Macroscope

CHAPTER 6

They sped toward Neptune, a scant two million miles distant. Ivo needed no instrument to contemplate its grandeur. From this point in space the planet had an apparent diameter twice that of Luna as seen from Earth, or a full degree. It was a great-banded disk of green speckled with dots and slashes, as though a godlike entity had played a careless game of sprouts upon its surface.

They were in free-fall, with Brad’s container sealed and aerated by an electric pump.

“Dull,” Afra murmured facetiously. “Just a minor gas-giant nobody would miss.”

Dull? Ivo appreciated the irony, for he had never seen a more impressive object. As he concentrated he was able to discern more detail: the comparatively bright, yellowish equatorial belt, blue-gray bands enclosing it above and below, mottled green “temperate” sections merging into the black poles — a rather attractive effect. Earth, compared to this, was a bleak white nonentity. Neptune’s spots were concentrated in the central zone and were mostly dark brown or black, and he almost thought they moved, though he had no objective evidence. A single dark blue oval showed near the horizon in what he thought of as the northern hemisphere. The planet was not visibly oblate, yet his eye filled in what he thought was there. He imagined a celestial pair of hands compressing the planet so that its midriff bulged, the belt taut.

Now he studied the surrounding “sky.” It was seemingly sunless, with fiercely bright and crowded stars. The largest object, apart from Neptune itself, was a disk several diameters to the left.

“Triton,” Afra said, observing the direction of his glance. “Neptune’s major moon. There’s a smaller one, Nereid, that’s farther out than we are now. Nereid’s orbit is cometlike; very unusual for a planetary satellite. Of course, there may be other moons we haven’t discovered yet; new ones keep popping up around the major planets.”

“This is all very interesting,” Beatryx said, obviously only marginally interested. Ivo suspected that she still suffered from the shock of the melting procedure, but tended to internalize it. “But now that we’re here, what do we do?”

No one answered. Neptune loomed larger already, green monarch of the sea of space around them.

“It looks so big,” Beatryx said. “And — wild. Are you sure it’s safe?”

Groton smiled. “Neptune is seventeen or eighteen times as massive as Earth, but it is a lot less dense. What we see is not really the surface of the planet — it is the cloud cover. So it is large and wild, but don’t worry — we won’t try to land on it. We’ll take up orbit around it.”

“We’ll just love a year of free-fall,” Afra said.

Ivo watched the crumbs of their meal floating elusively in the currents of the forced-air circulation and knew what she meant. Free-fall was fun to visit, but not to stay. The space was too confined for long-term residence of four people, and muscles would atrophy in weightlessness if the body didn’t malfunction in other ways first. And keeping Brad aerated yet contained would be tedious, perhaps dangerous. The melting was supposed to be a high-gravity alleviant, and might be vulnerable to prolonged weightlessness.

No — an orbit around Neptune was no answer.

“How about Triton?” Groton said. “It’s about the size and mass of Mercury, I understand. Surface gravity should be about a quarter Earth-normal, and there might even be a little atmosphere. We’ll need a base of operations, if only to process hydrogen for the tanks. And it would be fairly simple to intercept Triton at this angle, since we’re coming up behind it.”

“That does sound very nice,” Beatryx said.

Groton was just warming up. “Now as I see it, our original purpose was to rescue the macroscope from deactivation or worse by the UN. To accomplish this it was necessary to remove the instrument from the immediate vicinity of Earth in a hurry. This much has been accomplished. Our main responsibility now is to keep ourselves advised of the situation at home, and to be ready to return the scope when the time is appropriate. Meanwhile, we can utilize the scope for reconnaissance.”

Ivo smiled. “You mean Super-Duper Poo—”

Afra quashed him with a glance. Oh, well. Call it reconnaissance or call it poop scooping, there was no sense going back blind.

“What’s this?” Afra demanded. They looked at her, startled. She had apparently been reorganizing her purse during the preceding dialogue, and now was looking at a page of a little stenographer’s notebook.

Ivo saw strange squiggles on the sheet.

“It’s in stenotype — a script version,” Afra said. “I never heard of such a thing! I use Gregg.”

“Oh, shorthand,” Groton said. “Can you make it out?”

Afra concentrated on the half-familiar symbols. “It doesn’t make much sense. It says ‘My pawn is pinned.’ ”

“Another message from Schön!” Beatryx exclaimed.

