The Compleat McAndrew

NINTH CHRONICLE: McAndrew and the Fifth Commandment

What do the following have in common: Aristotle, Confucius, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, and Madame Curie?

The answer is, each of them had a mother. And if that seems like a stupid and trivial response, I offer it to make a point. Every famous man or woman has a mother. More often than not, we never hear of her. How much do you know about Hitler’s mother? Not a thing, if you are like me.

So it was a shock one morning to come to the Penrose Institute and learn that McAndrew’s mother was expected to arrive there later the same day. He had a mother, of course he did, but she lived down on Earth and I hadn’t heard him say much about her, except that she had no interest in space or anything to do with it.

“Did she say why she’s coming?” I asked.

McAndrew shook his head. He looked nervous. He may be one of the gods of physics, the best combination of experimenter and theorist since Isaac Newton, but I had the feeling that might cut little ice with Ms. Mary McAndrew. Probably, she still thought of him as her little boy. I imagined a darling and elderly Scottish lady, grey-haired and diminutive, summoning up the nerve at long last to travel beyond high orbit and pay a visit to her own wee laddie.

“Writing her will.” McAndrew spoke at last. “Something about changing her will.”

If anything, that confirmed my impression. Here was a nervous old dear, worried about the approach of death and wanting to make sure that all her affairs were properly in order before the arrival of the Grim Reaper.

I said as much to McAndrew. He looked doubtful, and rather more nervous. I didn’t realized why until I went with him to the docking port, where the transfer vessel from LEO to the L-3 Halo orbit was making its noon arrival.

After a five-minute wait, four people emerged from the lock. The first two were Institute administrative staff, returning from leave and laden down with trophies of Earth including a basket of pineapples and a live parrot.

The third one I also recognized. It was Dr. Siclaro, the Institute’s expert on kernel energy extraction. He too had been on vacation. He was wearing a flowered shirt and very short white shorts, revealing tanned and powerful legs. The fourth person was a glamorous redhead, dressed to kill. She was right at Siclaro’s side, chatting with him while frequently glancing down to eye with interest his calves, muscular thighs, and all points north. From the look on her face he had been protected from direct physical assault only by the new-grown and loathsome mustache that crawled like a hairy ginger caterpillar across his upper lip.

I was looking past those two, waiting to see who next would emerge from the lock, when McAndrew stepped forward. He said weakly, “Hello, Mother.”

“Artie!” The redhead turned and gave him a big hug, leaving generous amounts of face powder and lipstick on his shirt.

Artie? I had never expected to live long enough to hear anyone call Arthur Morton McAndrew, full professor at the Penrose Institute and a man of vast intellectual authority, Artie.

“Mother.” McAndrew awkwardly disengaged himself. “You look well.” She looked, I thought, like an expensive hooker. “This is Jeanie Roker. I’ve told you about her.”

That was news to me. What had he told her? She took my hand and gave me a rapid head-to-foot inspection. “The mother of Artie’s bairn,” she said. “Now, that’s very convenient.”

I couldn’t tell from her expression if she approved or disapproved of the fact that Mac and I had had a child together, but I was doubly glad that there had been a lunchtime ceremony honoring old Professor Limperis and I was dressed in something a lot fancier and more formal than my usual crew’s jump-suit.

Why, though, was it convenient that I was at the Institute?

“The three of us will talk later.” Mary McAndrew was as tall as I, and big blue eyes stared straight into mine. So much for my bent and tiny Scottish elder. “First, though, I need to unpack, freshen up, and maybe have a wee nap.”

She looked at Dr. Siclaro. “I hate to impose, but could you show me where I’ll be staying?”

“It will be a pleasure.” If Monty Siclaro found it odd that he would serve as guide to the Institute rather than McAndrew, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He offered Mary McAndrew his arm and they swayed off together. A mechanical porter emerged from the lock and followed them carrying nine cases of luggage.

I wouldn’t pack nine cases for a trip to the end of the Universe. As soon as they were out of earshot I asked, “Mac, just how long is your mother planning to stay here?”

“I have no idea.” He gazed at me hopelessly.

“But her luggage.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing. When I was a lad, she’d take six cases with us for a weekend away.”

Another revelation. McAndrew not only had a mother, he had also had a childhood. In all the years I’d known him he hadn’t said one word about his early days. And I wouldn’t hear more about it for a while, because Emma Gowers arrived to drag him away for a seminar with the enticing title of “Higher-dimensional complex manifolds and a new proof of the Riemann conjecture.” I may not have learned much in life, but I recognize cruel and unusual punishment when I see it. The speaker was Fernando Brill, whom I recalled had an unusually loud and penetrating voice. I wouldn’t even be able to sleep through him. I stayed in the Institute’s parlor, where it was the custom of the faculty to meet daily for tea.

It was only two-thirty. I expected a clear couple of hours when I could take a nap, because I had been travelling most of the night on my journey from Lunar Farside. I closed my eyes. Two minutes later — at least, it felt that way, though the clock registered 3:15 — a dulcet voice cooed in my ear.

“Why, here you are, my dear. I didn’t expect to see you until later.”

I opened my eyes. Mary McAndrew was in front of me. She was wearing a green dress, slit to each hip. By the look of it she was not wearing much else. Monty Siclaro stood at her side, giving an impression of a new-found Egyptian mummy.

McAndrew’s mother turned to him and squeezed his hand. “You run along now Monty, you sweet man. Jeanie and I need to have a bit of a chat. We’ll see more of each other later.”

