew said. But it's not so bad. To me, it was home for my whole life."

"We'll talk to the Ark again. There may be a chance to come here later, when we've had more time to study the life that you lived. I hope you'll find a new life in the System."

I meant it, but I was having a sudden vision of the Earth we were heading back to. Crowded, noisy, short of all resources. Wicklund might find it as hellish as we had found life on the Ark of Massingham. It was too late to do anything about it now. Fortunately, this sort of problem probably meant less to Wicklund than it would to most people. Like McAndrew, his real life was lived inside his own head, and all else was secondary to that private vision.

I pressed the key sequence and the drive went on. Within seconds, the Ark had vanished from sight.

I turned back and was surprised to see that McAndrew was sitting up in his bunk. He looked terrible, but he must be feeling better. His hands were yellow paws of surrogate flesh, his face and neck a bright blue coating of the ointment that Wicklund had applied to them. The dribble of blood that had come from his mouth had spread its bright stain down his chin and over the front of his tunic, mixing in with the blue fabric to produce a horrible purple splash.

"How are you, Mac?" I said.

"Not bad. Not bad at all." He forced a smile.

"You know, it's not good enough. You promised me ages ago that you'd schedule a repair for that lung—and you didn't do it. If you think I'm prepared to keep dragging you around bleeding and bubbling, you're wrong. When we get back, you have that lung fixed properly—if I have to drag you to the medics myself."

"Och, Jeanie." He gave a feeble shrug. "We'll see. It takes so much time away from work. Let's get on home, though, and we'll see. I've learned a lot on this trip, more than I ever expected. It's all been well worth it."

He caught my skeptical look. "Honest, now, this is more important than you realize. We'll make the next trip out together, the way I promised you. Maybe next time we'll get to the stars. I'm sorry that you got nothing out of this one."

I stared at him. He looked like a circus clown, all smears and streaks of different clashing colors. I shook my head. "You're wrong. I got something out of it."

He looked puzzled. "How's that?"

"I listen to you and the other physicists all the time, and usually I don't understand a word of it. This time I know just what you mean. Lie still, and you can see for yourself. I'll be back in a second."

All the colors of the vacuum? That was McAndrew. If a picture is worth a thousand words, there are times when a mirror is worth more than that. I wanted to watch Mac's face when he saw his own reflection.

AFTERWORD: ALL THE COLORS OF THE VACUUM.

In the Afterword to "The Man Who Stole The Moon," I described my confusion when I received a letter from a reader who was pleased to find a hidden reference there to Heinlein's hero, Delos D. Harriman. This story provides me with even more confusing evidence that most of my brain is quite outside my conscious control.

The story was published in the February, 1981, issue of ANALOG. Before the end of the month I received a letter from a reader. He referred me to the works of Sylvester, the 19th Century English mathematician, in one of which he described his first meeting with the French mathematician Poincaré. My description of McAndrew's first encounter with Wicklund, the reader said, was obviously drawn from Sylvester's experience. Even the physical appearance was the same.

Fine.

The only trouble with this idea is that, whereas I had certainly read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and could well be subconsciously cueing my story and characters to it, I had never to my knowledge read one word of Sylvester that was not in a mathematical paper, and he would not be talking there of an encounter with Poincaré.

I stewed on this for a week or two, without result, and was ready to say the whole thing was blind coincidence. Finally, more or less at random, I went down to the basement and hunted through old books until I found a battered copy of Eric Temple Bell's MEN OF MATHEMATICS. There is a chapter on Poincaré, and in it I found this: "Elsewhere Sylvester records his bewilderment when, after having toiled up the three flights of stairs leading to Poincaré's airy perch, he paused, mopping his magmficent bald head, in astonishment at beholding a mere boy, 'so blond, so young,' as the author of the deluge of papers which had heralded the advent of a successor to Cauchy."

I have read MEN OF MATHEMATICS, so one could argue that this explains the mystery. But not to me. I read the book when I was sixteen years old, and since then I am convinced I have never looked again at that chapter.

When we understand the storage and recall procedures of the human memory, we'll be able to build a very interesting computer.

PERFECTLY SAFE, NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

"A bit lower on the left. Bit more. There, that's it. Hold it right there."

I held it as Waldo directed and he drove in the last nail, then stepped back. Perfect. We looked at the sign and beamed at each other.

'Burmeister & Carver—Legal Advisors.' The old firm, a long way from Washington D.C., but back in business again.

We went into the office and closed the door. Not much space inside—it cost ten credits a square foot, unfurnished, for rentals in Tharsis City. But we had one respectable-sized office, and a much less fancy office/utility room behind it. We'd agreed to take turns manning the front office until we built up enough business to spread ourselves a bit. As the first and only lawyers on Mars, we were sure that wouldn't take long.

I went back to my desk in the rear office—Waldo was taking the first shift out front. Then I came straight out again. Fifteen minutes earlier there had been a jelly doughnut on my table. I looked at Waldo and began, "Waldo, did you—?"

What was the use? I gave up in mid-sentence. In the twenty years since we left law school I'd seen Waldo swell from a youth of sylphlike elegance to a first-order man-mountain. The time he'd spent (more accurately, done) on the Venus terra-forming project had thinned him, temporarily, but as soon as he reached Mars he'd started to swell again. I'd bullied, insulted, cajoled, lectured and warned Waldo. If he kept on eating the way he did, one day he'd explode. He listened contritely, swore he'd diet at once, implored me to keep sweet stuff out of his reach and thanked me for trying to help. Then as soon as my back was turned—chomp.

