Macroscope

CHAPTER 2

Afra Summerfield was waiting for them at the torus airlock. She spoke to Brad as soon as his helmet came off: “Kovonov wants to see you right away.”

Brad turned immediately to Ivo. “That Russian doesn’t chat for the joy of it. There’s trouble already, probably political, probably American, or he wouldn’t ask for me. I have to run. You won’t object if I dump you on Afra?” He was out of his suit and moving away as he spoke.

Who was this Kovonov who compelled such alacrity?

Ivo looked at Afra, and found her as stunning as before. She was in a blue coverall, with a matching ribbon tying back her hair, the whole almost matching her bright eyes. The astonishing revelations in connection with the macroscope had diverted his mind from her for an hour, but now he was smitten with renewed force.

“Take your time!” he yelled magnanimously, but Brad was already in the elevator. Afra smiled fleetingly, showing a dimple and striking another chord upon his fancy.

Ivo did not believe in love at first sight, ridiculous as it was to remind himself of that now. He did not believe in coveting one’s neighbors things, either, but Afra overwhelmed him. It was a measure of Brad’s confidence in himself that he flaunted her so casually, heedless of her impact on other men.

“I suppose I’d better show you the common room,” she said. “He’ll look there first for us, when he’s free.”

The thought of accompanying her anywhere in any guise excited him. The imponderables of mankind’s future receded into the background as Afra preempted the foreground. For the moment, her person and her attention belonged to him, however casual the connection might be. There was pleasure merely in walking with such a beautiful girl, and he hoped the tour would be a long one.

“Are you going to help us, Ivo?” she inquired, the implied intimacy of her use of his first name sending another irrational thrill through him. He felt adolescent.

“What did Brad tell you about me?” he countered. Her perfume, this close, was the delicate breath of a single opening rose.

She guided him to the elevator, now returned from Brad’s hasty use. “Not very much, I must admit. Just that you were a friend from one of the projects, and he needed you to get in touch with another friend from another project. Shane.”

He had not realized before how small these elevators were. She had to stand very close to him, so that her right breast nudged his arm. It’s only cloth touching cloth, he thought, but couldn’t believe it. “That’s Schön, with the umlaut over the O. The German word for—”

“Why of course!” she exclaimed, delighted. Her intake of breath delighted him, too, but for an irrelevant reason. “That never occurred to me — and I have spoken German since I was a girl.”

She was still a girl, as he was acutely aware. He felt the need to keep the conversation going. “Do you speak any other languages?” Adolescent? Infantile!

“Oh, yes, of course. Mostly the Indo-European family — Russian, Spanish, French, Persian — but I’m working on Arabic and Chinese, the written form of the latter for now, since it covers so many spoken forms. The Chinese symbols are based on meaning rather than phonetics, you know, and that presents a different set of problems. I feel so parochial when Brad teases me with Melanesian or Basque or an Algonquin dialect. I hope you’re not another of those fluent linguists—”

“I flunked Latin in high school.”

She laughed.

Ivo tried to untangle the physical reaction he experienced from the intellectual content of their conversation, afraid of a Freudian slip. “No, I mean it. ‘Schön’ is the only foreign word I know.”

She studied him with perplexed concern. “Is it a — a mental block? You’re good at some things, but not at—”

The elevator ride finally ended, and she disengaged her torso from his. They climbed into a cart. Now it was her thigh that distracted him, wedged against his. Could she be unaware of the havoc she wrought along his nerve connections — his synapses? “I guess Brad didn’t tell you about that. I’m no genius. I am pretty good at certain types of reasoning, the way some feeble-minded people can do complex mathematical tricks in their heads or play championship chess — but apart from that I’m a pretty ordinary guy with ordinary values. I guess you thought I was like Brad, huh?” Fat chance!

She had the grace to blush. “I guess I did, Ivo. I’m sorry. I heard so much about Schön; then you came—”

“What did he tell you about Schön?”

“That would fill a small manual by itself. How did you come to meet him, Ivo?”

“Schön? I never did meet him, really.”

“But—”

“You know about the projects? The one he—”

She looked away, and the loose ponytail flung out momentarily to brush his cheek. Is she a conscious flirt? No, she was being natural; he was the one, reacting. “Yes,” she said, “Brad told me about that too. How Schön was in the — free-love community. Only—”

“So you see, I did not actually share lodging with him.”

“Yes, I was aware of that. But why are you the only one who knows where to find him?”

“I’m not. Brad knows. Other members of the project know, though they never talk about it.”

This time her flush was frustration, and he felt the angry flexure in the muscle of her leg. She doesn’t like to be balked.

“Brad told me you were the only one who could summon him!”

“It’s an — arrangement we have.”

“Brad knows where Schön is, but won’t go for him himself? That doesn’t sound like—”

The journey by rail was over, no tunnel of love. “Brad can’t go for him himself. I guess you could call me an intermediary, or maybe a personal secretary. An answering service: that’s closest Schön simply won’t come out for anyone unless I handle it. He doesn’t involve himself with anything that isn’t sufficiently challenging.”

“An alien destroyer that has our whole exploratory thrust stymied — isn’t that enough?”

So she knew what Brad had told him. “I’m not sure. Schön is a genius, you see.”

“So Brad has informed me, many times. An IQ that can’t be measured, and completely amoral. But surely this is cause!”

“That’s what I’m here to decide.”

They arrived at the common room: a large compartment of almost standard Earth-gravity, with easy chairs and several games tables. Ivo wondered what billiards or table-tennis would be like in partial gravity. Beside the entrance were several hanging frameworks: games ladders with removable panels. On each panel was a printed name.

“Who’s Blank?” he asked, reading the top entry of the first.

“That’s a real name,” she said. “Fred Blank, one of the maintenance men. He’s the table-tennis champion. I don’t really think they should — I mean, this room is for the scientists, the PhD’s. To relax in.”

“The maintenance men aren’t supposed to relax?”

She looked a little flustered. “There’s Fred now, reading that magazine.”

It was a Negro in overalls and unkempt hair. Beside him sat a Caucasian scientist, portly and cheerful. Both looked hot; evidently they had just finished playing a game. It seemed to Ivo that Afra was the only one disturbed, and that told him something about both her and the other personnel of this station. The scientists respected skill wherever they found it; Afra had other definitions. The portly white for the moment probably envied Blank his facility with the paddle, without being concerned with such irrelevancies as education.

In the center of the room stood a pedestal bearing a shining statuette mounted at eye level. Ivo paused next to contemplate this honored edifice. It was a toy steam-shovel, of storybook design, with a handsome little scoop. The cab was shingled like the top of a country cottage, with a delicately sagging peaked roof and a bright half-moon on the door. Within the jawed shovel was a ball like a marble, and so fine was its artistry that he could see the accurate outline of the continent of North America etched upon the surface of that little globe.

The pedestal bore the ornate letters S D P S. “What does it mean?”

Afra looked embarrassed again. “Brad calls it the ‘Platinum Plated Privy,’ ” she murmured, quiet though no one else was close. “It really is. Platinum plated, I mean. He — designed it, and the shop produced it. The men seem to appreciate it.”

“But those letters. S D P S. They can’t stand for—”

She colored slightly, and he liked her for that, sensing a common conservatism though their viewpoints in other respects differed strongly. “You’ll have to ask him.” Then she shifted ground. “Here we are talking about unimportant things and ignoring you. Where do you come from, Ivo? That is, where did you settle after you left your project?”

“I’ve been walking around the state of Georgia, mostly. All of us who participated in the project were provided with a guaranteed income, at least until we got established. It isn’t much, but I don’t need much.”

“That’s very interesting. I was born in Macon, you know. Georgia is my home state.”

Macon! “I didn’t know.” But somehow he had known.

“But what interested you about that state? Do you know someone there?”

“Something like that.” How could he explain ten years of seeming idleness, retracing the various routes of a native son?