“He must have planted notes all over the station,” Groton said. “That polyglot, then the Neptune-symbol, and now this. He could have written them all at once and distributed them for us to find randomly—”

“But why didn’t he come to us directly?” Beatryx wanted to know. “If he was close enough to get into Afra’s purse—”

“Schön is devious,” Ivo said. But the explanation sounded insufficient, even to him. What other little surprises did the genius have in store for them?

Neptune had grown monstrously by the time the ship braked down to something resembling orbital velocity. The planet’s disk was fifteen times the apparent diameter of Luna from Earth, and its roiling atmospheric layers were horrendously evident. The great bands of color hardly showed now; instead there was a three-dimensional mélange of cloud and gas and turbulence suggesting a photograph of a complex of hurricanes. The spectators were still too far removed to perceive the actual motion, and could contemplate at leisure the awesome extent of the frozen detail.

Ivo felt as though he were peering into a cauldron of layered oils recently disturbed by heating. He had a vision of Brad’s basin perched on a furnace — and suppressed it, shocked at himself. Gray-blue bubbles a thousand miles across seemed to rise through the pooled, heavy gases, while slipstreams of turbulence trailed at the edges. In one place the recent passage of a bubble had left a beautifully defined cutaway section of gaseous strata, yellow layered on green on pink and black. In another, masses of whitish substance — hydrogen snow — were depressing the seeming ocean beneath, ballooning downward in a ponderous inversion. He was reminded of hot wax flowing into cool water.

No, there would be no landing in that.

Afra had retreated to the bowels of Joseph to supervise the maneuvering. They had cut inside Triton’s retrograde orbit and were overhauling the moon at a rate that was rapid in miles per hour but seemed slow because of the immensity of the scale. The thirty-one-thousand-mile disk of Neptune dwarfed everything, and its rainbow hues rendered its satellite drab.

Yet baby Triton had its share of intrigue. Only a tenth the diameter of Neptune, it was still one and a half times the span of Luna, and three and a half times Luna’s mass. Triton, mass considered, was the true giant of the moons of the Solar system, though there were others with a larger diameter. It expanded until its disk was the size of that of the mighty Neptune, then larger, and it was as though the two were sister planets. But where Neptune was stormy and bright, Triton was still and dark, from this angle. Its surface was tunelessly rigid.

“Rigid ridges,” Ivo murmured, half expecting Afra to say “What?” But she was not at hand.

There were craters: mighty broken rings of rock, shadowed in the middle, some pocked by smaller craters within. There were mountains: overlapping wrinkles across the surface. There was a brief atmosphere hazing the planetary outlines. And there were oceans.

“Must be some compound of oxygen and nitrogen,” Groton said. “Water is out of the question.” Intrigued, he had Ivo focus the macroscope on it and code in a spectroscopic analysis. “Atmosphere is mostly neon and nitrogen,” Groton said as he studied the result. “With a little oxygen and trace argon. The ocean is a liquefied compound of—”

Then they spied the object in space.

“Alert!” Groton snapped into the intercom. “We’re overhauling something, and I don’t mean Triton.”

“A ship?” Afra’s voice came back. “Schön?”

Ivo centered the small finder-telescope upon it. The thing leaped into focus: a fragment of matter about forty miles in diameter. “Too big,” he announced. “It’s rock or another solid — and it’s irregular.” He checked the specific indications, since they were passing it rapidly enough to measure parallax. “About fifty miles long, thirty-five wide at the thickest point.”

“I see it!” Afra cried. “We have it on Joseph’s screen now. We — that thing is in orbit!”

“Not around Neptune,” Groton protested. “It’s heading in toward the planet. Couldn’t—” He paused to take in his breath. “A moon of a moon? I don’t believe it.”

But it had to be believed. Due observation and analysis showed that it was a satellite of Triton, orbiting at about ten thousand miles distance with its broad side facing its primary. Its direction was “normal” — opposite to that of retrograde Triton. Its composition: H₂O.

It was a solid mass of ice, so cold that its surface would be harder than steel — and at the edges it was translucent. The light of stars shone through it, separating into prismatic (though very faint) flashes of color, a constant peripheral display.

“What a beauty!” Afra exclaimed. “Whatever shall we name it?”

“Schön,” Groton said succinctly.

