Naturally everyone stared at me as if I had lost my mind. I thought I had, too.
Especially when the people facing away from me started turning around.
Yep, that was Dorothy Robb, older but still as vital as I remembered.
Yes, that was Smithers, his hairline strangely receded.
Yes indeedy, absolutely beyond question, the man in the center was Richard Conrad, Conrad of Conrad, and he still didn’t look the part. He still looked like some sort of gruff lovable academic don, now well past retirement age but quite vigorous.
His companion was a short compact woman I had never seen in my life, and I was oddly grateful for that. At last, a hallucination with a trace of creativity! She seemed my age or a little older, remarkably fit, and as focused as a comm laser.
On Conrad’s other side was another total stranger, about ten years older than me. This one was more interesting. His short stature, pale skin, and overdeveloped limbs told me he was a Terran. He had an overall air of sweet hayseed innocence, a gullibility based on intrinsic decency, which usually assumes itself in others. He wore a small dopey mustache like the one Jinny had once tried to get me to grow. But his eyes—his eyes had a contradictory quality I cannot express with words. I would have to show you a similar pair, and say, “Like those.” I had only seen such eyes twice. My father had had them. And so had one of his best friends, whom everyone knew should also have won the Nobel, and who I called Uncle Max. They were the kind of eyes that caused other great geniuses to drop their egos and just stare. I wondered what his field was.
I was giving myself creative credit for having finally produced a really intriguing hallucination, when the last two people present finished turning around.
Given the mental state and emotional shape I was in right then—and the seeming theatricality with which they had both turned so slowly—I was actually fully expecting one of them to turn out to be Jinny.
I was not expecting both of them to.
The one farthest from me, standing beside the man with kaleidoscope eyes, did not look like Jinny as I remembered her. What she looked remarkably like, I realized, was the mental picture I had always had of “fellow orphan” Jinny’s imaginary “dead mother, Mrs. Maureen Hamilton.”
This one was—convincingly appeared to be—the real, actual Jinny Conrad. If she were alive, she would have been about thirteen years older than when I’d last seen her. If this was her, she had apparently lied to me about her age. Despite excellent cosmeticizing, she looked thirty-five. That too would fit.
But it was difficult to focus analytical thought on anything at all, let alone a psychotic puzzle like this, because the other Jinny was so much closer to the Jinny I still carried in my heart’s memory that it threatened to stop my heart. Jinny at eighteen or nineteen—an honest eighteen or nineteen—so beautiful it wasn’t even fair, a perfect rose just unfolding. Jinny as I had seen her then—wise and smart and compassionate and strong and certain—transported through time. Looking back at me now exactly the way she had back then, with eyes that were lamps, whose pupils were black holes, calling me to fall in.
“Hello, Joel,” they both said at once.
I had begun to stop laughing when they both turned around, and finished a few seconds after they were done, with a last few “ha’s.”
But a split second after they both greeted me, I finally got it.
I may have been in ragged shape, an emotional basket case with a malfunctioning brain, belabored by too many impossible stimuli at once—but I had started the course with a pretty decent thinking machine. Presented with a series of clues that allowed only one rational explanation, I was bound to get there eventually. I was aware of the ancient dictum that if you’re certain you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, however unlikely, must be the answer.
Once I got the premise, everything else made sense half a second later. I even had a pretty good idea who the two strangers were, and why they were present.
This time I laughed so hard I went into a tumble, and lost my vertical. I would have literally rolled on the floor laughing if there’d been any gravity to put me there. I had always thought it a hyperbolic expression. There was simply no position that could contain or properly brace my titanic mirth; yearning to laugh even harder, I would curl into fetal position, then explode like a starfish, then punch and kick the air the way I’d learned in Tiger’s dojo, desperate to force all the laughter out before it burst me.
The moment I could spare the air, I managed to squeeze four words into the outgoing message traffic, two at a time.
First: “Hello, Evelyn.”
And then: “Hello, Jin.”
Two things made my father special, and only one of them was that he could think better than practically anybody else.
The other was that he could think faster than practically anybody else.
That means more than just getting to the answer before anyone else can. It means you reach answers no one else will. The faster you can think, the longer a logic chain you can follow out before you get tired and decide to stop. In modern physics, that can be crucial. He told me once, “The universe is so simple, it takes very complicated thought to touch it.”
I inherited a touch of his freak speed. It became clear quite early that I emphatically had not inherited Dad’s gift for exotic mathematics—but it was just as clear that he genuinely did not give the least sub-subatomic particle of a damn about that, and maybe that indicates genius of another, completely different kind on his part. But I had mastered the alto sax at seven, playing with a speed that had literally frightened my first teacher, Francis Layne—who himself was called “Fast Layne.” In my secret heart of hearts, I had always honestly believed I was one of the best composers alive, and one of the best saxophonists, too, although I had expected it to be decades before there was much agreement on that. Now, of course, I had it in the bag.