Monty You-Sweet-Man Siclaro, distinguished fellow of the Penrose Institute and leading expert on the extraction of energy from Kerr-Newman black holes, dutifully tottered away. His etiolated look suggested there wasn’t much more of him for her to see.

“Now there’s just the two of us.” Mary Mother-of-Mac sat down beside me. “So, my dear, why don’t we find out a little more about each other?”

I learned during the next three-quarters of an hour what she meant by that. I was asked a series of penetrating questions regarding everything from my education and job description to my personal hygiene and tastes in men.

At the end of it she sat back and gave me a big smile. “You know, that is so much a relief. Artie is such an innocent. I was afraid that he might have fallen for a pretty face.” She thought for a moment, possibly decided that she was being less than tactful, and amended her statement. “Or he might have found an intellectual. That would be even worse.”

I said, “Perish the thought.”

It was wasted on her. “Now I’ll tell you what’s happening and why I’m here,” she said. “First, I’m going to be married.”

I made conventional sounds of congratulation.

“Well, I mean, it’s as good as being married. Fazool and I are going to live together. He’s enormously rich, and he likes the idea that I’m utterly poor. It makes him feel protective — he thinks if it weren’t for him I’d be in the poor-house.”

The house I would suggest for her sounded rather like poor-house; but I kept my mouth shut.

“Fazool would be very upset,” she went on, “if he ever found out that I had funds of my own. So I’ve decided to put my money into a trust. Artie is my only child, and the lad will be the ultimate beneficiary. I’m glad you’re around to take care of him, because he can be such a dim-wit.”

I looked around. The tea-room would be filling up in a few minutes, but fortunately the place was still deserted except for the two of us. Describing McAndrew as a dim-wit at this Institute would get you the same reaction as chug-a-lugging the altar wine during a church service.

“What about Mac’s father?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be a beneficiary?”

“Ah, yes.” Her face took on a look of wistful sadness.

“Dead?” I realized that I had never heard McAndrew speak of his father, not even once.

“By all the logic, he is.” She smiled sweetly. “But a son-of-a-bitch like that is awful hard to kill.”

The arrival of a chattering half-dozen scientists saved me from fielding that remark. Mary McAndrew made an instant survey, checked the line of her skirt to make sure that plenty of leg was showing, and headed for the tallest and most distinguished-looking of the group. It was Plimpton, who according to McAndrew had not had an original thought since he started to grow facial hair and possibly not before. On the other hand, I don’t think Mary was seeking original thought. Original sin, maybe.

I followed her toward the tea and sweetmeats. Apparently I had been weighed in the balance and found reasonably adequate. But I suspected that Mary McAndrew employed an unusual scale.

A mother, and now a father, too. I couldn’t wait to hear McAndrew’s side of the story.

But wait I had to. McAndrew arrived at last from the seminar with half a dozen other scientists. He headed toward his mother. Before they could exchange more than two words, Emma Gowers came sashaying over toward them.

A word about Emma. She is the Institute’s expert on multiple kernel arrays and a formidable brain. She is also blond and beautiful, with a roving eye, a lusty temperament, and a taste for big, hairy men of diminished mental capacity.

I was standing only a step away. I saw Mary McAndrew and Emma size each other up, and I realized that neither knew who the other was. But like called to like, and they straightened and preened like two fighting cocks.

“Come on, Mac,” Emma said. “You and I have a date.”

The wording was provocative, but I knew that Emma had no possible sexual interest in McAndrew. His mother didn’t. So far as she could tell, Emma was cutting in.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

McAndrew made a feeble gesture from one to the other. “Mother, this is one of my professional colleagues, Emma Gowers. Emma, this is my mother.”

Mary McAndrew extended a slim and delicate hand. “And which profession would that be, my dear?” Her tone couldn’t have been warmer.

Emma gave her a friendly smile. “Not the one you are most familiar with, I’m sure.” She had been making a close inspection of Mary McAndrew’s neck and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “But it’s encouraging to know that a person doesn’t have to change her line of work, just because she’s old. Come on, Mac.”

She gripped McAndrew firmly by the arm and pulled him away toward the door. I was left to face his mother.

I said, “It’s not the way it looks. She’s not chasing him. There’s a problem with the balanced drive on one of the ships, and he and Emma have an appointment to take a look at it.”

Mary McAndrew seemed not in the least upset. She said thoughtfully, “Well, I certainly underestimated that one. She and I must have a cozy chat when they get back. Where do you say they’re going?”

It was easier to show than to tell. I put down my cup and led her across to one of the room’s small observation ports. “They’ll be going outside the Institute and over to one of the ships. You can see it from here. That’s the Flamingo, the Institute’s smallest experimental vessel.”

She followed my pointing finger. The Flamingo was berthed about four kilometers away. We had a profile view of the circular flat disk of condensed matter at the front, with the long column jutting away from the center and the small sphere of the life capsule sitting out near the end of it.

“What a strange-looking object!” Mary said. “Why, it’s not in the least like a ship.”

I stared at her. Was she joking?

“You’re looking at a ship that uses the McAndrew balanced drive,” I said. “Mac says it’s a trivial idea, but it’s the most famous thing he’s ever done. He’s known everywhere in the Solar System because of it.”

“Is he now?” She peered at it with a bit more interest. “But it’s ugly. That plate, and the long spike. And where do the people sit?”

She didn’t know, she really didn’t. Her own son’s most celebrated invention, and she had no idea.

“The crew and passengers go in the life capsule.” I pointed. “That’s the little ball you can see at the end of the spike.”

“But it’s teeny. All that big ship, and such a small space for people. What a waste.”