She didn’t press him. “I should show you the infirmary, too; Brad did mention that. I suppose he wants you to be able to describe it accurately to Schön.”

They traveled on. Ivo wondered what was supposed to be so important about the infirmary, but was content to wait upon her explanation. He was learning more about her every moment, and positive or negative, he was eager for the information.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Afra fretted, “is why Schön was in that other project. He should have been with Brad.”

“He was hiding. Do you know the parable about the good fish?”

“The good fish?” Her brow furrowed prettily.

“The good fish that the fisherman caught in the net and gathered into vessels, while the bad were cast away. Matthew XIII:48.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. What is the relevance?”

“If you were one of the fish in that lake, which kind would you want to be?”

“A good one, naturally. The whole point of the parable is that the good people shall find favor with God, while the bad ones will perish.”

“But what happens, literally, to the good fish?”

“Why, they are taken to the market and—” She paused. “Well, at least they aren’t wasted.”

“While the bad fish continue to swim around the lake, just as they always did, because no fisherman wants them. I’d rather be one of them.”

“I suppose so, if you take it that way. But what has that to do with—” She broke off again. “What did they do with the geniuses in Brad’s project?”

“Well, I wasn’t involved in that. But I would guess Schön wanted to live his own life, unsupervised by the experimenters. So he hid where they would never find him. A bad fish.”

“Brad had no trouble. I know he didn’t fool them any more than he fooled me. He’s a lot more intelligent than he says he is.”

Ivo remembered that Brad had represented himself to her as IQ 160. “That so? He always seemed pretty regular to me.”

“He’s like that. He gets along with anybody, and you really have to get to know him before you realize how deep and clever he is. He was the big success of the project — but of course you know that. Even if he does try to claim he’s stupid compared to Schön. I used to think he made Schön up, just to amuse me; but since this crisis—”

“Yeah. That’s the way it was with me too, in a way. But now I sort of have to believe in Schön, much as I might prefer to forget all about him, or there isn’t much point in hanging around.”

She smiled. “I’d tell you not to feel sorry for yourself, if I didn’t so often feel the same way. Nobody likes to feel stupid, but around Brad—”

“Yeah,” he said again.

They entered the infirmary. It carried the usual aseptic odors, the normal aura of spotless depression. “These are the — five,” she said, bringing him to a row of seated men. “Dr. Johnson, Dr. Smith, Dr. Sung, Dr. Mbsleuti and Mr. Holt. All most respected astronomers and cryptologists.”

“Johnson? Holt? Sung? I’ve heard those names before.”

“Yes, Brad would have mentioned them, if you weren’t already familiar with their reputations. The significant planets they discovered were named after them. Did Brad explain — ?”

“He showed me some planets. I didn’t realize — well, never mind. I know now.”

He looked at the seated men. Dr. Johnson was a saintly-looking man of perhaps sixty, with iron hair and brows and deep lines of character about the eves. His gaze was direct and compelling, but fixed, as though he were concentrating on some transcendent intangible.

“Doctor,” Ivo said, stepping close. “I admired your planet, with its noodle plants and yellow trees.”

The serene gray eyes refocused. The firm jaw dropped; then, after a second or two, the lips parted. “Huh-huh-huh,” Johnson said. A trace of spittle overlapped one corner of his mouth.

“Hello,” Afra said distinctly. “Hel-lo.”

Johnson smiled, not closing his mouth. A waft of ordure touched them.

“That’s what he’s trying to say,” Afra explained. “Hello. He was always courteous.” She sniffed. “Oh-oh. Nurse!”

A young man in white appeared, a male nurse. “I’ll take care of it, Miss Summerfield,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better leave now.”

“Yes.” She led the way out of the infirmary. “They don’t have much control,” she said. “We’re trying to reeducate them, but there hasn’t been enough time yet to know how far they can recover. It’s a terrible thing that happened to them, and we still don’t—”

Brad was coming swiftly down the hall. “Crisis,” he said, joining them. “There’s an American senator coming, an ornery one. Someone leaked the mind-destroyer to him, and he means to investigate.”

“Is that bad?” Ivo asked.

“Considering that we haven’t released the information yet to anyone beyond the station, yes,” Brad said. “Don’t be fooled by our candor with you, Ivo. This is super-secret stuff. We’ve been fudging reports from all five victims, just to keep up appearances while we try to break this impasse. Until we crack it, no one leaves this station — no one who knows, I mean.”

“What about that man who brought me? Groton?”

“He can keep his mouth shut. But all he knew, then, was that I needed you, where to find you, and what to say to you once he got you alone.”

That explained the stalking. Groton hadn’t wanted to make contact in the crowd, though he had finally had to.

“But don’t misjudge him,” Afra said. “Harold and Beatryx are very warm people.”

Did that mean Groton was married? Ivo had not pictured that. It proved again how far off first impressions could be.

“Here’s the situation,” Brad said, bringing them to his room. “Senator Borland is on his way. He’s class-A trouble. Borland is a first-termer, but he’s on the make already for national publicity, and he’s ruthless. He isn’t stupid; in fact, there’s a distinct possibility he’s smart enough to get hooked by the destroyer sequence. It’s certain he’ll demand to see the show, and there will be merry hell if we try to fob off a substitute.”

“But you can’t show him the destroyer!” Afra exclaimed, alarmed.

“We can’t hold it from him, if he’s determined — and he is. He knows he’s on to something big, and he means to make worldwide headlines before he finishes with us. Kovonov put it to me straight: Borland is American, so he’s my baby. I have to neutralize him somehow until we can crack this thing open and get it under control, or the whole feculent mess will erupt.”

“When’s he due?” Ivo asked.

“Six hours from now. We only got the hint when he embarked, and it took until now to pin down his purpose. He’s a real old-fashioned loudmouth, but he can keep a secret when it pays him to and he’s no political amateur. He’s obviously had this in mind for some time, and now he’s coming to milk us for that vote-getting publicity.”

“Why not tell him the truth, then? If he’s that savvy, he should be willing to do something constructive for his votes, instead of—”

“The truth without the solution would wreck us — and put Borland on his party’s next Presidential ticket. He isn’t interested in our welfare, or in the future of space exploration. He’d be delighted to take credit for pulling America out of the macroscope.”

“But the other countries of the world would keep it going, wouldn’t they? Isn’t it under nominal UN control?”

“More than nominal. They might indeed — in which case we’d become a has-been power in a hurry, as other breakthroughs like my heat-shield are achieved. America can’t possibly match the alien science we know is there, once it becomes available. Or — the macroscope project might founder, frightened off by talk of a death-ray from space. The average populace has a profound distrust of advanced space science, perhaps because it doesn’t match the old, space-opera conception. People might accept the notion of astronauts plunging into space fearlessly in rockets, but the ramifications of relativistic cosmology and quantum physics—”

“How about just giving the senator what he wants — a gander at the sequence, if it comes to that?”

“What would it settle? Either it would pass him by, in which case he’d have ‘proof’ that we were killing off world-famous scientists by less exotic means than claimed — an international conspiracy, naturally — or it would bite him. Then we’d have five scientists and a U.S. senator to explain.”

Ivo shrugged. “I guess you’re stuck, then.”

“Our only chance is to crack the case before he gets here. For that we need Schön even more urgently.”

“There isn’t time to fetch him from Earth now,” Afra pointed out.

Brad did not reply.

“I’m not sure Schön would help, anyway,” Ivo said. “He might not care about America, or the macroscope.”

“What does he care about?” Afra demanded.

Brad cut off any reply. “Let’s take a break. We’re acting as though no one else in the station is concerned.”

Afra started to protest, but he put his ringer to her lips and forced her to subside. Ivo could see that she accepted from Brad what she would have taken from no other person. On the face of it, her objection was reasonable. Brad had dropped a bomb in their laps with a six-hour fuse, then called intermission as though the matter was of indifferent concern. How could this spirited creature know that Brad had already done his utmost to summon the cavalry, or that the break he recommended was hardly the nonchalance it appeared? Yet she trusted him.

