“When?” McAndrew had been in Limperis’ office when I called, and it was the older man who leaned forward to ask the question.
“Eight days from now. That was the first gap in his schedule. He’ll spend most of the day at the Institute.”
“Then we’re home free,” said McAndrew. He was cracking his finger joints — a sure sign of high excitement. “Jeanie, we can put on an all-day show here that’ll just blow him away. Wenig has a new E-M field stabilizer, Macedo says she can build a cheap detector for small Halo collapsars, and I’ve got an idea for a better kernel shield. And if we can ever get him to talk about it, Wicklund’s cooking up something new and big out on Triton Station. Man, I’m telling you, the Institute hasn’t been this productive in years. Get Tallboy here, and he’ll go out of his mind.”
Limperis shot a quick sideways glance at McAndrew, then looked back at the screen. He raised his eyebrows. I could read the expression on that smooth, innocent-looking face, and I agreed with him completely. If you wanted a man to quantize a nonlinear field, diagonalize a messy Hamiltonian, or dream up a delicate new observational test for theories of kernel creation, you couldn’t possibly do better than McAndrew. But that would be his downfall now. He could never accept that the rest of the world might be less interested in physics than he was.
Limperis started that way, but years of budget battles as head of the Institute had taught him to play in a different league, “So what do you think, Jeanie?” he said to me, when Mac had finished babbling.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t read Tallboy. He’s an unknown quantity. We’d better look up his background, see if that gives us some clue to what makes him tick. As it is, you’ll have to try it. Show him everything you’ve got at the Institute, and hope for the best.”
“What about the expedition?”
“Same for that. Tallboy acted as though he’d never heard of Alpha Centauri. The Hoatzin’s just about ready to go, but we need Tallboy’s blessing. External Affairs controls all the—”
“Call from Luna,” cut in a disembodied voice. “Central Records for Professor McAndrew. Level Two priority. Will you accept interrupt, or prefer reschedule?”
“Accept,” said McAndrew and I together — even though it wasn’t my call. It had to be from Jan.
“Voice, tonal, display or hard copy output?”
“Voice,” replied McAndrew firmly. I was less sure of that. He had done it so that I could receive the message, too, but we would have to witness each other’s disappointment if it was bad news.
“Message for Arthur Morton McAndrew,” went on the neutral voice. “Message begins. January Pelham, ID 128-129-001176, being of legal age of choice, will file for parental assignment as follows: Father: Arthur Morton McAndrew, ID 226-788-44577. Mother: Jean Pelham Roker, ID 547-314-78281. Name change filed for January Pelham Roker McAndrew. Parental response and acceptance is required. Reply via Luna free circuit 33, link 442. Message ends.”
I had never seen McAndrew look so pleased. It was doubly satisfying to him to have me on the line when the word came through — I was sure that the Communications Group were trying to track me now through Tallboy’s office, not knowing I was tapped into Mac’s line.
“What’s the formal date for parental assignment?” I asked.
There was a two second pause while the computer made confirmation of identity from my voiceprint, sent that information over the link from L-4 to Luna, decided how to handle the situation, and connected us all into one circuit.
“Message for Jean Pelham Roker. Message begins: January Pelham, ID 128—”
“No need to repeat,” I said. “Message received. Repeat, what is the formal date for parental assignment?”
“Two hundred hours U.T., subject to satisfactory parental responses.”
“That’s too soon,” said McAndrew. “We won’t have enough time for chromosomal confirmation.”
“Chromosomal confirmation waived.”
On the screen in front of me McAndrew blushed bright with surprise and pleasure. Not only had Jan filed for us as official parents as soon as legally permitted, she had done so without knowing or caring what the genetic records showed. The waiver was a definite statement: whether or not McAndrew was her biological father would make no difference to her; she had made her decision.
For what it was worth, I could have given my own assurance. Some evidence is just as persuasive to me as chromosomal mapping. No one who had seen that blind, inward look on Jan’s face when she was tackling an abstract problem would ever doubt that she was McAndrew’s flesh and blood. I had cursed that expression a hundred times, as McAndrew left me to worry alone while he disappeared on a voyage of exploration and discovery inside his own head.
Never mind; McAndrew had his good points. “Parental acceptance by Jean Pelham Roker,” I said.
“Parental acceptance by Arthur Morton McAndrew,” said Mac.
Another brief pause, then: “Acceptance received and recorded. Formal assignment confirmed for two hundred hours U.T. Arrange location through Luna link 33-442. Hard copy output follows. Is there additional transfer?”
“No.”
“Link terminated.” While the computer initiated hard copy output to the terminal at the Institute, I did a little calculation.
“Mac, we have a problem — Jan’s acceptance ceremony is set for the same time as Tallboy’s visit.”
“Of course.” He looked surprised that I hadn’t seen it immediately. “We can handle it. She’ll come out here. She’ll want to visit — she hasn’t been to the Institute since Wicklund went out to Triton Station.”
“But you’ll be too tied up with Tallboy to spend much time with her. What rotten luck.”
McAndrew shrugged, and it was enough to start him talking. “Whenever a set of independent events occur randomly in time or space, you’ll notice event-clusters. They’re inevitable. That’s all there is to coincidences. If you assume that event arrival times follow a Poisson distribution, and just go ahead and calculate the probability that a given number will occur in some small interval of time, you’ll find—”
“Take him away,” I said to Limperis.
He slapped McAndrew lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. Coincidence or not, this is a day for celebration. You’re a father now, and thanks to Jeanie we’ve got Tallboy coming out here to see the show.” He winked at me. “Though maybe Jan will change her mind when she hears Mac talk for a few hours, eh, Jeanie? Poor girl, she’s not used to it, the way you are.”
McAndrew just grinned. He was riding too high for a little gentle joshing to have any effect. “If you pity the poor lass at all,” he said. “It should be for the Philistine space-jock of a mother she’ll be getting. If I wanted to talk to Jan about probability distributions, she’d listen to me.” She probably would, too. I’d seen her math profiles.
Limperis was reaching out to cut the connection, but Mac hadn’t quite finished. “You know, the laws of probability not only permit coincidences,” he said. “They—”
He was still talking when the screen went blank.
I had no more official business down on Earth, but I didn’t head out at once. Limperis was quite right, it was a time for celebration; you didn’t become a parent every day. I went over to the Asgard restaurant, up at the very top of Mile High, and ordered the full panoramic dinner. In some ways I wasted my money, because no matter what the sensories threw at me I hardly noticed. I was thinking back seventeen years, to the time when Jan was born, so small she could put her whole fist in the old silver thimble that McAndrew’s friends gave her as a birthgift.
It was a few years later that I realized we had something exceptional on our hands — Jan had breezed through every test they could give her. I felt as though I had a window to McAndrew’s own past, because I was sure he had been the same way thirty years earlier. The mandatory separation years hadn’t been bad at all, because McAndrew and I had spent most of them on long trips out, where the Earth-years sped by in months of shipboard time. But I was very glad they were over now. In a few more days, McAndrew, Jan and I would be officially and permanently related.