“It has to be that way. That plate on the front is a hundred-meter disk of compressed matter, electromagnetically stabilized. If you put people in the middle of the disk while the ship is at rest, they’d feel a gravitational pull of fifty gees — enough to flatten anybody. But in the life capsule out at the end of the spike, a person feels a pull of just one gee. Now when you turn the drive on and the acceleration grows, the life capsule automatically moves closer to the disk. The acceleration and the gravitational force pull in opposite directions. The life capsule position is chosen so the total force inside it, the difference of gravity and acceleration, stays at one gee. A lot of people call it `the McAndrew inertia-less drive,’ but Mac hates that. He says inertia is still there, and the right name is the balanced drive.”

I should have more sense. Predictably, I had lost her. In the middle of my explanation she had turned away from the window and she again had her eye on the mentally nulliparous Plimpton.

“Gravity, acceleration, compressed matter,” she said. “Oh, how that carries me back. Like father, like son. McAndrew’s father, he’d drive a woman mad with talk of compressed matter, when what she was needing was a little personal attention.”

“McAndrew Senior was a physicist, too?” If I couldn’t get family information from Mac, maybe his mother would provide it.

“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?”

McAndrew did not answer, but picked up the blue notebook. He began to leaf through it, and this time he was occupied for much longer.

I didn’t speak, either. I had learned long ago that when McAndrew had that look on his face it was a waste of time to try to gain his attention. He was off in a different universe. Mary McAndrew must have learned the same thing, long ago in McAndrew’s childhood. She went off to the kitchen without a word and appeared a few minutes later with a loaded tea-tray.

McAndrew finally laid the notebook carefully back on the table.

“Well?” I asked.

“I dinna ken. It’s a thing a man has to sleep on.”

“That’s all you can tell us?”

“I can tell you what he — my father — wrote.” Mac said “my father” awkwardly, as though the words came hard to his tongue. “What I can’t tell you is whether what he wrote is true. That needs some hard thinking.”

“Nothing there,” Mary said. She calmly poured tea. “Nothing, just as I told you.”

It occurred to me that after leaving the contents of the box to rot for all these years she wanted there to be nothing.

McAndrew spoke again, slowly and carefully. “What Heinrich Grunewald says — what he says” — there was a slight emphasis on he — “is that there’s another way to produce compressed matter, and if ye do it his way there’s no need of electromagnetic stabilization. The compressed matter will be naturally stable. If he’s right, you can also achieve far higher densities than we have at present. Up to three billion tons per cubic centimeter.”

Mary did not react, but I did. The compressed matter used in the balanced drive plates averaged three thousand tons per cubic centimeter, and that was considered phenomenal.

“Does he say how to do it?” I asked.

“Aye. But that’s the hard bit to swallow. He says that it involves a local modification and enhancement of the strong force.”

“What strong force?” Mary asked.

I waited for someone to answer. Then I realized that unlike at the Institute, where bulging super-brains stood ready to lecture on any conceivable topic in physics, McAndrew and I were the only two available; and from the look on his face he was gone again, off to some unimaginable place where I could never follow.

“What strong force?” Mary said again. “Have the two of you gone deaf?”

“I’ll explain,” I said. I should have added, or try to. Make me your authority on physics and you run a considerable risk. “There are four basic forces in the universe.” That much I was sure of. “There’s gravity, that’s the one everybody knows even if they don’t understand it. There’s the electromagnetic force, that powers electrical motors and everything else to do with electricity and magnetism. There’s a thing called the weak force, which causes radioactivity.” (At that point McAndrew should have awakened and roasted me for a simplistic explanation. The fact that he didn’t meant he wasn’t really there). “And then there’s the strong force, which holds nuclei together when electromagnetic forces want them to fly apart.”

I was about to add that unified theories explained all four as part of a single generalized force, and that all were mediated through the exchange of virtual particles with names like photons and gluons. I didn’t. I could see Mary’s face.

I finished, a bit lamely, “What your husb — what McAndrew’s father claims to have done is find a way to change the way the strong force operates. If he was right, and he could make it stronger, then there could be a better way to form compressed matter.”

Mary sniffed. “If I’d known that was all I had in the box all this time, I wouldna have bothered to keep it all this time.” She picked up the video recording. “And here we have more of the same?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“So let’s take a wee look, and find out.” She went over to a corner of the living room and pulled back a drape to reveal a playback unit so antiquated that I’d have accepted the idea that it was steam driven. “Artie, are you awake? Artie! Och, the lad’s hopeless.”

“Play it,” I said. “Maybe it will bring him back into the real universe.”

“I have doubts of that. I never found anything that would when he’s got that face on him.” But she inserted the video recording.

The overhead lights, coupled to the playback unit, dimmed. The wall display flashed a brief kaleidoscope of color, then settled to show the figure of a standing man. It zoomed to a close-up of his face and I had a sudden and startling feeling of recognition. The long jaw and thin-lipped mouth were different, but the distant eyes and high, balding forehead were pure McAndrew.

Heinrich Grunewald spoke. His voice was slow, deeper than Mac’s, and slightly accented. “This recording contains its own time-line, giving the date and hour that it is being made. I’ll be away for a little while, so I want there to be no arguments regarding priority of invention when I return. I have developed a modified theory of the strong interaction, with huge and various commercial potentials. Among the near-term applications are cheap forms of compressed matter, the ability to make shipment of diffuse materials in much smaller containers, induced radioactivity, more compact forms of existing commercial fusion devices, and low-temperature proton-proton fusion.”

