Would I win the argument? I didn’t know. But it did occur to me that when the history of the first Alpha Centauri expedition was written, it might look quite different from what anyone had expected.
EIGHTH CHRONICLE: With McAndrew, Out of Focus
There are sights in the Universe that man — or woman — was not meant to see.
Let me name an outstanding example. McAndrew, dancing; Arthur Morton McAndrew, hopping about like a gangling, uncoordinated stork, arms flapping and balding head turned up to stare at the sky.
“The first since 1604!” he said. He did not, thank God, burst into song. “Not a one, since the invention of the telescope. Ah, look at it, Jeanie. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing a person ever saw?”
Not the most complimentary remark in the world, to a woman who has borne a child with a man and been his regular, if not exactly faithful, companion for twenty-odd years.
I looked up. It was close to nine in the evening, on the long June day that would end our holiday together. Early tomorrow McAndrew would leave Earth and return to the Institute; I would head for Equatorport, the first step in a trip a good deal farther out. I was scheduled to deliver submersibles for use on Europa. As part of the deal for making the run, I would be allowed to dive the Europan ice-covered abyssal ocean. I was excited by the prospect. The difference between deep space and deep ocean is large, and sky captains and dive captains respect and envy each other.
Overhead, the cause of McAndrew’s excitement flamed in the sky as a point of intolerable brilliance. The Sun and Venus had already set. Jupiter was in opposition and close to perihelion. The planet should have been a beacon on the eastern horizon, but today its light was overwhelmed by something else. What I was looking at was infinitely brighter than Jupiter or Venus could ever be. Instead of the steady gleam of a planet, the light above blazed like the star it was. But it dominated everything in the sky except for the Sun itself, visible even at noon, a light strong enough to throw clear shadows. For two days there had been no night in the northern hemisphere.
“A naked eye supernova!” McAndrew didn’t want or expect an answer to his earlier question. “And so close — only a hundred and three light-years. Why, if we used the balanced drive…”
His voice trailed away, but I’ve known the man for a long time. I suspected what he was thinking.
I said, “Be realistic, Mac. Even if you could fly out there in a reasonable subjective time, you’d be away at least a couple of hundred Earth years.”
I was about to add, remember your relativity, but I didn’t have the gall. McAndrew knew more about special relativity and time dilation than I would ever know. Also more about general relativity, gravity, quantum theory, superstrings, condensed matter physics, finite state automata, and any other science subject that you care to mention. What he didn’t know, and would never learn, was restraint.
Our holiday was over, whether I wanted to admit it or not. We would spend one more night together, but McAndrew would not be in bed with me. Not all of him, that is. His body, yes, but his head was already a hundred and three light-years away. It would not be coming back any time soon. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but even now he itched to be at the Penrose Institute, out in space where his precious observational tools could see far more than any instrument condemned to lie at the bottom of the murky atmosphere of Earth.
Me, I could look into the evening sky and see herring-bone patterns of gorgeous rose and salmon-pink clouds catching the light of the supernova. McAndrew looked at the same thing and saw an annoying absorbing layer of atmospheric gases cutting off all light of wavelength shorter than the near ultraviolet. The Cassiopeia Supernova was flooding the Solar System with hard radiation — and here was McAndrew, down on Earth, condemned to visible wavelengths and missing half the show.
“It will still be there tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll have a month or two before it begins to fade.”
I might as well have saved my breath. He said, “If I flew south tonight, maybe I could get a pre-dawn lift.”
“Maybe you could.” Actually, I knew the lift-off and transfer schedules in fair detail, and there was no chance of a launch that would get him one second sooner to the Institute, which was free-flying now in an L-3 halo orbit. Also, the last evening of a holiday is supposed to be special.
“Sounds like you don’t think I should,” he said. And then, showing that he is more human than almost anyone in the Solar System gives him credit for — he’s supposed to be McAndrew, giant brain and intellect incarnate — he added, “Ah, now Jeanie, don’t get mad at me. You know, I wasn’t thinking of trying to fly all the way out to the supernova. But Fogarty and me, we’ve had an expedition in mind for a while to visit the solar focus. This would be a great time to do it. We’d learn a lot about the supernova.”
“You might,” I said. I did not add that I did not like Paul Fogarty. McAndrew could tell me, as often as he liked, that Fogarty was bright and young and inventive. Maybe he was all those things, but I thought he was also ambitious and snotty and obnoxious.
Pure personal vanity on my part, of course. Young Paul Fogarty had met me during one of my visits to the Institute, learned that I was not a scientist but a mere cargo captain, and after that did not recognize my existence.
If McAndrew was trying to be nice to me for a final evening together, I was more than willing to meet him halfway. “If you want to go to the solar focus,” I said. “Then you should do it. Go and have fun. You deserve it. Not a long trip, is it?”
“Just a hop.” He thought for a moment, and the only sign of Scottish ancestry appeared in his speech. “Och, Jeanie, it’s not even that. We hardly need the balanced drive at all. Five hundred and fifty astronomical units to the solar focus, that’s only eighty-odd billion kilometers. If we take the Hoatzin and hold it down to a hundred gees, that’s less than a week of shipboard time there and back — even allowing for turnover and deceleration. Don’t worry that I’ll be gone long. I’ll be home again and waiting for you when you finish playing the deep-sea diver.”
Possibly. But I knew him of old. Get McAndrew into a situation of scientific interest, and he loses all sense of time and everything else.
When I emerged from the Europan ocean, he might indeed be back at the Institute; but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find him still eighty billion kilometers out, sitting at the solar focus — the place where the Sun’s own gravitational field would act like a lens, and converge light from the Cassiopeia supernova to a focus.
I tilted back my head to stare once more at the burning point of light in the sky. A hundred and three light-years away, but it shone on Earth a thousand times as bright as the full Moon. This was the closest supernova to Earth in all of recorded history. Maybe that was just as well. Much closer, and it would be a danger to all life on Earth.
Unlike McAndrew, I could be quite as happy without the Cassiopeia supernova.
I accuse McAndrew of things, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just as guilty myself.
The Europan ocean is eerie and spectacular and unlike anything else in the Solar System. People talk about the silence of space, floating in the void beyond Neptune with all engines off. Fair enough. But I’ve been there, and I can tell you that it’s nothing like as uncanny as the quiet of Europa’s abyssal ocean, a hundred kilometer depth of water and above that a thick shield of ice-cap to seal you off from the rest of the Universe.