Oh, to have a girl like that…

The “break” was in the form of a rather elegant dinner with the Grotons. Ivo had assumed that Harold Groton was an ad hoc emissary, and had to revise his impression of the man once again. Brad’s social taste was always good.

Beatryx, Harold’s wife, was a plumpish, smiling woman somewhere in her forties, light-haired and light-eyed but probably never lovely in the physical sense. Their apartment was quite neat in an unobtrusive manner, as though the housekeeper cared more for convenience than for appearance, in contrast to the tale told by Afra’s habitat. Ivo had the impression of stepping into an Earth-building, and thought he might glimpse a street or yard if he looked out a window. If he could find a window.

He found something better. The Grotons were situated at the edge of the torus, where the white-walls would be on a tire. The station was oriented broadside to the sun, so that one wall continuously faced the light and the other remained in shadow. This was the dark side. There was a large port looking directly out into the spatial night.

“It varies with the season,” Brad said, noting the direction of his attention. “The station is a planet, technically, and does have an annual cycle. It rotates to provide weight for the personnel, and that rotation gives it gyroscopic stability. It maintains its orientation in an absolute sense while revolving about the sun, so its day becomes sidereal. Three months from now that view will be twilight, and in six it will be full noon, and they’ll have to block it off with hefty filters.”

Ivo looked out at the uncannily steady stars of this arctic night. “They’re moving!” he exclaimed, then felt foolish. Of course they seemed to be moving; the torus was spinning, so that the heaven as viewed from this window rolled over in a complete circle every few minutes as though tacked to a cosmic hub. They were the same stars and constellations he had seen from the macroscope housing, but this porthole vantage changed his perspective entirely. It was, literally, a dizzying sight.

They all were smiling. “It’s hard to believe they’re exploding outward, those stars,” he said somewhat lamely. “Most of the ones you see aren’t,” Afra said. “They’re members of our own Milky Way galaxy, a comparatively steady unit. Even the other galaxies of our local group are maintaining their positions pretty well.”

Ivo realized that he had stepped from one inanity into a worse one. But Beatryx, coincidentally, came to his rescue. “Oh,” she inquired. “I thought every galaxy was flying away from every other one at terrible speed. Because of that big argument.”

“The so-called big bang,” Brad said, without smiling this time. “You are right, Tryx. Groups of galaxies are moving apart, or at least appear to be from our lookout. But this should be a temporary state, and the reversal may already be in process, since our universe is finite and falls within the calculated gravitational radius. A few more years of observation with the macroscope, and we’ll have a better idea. Assuming we can get around the galactic interference limitation.”

“Reversal?” Beatryx was worried. “Do you mean everything will start flying together?”

“Afraid so. It will be quite crowded, by and by.”

“Oh,” she said, distressed.

“Yes, five or six billion years from now things may really be hopping.”

Brad was teasing her, a little cruelly Ivo thought, and it was his own turn to come to the rescue. “What’s this galactic interference? You’re not talking about the—”

“No, not about the destroyer. This is less blatant. Within the galaxy the scope of the macroscope is absolute — but we can’t seem to get any meaningful images from other galaxies. No natural ones, that is. Nothing but a confused jumble that fades in and out. So our assorted telescopes are still superior for the million and billion light-year range.”

“The Big Eye and the Big Ear are better for long distance than the Big Nose,” Ivo observed.

“We’re confident that advances in the state-of-the-art will bring the macroscope up to snuff, however.”

“Meanwhile, I suppose you can make do with the local galaxy,” Ivo said. “With a hundred billion or more stars to sniff in three or four dimensions.”

“And every planet and speck of dust, given time,” Brad agreed. “We can see them all, virtually — assuming we get the scopes and manpower to look.”

“Four dimensions?” Beatryx again.

“Space-time continuum,” Brad said. “Or, in human terms, our old problem of travel-time. The farther away the star we’re looking at, the older it is, because of the time it takes our macrons to get here. This doesn’t matter much when we snoop Earth, because the delay is only five seconds. The entire diameter of our solar system is only a matter of light-hours. But Alpha Centauri is four years away, and an intriguing monster like Betelgeuse — ‘Beetle-juice’ to cognoscenti — is three hundred. That civilized species on Sung, the probs, that I showed Ivo today is ten thousand years away. So our galactic map, the moment we made it, would be out of date by a variable factor ranging up to seventy thousand years. Unless we recognize that added dimension of time, we’re hopelessly fouled up.”

“Oh.”

“If we had some form of instantaneous travel — and that isn’t in the cards, in this framework of reality — we’d still have the darndest time visiting that Sung civilization, presuming that it existed today,” Brad continued. “We’d have to assume that our instant system was posted on universal rest, and that’s trouble right there. Our galaxy is moving and spinning at a considerable rate. A star thirty thousand light-years distant would be nowhere near our mapped coordinates — even if they were entirely accurate by our present frame of reference.”

“Why not orient on the galaxy, then?” Ivo asked. “The stars are pretty stable relative to each other inside it, aren’t they?”

“Too easy, Ivo. That implies that the galactic rotation can be ignored, and it can’t. You jump thirty thousand light-years toward galactic center and you carry a sizable energy surplus with you. Angular momentum must be conserved. It’s like the Coriolis force, or Ferrel’s Law on Earth. You—”

“If I may,” Harold Groton said, interrupting him politely. “I have been this route myself. Ivo, did you ever whirl a noisemaker at the end of a string?”

“No, but I know what you mean.”

“And you know what happens when you pull it short?”

“Buzzes around twice as fast.”

“That’s what happens when you pull in toward the center of the whirling galaxy.”

“If we had instantaneous transport,” Brad said. “But the problem is academic, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if our maps are outdated before we can make them up.”

The meal was done, and Ivo realized that he had enjoyed it without paying any attention to what it was. Chocolate cake for dessert, and—

“Come on, Bradley,” Groton said. “Relax your top-heavy mind with a sprout.” And light wine, and—

Brad laughed. “You never give up. Why don’t you take on Ivo?”

Groton obligingly turned to Ivo. “Are you familiar with the game?”

“And mashed potatoes—” Ivo said, then blushed as they glanced at him in concert. He had to stop letting his thoughts run away with him! “Uh, the game. I guess not, since I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Afra was looking restless again, and now Ivo was also beginning to wonder. Brad knew he wasn’t going to have Schön for the coming crisis with officialdom. Why did he persist in this party-game banter? It was costing crucial time. Brad should be setting things up to divert the senator and postpone disaster.

Still, what could any of them do, but play along? Brad’s mind operated far more subtly than most people suspected, and he never gave up on a problem.

Groton brought out a sheet of paper and two pencils. “Sprouts is an intellectual game that has had an underground popularity with scientists for a number of years. There are several variants, but we’ll stick to the original one this time; it’s still the best.” He put three dots on the paper. “The rules are simple. All you do is connect the dots. Here, I’ll take the first turn.” He drew a line between two dots, then added a new dot in the center of that line. “One new spot each time, you see. Now you connect any two, or loop around and join one to itself, and add a spot to your line. You can’t cross a line or a spot, or join a spot that already has three lines connected to it. The new ones formed on the lines actually have two connections already made, you see.”

“Seems pretty simple to me. How is the winner determined?”

“The winner is the one who moves last, before the spots run out. Since two are used up and only one added, each turn, there is a definite limit.”

Ivo studied the paper. “That’s no game,” he protested. “The first player has a forced win.”

Brad and Afra laughed together. “Nabbed you that time, Harold, you old conniver,” Brad said.

“I’ll be happy to play second,” Groton said mildly. “Suppose we start with a simple two-dot game, to get the feel of it?”