But I had also noticed quite early that I was usually faster on the uptake than most people. Unless the subject was me, anyway. I spent the better part of most conversations waiting for everyone else to catch up. Patterns form and combine in my mind like crystals reproducing at fast forward, sometimes so fast that even to me it seems like I skip whole steps in my logic process and just thumb to the back of the book for the answer. Telepathy is literally instantaneous; maybe sometimes other kinds of thought are, too.
I saw the people present, I knew who all but two of them were, and it seemed that the instant I got over disbelieving the evidence of my eyes, I knew who the two strangers had to be, and how all of them must have gotten here, and why each of them had come, and what their presence could mean. The actual deduction and induction itself didn’t require genius, really—merely a willingness to think the unthinkable. I’d been doing that for weeks. I had most of it worked out by the time I’d stopped laughing.
Jinnia Conrad, when last seen, had been in the market for a new promising young genius-carrier.
Was there the slightest chance her grandfather would not have said to her, “This time, find one in some serious profession. No more damned artists,” and made it stick? Selecting a sax player had probably been as close as she’d dared come to a gesture of rebellion against her dynastic destiny, tolerated only because of my father’s pedigree.
What was the exact global opposite of a sax player, if not an experimental physicist? Okay, perhaps a financier, but Jinny wasn’t a pervert.
Assume she repeated the pattern, found the male offspring of one or maybe even two of the greatest such tinkerers in recent history, and assume that this lad had inherited the same kind of genius, the urge and ability to take the universe apart and put it back together in different ways with his own hands. He certainly had the eyes of a Tesla. And the naïveté.
Propelled irresistibly by Jinny’s—oh, horrid pun—by her relative-istic drive, and funded by the unlimited resources of the Conrad Family—as if J. P Morgan had been canny enough to simply find Nikola Tesla a wife who would keep
him in harness—was there anything such a genius might not have accomplished?
Suppose he was interested in faster-than-light star drives? His grandfather-in-law would like that.
If he were, he would damn well have a ship equipped with one ready to test within five years, if I knew Jinny.
If he and it survived the initial tests, then the passenger list for its very first official shakedown cruise as a commissioned vessel, long before the rest of the Solar System was told of its existence, was absolutely and beyond question going to include at least two people besides the inventor-pilot: the pilot’s wife, and her grandfather. This voyage would be not merely historic, but conceivably the most historic of all time—no possibility existed that those two names would not be in the first paragraph of the story.
They say luck is the residue of good planning. If the most paranoid man that ever lived ends up being the only one in a position to escape the end of the world with a few playmates for company…can you even call that luck? They must have been on the dark side of Terra, or some other large planet, when it suddenly began to glow around the edges.
If Conrad of Conrad was aboard a small vessel, a minimum of three others were, too.
First and most essential to that paranoid old villain, a very very good and very very very reliable bodyguard. She would be the one I had mistaken for a companion, the cello voice with menace in its undertones. No wonder she looked fit! She could probably fight us all with one hand, while using the other to hold a shield…over her employer. If you’re compelled to try and screw literally everyone you’ll ever meet, you need a strong condom.
Second, Rennick: pan-trained stooge, Speaker To Peasants, flapper, flunky, and designated fall guy should one ever become necessary. Don’t leave the castle without one.
Third, Dorothy Robb: his walking desk, database, secretary, researcher, and necessary impertinent, licensed to sass him occasionally. She had the courage to be willing to pretend every day that she did not fear his terrible power…and the wisdom never to go so far that he began to suspect she really didn’t.
Something about their respective positioning and zero-gee kinesthetics gave me the sudden insight that Jinny’s mocking nickname for Rennick had indeed been aptly chosen. His loyalty to his boss was charged with, if not based on, suppressed eroticism. His body language said his subconscious absurdly considered even ninety-year-old Dorothy Robb a potential rival.
Given the not-terribly-surprising existence of young Gyro Gearloose—if any of them were here, he had to be—I fully understood at once the presence of Jinny, and her grandfather, and all three stooges. The one I had the most trouble explaining to myself was the person I still thought of as “little” Evelyn.
Little she no longer was—but it made little sense that she should be here. If the Conrad superluminal yacht had an extra seat, why hadn’t it gone to some closer relative of Jinny’s than a mere cousin? Why not one of her own parents—or if they were dead or the old man loathed them, Evelyn’s?
All I knew was that her presence was the single most wonderful phenomenon in the Galaxy at that time. I was absolutely certain of that.
I’ve recounted this as if I examined each person there one at a time, and finished with Evelyn, because sentences can’t happen all at the same time. It wasn’t like that. Start to finish, she occupied a huge fraction of my attention and processing time. All the others I saw with peripheral vision—it was my day for clichés come true, and I literally could not take my eyes off her.
The resemblance to Jinny at her age was striking even given their kinship, enough to be eerie. But the differences were just as striking to me, now that I looked. And very dear.
This face was at least as strong as Jinny’s, as determined, as proud. But it was not ruthless. Its eyes were fully as intelligent and alert—but nowhere near as calculating. It was every bit as heartstoppingly beautiful as Jinny’s face had been at nineteen—and more, because it didn’t care. It did not think of its own beauty as a tool, or a weapon.