Ivo waited for Afra to object, but there was no reply from the intercom. Presumably she was waiting for him to object. The implications—

“This,” said Groton, “is a break. We won’t have to set up an orbit; one is waiting here for us.”

“But we have to land on Triton,” Ivo protested. “Schön couldn’t possibly provide the gravity we need. Schön-moon, I mean.” He had been made edgily aware of the unsatisfied curiosity about Schön-person that continued to nag at the others’ minds.

“No question there. But we can’t simply settle down with the macroscope on Joseph’s nose. We’re geared for space; a landing would crush us.”

“But if the ship stood up under ten G’s, and this is only a quarter G—”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. The ten G’s were steady and uniform; the drop would be another matter. The effect of it would be many times ten G.”

“Oh.” At least Groton wasn’t superior about his knowledge. “But if the ship can’t land, and we can’t stay in free-fall—”

“Planetary module. We’ll get down all right. It will actually be easier to shuttle back and forth, and we won’t have to risk the macroscope on land. Just so long as we don’t lose Joseph in the sky after we desert him. But with an object as big and bright as Schön to zero in on, we won’t have a problem. We’ll be able to spot that in the sky without a telescope, any time.”

The reasoning evidently appealed to Afra, because they were already phasing in on Schön. The block of ice seemed to drift closer, and the pits and bumps of its frigid surface magnified. The moonlet filled the screen, until it seemed as though they were coming in for a landing on a snowbound arctic plane — except that there was no discernible gravity.

Gently Afra closed with it, guiding the ship in by means of the tiny chemical stabilizer jets set in the sides. Ivo wondered what would happen when they came to rest, since the macroscope housing bulged well beyond the girth of Joseph — then remembered that with so little attraction there would be no particular stress. Actually, they were closer to synchronous orbit than to a “landing,” and it would be wise to tie the ship down.

At fifty miles an hour, relative velocity, they approached, coming up underneath the moonlet; then twenty, and down to five. Schön seemed near enough to touch and the sense of being underneath it had dissolved; it was now like drifting down in a blimp. Finally, at barely one mile an hour, they covered the last few feet and jolted into contact. They were down.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” Groton suggested as the two women came forward. “The recondensing water vapor will anchor the ship as it cools, and that won’t be long at all. We have no responsibilities, for the moment.”

They went out upon the surface, and it was like flying. It was a vacation from reality. The trace vapors generated by the leaking warmth of their suits buoyed them up, away from the cold surface, and they had to use their gas jets to control their motion. A single push, and Ivo sailed along at a ten-foot elevation, feeling both powerful and insecure. To have a physical landscape so close, yet not to be bound by it…

Schön, like Triton, was locked to its primary. They had landed upon the “downward” face, and this accentuated the wrongness. Triton was too big, too close; when they looked at it they seemed to be above it, and when they drifted too high it was like falling, except that they fell, instead, up toward Schön. Was it the stuff of dreams — or of nightmares?

Ivo approached the horizon, and it did not recede from him. He drifted over the edge and had to correct as the “ground” dropped away from him, a new horizon a mile ahead. This really was a flat world; it was possible to fall off the edge, though the fall would be away rather than down. He navigated the intervening mile and found a third horizon, half a mile distant. One more, he thought; one more, then quiet. This experience was tiring.

But, fascinated, he traversed two more — and there was Neptune.

He knew that the ruling planet was no larger than it had appeared from the ship. He reminded himself of that. But then he had been closed in, protected; here he was exposed, and seemingly ready to plunge directly into it. The gaping face of it appalled him, so close, so fierce — the aspect of a physical destroyer. God of the sea — terror of man.

Ivo fired his jet and retreated hastily.

They had to take the ship into space again — a mile or so — to effect the separation of the module; then Afra piloted the chemical craft while Groton brought Joseph back to Schön. Ivo and Beatryx watched the entire maneuver from the landed macroscope housing, and he was not certain which of them was more nervous. An accident, even a slight mishap — and they could be stranded where they were for the duration. Until death did them part — shortly.

There was no accident. They loaded minimum supplies into the module and set off as a group for Triton. Not until the rough landing was over did Ivo allow his mind to function normally again. The experience had frankly terrified him, and he knew that Beatryx had reacted similarly.

Here at last there was gravity. Suited again, they stepped upon their new moon-planet home and looked about.

