The Compleat McAndrew

As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard.

The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow.

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go.

If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility—if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in.

It is remarkable that observation of the faint agglomerations of stars known as galaxies leads us, very directly and cleanly, to the conclusion that we live in a Universe of finite and determinable age. A century ago, no one could have offered even an approximate age for the Universe. For an upper bound, most nonreligious scientists would probably have said “forever.” For a lower bound, all they had was the age of the Earth.

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

One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious.”

It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them.

That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.

The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting that the entire rest of the history of the universe.

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 laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.

We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago.

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence.

“Captain Roker, I don’t like your insinuation,” he said. “McAndrew is a physicist—so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study, not a surgical operation. Castration isn’t part of the Ph.D. Exams, you know.”

The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens.