Illustration by Vincent DiFate

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, gray-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 realize 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 jumpsuit.

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

"The three of us will talk later." Mary McAndrew was as tall as me, 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 traveling 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 "poorhouse"; 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 dimwit."

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 dimwit 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 gs–enough to flatten anybody. But in the life capsule out at the end of the spike, a person feels a pull of just one g. 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 g. A lot of people call it ‘the McAndrew inertialess 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 me? Of course, I went along, too. I have to take care of McAndrew. He can be such a dimwit.

"McAndrew & the Fifth Commandment" copyright 1999, Charles Sheffield