They were in a valley formed by the curving walls of adjacent craters that were now great mountain ranges jutting to either side. Other ranges were visible in the distance. Not far from their landing spot was an immense crevasse: a geologic fault running between the craters, V-cleft, and filled at the bottom with liquid. The ground surface was packed with dust, somewhat like solid snow, with rocks nudging through it irregularly. Mighty Neptune provided a dim illumination; there was nothing like Earth’s sunlight out here.

“Well, we have our world,” Beatryx said dubiously, after they had returned to the module. “Now what do we do with it?”

“We’ll have to camp in the module until we can construct permanent quarters here,” said Groton thoughtfully. “But before we do that, we’d better survey the area for good locations.”

Afra had stripped off her suit in the pressurized cabin and was wiping the perspiration from her body with an absorbent cloth. Ivo realized that she was nude from the waist up — and further realized that their situation had intensified group interaction to such an extent that he hadn’t even noticed her action until this moment. He suspected that it would be a long time before there was room again for modesty, when cubic yards were all the space available for the four, here. The macroscope had been roomy, compared to the module.

“I’d like first to know how long we’re going to stay,” she said. “Is Schön-person somehow going to find us here, and if so, how soon? No sense building anything fancy if it’s only for a few days.” She had not interrupted her clean-up.

Ivo remembered the breastless carcass he had watched melting, and was tempted to reach out and verify again that what he saw here was real. He refrained.

“Ivo?” Beatryx prompted.

He jumped. “I don’t think Schön is coming. Anything we do, we’ll have to do on our own.”

“Can you find him or can’t you?” Afra demanded, peeling down the nether portion of her suit. “Or contact him. You’ve been more and more mysterious, and there’s still that business about that poet—”

Beatryx interrupted what was threatening to become a tirade. “Afra!”

“But he’s refusing to cooperate! We can’t put up with—”

It was Harold’s turn to interrupt. “If the rest of you will leave off, I will address myself to the problem of Schön. I’ll make a report when I have something to report. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to stop us from setting things up. We’ll need a base of operations regardless of the company. Let’s just do things in an orderly manner and see what develops.”

Afra did not seem fully satisfied, but she shrugged into shorts and a fresh blouse. She didn’t bother with a brassiere in quarter-gravity. “Assuming that we find a suitable location, exactly how do you propose to construct ‘permanent quarters’? The only abundant building materials we have are plain rock and cold dust, and those have certain limitations.”

“I am aware of the limitations. But I figure Ivo can take another peek through the scope and come up with some galactic blueprints for us. This must be a fairly common situation, galactically speaking, and there must be survivors’ handbooks. Why not use them?”

“I can try. Tell me what kind of information you seek, and I’ll look for it. I can’t use the computer’s automatic search pattern, since this is intellectual, but—”

“Fine. I’ll work out a schedule and talk to you again, and we’ll ferry you up to the scope in a few days. I suppose we’d better set a limit on free-fall time, though — say, no more than one day in three. That sound reasonable?”

Afra and Ivo nodded. Whatever leadership existed here seemed to be gravitating steadily to Groton, perhaps because their immediate problems had become ones of engineering — or perhaps, Ivo thought, just because of his level-headed calm.

“Should he be alone?” Beatryx inquired.

“Um, that too,” Groton agreed. “Maybe we’d better make another rule that nobody be alone. That macroscope is dangerous, as we know — but so is Triton. We’ll have to watch each other all the time, because we may not be able to survive as a group if even one of us goes.”

“Should we make sure each of us can do each task?” Afra asked next. “Right now, Ivo’s the only one competent on the scope. Harold and I can pilot—”

“If we can’t get along without all of us,” Ivo pointed out, “it doesn’t really matter what any one of us knows. We function as a group or not at all.”

“There is macabre sense in that,” Groton agreed, “if we ignore the possibility of someone’s temporary incapacity. Let’s assign tasks, then, and let people train for others as circumstance dictates. Ivo, you’re the scoper, of course; Afra, you’re the pilot, because I’ll be the construction engineer. Beatryx—”

“Cooking and laundry,” she said, and they laughed.

It was Beatryx who stood watch with him his first day on scope duty. Afra had piloted them off Triton and ensconced them safely in the macroscope, then dropped back to keep Groton company and help him survey for his construction. He had remained below in his suit, no one thinking to invoke the never-alone rule against him this time. Ivo had a carefully rehearsed headful of specifications, and his job now was to locate some galactic station that had the products required. He hardly comprehended the electronic terms, but he hoped that he could at least match bid to asked.

