We walked forward. Mac saw me first, and stood up. “Jeanie! This is Merle Thursoe and Tom O’Dell. We’re setting up a really great experiment.”
He nodded to me, almost dismissively, and turned back to the display. Then something — maybe my snort of anger — must have told him that this wouldn’t quite do for someone who had come so far to see him.
“Tom, Merle,” he said, “would you carry on without me for a few minutes?” And then, turning back to me and standing up, “Jeanie, I don’t think you know Ernesto Kugel. Come on. You have to meet him.”
He walked me right through the complicated center of the room, to a cubicle no bigger or better furnished than any of the others. Sitting at a desk there, facing outward, was a serious little man wearing a formal black suit, white shirt, and dark blue neckerchief. A matching blue rose adorned his lapel.
“Director Ernesto Kugel.” McAndrew was at his most formal. “May I present Captain Jeanie Roker.”
Kugel stood, came around his desk, and bowed, giving me a splendid view of the top of a hairless scalp as smooth and white and round as an ostrich egg. His whole head was free of hair, except for the neatly trimmed black moustache on his upper lip. I decided that nature could never have created the effect. Ernesto Kugel had worked on it.
I was all set to dislike the man, when he straightened up and took my hand.
“I am delighted to meet you, Captain Roker,” he said, in a deep, smooth voice. “Professor McAndrew told me that you are most competent. What he did not mention is that you are also elegant and beautiful.”
I stared at him. “Does that line work often?”
He gazed back, unblinking and unashamed, his brown eyes as bright and lively as a bird’s. “Not so often.” He suddenly smiled, and it transformed his face. “But let us say, it works often enough.”
“And I suppose that joking about it works, too?”
“Sometimes. Most times. And if it does not” — he shrugged — “what harm has been done? God made two sexes, Captain Jeanie — and luckily that was exactly the right number.”
I suddenly found it impossible to dislike him at all. We stood grinning at each other, until McAndrew said, “I want a word in private. Just the three of us.”
“Of course.” Kugel nodded his head toward the cubicle. “But this is as private as we get. I believe it is bad if I hide myself away from where the real work is done. Bad for my staff — and worst of all for me.” Kugel waved to us to sit down. His desk was as neat and organized as Mac’s was usually messy.
McAndrew didn’t waste any time. “Ernesto, I could explain our discussions to Captain Roker — to Jeanie. But I would feel much more comfortable if you were to do that.”
“Of course.” Kugel leaned toward me, and spoke in his low, confidential voice. “You should sleep with him, you know. You two should have children.”
I turned on McAndrew. “You brought me in here, just to hear a proposition on your behalf? You ought to be old enough to handle your own public relations.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Mac waved at the other man. “Keep going, Ernesto.”
“Of course.” Kugel was chuckling to himself. “What I mean, Captain Jeanie, is that the man standing before you, Arthur Morton McAndrew, is a great genius. His genes, and your genes, should be preserved and cherished. I knew his reputation long before he came here, but now I realize that he is one of the immortals.”
“But I’m not fit to carry Dr. Kugel’s coat, when it comes to large-scale engineering,” McAndrew added. Praise of his abilities makes him terribly uncomfortable.
I sighed. It was obviously a mutual admiration society. Apparently I had travelled the distance from Moon to Earth, just to hear the two of them compliment each other.
“But to be specific,” Kugel said, after a long pause in which they sat nodding and smiling. “Before Professor McAndrew’s arrival, I and my staff had operated the Geotron for three months. In all that time, we had observed an inexplicable loss of neutrinos. We know how many the machine produces. And we know how many we are finding, in each of our mobile detectors. From that it is a simple calculation to estimate the total number escaping over the whole of the Earth’s surface. There were too few of them, less than we were creating — and not by a number within the reasonable bounds of statistical error. There were far too few. For a long time we thought that it must be a matter of phase changes, or instrument calibration. Finally we decided that could not be the case.
“We had no explanation. Until two of my brightest young staff, Thursoe and O’Dell, became involved.”
“Jeanie met them both,” McAndrew said.
“Then you must know, Captain, that both of them are far brighter than I. They proposed a specific physical reason for the absence of neutrinos, arguing by analogy to the conserved vector current theory of Feynman and Gell-Mann. That would imply the existence of a new kind of weak force, and a new physical invariant. It was speculative, but I thought it looked very interesting. I mentioned the work and the theory in my weekly report of activities to the Food and Energy Council. I did not expect that it would receive external circulation — until the sudden arrival of Professor McAndrew’s request to visit the Geotron facility, and review the evidence.”
He turned to Mac. “Now I think that you should continue.”
“Well…” McAndrew became uneasy. “I don’t like to criticize other people’s work, you know, and the O’Dell and Thursoe theory is highly ingenious; but it did occur to me that there could be a simpler explanation.”
“You knew it,” Kugel said flatly. “Knew it before you ever left the Penrose Institute.”
“No. Everything depended on the experimental results.” McAndrew turned back to me. “You see, Jeanie, the Geotron had been operating at a very precise and very high neutrino energy, a domain that to my knowledge had not been explored before in any detail. It seemed to me that the explanation for the loss of neutrinos could be something as simple as resonance capture. Certain materials, common in Earth’s interior, may have a very high capture cross-section for neutrinos of the Geotron energy. And that could account for the observed difference between production and detection. It would also be a most important scientific discovery, because such a resonance is not predicted by current theories.”
“Mph,” I said. It meant, Mac, I have now heard more than I wish to know about lost neutrinos.
But McAndrew, as it turned out, was close to the end. “And there’s a very simple way to tell if I’m right,” he said. “In less than twelve hours we can do an experiment with a modulated Geotron energy, far from possible resonance, and get an instant neutrino count. That’s what O’Dell, Thursoe, and I have been working on. And we are just about ready for final set up.”
As I said, I’ve known McAndrew for a long time; long enough to interpret what he had just told me: he was all ready to do a neat physics experiment, and for the next half day nothing in heaven or earth would budge him from the Geotron facility.
That conviction was at once reinforced by Ernesto Kugel.
“You are of course welcome to remain here during the experiment,” he said to me placatingly. “On the other hand, one of the Administrator’s own staff members suggests that you might find a visit to our new food production plant, a few kilometers away, much more intriguing. He would be happy to serve as your escort.”
“More than happy.” And dead on cue, Van Lyle was standing at the entrance to the cubicle. “Ready when you are, Captain Roker.”
It was all fine — and all just a little bit too pat.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, “before we leave.”
“Sure.”
Inside the stall I sat down on the toilet seat, put my head in my hands, and thought.
I was uncomfortable. What was the source of my discomfort? Nothing that I could put a name on, except that maybe the leopard had changed his spots a little too completely. This Van Lyle was not the Van Lyle I had known.