McAndrew was awake after all. I heard him gasp at that last item. Grunewald went on, “I am not talking theory alone. The technical details permitting each of these developments can be found here.” He raised a blue notebook, like a bigger version of the one in the lockbox.

I glanced at Mary McAndrew, who shook her head. “Nothing like that, not left with me. It’s been a long time, but I think maybe I saw it.”

McAndrew said, “Then where is it? We have no other lead.”

“It went with him.” I was surprised that the two of them were slow to catch on. “If it gives the practical details it’s worth an enormous fortune. He didn’t want to risk anyone else getting their hands on it.”

“We have to find it, and him.” McAndrew sounded unusually forceful. He saw my expression. “Oh, not the inventions, Jeanie. You know I don’t give a damn about them. We need the theory.”

Mary McAndrew turned to me. “I told you. He hasn’t changed a bit. He needs a keeper.”

I asked, “But where did he go?”

McAndrew snapped at us. “If the pair of you would stop blathering, maybe we’d have a chance to find out.”

Heinrich Grunewald was still talking. Mac reversed the video to the point where his father was hefting the blue book.

“… developments can be found here.” Grunewald flourished the notebook in a self-satisfied way and finally placed it back out of sight. “With industrial sabotage so common, I do not wish to perform my final validation experiments where others might find a way to steal or even to interfere.”

Mary McAndrew said, “Och, he’s crazy suspicious. He was always paranoid. I’ve never known another man look under every bed before he’d get in it, no matter who he was with and what he had to look forward to.”

McAndrew and I both shushed her, as Grunewald went on, “So to do the validation I’m taking the Fafner out, away from the main shipping lanes—”

“Got him,” I said.

“Keep quiet,” McAndrew snapped. But I’m a seasoned cargo captain, and for a change I knew something he didn’t. It didn’t matter whether or not Heinrich Grunewald told us anything else. If he had taken his ship out, as he said, then his flight plan would be on file. So would any firing of the ship’s engines.

The man was gone, but not forgotten and not untraceable. It might take a while, but I felt sure we would be able to track down McAndrew’s long-lost father.

Like many things in life, the problem I had been so sure I could solve proved more difficult than it sounded.

We headed for the Penrose Institute to perform the calculations. Mary McAndrew told us that she could not come, she had to pay some attention to “poor neglected Fazool.” But I was to let her know what we found.

“I know he’s surely dead,” she said to me as we left for Equatorport. “He was a wicked, obstinate, reckless man. But the two of us had some great times, and I was awful fond of Heinrich. Why, I was even faithful to him.”

It would have been unkind to ask for how long.

Mac and I headed for the Institute, and at first everything went according to plan. I delved into the old data bases and found the flight plan of the Fafner. Among the listed on-board equipment, tantalizingly, the manifest included the enigmatic item, “strong field modifier, prototype.”

I learned the exact second of the ship’s departure. I found its nominal destination, though that could change through subsequent course corrections or changes of mind. I obtained a complete list of subsequent engine firings, which even without the record sent back from the Fafner’s inertial navigation system would allow us to pinpoint the ship’s last known location. After all the engine firings, a certain stochastic element affected the Fafner’s movements depending on the vagaries of gravitational perturbation by small bodies and variations in solar wind. But natural body positions for anything substantial were in the data banks on an hour-by-hour basis, and the programs to compensate for their effects were routine.

The calculations took a while, even with McAndrew’s talent for instant shortcuts. Once we had answers we borrowed the synthetic aperture distributed observation system for a few days and surveyed the sky sector where the Fafner should be found.

Result: nothing. Not a sign. No Fafner, not in the region we had defined as most probable or in one ten times as big in all directions. The ship had disappeared.

I checked the calculations, redoing everything the long way. The Fafner was not a big ship, nothing to compare with a cargo carrier or even a large passenger vessel, but it was thirty meters long and almost fifteen across. Anything that size would stand out prominently on the observations made by the big scope, especially when you used a time exposure to sort out moving objects within the Solar System from the fixed celestial background. Comparison with known natural bodies ought to do the rest.

I found nothing wrong with McAndrew’s calculations. He checked my checking. That took two more days. Finally we were ready to admit defeat. By this time a dozen others at the Institute were taking an interest. McAndrew phrased the dilemma for all of us. “Objects just can’t disappear. Here are the possibilities: The Fafner might have totally disintegrated. It might have hidden away inside another object. Or it might be deliberately covered with nonreflective material at the wavelengths used by the Institute scopes.”

“Or stolen away by aliens,” I added. I was tired.

McAndrew nodded as though that was a serious possibility. “In any case,” he said, “we’ve gone as far as we can just sitting and looking.”

“The ship can’t be far away from where we calculated,” I said. I could see where the discussion was heading, and I knew that we faced a very tough job. “It’s in the Inner System, and near the plane of the ecliptic. In the Asteroid Belt, almost certainly.”

McAndrew nodded and looked gloomy. “Aye. Wouldn’t you just know it’d be that way?”

The others muttered vague expressions of sympathy.

To see why, imagine that you are asked to look for something small. Would you rather search a large volume or a small one?

The answer to that question depends where you are and what you are seeking. The region of the Solar System that includes the Sun, planets, moons, asteroids, and the odd collection of misfit bodies forming the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt is a substantial volume; it is shaped like a flat pillbox, about thirty billion kilometers across and maybe forty million deep. Say, a billion billion cubic kilometers of volume altogether. But that’s infinitesimal compared with the space bounded by the inner edge of the Oort cloud. There, we are talking a spherical region with a radius of a twentieth of a light-year. The volume in cubic kilometers is a number with thirty-five zeroes, too many for me to be comfortable with. You can subtract the volume of the pillbox, and it makes no noticeable difference.