“That’s a win for the second player.”

Groton glanced at him speculatively. “You sure you never played this game before?”

“It’s not a game. There’s no element of chance or skill.”

“Very well. You open a three-spot game, and I’ll take my luck with that nonexistent chance or skill.”

Ivo shrugged. He marked a triangle of dots

and drew a line between the top and the left, adding a spot to the center.

Groton connected the center spot to the isolated one.

Ivo made a loop over the top of the figure.

Groton shrugged and added to it.

Two more moves put an eye inside and a base below.

Ivo finished it off with an arc across the bottom, leaving Groton with two points but no way to connect them, since one was inside and the other outside.

“Now,” Groton said, “how about trying it for higher stakes? Say, five or six spots?”

“Five is the first player’s win, six—” he paused for a moment — “six is the second’s. It’s still no game.”

“How can you know that?”

Brad broke in. “Ivo’s special that way. He knows — and he can beat us all at sprouts, right now, I’m sure.”

“Even Kovonov?”

“Could be.”

Groton shook his head dubiously. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Ivo looked up and caught Afra looking at him intently. “Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I thought I explained about that. It’s nothing. Just a trick of reasoning. I’ve had it as long as I can remember.”

“You interest me,” Groton said. “Would you mind telling me when you were born?”

“Don’t do it, Ivo!” Brad said. “You’ll be giving away all your life secrets.”

“He will not!” Afra cried. “Why be ridiculous?”

Ivo looked at each of them, trying not to linger too long on Afra’s face, so lovely in its animation. “Have I missed something?” Again? he added internally.

“Harold is an astrologer,” Brad explained. “Give him your birthday to the nearest minute and he will draw up a horoscope that really has your number.”

Groton looked complacently pained. “Astrology is a hobby of mine. You may consider it a parlor game, but I’ll stand by its validity when properly applied.”

Ivo regretted his involvement in this dialogue, not because he was at all concerned with the subject but because he saw that he was being used to tease the man. He could not decide that he liked Groton, but cruelty, even this mild, was not in his nature. Brad sometimes seemed to be insensitive to the foibles of those less intelligent than he. “March 29th, 1955,” he said.

Groton noted it on a little pad. “Do you happen to know the exact time?”

“Yes. I saw it on the record, once. 6:20 a.m.”

Groton noted that too. “And I believe you mentioned that you were born in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania or Mississippi?”

Ivo tried to remember when he could have mentioned such a fact. “Pennsylvania. Does it make a difference?”

“Everything makes a difference. I could explain if you’re interested.”

“Let’s not make this a classroom session,” Afra said impatiently. Ivo could see that there were parameters of insensitivity about her, too; or perhaps it was merely impulsive emotion. She was like a race-horse, fretful, impatient to be moving, and unappreciative of the more devious concerns of others.

Why had Brad desired a race-horse?

Why did Ivo?

“Interesting figure of speech,” Groton said, seemingly unperturbed. “Astrology might well be taught in the classroom. I wish I had been exposed to it a dozen years earlier.”

“I don’t understand,” Afra said with measured frustration, “how a competent engineer like you can take up with a common superstition like that. I mean, really — !”

“Didn’t you teach in the classroom once, Harold?” Beatryx inquired, breaking in so gently that it took Ivo a moment to realize that she was intercepting a developing argument. Afra and Groton must have been through a similar dialogue before, and the good wife knew the signs. Ivo could read them himself: the stolid man replying seriously to facetious questions, never losing his temper, while the excitable girl worked herself into a frenzy. Perhaps Groton defended astrology merely because it was ludicrous, subtly or not-so-subtly baiting her.

Had he been sympathizing with the wrong person? Afra was beautiful and brilliant, but her temperament betrayed her. She might actually be at a disadvantage in this type of encounter.

No — Brad would have broken up any such contest. Groton had said something, and Afra had pounced on it, while his mind drifted, and now somehow Groton was launched into a narration of his teaching experience. This had, it developed, predated his marriage to Beatryx. Ivo listened, finding to his surprise that he was interested. There was much more to Groton than he had thought.

“…volunteered. I suppose quite a number of professional people were as naïve as I was. But the company I worked for then — remember, this was back in ’67 or ’68 — had no sympathy with the striking teachers, and offered time off with full pay for any employee who was willing to give it a try. And of course the temporary salary from the school system was extra. So a number of us engineers set out to show the dissident teachers that we valued a functioning school system, even if they didn’t, and that we were ready and able to preserve it, no matter how long they threw their collective tantrum. After all, we were as qualified as they were, since we all had BA’s, MA’s or doctorates in our field, and plenty of practical experience too. That’s the way it looked to me at the age of twenty-seven, at any rate.”

He paused, and Afra did not break in with any irate remark this time. She was interested too. Beatryx had succeeded in pacifying things.

Twenty-seven. Two years older than Ivo was now. He could picture himself in that situation readily enough, however, assigned to fill in at a school where about half the regular teachers were out on their illegal strike. Technically, it was a mass resignation subject to withdrawal upon satisfaction… a transparent veil.

He dressed in a careful suit, trying to appear composed though his pulse raced with stage fright at the coming confrontation with a juvenile audience. Would he remember what to say? Would he be able to present clearly what was so well-defined in his own mind? It was so important that the material be properly covered.

This particular high school had not been able to keep all the classes going, and some of the lower grades were home, but there seemed to be kids everywhere. Boys were running down the halls and screaming, throwing books on the floor and collecting in noisy huddles: there seemed to be nobody with the authority to bring order. As Ivo waited with the other volunteers for briefing and specific assignments he observed some pretty heavy petting going on in a doorway, but the passing teachers ignored it. He had forgotten how mature, physically, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls were. Two boys broke out in a fight directly in sight of the principal’s office; the harried executive simply stuck his head out. yelled “Break it up!” and glared until they ran off. The lovers were also startled out of their preoccupation, and sidled to a more distant doorway before resuming their courtship. Otherwise, chaos reigned.

His classroom was at the end of a wing, in the technical section. He was lucky, as it turned out: he was “in his field.” Some of the engineers from his company found themselves trying to teach English or History, and one even wound up babysitting a Spanish class. The kids kept jabbering Spanish at him, and laughing, and he couldn’t tell whether it was legitimate drill or dirty jokes at his expense. Ivo was to feel queasy, later, just thinking about that; it was like nakedness on a stage.

He stood before thirty-five senior engineering students. They were, in that quiet before the storm, reasonably orderly, watching him intently. What should his first words be? How should he break the ice?

No problem: he called the roll. The principal had made that tediously clear. They could put up with a few firecrackers and water balloons in the halls, but they could not omit that roll. It seemed that the state paid so much per head per day in class, and the school mustn’t miss a head. Still, it did help control the situation. A kid running up and down the halls or necking in a corner did not get credit for attendance unless he got into his classroom in a hurry. So rollcall was not as stupid as it seemed at first.

Easier said than done. He did not know those boys by sight, and had to take their word when they answered to the names he laboriously pronounced. There was increasing merriment that he thought stemmed from his errors in pronunciation — until two answered at once on “Brown” and he realized that they were covering for an absent student.

He remembered, with relief, the seating chart. He could check them that way… as soon as each boy was seated where he belonged. “All right, engineers — you know where you sit. Move. From now on, I want every one of you in the proper place.”

“My place is home!” one quipped, and the rest joined in with a too-boisterous laughter.

His next task was to discover where they stood in engineering, so that he could start teaching meaningfully. It was a general course, mostly electronics, and the textbook was good except that it was sadly out of date. He would have to extrapolate from it, filling in the advances of the past decade, or the training would be almost useless.

One of the boys casually took out a cigarette and lit it.

Ivo snapped to classroom awareness. “Hey! You—” he looked at the seating chart — “Boonton. What are you doing?”

“Smoking,” the boy replied, as though surprised at the challenge.

