“Well, I won’t keep you,” Pat said. “You know Mick Jarvas, of course? And this is my cousin, Dan Dannerman. Commander Jimmy Lin.”
Dannerman hadn’t had any clear idea of what he expected a Chinese astronaut to be like, but Jimmy Lin wasn’t it. The man was taller than he had imagined, and a lot huskier; he wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt, and shoes that, Dannerman was pretty sure, would have cost him a month of his observatory pay. “Glad to know you, Commander,” Dannerman said, automatically extending his hand.
But the People’s Republic astronaut obviously didn’t share the pleasure. He didn’t accept Dannerman’s hand. He didn’t even speak to him. He gave him a long, hard look, then turned to Pat Adcock. “I’ll be back before lunch,” he said. “We can talk then.”
“I’ve got a lunch date; make it this afternoon,” she said, gazing after Lin as he let the elevator door close behind him. Then she turned to Dannerman with a mildly puzzled look. “He’s usually chummier than that. You didn’t forget to shower this morning, did you?” He shrugged. “Well, let’s get to work; you can sort that out later.”
Dannerman would have to sort that out, somehow, if he was going to carry out the colonel’s orders, but it was going to be harder than he’d thought. He hadn’t expected that kind of unprovoked hostility from Lin; and he was going to have to come up with something better than a broken wrong arm to get Jarvas out of the way. And then, as he checked his weapon with Jarvas, there was another curious thing. The bodyguard gave him a long look, partly abashed, partly pugnacious, but, though he seemed to want to say something, he didn’t get it out.
There was one thing Dannerman could do, though. Hilda had kept her promise and transmitted the background packets on the observatory employees who had turned up in the sin file. Two of them were unlikely to help: the astrophysics grad student three weeks past her period and frantically sending faxes to her boyfriend, now in Sierra Leone; Harry Chesweiler, identified as a former member of the Man-Boy Love Association. But the packet on Christo Papathanassiou did look good. The old man had got himself picked up for questioning about a terrorist assassination back in the old country. That, Dannerman thought judiciously, could be made to work-whether or not Papathanassiou was actually guilty of anything.
Dannerman couldn’t do anything about it for the first couple of hours that morning, because he was kept busy with his nominal observatory duties. And then, when he went looking for the Cypriot, Papathanassiou was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t in with Pat, or in the room of number crunchers all the scientists used to set up their mathematical models. When Dannerman looked into Rosaleen Artzybachova’s cubicle he wasn’t there, either, and the old lady herself was, incredibly, doing push-ups on the floor. “You want me?” she called, looking up at Dannerman.
“Actually I was looking for Dr. Papathanassiou.”
“Try the canteen,” she said; and that was where Dannerman found him, attacking a wedge of some unfamiliar kind of pastry smothered in heavy cream.
He looked defensive. “One has to keep one’s blood sugar up,” he said.
“Good idea,” said Dannerman. “Mind if I join you?” And when he had a dish of sherbet for himself he said, “I was kind of hoping I’d run into you, Dr. Papathanassiou. I was looking at those tapes from space again last night-“
“Those odd-looking alien creatures? Yes?”
“And I just didn’t understand about this Big Crunch.”
“Ah,” Papathanassiou said, gratified, “but really, it’s very simple. The universe is expanding; in the future it will collapse again; that’s all of it. Of course,” he went on, “the mathematics is, yes, rather complex. Actually it was the subject of my dissertation in graduate school, did you know that?” Dannerman did, but saw no reason to say so. “It was necessary to use symplectic integrators to predict the next fifty quadrillion years of motion in only our own galaxy. You’ve heard of the three-body problem? What I had to solve was the two-hundred-billion-body problem.”
He tittered. Dannerman pressed on. “But what I don’t understand is, when the universe collapses again, what does it collapse to?”
“Ah.” The astronomer ruminated for a moment, licking cream off his upper lip. “Well, you see, when everything has come together again great velocities and pressures are involved. First all matter is compressed. Then the atomic nuclei themselves are compressed. They become a new form of very dense matter which is stable-well, temporarily stable. Are you following me so far?”