The odd thing, though, is that inside the pillbox it’s much harder to find something. And if you had to pick one place where the search is more difficult than any other, the Inner Belt of the asteroids is where you’d least like to be.

The key word is clutter. There are far too many natural bodies in orbit. The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size.

The data bases at the Institute keep dynamic track of every body of any size, down to ten meters across. The Fafner was much bigger than that, so it ought to have been picked up in our search. Recognize that it hadn’t been, and where does that leave you? You know there are countless millions of objects near where the missing ship ought to be, and you have no idea at all why your original search failed.

So we would fly out there and take a look for ourselves, and hope that our human brains could spot an anomaly able to fool the smartest computers in the Solar System.

How? I had no idea.

McAndrew did. “If it’s been blown apart to its component atoms,” he said, “we’ll never find it. But if it’s still in one piece, there’s a way that can’t fail.”

We were preparing to leave, and we were not using a ship with McAndrew’s balanced drive. Instead he had picked out an old touring pinnace with a one-gee acceleration limit. After my initial surprise I decided that I knew why (it would turn out later that I was wrong). McAndrew, it seemed to me, wanted time to think. He’d never admit it, but his pride was hurt. It was bad enough that somebody would come up with a basic idea that he had missed, in an area of theoretical physics where he had thought longer and harder than any person alive. That the somebody was his own father — the father who had run off and deserted him and his mother — was even worse.

As the Driscoll eased away from the institute, I compared travel times. Even the most minimal ship equipped with the balanced drive was capable of continuous forty-gee acceleration. With that performance, our destination would have been a mere seventeen hours, standing start to standing finish. On the other hand, at the leisurely half-gee best suited to the Driscoll’s engines, we faced a journey of close to a week.

All right for McAndrew, perhaps; he was sitting barefoot, staring vacantly at the cabin wall and cracking his finger and toe joints in a way that I always found infuriating. I knew from experience that he was likely to sit for days, eating his meals like a zombie and washing only at my insistence. Meanwhile, what was I supposed to do, here in a ship that flew itself?

I reviewed everything we had learned so far. Heinrich Grunewald’s paranoia had not ended when he left Mary McAndrew. The Fafner required a crew of three when it flew in cislunar space. Upon leaving that controlled region, Heinrich as soon as possible had the other two men ferried back to Earth station. He continued alone. His last recorded engine burn placed him in stable orbit in the middle of the Asteroid Belt. Any new engine burn would have been detected. None had been recorded. Any explosion in that location powerful enough to destroy a ship would have been seen. No instruments, on Earth or elsewhere, had seen such evidence.

The ship must be there. The ship was not there. I sat and wondered. Where’s Heinrich?

McAndrew emerged from his trance when we still had a full day of flight time ahead. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Or at least, part of it.”

“Well, isn’t that nice.” I should have known better. Sarcasm is wasted on the man. He smiled at me. I went on, “So you know how changing the strong force would allow somebody to do the things that your father claimed?”

He stopped smiling. “Och, I’ve always known that. It’s obvious.”

“Not to me it isn’t. I don’t suppose you’d consider explaining?”

“The strong force holds nuclei together. So suppose you could make it more powerful and act over a longer range, for an indefinitely long period. That would lead to stable compressed matter, and you’d be able to squeeze anything you like into a smaller space. If you used the strong force to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between protons, you’d also be on the road to easy proton-proton fusion at room temperature.

“Now suppose you work the other way round, and know how to weaken the strong force. Then nuclei will be less strongly bound, and a lot of naturally stable elements will become unstable. That gives you induced radioactivity.”

“But that’s everything.” It seemed to me he had covered everything on Heinrich Grunewald’s list. “Why do you say you only have part of it?”

“Because I slipped something in there at the beginning. I said, suppose you could modify the strong force for an indefinitely long period. That’s the killer, Jeanie. I can see a way to make changes, but they’d be unstable. Worse than that, they’d be unpredictable. You’d never know when the effect would reverse itself and things return to the way they were. And when I try to stabilize the situation over time, I need to assume the existence of isolated quarks. I might find a way around that when I give it a bit more of a think, but I still won’t know what went wrong. Something surely did. There must be a missing piece — some trivial point, some fact that I’ve overlooked…”

He was all set to drift off again. I said, loudly, “Mac, we’d be a lot closer to the something you’re missing if we knew how to find the Fafner. In another twenty-four hours we’ll be sitting out in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, wondering what to do next.”

He stared at me with those pale, vague eyes. “Why, I already know what we’ll do. Why do you think I wanted to take the Driscoll, instead of something with a balanced drive?”

“Because you wanted time to think.”

“Maybe. And I got that. But we’d have a problem if we’d used the balanced drive. The compressed matter plate on any of those ships masses trillions of tons.”

“That’s never given us any difficulty before.”

“Because we’ve never had this situation before. Think about it, Jeanie. If the Fafner’s still in one piece, what’s the one thing about itself it can’t hide?”

“Thermal signature?”

“That’s not a bad answer for a ship that’s alive. Anything with people on board has to generate and give off heat. But the Fafner’s more than likely dead, so there would be no thermal signal. A ship can be at the same temperature as its surroundings, or it can change its size and shape, or it can be coated with an absorbing layer so it’s hard to see. The one thing it still has, no matter what it does, is mass.”