“Isn’t there a school rule against student smoking?”

“It’s permitted for seniors in the technical wing, sir.”

Ivo looked about, suspecting that the boy was lying. Others in the class were covering smirks. They were trying the substitute out, as he had been warned they would.

This was the time for toughness. The principal had put it plainly to the group of volunteers: “Either the instructor rules the students or the students rule the instructor. If you’re weak, they will know it. Put your foot down. The whole authority of the public school system stands behind you. Most of our kids are good kids, but they need to be governed firmly. Don’t let the few bad apples take over.”

Platitudes galore, he had thought at the time — was it only an hour ago? — but probably good advice. Now was the time to apply it. He affected a boldness he did not feel and laid down the local law.

“I don’t care what the technical-wing rules are for what grades. I will not permit the fire hazard of smoking in my classroom. Put that weed away immediately.”

Then they all were on him. “What do you mean?”

“Mister Hoover lets us smoke!”

“How do you expect us to concentrate?”

“Cheeze!”

Ivo hesitated, suddenly unsure. He did not want to be a martinet. “All right, Boonton. You may smoke in class—” there was a spontaneous cheer — “if you can show me a note from the principal approving it.”

Silence.

Then the boy jumped up. “I’ll go see him right now! He’ll tell you it’s okay!”

Ivo let him go. He spent the rest of the period trying to pin down how much the boys knew about engineering of any type and how far into the text they had progressed. It was hard, taking over a functioning class from another teacher, and he could see that much effort would inevitably be wasted in the changeover, simply because of the differing styles of the two men.

Boonton never came back. Ivo didn’t have time to be concerned with that. Probably the principal had been busy.

The bell rang for the end of the period, and he realized that he had really accomplished nothing. All he had done was call the roll and argue about smoking and try to find some place to start. As they cleared out and the next bunch came in, he remembered that he hadn’t even given them a homework assignment. What a beginning!

The room was a mess. Balls of paper littered the floor, chairs were scattered, assorted slop was on the desks and strands of colored wire lay in odd places. And here he had to do it all over again with a new class!

Somehow he made it. But that afternoon he received a note from the principal, suggesting that he try to settle his problem in class instead of aggravating the students and involving the front office. That was how he learned that Boonton had simply gone home for the day with a story about being prejudicially kicked out of class by a temporary teacher. His mother had called the principal in a fury, and the reprimand was being duly relayed to the concerned teacher.

Ivo reread the note, appalled. No one had bothered to check his version of it. It appeared that any student could make any charge against any teacher — and be believed without question.

There were limits. He went to the principal’s office at the beginning of his daily free-period, but the man was too busy to see him. Finally he settled down in the teachers’ lounge and wrote a report covering the situation. That neatly used up the time he had planned to use for reviewing the lessons for the following day, but at least it would settle the matter.

“Ha!” Afra said.

Ivo was jolted back to reality: this was Harold Groton’s experience, not his own.

“I was dead tired the end of that first day,” Groton continued. “As nearly as I could tell, I had cleaned up enough debris and mispronounced enough names to last me for a normal year — but I hadn’t taught anybody any engineering. And to top it all off, I received three calls at my home from irate parents complaining about my mistreatment of their hard-working angels. The last one was at one a.m. I think that was when I really began to understand what it meant to be a teacher.

“The next day was worse. The word was out that I could be taken. Everyone seemed to know that I’d had trouble with the office, and the students were determined to run me down. They talked out of turn, they slept in class, they looked at comic books; I couldn’t make all of them pay attention all the time. I saw that few of them cared about the subject or had any real thought for the future, and the ones who needed instruction most were the ones who refused even to listen when it was offered. They drew pictures of girls and hotrods in their notebooks, and there was always some obscene word on one of the blackboards. I’d erase it, not making an issue of it — as I’d been advised — but another would be there again next period. There’d be an anonymous noise while I was talking — a clicking or a harmonica note or something similar — and it would stop the moment I did. I couldn’t ignore it because every time it happened the whole class got out of control and became noisy, and I couldn’t pin it down either. And the thing was, they knew as well as I did what would happen if I cracked down on anyone and sent him to the principal’s office for discipline. I’d get spoken to, not the student, for letting things get out of control. It was my responsibility.

“Hell,” Groton said, “is a roomful of rebellious juveniles — and a pusillanimous administration. I was committed, and I refused to quit — but I became obsessed with the progress of the negotiations between the state authority and the FEA.”

“FEA?” Ivo asked.

“Florida Education Association. That was the teachers’ group, and they still may be, for all I know. I really came to appreciate their stand. I never worked so hard in my life, in the face of such abuse. Oh. the newspapers were full of editorials! ‘Wonderful Volunteers Filling In For Errant Teachers,’ ‘Nobody Cares About Our Innocent Children,’ ‘Governor Unavailable For Comment’ and so on. But I was in a position, as I had not been before, to comprehend the truth. The boys were a lot less innocent than the editorialists! I was a scab — a strikebreaker — and while I think there may have been some better way to protest, the teachers certainly had compelling arguments on their side.

“The extra pay had seemed nice at first, like so much lagniappe. It enhanced my normal gross by a good fifty percent. But it wasn’t worth it! For one thing, my time was never my own; I was grading papers every night and trying to do something about the ones with identical mistakes — pretty sure sign of cheating, but not proof — and preparing for the next day’s sessions. I had trouble sleeping. I kept seeing those vulpine young faces peering at me, waiting for any slip, eager for my attention to wander so that they could sling another spitwad at the windowpane. And I realized that their regular teacher had to do this all the time — for no more pay than that fifty percent!

“But the worst shock came at the end. The teacher walkout collapsed after a couple of weeks, and most of them came back to fill their old places. I went back to my own job with voluminous relief. It was the weight of the world off my shoulders! But I paid one more visit to that school, after things were settled, because I wanted to meet the man I had replaced. I wanted to apologize to him for my ignorance and interference, and congratulate him for being a better man than I was. The education had been mine, really, and I had learned a lot of respect for him, knowing how good a job he had done under such conditions. I had seen his books and records, and knew he was a very fine engineer, too; he was right up to date, even if the texts he had to use weren’t.

“But he wasn’t there. His classes had been redistributed among other teachers. The school board had refused to hire him back. It turned out that he was an officer of the FEA, and one of the organizers of the walkout. So the board had its revenge on him and those like him, even though they were among the best teachers in the system. The mediocre teachers they kept; those were not ‘troublemakers’ who insisted on pushing for school improvements. I learned that this was happening all over the state, and I knew that the educational system there was never going to be the same again. They had brutally purged their most dedicated men and women, the ones who cared the most, rather than admit that the teachers’ complaints were valid.”

“Why didn’t they pay their teachers more?” Ivo asked. “Buy better texts, and so on? Why did they let so many other states forge ahead where it counted?”

“The state was in a financial bind at the time. If they had allocated more for the teachers, they would have had to do the same for the other neglected professions — the police, the social workers, even migrant labor. That would have meant an increase in taxes—”

“Oh.”

“Or a closing of tax loopholes,” Brad added. “And that would have been even worse for the special interests in power at the time.”

Ivo had a sudden vision of the proboscoids of planet Sung, abusing their resources into extinction. This is how it happens, he thought. Public apathy led to control by the special interests and unscrupulous individuals, and the trend was disastrous.

Had Brad known that the conversation would take this turn? Was this his way of showing Ivo that the tide had to be turned at this last frontier, the frontier of space? Senator Borland, representing the reactionary power of—

Groton smiled. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to run on like that. I don’t usually—”

“You never told me, dear,” Beatryx said. “Nobody likes to advertise his mistakes. That’s why I tried to forget what my ‘teaching’ really was. It still gets to me, when I think about it — that hellish two weeks — it seemed like several months. It was a long time before I felt really settled again. Before I could forget that terrible insecurity of responsibility without authority, of degradation at the hands of the precious youth of our country, of the bitterness at unworkable and unfair policies and useless effort.”