Dannerman nodded, not entirely truthfully.
“Excellent. Interestingly, some workers once thought that sort of thing might happen in a particle accelerator. They called that state ‘Lee-Wick matter,’ and they feared it would be so dense that it would accrete everything else into it. Perhaps, do you see?, even turning the whole Earth into Lee-Wick matter.” He wiped his lips with a napkin, grinning. “They were incorrect. No accelerator can reach those forces, though at the Crunch-“
“Yes?”
“Why, then,” Papathanassiou said, nodding, “yes, perhaps it could be possible. Not in the form of Lee-Wick matter, no; one is pretty confident now that that doesn’t exist after all. Rather it would be in the form of strange matter. That’s to say, matter made from quarks-do you know what a quark is? Well, never mind; but strange matter would be very dense indeed, and it would keep on getting denser and denser. You cannot imagine how dense, Mr. Dannerman.”
“Like a black hole?” he hazarded.
“Far denser than even a black hole. It would encompass the entire universe, you see, for as soon as it began to form it would transform everything around it into strange matter. Do you know our story of King Midas and his touch of gold? Like that. But only for a tiny fraction of a second, because such matter has a net positive charge-no electrons, you see-and so it tries to fly apart, like a bomb. Have I answered your question?”
“Well, yes.” Dannerman cleared his throat. “That part of it, anyway. But it’s funny you should mention a bomb.”
Papathanassiou’s cheerful expression faltered. “I beg your pardon?”
“Someone was asking about you,” Dannerman lied. “He mentioned bombs? And a brother?”
The astronomer’s smile was gone. “I don’t understand. Who was this person?”
“I don’t know. Greek, I think. You know that bar downstairs? 1 was having a cup of coffee, and he sat down next to me and asked if I knew you. Do you think I should mention it to Dr. Adcock?”
“Dear God, no!”
“I mean, so she can find this man and make him stop. He said some very unkind things about you, Dr. Papathanassiou.”
“No! Please, no,” the astronomer begged.
“Well,” Dannerman began, then paused as his communicator beeped at him; there was an incoming call on the observatory system. In any case, he thought, that was a good place to stop; the hook had been planted, and it would be worthwhile to let Papathanassiou worry for a while. “I’d better take my call,” he said. “Anyway, I won’t say anything to her today. But I need to think this over; maybe you and I can talk again tomorrow? Here? I think that would be a good idea-and, oh, yes, thank you for explaining to me about the Big Crunch.”
The call turned out to be Gerd Hausewitz from the Max-Planck Institut again, and he was looking aggrieved. “You promised to supply the specs for the Starlab mission,” he reminded Dannerman.
“I know, Gerd. I’ve requested them.”
“It is only that we supplied the data you asked for at once.”
“I know you did. What can I tell you? I don’t know how it is in your place, but here it takes time to get people to move.”
“Yes, of course, Dannerman, but-“ He looked over his shoulder and spoke more softly. “-my superiors are quite interested in this matter. They were not pleased that I delivered your material without at once receiving what we asked in return. This could be difficult for me here.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Please, Dannerman.”
“Yes, I promise,” Dannerman said, half turning as he cut the contact. Someone was at his door and, surprisingly, it was the Chinese astronaut, PRC Space Corps Commander James Peng-tsu Lin.
He was wearing a propitiatory smile. “Hey, Dan,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, really. I was pretty rude this morning, and I didn’t mean to be-had to get down to the embassy and all that red tape, had a lot on my mind. So let’s start over, okay?”
“Glad to, Commander Lin-“
“Just Jimmy, all right? Listen, what I was thinking, are you free for lunch? Looks like we’re going to be working together for a while, and I like to get to know new people when they come to work here. Especially if they’re Pat’s cousin. They tell me there’s some pretty fine ethnic food just around the corner-?”