When he spoke that one, final word I could see the rest for myself. We knew from the Fafner’s records the ship’s mass at the time of final engine burn: three hundred and thirty tons. Even if Grunewald had jettisoned material into space, the present value would not be far from that. If we were anywhere close to the ship we could locate it using our mass detector. The instrument was highly sensitive and it could be programmed to correct for every nearby object in the right size range. The trillion-ton mass of a compressed matter plate was something else. On a ship with a balanced drive, the plate’s effects would overwhelm the gravity field of everything in the neighborhood.

It’s my one big complaint with McAndrew. He assumes you understand what he understands. Even when you feel sure you know what goes on inside his head, you don’t. One of his colleagues told me that the difference between McAndrew and other people is that Mac knows how to think around corners. It’s probably true, but it doesn’t help much.

I wondered if he got that talent from his father. I had no idea what Heinrich Grunewald had been doing out here, or why he had disappeared thirty years ago from the face of the Solar System. I thought of Mary McAndrew’s words, “he was a wicked, obstinate, reckless man.” Cut out the wicked part, and you had McAndrew.

I can’t think around corners, but I have excellent instincts for danger. And I was feeling uneasy, more nervous than the situation seemed to justify.

We had arrived, exactly at the place where the Fafner was supposed to be. I cut the drive and used the visible wavelength sensors to scan through a full four-pi solid angle.

Did I see the ship? Of course not. You might say I already knew I wouldn’t, because if it had been there the scopes of the Penrose Institute would have found it before we ever left.

I pointed that out to McAndrew.

“Which is why we had to come out here and take a look for ourselves.” He seemed filled with secret glee, his normal reaction when facing a scientific mystery. “Jeanie, keep the drive off and the displays on, and let’s have a go with the mass detector.”

I took a last look at the screens. The optical sensors would find and highlight any unknown body that subtended more than a fiftieth of a second of arc. That meant I would see something as small as a tenth of a meter across, even if it were a hundred kilometers away.

The displays showed absolutely nothing. The Driscoll sat in the middle of a large volume of emptiness.

Convinced that we were wasting our time, I turned on the mass detector. Instantly, a loud buzz from the instrument made me start upright in my seat.

“There we are.” McAndrew clapped his hands in delight. “What do we show for mass and range?”

“Eighteen thousand tons,” I said. “So that’s not the Fafner, it’s far too massive. It’s at eighteen kilometers.” I took another look at the optical sensor outputs. “But Mac, there’s nothing there.”

“We’ll see. Take us that way — slowly.”

I did as he asked, but at one kilometer away from the invisible target I stopped the Driscoll. “No closer, Mac. That’s as near as we’re going.”

“But there’s no possible danger—”

“This ship has to take us home. If you want a closer look, we use suits.”

“Jeanie—”

“On a ship you can only have one captain.” When I feel a certain way I can be as obstinate as McAndrew.

He knows it, too. He scowled at me, but he didn’t argue. He went over and began to put on a suit. I locked the Driscoll to hold a fixed one-kilometer distance from whatever was exciting the mass detector, and went across to do the same.

Keeping an eye on McAndrew? Sure. But I had my own curiosity to satisfy. Why were the optical sensors and the mass detector at odds with each other?

He went a meter or two in front of me, heading for the place where the mass detector insisted that we would find an invisible eighteen-thousand ton object. The suit displays homed us in the location. McAndrew went slower and slower. He was using the light in his suit to illuminate the space ahead of him.

Finally he paused, and said, “There you have it!”

“There you have what?” I, only a meter behind him, saw nothing at all.

“The body — the eighteen-thousand ton body — that Heinrich used to test his strong force modifier. If he compressed it down to three billion tons per cubic centimeter, the radius would be a fraction of a millimeter — just about right.”

Finally, I saw a mote of reflected light. When I moved my head within the suit helmet, I realized that the object was tiny and just a few feet in front of us.

“That thing?” I said. “That’s what the mass detector picked up?”

“Of course. What I expected, and what I hoped we’d find.”

He reached out with his gloved left hand. Before I could stop him he gripped the tiny particle between his thumb and forefinger. “As you’d expect,” he said. “It’s tiny, but it should have all the inertia of the original body. Let’s see.”

I saw him pull, but all that did was move his position. “Doesn’t budge,” he said. And then, in a different tone, “This is the damnedest thing. Jeanie, I can’t let go. My finger and thumb won’t come apart — and they hurt.”

He was wearing a tough, insulated suit. Cold or heat could not get through it, nor could radiation. If the suit had somehow developed a hole at finger or thumb, air would be jetting out into space. I saw no tell-tale sign of chilled vapor.

McAndrew turned on his suit jets. It changed his body position only by the length of his own outstretched arm. He was stuck, locked in place by an invisible mote.

I heard his grunt of pain and effort. Suddenly I imagined his father, floating outside the Fafner and with no one to help him, reaching out to touch the mote of compressed matter and held as McAndrew was held.

I still had no idea what was going on, so my next actions were pure instinct. I said, “Grit your teeth, Mac, this is going to hurt worse than it hurts already,” and I took a metal shearing tool from the belt of my suit. Before McAndrew could do anything about it I moved to his suit and severed the top joint of his thumb and first finger.

He cried out in pain as a foam of blood and air spurted from his suit glove. In less than a second the suit sensors reacted and tightened a seal on the fingers. I used the thrustors on my own suit to pull us away toward the Driscoll. As we backed up I saw the first joints of the finger and thumb, still firmly attached to each other. In my over-stimulated condition they seemed to be moving closer to each other and shrinking at the ends.