Yet he had not done anything about it himself, Ivo thought. How could mankind turn about, when even those who were shocked by the visible carnage merely retreated from it?

“At least I know better now,” Groton said. “Now that I have Beatryx. And I stay out of ‘causes.’ Maybe I just had to get the mistaken idealism out of my system before settling down.”

Oh.

Brad took Ivo to the confrontation. Afra was busy elsewhere, and he tried to keep his mind off her.

Senator Borland reminded him, shockingly, of the catatonic Dr. Johnson Afra had introduced him to in the infirmary. Borland’s manner dissipated that initial impression in a hurry, however; he was younger and far more forceful than the scientist could ever have been. Ivo tried not to think of him automatically as the enemy. Borland had probably had nothing to do with the closing of schools and suppression of teachers.

It was amazing that one so young as Brad should be trusted to deal with such a man. But Brad was — Brad.

The Senator arrived with his personal secretary: a noisy young man who could only be properly described as a “flunky.” The flunky did the talking, speaking of Borland always in the third person as though he were not present, while Borland himself looked alertly about as though not concerned with the dialogue.

“You!” the flunky cried imperiously, spying Brad. “You’re American, right? The Senator wants to talk to you.”

Brad approached slowly. Ivo could tell he was repressing irritation; he was hardly one to be ordered about abruptly.

The flunky consulted his clipboard. “You’re Bradley Carpenter, right? Boy genius from Kennedy Tech, right? The Senator wants to know what you’re pulling here.”

“Astronomy,” Brad said. There was a small stir among the assembled personnel of the station, and one big man with the Soviet insignia on his lapel smiled, not hesitant to show his contempt of the capitalist hierarchy. The West Europeans kept straight faces, though one had to cough. Borland had no power over them, but there were courtesies to maintain.

“Stargazing. Uh-huh,” the flunky remarked. “The Senator means to put a stop to needless and wasteful expense. Do you have any idea how much of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money you’ve squandered here in the past year?”

“Yes,” Brad replied.

“The Senator means to get to the bottom of this foolishness. This—” There was a doubletake. “What?”

“None.”

“None what?”

“None squandered. You seem to assume that the purpose of research is the production of tangible commodities. The research is not in error; your definitions are.”

Borland swung around to cover Brad. He touched one finger to his subordinate’s arm and the youth froze. “Hold on there, lad. Suppose you prove that statement. What’s so special about your telescope, makes it worth this many billion dollars? Just give me the tourist-class rundown, now.”

“It isn’t a telescope.”

“The Senator didn’t ask you what it wasn’t!”

Ivo could tell by the silence that even the non-English-speaking personnel present were waiting to see the gadfly get swatted. Brad’s obscure humor was not the only trait friends had come to appreciate.

They were disappointed this time. Brad did go into the elementary lecture reserved for visiting dignitaries. After a moment Ivo realized why: Brad was swatting for the gad, not the gadfly.

“According to Newton’s theory of gravitation, every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Currently we prefer to think of gravity as the physical manifestation of the curvature of space in the presence of matter. That is—”

“What about the telescope?” the flunky demanded. “The Senator doesn’t have the time for irrelevant—”

Borland touched him on the arm again. It was like lifting the needle from a record.

“That is,” Brad continued, having taken advantage of the break to move to one of the blackboards, and now erasing the complex “sprouts” diagram there, “we might visualize space as a taut elastic fabric, and the masses in our universe as assorted objects resting upon it. The heavier objects naturally depress the surface more.”

He drew a sagging line with a circle in its center, then added a smaller circle. Ivo tried to imagine how a sprouts game might achieve such a configuration, but his talent did not help him there.

“This is the way the depression of space in the vicinity of our sun might affect the Earth, making due allowances for the two-dimensionality of our representation,” Brad said. “As you can see, the small object will have a tendency to roll in toward the large, unless it should spin around it fast enough for centrifugal force to counteract the effect. But of course the Earth creates its own depression, and objects near it will be similarly attracted unless they establish orbits.

“The universe as a whole, therefore, is both curved and immensely complicated, since there are no real limits to any depression, large or small. No actual ‘force’ is necessary to explain the effects we experience in the presence of matter, apart from the basic nature of the situation. The gravitic interactions are everywhere, however, ripple upon ripple, and with constantly changing values. Any question so far?”

“GTR,” Borland said.

“General Theory of Relativity, yes. Our concern is with these interactions.” Brad marked a place on the diagram, between the sun and Earth, but nearer the latter so that it crested the wave. “We find that the peculiar stress of overlapping depressions — fields of gravity, if you will — creates a faint but unique turbulence, particularly at points in space where two or more fields are of equivalent potency. You might liken it to the sonic boom, where a physical object impinges the domain of sound, or Cerenkov radiation. It is, like the Cerenkov, a form of light — or rather, a subtle harmonic imprinted upon light passing through the turbulence. This aspect of light was not understood or even measurable until very recently; our technology was not sophisticated enough to detect such perturbations, let alone analyze their nature.”

Borland held up his hand as though in a classroom, reminding Ivo again of Groton’s experience. Now the spitwads were political. “Now a question, if you please. You tell me a beam of light passes through this gravity turbulence between two objects in space, and gets kinked a bit. But the way I figure it, there’s hardly a cubbyhole in the cosmos that doesn’t have gravitational equivalence of some sort; there are just too many stars, too many specks of dust, all with their little fields crossing into infinity. Your beam of light should have a thousand kinks, and kinks on kinks, if it travels any distance. So how do you figure which is which? Seems to me you’re better off just taking your light as is, through a regular telescope; that’s uncluttered, at least.”

It occurred to Ivo with a little shock that a very sharp mind lurked behind the senatorial façade.

“This is true, ordinarily,” Brad admitted carefully. “The ‘kinks’ our instrument detects are crowded. But while raw light is superior both for short work and long range, definition suffers in the intermediate range of say, one light-minute to a hundred thousand light-years. The macronic imposition, in contrast, is, for reasons we have yet to understand, more durable. We find the macrons in a beam emanating from a thousand light-years away to be almost as distinct as those from our own sun’s field. The same is true for virtually any galactic distance. As our range increases—”

“I’m with you. You can shout down the hall, but you need a phone for the next city, even if it sounds tinny, and it works the same for the next continent. Now that term you used — macron — that sounds like a thing, not a quality.”

“Yes. Our nomenclature is vague because our comprehension is vague. We appear to be dealing also with the particle aspect of light, more than with the wave, and perhaps with particles of gravitation. That may be the reason the effect appears to be independent of the square-cube law.”

“Mate a photon to a gravitron and breed a macron,” Borland remarked. “Damn interesting. I can see the implications of such interaction between light and gravity, untrained as I am in quantum mechanics.” Untrained but hardly ignorant, Ivo thought. “So you either get all your macron, or none of it,” the Senator continued after a pause. “But how can you get pictures of objects on or inside a planet, where there is no light?”

“The turbulence is removed from the source of the field, since it is equivalence that counts. Even an object in a planet has mass of its own, and its field interacts with that of the planet and of neighboring objects. At some point there will be an interaction that occurs in light — and some of the resultant macrons will reach us, however far away we are. It is only necessary for our receiver and equipment to be sufficiently sensitive. A computer stage is required for the initial rectification, and another to sort out and classify the myriad fragmentary images obtained. It is not a simple process. But once complete—”

“You are able, with your macroscope, to inspect any point in space — or on Earth?”

Brad nodded.

“I observed your emblem.”

“We do not use it that way,” Brad said shortly.

Ivo realized that they were talking about the platinum-plated shovel: the S D P S. Who could fathom its meaning by guesswork? Evidently the Senator understood the initials well enough. Perhaps he had prior information? He sounded less and less amateurish to Ivo. Had Brad met his match?

