“Och, Artie’s father wasn’t a McAndrew.” She arched plucked eyebrows at me. “Perish the thought. I would never dream of marrying a dreadful man like that.”

That’s the point, right there, where I ought to have changed the subject. Instead I said, “Not a McAndrew. Then who was he?”

“His name was Heinrich Grunewald. If he’s alive it still is, though I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him for over thirty years. He’d come visit for a while, then before you knew it he’d be running off. The last time he breezed in from nowhere, just as usual, and we had a lively couple of days. When the two of us weren’t busy in private he talked Artie’s ears off. I asked him, what was he doing, filling the lad’s head with nonsense? Force fields, and quarks, and that sort of rubbish. He laughed, and said that although nobody knew who Heinrich Grunewald was now, Artie needed to get used to the fact that he was going to have a very famous father. Next time he came to see me, he said, his face would be all over the media and we’d be hard put to find private time what with people camping out on the doorstep of the house.”

“I’ve never heard of Heinrich Grunewald.”

“No more you will. Isn’t that like a man, all blather and big talk? I flat out told him I didn’t believe him. I said, now what is it you’ll be doing to make you so famous? He got mad, the way men do when you talk straight to them. He gave me a bunch of notes and a video recording he’d made that very day, and he said the evidence was all there. He was going off to prove it, and I and the rest of the Solar System would treat him with a lot more respect when he came back.”

“But he never came back?”

“No more he did. Dead, you’d think, but off with some other woman is just as likely. Heinrich was a cocky devil, and a good-looking man. Good in bed, too, I’ll give him that.” At the words “good in bed,” she roused herself and stared around the room.

“What about the papers and the recording?” I asked.

“Gibberish.” She was perking up. Plimpton was giving her the eye and Monty Siclaro, restored to relatively normal condition, had entered the room. “I took a look at the stuff he left, but it was nothing but the same old babble. Strong forces, weak forces, compressed matter, quarks and squarks and blarks. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Oh. I stuck it away in a lockbox at the old family house. He’d told me not to lose it, and at the time I expected he’d be coming back.” Plimpton and Siclaro were standing a yard apart from each other. Drawn by some invisible force, Mary headed for the space between them. “Of course, he never did,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve not looked for it for years, but I suppose it’s sitting there still.”

End of story. Except that I, in my folly, later repeated to McAndrew his mother’s words.

He stared at me and through me and past me. “Mother never told me that,” he said. “He talked about the strong force, and compressed matter, I remember that. But old notes, and a video…”

Mary McAndrew stayed at the Institute for two more days. When she returned to Earth, McAndrew went with her.

And I? Of course, I went along, too. I have to take care of McAndrew. He can be such a dim-wit.

Plenty of people live on Earth, but when you go there you have to wonder why. The air feels heavy and too dense. In the cities it’s dirty and full of fumes and sits in your lungs like thick soup. In the countryside there’s the stink of dead plants and animals wafted around on every breeze. Earth people are so used to the smell of rot, they don’t even notice. And after a day or two you’re just as bad. Apparently your brain can’t stand continuous stench, so after a while it cuts off the signal and you don’t smell a thing.

Other things, though, you don’t get used to so easily. Mary McAndrew lived most of the time in Paris or Rome, but the “family house” that she referred to, where Mac had spent his early years lay on a small island. It was part of a group known as the Shetlands.

Once we got there I could see why she preferred Paris or Rome. Or anywhere. The island sits far beyond the north coast of Scotland, up at latitude sixty degrees. The house was built of solid stone, with great wooden rafters across the ceiling of each room. Mary told me that the building was over two hundred years old, and her family had lived in it for as long as it had been there.

Nothing wrong with that, but I soon learned that the McAndrews were not the house’s only residents. Mac and I were shown to a bedroom off on the north side of the building. It was only two in the afternoon, but it was winter for Earth’s northern hemisphere and we were so far up toward the pole that it was already getting dark. I stepped into the room and went to place my bag on the bed. As I did so, something small and brown jumped off the counterpane and streaked away toward a gloomy corner.

I gasped and clutched my bag to my chest. “Mac! What the hell was that?”

“Och, that’s nothing.” He walked forward and peered down at the wainscotting. “Just a wee mouse, and now it’s gone. You can bet it’s a lot more frightened of you than you are of it.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that.”

“I’m tellin’ ye. You’ll not see a sign of the beastie once we’re moved into the room.”

I noticed something odd about his speech. Back on the home territory of his childhood, a Scottish accent was creeping in.

“Puir little thing,” he went on, “there’s been naebody in this room for so lang, it thought it had the rights to it. Don’t you worry, it won’t come a-walking over your face at night.”

I could have lived very well without that thought. I noticed that the window had a spider’s web in the upper left corner, and I wondered how many other animals we were expected to share our space with. I felt a bit more sympathy for Heinrich Grunewald. Given a choice, before you knew it I’d have been running off just as he used to.

I left my bag — tightly closed — on the bed. McAndrew led us back to the long living room of the house. Mary McAndrew was waiting there with a dusty box sitting on the low table in front of her.

“Here it is. And I hope it’s been worth coming all this way for it.” Her voice said that she very much doubted that. She looked at me, as much as to say, Jeanie, I thought you had more sense. We could all be in Paris. Couldn’t you talk him out of it?

If she knew McAndrew at all, she knew the answer. When it’s new science, or even a sniff of new science, McAndrew is the most obstinate human in the Solar System. He lifted the box as reverently as though it contained the Crown Jewels, blew off dust, and wiped at the top with a yellow cloth.

“It’s not locked,” I said.

“And why should it be?” Mary said as McAndrew eased the top open with a creak of rusting hinges. “Nothing here that anybody in his right mind would pay a brass farthing for.”

At first glance I was inclined to agree. What Mac lifted out of the box was a small notebook with a faded blue cover, a dozen sheets of yellow paper with dirty brown edges, and a video recording of a design that had gone out of use thirty or forty years ago.

“Can you play that?” I asked.

“Oh, surely.” Mary took the video container and wiped the top with the duster. “Artie will tell you how it is on the islands. Things don’t get thrown away so quick here as in other places.”

McAndrew had meanwhile picked up the sheets of paper. He flipped through them in a few seconds.

“Nothing?” I asked.

“Nothing I didn’t know already.” He put the sheets down. “Standard results on the stabilization of compressed matter with electromagnetic fields. Same as we do with the balanced drive plates.”

“Nothing,” said his mother. “Didn’t I tell you so?”