McAndrew’s suit had decided that he would be better off with a shot of anesthetic. He was still conscious when I hauled us both through the air lock of the Driscoll and peeled off our suits. I put him on a bunk and anxiously examined his left hand.

“How is it, Jeanie?” he said. The painkillers left him rational and quite calm.

“Not too bad. The cuts are clean. But there’s no way to regrow the joints before we’re back home.”

“I’ll manage,” he said. “My own fault. That’s what you get when you don’t think before you act.”

“We’ll be home in less than a week.” I was already at the controls of the Driscoll. “I’ll keep you as comfortable as I can until we get there.”

“Hey, we can’t leave.” He had been lying down, but now he sat suddenly upright. “Not without what we found.”

“We’re certainly not leaving with it. That thing, whatever it is, is lethal.”

“It isn’t, unless you were as careless as I was. Look, I’ll tell you what happened. Then see what you think.”

I paused in setting up our flight home. I looked at the mass detector readings, and confirmed that we were still a full kilometer away from the particle of compressed matter.

“Five minutes to persuade me,” I said.

“It won’t take that long. But you’ll have to take my word on the numbers.”

“I’ll give you that much.” When it comes to calculations, McAndrew doesn’t know how to make mistakes.

“All right.” He lay down again on the bunk and stared up at nothing. “You take a natural body, floating around here in the Asteroid Belt. You go to it, and you place in position there a piece of equipment that locally increases the strong force. Then you turn on the equipment — remotely, from a safe distance. The increase in the strong force makes the body collapse, until it has a density of three billion tons per cubic centimeter. That’s what he claimed he could do, so let’s believe him. If the body you started out with massed eighteen thousand tons, the one you end up with will be minute. About a quarter of a millimeter across.”

“I didn’t have any numbers,” I said, “but I finally guessed that something like that had to be going on. It’s the only way we’d have a strong signal from the mass detector, and not see anything. But you couldn’t escape when you took hold of it, and the pain you felt—”

“My own fault entirely. I didn’t do the other half of the calculation. Gravity’s the weakest force in the Universe, but it follows an inverse square law. Take a mass of eighteen thousand tons, and squeeze it down into a quarter millimeter sphere. What’s the gravity at the surface?”

That sounded like a rhetorical question. I waited.

“The field at the surface of the sphere is thousands of gees.” He held up his damaged hand. “And I was fool enough to grab hold. I couldn’t get my fingers free. Not only that — the field pulled in anything close enough. The material of my glove, then the tips of my finger and thumb. I could feel the blood sucking out.”

“But I didn’t notice a thing,” I protested.

“No more you would. The inverse square law got me, but it saved you. Ten centimeters away from the sphere, the pull is down to a hundredth of a gee — not enough to feel. But close up… good thing you were there to cut me away, or I don’t know what I’d have done.”

I did. I could see it with awful clarity. The same thing would have happened to McAndrew as had happened to Heinrich Grunewald. Held by the tiny ball of compressed matter, unable to move back to the Fafner because of the immense eighteen-thousand ton inertia. Except that at the time it had been not quite eighteen thousand tons. The ball, slowly and inexorably, would have consumed Heinrich, drawing his body little by little into itself. And then, over a much longer time frame, the Fafner must have suffered the same fate. The gentle force of gravity would have tugged it gradually toward the speck of condensed matter, closer and close until there was finally physical contact. From that moment the Fafner was doomed, just as McAndrew’s father had been doomed. As McAndrew himself, without my intervention…

I realized that he was speaking again. “But now we know what happened,” he was saying in an unnaturally cheerful voice, “there’s no danger at all. We’ll bring the compressed matter on board, contain it electromagnetically, and take it back with us to the Institute.”

“Not on this ship you won’t.” The most brilliant mind in the System, but sometimes you wonder if he’s capable of learning anything. Maybe I ought to be charitable and blame the anesthetic. He was starting to sound decidedly woozy. I went on, “Didn’t you tell me, just an hour or two ago, that the compressed matter might be unstable — it could revert unexpectedly to its original condition? Suppose that happened on the way back. Do you want to share your living quarters with an eighteen thousand ton lump of rock?”

“Ah, but I think I see a way around that. If we build the right piece of equipment—”

“You mean when you’ve built the right piece of equipment. After that’s done, and it’s been thoroughly tested, and you know it works in every case and there’s no danger of compressed matter instability, then if you like we’ll come back out here and collect your finger and thumb.”

I wasn’t worried about his finger and thumb, but I didn’t want to say what was really in my mind. Then maybe we’ll be able to give your father a decent burial.

Ignoring McAndrew, I set the final coordinates for home and turned on the drive. The Mighty Mote we were leaving behind was not going to run away. Heinrich Grunewald, in his strangest of sarcophagi, would still be waiting if and when we came back.

When Mary McAndrew left the Penrose Institute for the first time I would have bet good money that she would never return. Scientists like Plimpton and Monty Siclaro were all right for diversion, an occasional snack as it were, but not for her regular diet.

I would have lost. Mary showed up, one year to the day after her first visit, for the formal ceremony in which an award was made, posthumously, to Heinrich Grunewald for his part in the development of the Grunewald-McAndrew formalism for the modified strong interaction.

McAndrew had insisted that the names be listed in that order. He said that his own contribution, allowing a generator to amplify the strong field externally so that the equipment itself would not be destroyed, was minor. All the major insights for the theory had been provided by the late Heinrich Grunewald.