“Naturally not,” Borland was saying. “Certain persons might not take kindly to such observation. Some might even feel so strong a need to protect their privacy that they would institute stringent measures. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” Brad said, his tone showing his disgust. The gad had not been swatted yet, though the gadfly had merged with the background.

“No you don’t. Have you ever lived in one of facing tenements? Your window opening to a courtyard of windows?”

“No.”

“You missed a good education, lad.” Borland looked around. “Anybody else?”

The scientists of the station stood awkwardly.

“In a tenement,” he repeated softly. “Anybody.”

A brown hand went up from the doorway. It was Fred Blank, of the maintenance department, also table-tennis champion. His signal was tentative, as though he didn’t like calling attention to himself at such a gathering.

Borland faced him. “Ever use the glasses?”

Blank looked sullen.

“Or maybe a cheap telescope?” Borland persisted. “Yeah, you know what I mean. Ten, twenty, maybe a hundred windows, depending on your location, and maybe half with no shades. Who wastes dough on shades, on nigger wages? Some girls don’t know they’re putting on a show. Some don’t care. Some figure it’s good for business. Same for some men. And family fights are fair game for capacity audience.” He returned to Brad. “You know how you cure a scoper?”

“I’d call the police.”

Borland wheeled to point at Blank. “That right, soul brother?”

Blank shook his head no. He was, reluctantly, smiling now.

“Yeah, you know.” Borland had assumed complete control of the dialogue. “You was there, Kilroy. You had the education. Calling cop ain’t in the book.”

The scientists of the station stood mute, except for those translating for their companions. Borland was showing them all up for impractical theoreticians.

“Now you begin to follow, maybe. To put it in highbrow for you: mass voyeurism is a typical consequence of the cybernetic revolution, and you aren’t going to curb it by invoking prerevolution methods. Back in the old days when we were nomads scrunching in tents, anybody poke his snoot in your door uninvited, you bash it in with your horny fist. The agricultural revolution changed all that, made cities possible — and cities are by definition crowded. The industrial revolution, maybe five thousand years later, made it ten times worse, because then every Joe had the wherewithal to poke into his neighbor’s business with impunity. The cybernetic revolution really tied it, because then that average Joe had the wherewithal and the time to pry — and nobody pays for a canned show when there’s a live one free.

“Now we’ve got the superscope, and we can diddle in our stellar neighbor’s business, as though our own weren’t enough. Now how do you figure a smart ET who likes his privacy is going to stop you from peeking — when there’s maybe a fifteen-thousand-year time-delay?”

The station personnel looked at each other in dismay. Obvious — yet none of them had thought of it! A mind-destroying logic-chain that wiped out the peeping tom, wherever and whenever he might be. The most direct and realistic answer to snooping.

Borland waited for the babel of translation and discussion to die away. The men who had studied him with veiled contempt showed respect now, and the Russian had stopped smiling. “Now, comrades, suppose we forget about preconceptions and tackle the main problem. I know most of your governments better than you do — yes, even yours, Ivan — because that is my profession. Politics. I also know something of human nature — the reality, not the theory — and thereby it figures I know something too of alien nature. You’re in trouble here, and so am I in certain respects you wouldn’t care about. Why don’t we forget our differences, pool our resources, and find out what we can come up with? Maybe we can help each other a little.”

Men looked at each other over the renewed murmur of the translations. Tentative smiles broke out. “Maybe we can, Senator,” Brad allowed.

Borland spoke to his helper. “Go hold a preliminary press conference, kid. Tell ’em what the Senator means to do — but stay well clear of the facts. Irritate ’em if they get nosy. You know the routine.” The flunky left without a word.

“Li’l wonder, ain’t he?” Borland remarked. “Took me years to find a foil like that. Now where’s this tape?”

“Tape?”

“Lad, my reconnaissance is not that clumsy. The recording you have of the destroyer. The one that clouds men’s minds, ha-ha-ha. The Shadow knows.”

“It isn’t a tape, or even a recording,” Brad said. “We can’t record it — at least, what we take down doesn’t have the effect. The — meaning doesn’t register.”

“But you can pipe it in here live, right? No sense inspecting a dead virus. We want to know what makes it kick. It only comes in on one station, right? And it’s continuous; you can tune it in any time?”

“One segment of the macroscopic band, yes. The center segment, where reception is strongest. The one we could use most effectively — if we could only tune the destroyer out.”

Brad showed the Senator to a smaller projection room. Most of the scientists and personnel dispersed, satisfied that the situation was coming under control. Afra appeared in blouse and skirt, making even plain clothing look elegant. Ivo tagged along, forgotten for the moment.

“This is where we set it up,” Brad explained tersely. “It amounts to a computer output, with the main signal processed at the receiver. There are electronic safeguards to guarantee that none of the effects penetrate beyond this room. This device is dangerous.”

“A program,” Borland said musingly. “A mousetrap in a harem. But why make up a show like that, instead of simply lobbing a detonator into the sun?”

“Evidently the originator isn’t against all life,” Brad said. “This is selective. It only hits the space-traveling, macroscope-building species like ourselves. The snoopers. So long as we keep our development below a certain level, we’re safe.”

“My sentiments too. That the kind of safety you care for?”

“No.”

“Let’s run it through again. I put out a theory, just to show you how it could be, but I’m not putting my money on it yet. GIGO, you know. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Maybe my notion is the right one, but let’s eliminate the others first. Like that song: ‘Oh why don’t I work like other men do? How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue? Hallelujah, I’m a bum!’ Feed that to a minister and he’ll tell you it’s profane. Should be ‘how the heck,’ the church-approved euphemism. Try it on a professor and he’ll tell you it’s agrammatical: should be ‘as other men do.’ But a worker will tell you the whole thing’s been censored. Should be ‘how the hell can I work when there’s no work to do!’ Us lowbrows get to the root, sometimes. Not always. You figure they’re afraid of the competition from some smart-aleck new species?”

“Fifteen thousand years late? And if we had a light-speed drive, which we never will, it would still take us another fifteen millennia to reach them. We can’t even reply to their ‘message’ sooner than that. So it’s really a delay of thirty thousand years. And I don’t see how they could be sure we’d be ready to receive or reply in that time.”

“Could be a long-term broadcast. For all we know, it’s been going on a million years,” Borland said. “Just waiting for us to catch up. Maybe time is slower for them? Like fifteen thousand years being a week or so, their way?”

“Not when the broadcast is on our time scheme. We haven’t had to adjust to it at all. If they lived that slowly, we’d have a cycle running a thousand years, instead of a few minutes.”

“Maybe. You figure they’re crazy with hate for any intelligent race, any time?”

“Xenophobia? It’s possible. But again, that time-delay makes it doubtful. How can you hate something that won’t exist for tens of millennia?”

“An alien might. His mind — if he has one — might work in a different way than mine.”

“Still, there are conceded to be certain criteria for intelligence. It isn’t reasonable—”

“Stop being reasonable. That’s a mistake. Try being philosophical.”

Brad looked at him. “What philosophy do you have in mind, Senator?”

“I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool, and that’s your problem. You figure your Scientific Method is the best technique you have for working things out, right? I tell you no.”

“Observe the facts, set up a hypothesis that accounts for them all, use it to predict other facts, check them out, and revise or scrap the original hypothesis if the new evidence doesn’t fit properly. I find it workable. Do Aristotle, Kant or Marx have a better overall system?”

“Yes. The primary concern of philosophy is not truth. It is meaning. The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis. You don’t begin with assumptions and piece them together according to the rules of mathematics; you question their implications, and you question your questions, until nothing at all is certain. Then, maybe, you are getting close to meaning.”

Brad frowned. “That make sense to you two?”

“No,” Afra said.

“Yes,” Ivo said.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you, so long as it opens your mind. This isn’t any game of chess we’re playing; we don’t even know the rules. All we know for sure is that we’re losing — and maybe we’d better start by questioning that. So this thing wipes out intelligence. Is that bad?”