For the first time I realized the imperfection in Jinny’s beauty that had always escaped my notice somehow, the missing note in the perfect chord: compassion. Evelyn believed other people were real, even non-Conrads. And liked them. Her eyes said in part that she had hurt others in her short life, and that she regretted more about that than the increased difficulty of getting them to accede to her whims.
As I was watching her, she did a little zero-gee move too complex to describe that caused her to look ridiculous for a brief moment, because if she had not, she would have bumped into Jarnell. She did it unconsciously, and I knew in a million years Jinny would never have done such a thing. Jarnell would have ended up apologizing to her.
This was a version of Jinny who could never play me the way the original had, no matter what the reasons.
As quickly as I absorbed all these things and reached all these understandings, I also saw just as clearly a couple of things that only two others present had fully realized yet, two of the most important facts in this whole equation.
Richard Conrad was not only still a very wealthy man, he was vastly wealthier than he had ever been, was now in fact without a doubt the wealthiest human being in the universe.
But his inconceivable fortune consisted of two assets.
And he only had one bodyguard.
Twenty
The butterfly counts not months but moments. And has time enough.
—Rabindranath Tagore
By the time I’d finally gotten the last of my laughter out, airflow had nudged me back within reach of the bulkhead I’d come through to enter the Bridge, and I used it to launch myself toward the meeting.
I tried to talk myself out of it all the way there. I guess I’m just not that big a man. When I reached the group, I used a deck chair to brake myself, and looked Conrad of Conrad in the eyes. For half a second.
“Hey, Connie,” I said.
And turned away “Dorothy, good to see you again. Alex, I see you again. Crave pardon, ma’am, we haven’t been introduced, my name is Joel Johnston.” I bowed as graciously as I had free-fall skills for.
“Alice Dahl,” she said crisply. That was a scary cello she was playing, all right. She did not acknowledge my bow with even a nod, or offer to shake, even with her non-gun hand. Maybe she didn’t have one. She was a golem.
Jinny said, “Joel, I’d like you to meet my husband, Andrew J. Conrad. Andrew, this is Joel.”
He and I exchanged about a hundred thousand words by eye traffic in three seconds, and each put out a hand at the same instant. I liked the man. The mustache looked silly, but I knew it had not been his idea.
“It is an honor to meet you, Captain Conrad,” I said. “Congratulations on your historic achievements. And I speak for the moment only of the latest ones. First man to exceed c. First master of a transluminal passenger vessel. First and only man ever to match orbits with a relativistic starship in transit.” I thought of another one. “And one of only seven creatures we know of who’ve ever been in the close vicinity of an exploding star and lived to tell about it. Welcome to our covered wagon. We hope you’ll find our technology quaint.”
He didn’t preen, or look smug, or sneer arrogantly, or try to pretend he didn’t enjoy the praise. He nodded and said, “Please call me Andrew. Thank you, Joel. I’m glad to be here.”
“You’re welcome, Andrew.”
“Jinny told me you’re a quick study. I can see she was right; you seem up to speed. We’re all lucky to be here.” His face clouded. “And I can’t hope to tell you how much I wish I’d built the Mercury years sooner. Centuries ago. Even last year…”
“We all do, son,” Captain Bean said softly. “Play the cards in front of you.”
Andrew nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s good advice.”
Van Cortlandt spoke up, his voice a pleasant tenor. “How did you ever figure out what was happening in time to run?”
“We were fortunate enough to be in Terra’s shadow when she li
t up.”
“And you’re sure destruction was complete?”
“We reached Ganymede with a thirty-three-minute lead over the wavefront, and spent five minutes talking to telepaths on the ground there. They were just receiving information consistent with the annihilation of Terra. We jumped again, and thirty minutes later telepaths on Saturn confirmed the destruction of Ganymede, with timing consistent with a solar explosion. At that point, I gave her the gun.”
“Andrew’s quick reactions saved us all,” Jinny said proudly, and his shoulders widened.
“What can you tell us about her drive?” I asked.
Solomon spoke up. “The subject came up, as you may imagine. Captain Conrad discussed the nature of the Mercury’s novel propulsion system frankly and forthrightly at some length, using short simple words, and continuing until the last of us lost the struggle to pretend we had the faintest clue what he was talking about. I myself gleaned only that its basic principle is—sometimes—called Drastic Irrelevancy. Have I got that right, Captain?”
“Drastic Irrelevancy Synergism, yes,” Andrew agreed. “You see, it’s…but then you don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Is there even a Sunday supplement shorthand version, albeit grossly oversimplified or crudely approximate, that you could give us?” Lieutenant van Cortlandt asked.
Andrew pursed his mouth in thought a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “In a week, I could probably provide Relativist Short with enough tools to begin thinking about the first part of the answer you want. Uh, there are a lot of parts. Yourself, and a few others here, a month would probably do it. For sure,” he amended, seeing van Cortlandt’s expression.