Mary sat quietly through the ceremony, though I don’t think it had most of her attention. She looked very serious and smiled only once, when McAndrew held up Heinrich Grunewald’s medal and citation for the visiting media to see. Her dress also seemed odd for the occasion. She wore a long black dress, with a single pearl pinned at the left shoulder. She looked stunning, but she seemed indifferent to the ogling male and female eyes of the media representatives.

After the ceremony was over McAndrew to his disgust had to submit to questions and an interview — Institute Director Rumford was not willing to give up such a wonderful opportunity for favorable publicity. As McAndrew left, Mary came over to me.

She got right down to the point. “Do you think you could show me Heinrich’s remains? I want to pay my respects, but Artie refuses. He doesn’t seem to like the idea, even though it’s his own father.”

“I have to agree with him, I don’t think it’s wise.”

“Why not?”

“Well…”

“Look, I heard that Heinrich had some sort of accident, and was squashed real bad. But I’m a grown woman, I won’t turn hysterical on you or anything.”

I wasn’t so sure of that. On the other hand, it sounded unreasonable to refuse anyone’s request to see the remains of a loved one when a team from the Institute had trailed all the way out to the Asteroid Belt to recover the compressed matter asteroid, and as an incidental had brought back the Fafner plus Heinrich Grunewald and a couple of bits of McAndrew’s fingers.

“Come on,” I said.

I led the way from the auditorium, out along a rarely-used corridor to an annex far removed from the main body of the Institute, and into a small chamber. The Mighty Mote sat in the middle of it, magnetically suspended to prevent it coming anywhere near other matter. A sphere of glass, three feet across, surrounded the exhibit to provide added security.

Mary advanced and stared in through the curved window.

“Where is he?” She turned to me in bewilderment. “You don’t understand. I wanted to see Heinrich, no matter how bad he was mashed up in the accident. I don’t see anything in there at all.”

She had just sat through a series of explanations, especially simplified for the media, about the significance of the work done by Grunewald and McAndrew. The emphasis had been on the inexpensive creation of compressed matter and the successful recovery of the prototype experiment on strong force enhancement. Apparently Mary had understood not a word.

I intensified the light level and adjusted the angle of the beam, so that the speck of compressed matter appeared as a tiny bright-blue spark.

“There,” I said, “is Heinrich Grunewald.”

“That?” Mary stepped close to the window.

“That.” I resisted the urge to add, And most of what you see isn’t even him. He’s squeezed in there along with the Fafner and eighteen thousand tons of rock.

“Oh dear.” Mary pressed her nose to the glass. “That little fly-speck of stuff? Heinrich wouldn’t be pleased at all, not with him always going on about size — though I told him, over and over, it’s what you do with it that counts. Is there any way of bringing him back the way he used to be?”

“McAndrew’s working on it. He has ideas, but it’s too soon to say if they’ll work. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I don’t have that much to remember Heinrich by, and they don’t look like they’re doing anything for him up here. And it’s terribly lonely in this little room. So I was wondering, I don’t suppose I could take the whole thing down to Earth with me, could I, and look after him there?”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. What you’re looking at is small, but it’s enormously dense. That little sphere with Heinrich’s remains weighs—” I caught myself in time. She’d wonder about eighteen thousand tons. I finished ” — a lot more than you’d think. There would be no way to stop it sinking right down to the center of the planet.”

“Oh dear. Then, no. I’m sure Heinrich would like it there even less than being up here.” She turned away. “They should have left him out where he was, among the stars. He’d have preferred that. I’m going to say goodbye to Artie, and then I’m leaving.”

I trailed along behind, waited while she had a private few minutes with McAndrew, and the three of us went along to the loading dock. She waved, and was gone.

Next day I was gone, too, on a routine delivery of a kernel assembly to Umbriel. I was away for a month. On the way back I dropped by the Institute, now free-orbiting beyond the Moon.

McAndrew was in his office. It was as crowded and cluttered as ever, with one important difference. Over in a clear corner sat a three-foot ball of glass. Within it sat the grain of compressed matter, and alongside that blue speck stood a small hologram of a smiling Mary McAndrew.

“Mac! I thought you told me the compressed matter was unstable. If it changes back to its original form—”

“It won’t.” The buds of his finger and thumb joints were already growing nicely. “I worked all that out when you left. It will stay like that as long as we want it to.”

“And you moved it in here.”

“Well, yes. My mother didn’t seem to like him being off by himself. I thought the two of them ought to be together.”

“Does she know about this?”

He looked surprised. “Why, no. Or if she does, I didn’t tell her.”

But I did. After McAndrew and I had agreed to meet for dinner and a long catch-up evening, I left him and placed a call to Mary McAndrew. I tracked her down in Cap d’Antibes, at one of Fazool’s mansions.

She listened in silence while I told her about the glass sphere and the hologram in McAndrew’s office. Then she said, “I still miss him, you know. Look after him, won’t you.”

She had mixed two different hims in one sentence, but I had no trouble sorting them out. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you know your son.”

“I do indeed. Just like his father. Come and see me, Jeanie. Fazool won’t mind. You and Artie both.”

“I will.”

“In fact, Fazool will probably make a pass at you.”

“I can stand that.”

“I hope Artie can. Goodbye, Jeanie. Look after him, and give him my love.”

“I will. Goodbye, Mary.”

We hung up. Look after him. I’d spent twenty years trying to look after McAndrew and it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.

I went to find the man to tell him that I had spoken with his mother and we needed to plan another visit to her.

McAndrew thinks he understands what the strong force is in the universe, and I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with him. But Mary McAndrew and I, we know better.