“Cosmologically speaking, perhaps not,” Brad said. “But the local effect is uncomfortable. It would be easier to live with it if it erased our least intelligent, rather than—”

Borland frowned. “You’re talking about IQ type brains? ‘Intelligence Quotient defined as Mental Age divided by Chronological Age times 100’?”

“We think so. Of course we can’t be certain that a numerical IQ score reflects anything more than the subject’s ability to score on IQ tests, so we may be misinterpreting the nature of the destroyer’s thrust. A numerical score omits what may be the more important factors of personality, originality and character, and even when detail scores are identical—”

“It is no sure sign that the capabilities or performance of the people are identical,” Borland finished. “I know the book, and I am aware of the shortcomings of the system. I remember the flap fifteen or twenty years ago about ‘creativity,’ and I remember the vogue for joining high-IQ clubs. When I want a good man, I stay well clear of the self-professed egghead. I can tell just by looking at faces who’s a sucker for the club syndrome.”

Borland peered at faces. He pointed a gnarled finger at Afra. “You!”

She jumped guiltily. “You belong, right?” he said. Without waiting for her startled nod of agreement he moved on. “You — no,” he said to Brad. “That big Russky who just left — no.” He looked at Ivo. “They wouldn’t let you in.” He returned to Brad. “But IQ is the only practical guide we have to the generalized potential of large numbers of people, so we have to use it until we have something better. Let’s just define it as the ability to learn, and say that a person with IQ one twenty is probably smarter overall than his brother with IQ one hundred. It’s only a convenience so we can get down to the important stuff. OK?”

Brad laughed. “Oll Korrect, Senator. Apply your philosophy.”

“Now you tell me this signal is nonlinguistic, so anybody can follow it, but it has a cutoff point. You have to be pretty smart, by one definition or another, for it to hit you. Does it hit the smarty sooner than the marginal one, or is it like the macrons: you get it or you don’t?”

“It seems to hit the brighter minds sooner. Intelligence is such an elusive quality that we can’t be sure, but—”

“Right. So let’s run this through in some kind of order. You have an IQ of two fifteen—”

“What?” Afra demanded, shocked.

“That isn’t—”

“I know. I know, I know,” Borland said. “Figures don’t mean anything, but if they did they still wouldn’t apply to you, because you’re smarter than the Joe who tries to test you. But remember we’re talking convenience, not fact. No, I haven’t seen your data-sheet; I do my own interpolation. If the figures did register for you, that’s about the way it would read, right?”

Brad did not deny it, and Afra did not look at him. Ivo knew what she was thinking. She had supposed he might be 175 or 180, still somewhere within range of her own score. Scores would be very important to her. Suddenly she knew he was as far above her as she was above the average person — and the average, to her, was almost unbearably dull.

“So chances are that of this group, you would be the first to be hit by it,” Borland said. “So let’s put you at the head of the table. Now I’m comparatively stupid — at least, about fifty points below your figure, and that’s a military secret, by the way, ’cause brains are a nonsurvival trait in the Senate — and your girl here runs about ten points below that. This lad—”

“About one twenty-five,” Ivo said. “But it’s unbalanced. I have—”

“There went another military secret,” Brad muttered. “I don’t think Mr. Archer should—”

“I insist on taking my place in your theoretic lineup,” Ivo said seriously.

“Good. You’re here, and it’s a nice gradient, so might as well use you,” Borland said. “Now let’s bring in someone who sits at one hundred even to round it out.”

“There’s nobody on the station—” Afra began.

“Ask Beatryx,” Brad murmured.

“Ask — !”

“It is no insult to be average, intellectually,” Brad told her gently. “The rest of us are freaks, statistically.” Afra flushed and went out.

“High-tempered filly there,” Borland observed. “Technical secretary?”

“More — until two minutes ago.”

“Let’s get with it. You can activate that relay right now, right?”

“You seem to be assuming that we’re really going to watch it.”

“Lose your nerve, son? You knew it was coming. Step outside and leave me with it.”

“Senator, there’s no way to demonstrate the destroyer to you without destroying you. You’d be committing mental suicide.”

Borland squinted at him. “Say I see it and survive it. Say I assimilate what the aliens are trying to hide. Where would that put me, locally?”

“Either stupid enough for a chairmanship, or—”

Ivo understood the pause. The Senator was hardly stupid. If he should survive the destroyer with a whole mind, he might have at his command the secrets of the universe, literally. He could become the most powerful man on Earth. He was the type of individual willing to gamble total loss against the prospect of total victory.

He was serious. This was what he had come for. He would view the destroyer. And Brad could not allow him to make that gamble alone. The Senator’s victory might well be more costly to Earth than his defeat — unless Brad could solve the destroyer first.

Borland’s gaze was fierce. “You want it the hard way, junior?”

“Congressional subpoena?” Brad shrugged. “No, we’ll undertake this suicide pact now, together.”

“Do it, lad.”

Brad glanced at Ivo, saw that he wasn’t leaving, and slapped a button under the table. The television screen that filled the far wall burst into color. All three rotated to face it.

Ivo, astonished at the suddenness of the decision and action, realized then how neatly they had done it. The three of them constituted a bracket, to honor that pretext, and Brad would not have wanted either woman to take the risk. Afra would never have excluded herself voluntarily, had she known what was brewing.

Shape appeared, subtle, twisting, tortuous, changing. A large sphere of red — he could tell by the shading that it represented a sphere, in spite of the two-dimensionality of the image — and a small blue dot. The dot expanded into a sphere in its own right, lighter blue, and overlapped the other. The segment of impingement took on a purple compromise.

Ivo’s intuition caught on. His freak ability attuned to this display as readily as it had to the game of sprouts. This was an animated introduction to sets, leading into Boolean Algebra, with color as an additional tool. Through set theory it was possible to introduce a beginner to mathematics, logic, electronics and all other fields of knowledge — without the intervention of a specific language. Language itself could be effectively analyzed by this means. One riddle solved; the aliens had the means to communicate.

The colors flexed, expanded, overlapped, changed shapes and intensities and number and patterns in a fashion that to an ordinary person might seem random… but was not. There was logic in that patterning, above and beyond the logic of the medium. It was an alien logic, but absolutely rational once its terms were accepted. Rapidly, inevitably, the postulates integrated into an astonishingly meaningful whole. The very significance of existence was—

Ivo’s intuition leaped ahead, anticipating the denouement. The meaning was coming at him, striking with transcendent force.

He knew immediately that the sequence should be stopped. He tried to stand, to cry out, but his motor reflexes were paralyzed. He could not even close his eyes.

He did the next best thing: he threw them out of focus. The writhing image lost definition and its hold upon him weakened. Gradually his eyelids muscled down; then he was able to turn his head away.

His entire upper torso dropped on the table. He was too weak to act.

The program ground to its inevitable conclusion. He was aware of it, though he did not watch. There was no sound in the room.

The door burst open. “Brad!” Afra cried, distracted. “You didn’t wait!”

Ivo was jarred out of his trance. Strength returned. He lurched to his feet, finding his balance. He lumbered along the table, reaching for the button Brad had touched. He scratched under the surface, his fingers uncoordinated, trying to make it work, and finally the image cut off.

Afra unfroze in stages. She had been hooked already by the destroyer, just entering its second cycle, but had not been exposed to more than a few seconds of it. There had not been time for her mind to go.

Others were crowding into the room, intent on the seated men. Now Ivo allowed himself to look at his friend.

Bradley Carpenter sat silently, oblivious to Afra’s fevered ministrations. His eyes gazed without animation and his jaw was slack and moist. Already the station doctor was shaking his head negatively.

The Senator was slumped farther down the table. The doctor went to him next and performed an intimate check.

“He’s dead,” he said.