As it turned out, we had been over-optimistic about the number of cases that would come our way. True, we were the only lawyers for forty million miles, and Mars did have a population of several thousand. But—no business. I maintain that where a barbarian would pick up a rock or a tree root to settle a dispute, a civilized man picks up a videophone and seeks legal counsel. Measured by that standard, Mars was too busy scrabbling for survival to qualify above the barbarian level. For the first three weeks I had little to do but sit about, watching Waldo occupy a steadily increasing amount of the available office space.

When our first client finally arrived, Waldo was manning the front desk and I was sitting in the back office looking at a lunar travel brochure. Waldo collected them. I was reading a poetic description of a valley of mud, dust and rock when I heard the door of the outer office.

"Are you Burmeister and Carver?" asked an unfamiliar voice.

"We are. I am Waldo Burmeister, at your service."

"I'm Peter Pinton. I've got something extremely valuable here and I'd like to leave it with you to lock in your safe."

Waldo's visitor seemed to be confusing us with a bank. We didn't have a safe, just a big cupboard in the back room with a defective lock. I sneaked a look through a narrow crack in the ill-fitting and badly made door between our inner and outer offices. Our visitor was very tall and lanky, with brown hair and a pair of innocent and startlingly blue eyes. His dress told me that he was a ranger—probably a geologist, roving around outside the domed city areas. Waldo had responded instinctively to the words 'extremely valuable' and had Pinton already seated in our one comfortable chair.

What would it be? Precious metals, old artifacts, Martian superfluids? I could almost hear the cash registers ringing in Waldo's head.

"In our safe, Mr. Pinton? Of course. Where is your deposit?" Waldo hadn't missed a beat. Pinton reached into his brown, bulky jacket and produced a small phial, about the size of a pill bottle, containing a pale, oily-looking liquid. Since Pinton couldn't see me I felt free to register my disappointment.

Waldo looked at the bottle dubiously. "What exactly is it, Mr. Pinton?"

"It's Pintonite, that's what it is." Our visitor smiled happily. "It's going to make me the richest man on Mars. I always suspected there should be something like this here—I've looked in places where the areology is right for ten years, and I've finally found and refined it." He held up the bottle. "The most powerful chemical explosive ever known, by a factor of ten. One gram's enough to blow a ten-meter crater in solid rock. It'll revolutionize mining on the asteroids."

Peter Pinton must have noticed Waldo's lack of enthusiasm at the idea of looking after a super-bomb. "Perfectly safe, nothing to worry about," he added. He shook the bottle with great vigor.

I screamed so hard that no sound came out and clapped my hands over my ears. Waldo, with an equally sound protective logic, covered his eyes with his hands. Pinton cackled inanely. "Perfectly safe. Only explodes under very special conditions. Safe as water."

He reached into his jacket again and produced a five thousand credit note. "Here's a down payment. I'll need your help when the time comes to negotiate on this with General Mining."

Now he was talking. I breathed again, but Waldo still seemed curiously reluctant to touch the phial or the money. I decided that it was time to introduce myself to our new client.

I had second thoughts as I came into the room. Peter Pinton was offering the phial to Waldo with his right hand and absent-mindedly scratching himself around the ribs with his left. No wonder Waldo was hesitant. I've read a hundred theories as to how Earth fleas evaded pre-flight inspection to get to Mars, and I don't believe any of them. But when you've seen how far a flea can jump under a surface gravity only two-fifths that of Earth, and with an atmosphere in the domed cities only one-third as dense, you have no trouble understanding how they've managed to spread the way they have. I could detect ripples of sympathetic itching running up and down Waldo's back. As Peter Pinton and I shook hands and he gave me the money and phial, I watched him closely for emigrants.

Pinton seemed relieved to be rid of the bottle. "I told Muriel I wanted somebody else to look after the Pintonite this morning. I'm not comfortable carrying valuables in the domicibile. I feel a lot easier now. Well, I'll be off. See you in a few days. I want to hear what Muriel says when I tell her you're looking after the Pintonite."

"Your wife?" I asked politely.

He looked at me curiously. "Now what would a man want with a woman, out in the red ranges? Muriel's my parrot." And he was gone without further comment.

Waldo took a big gulp of unsweetened coffee absent-mindedly as Pinton left the room. His face puckered like a punctured Mars dome. For the past couple of days he'd been holding down on his calories and we'd thrown out every temptation. The change so far was imperceptible.

I locked the money in our cash box and went through to the inner office to put Pinton's phial into the big cupboard, in among the crockery, stationery, low-calorie food items and legal reference volumes. I put it on the bottom shelf, next to Waldo's weighing-machine. He'd bought a spring balance, and derived comfort from the thought that he weighed less than eighty kilos—his 'college weight,' as he described it. I wondered if he was looking at lunar brochures for his next stopping-point when his Mars-weight topped eighty.

In the front office Waldo had a dreamy expression in his eyes. "If General Mining would pay Pinton a million credits for the rights to Pintonite, I bet that United Chemicals would offer double."