The first assignment was rough: a survey of galactic physical technology. But Beatryx was there when he emerged from the awesome visions of the cosmos, and she was cheerful and unassuming, encouraging and sympathetic. Ivo could appreciate the reason Groton, no intellectual slouch himself, had passed over the female engineers he might have had and chosen a woman like this. It was the feeling of familiarity, of home, that he needed most when the revelations of the ages shook his fundamental assumptions, and she carried about her a pleasing aura of homebody Earth.

Again he remembered Brad’s remark about normality being no insult, and again he appreciated it intensely. Intelligence might be defined as facility at solving problems — but it was only one talent among many required for existence. What about the problem of being fit to live with? By that definition, Beatryx was the smartest among them.

“Now I know what Lanier meant by the relation of music to poetry,” he said as he removed helmet and goggles, his head revolving with the music of the spheres and the meter of communication. “The rules are identical — there.”

“Lanier?” she inquired. “Sidney Lanier who wrote about the marshes?”

He looked at her, realizing his slip. “You know of him?”

“Only a little. I never understood the interpretations they taught me in school, but I did like some of the verse. I suppose I liked the American poets because they seemed closer. I remember how sad it made me when I learned about Annabel Lee.”

“Annabel who?”

“She was by Mr. Poe. I always used to think he was Italian, because of the river. I mean, he wrote about her. I memorized it because it made me cry.”

Ivo looked at her, seeing a woman of 37 who only once in the brief period he had known her had shown a sign of unhappiness. “Do you remember it now?”

“I don’t think I do, Ivo. It was a long time ago. Let me see.” She concentrated. “ ‘She was a child and I was a child. In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee.’ ” She shook her head. “She died — it was a wind blowing out of a cloud — but he loved her forever anyway.”

“I didn’t realize you liked poetry,” he said. “What’s your favorite poem of all time?”

“Oh, I remember that one,” she said, her face animated. Ivo had judged her to be forty or more the first time he met her, then had learned her true age; now she seemed to have lopped half a dozen more years off that. People became so much much more alive when occupied in something really interesting to them. “It was so sad, but it seemed so true. I mean, I don’t know it any more, but it was my favorite. It was about Jesus Christ and how they slew Him, when He came out of the woods. Oh, I wish I could remember how it went—”

“ ‘Into the woods my Master went / Clean forspent, forspent. / Into the woods my Master came / Forspent with love and shame.’ ”

“That’s it! Oh, Ivo, that’s it! How did you know?”

“A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” he said, “by Lanier.”

“Yes, yes, I had forgotten, yes that was his! But how did you know it?”

“I know — quite a bit of his work. I — well, it’s a long story, and I don’t suppose it matters now.”

“Oh yes it does, Ivo! He’s such a good poet — I know he is — you must tell me! I remember it, I think. He came out of the woods — ‘When Death and Shame would woo Him last,’—”

“ ‘From under the trees they drew Him last; / ’Twas on a tree they slew Him — last / When out of the woods He came.’ ”

There were tears in her eyes that would not fall in the trace gravity. “He found peace among the trees — and then they crucified Him on a tree. Wood, anyway. Such an awful thing.” She reflected on it for a moment. “But you didn’t tell me how you know about Sidney Lanier.”

Ivo was touched by her genuine appreciation and interest. “It was a kind of game we played. You see, none of us knew who our real parents were—”

“You didn’t know? Ivo, where were you?”

“In a — project. They took people of all races and — mixed them together for a couple of generations and got children who were a combination of everything. The idea was to breed back to the basic stock of man, or at least obtain something equivalent to what he would have been if he hadn’t split into so many races. To see if he was any better than the — well, the whites and the yellows and the browns and the blacks. They wanted to reduce cultural influences and make it all the same, so we had no parents. Just supervisors.”

“How horrible, Ivo! I didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Matter of fact, we had quite a time. We were never hungry or cold or neglected, and had all the best of everything. It was quite stimulating, as it was meant to be. There were several hundred of us, all the same age and — race. I didn’t really realize until I got out of the project that I was not a normal American.”

“Not a—”

“We’re considered nonwhite.”

“But that shouldn’t make any difference, Ivo. Not in America.”

He did not pursue that aspect farther. “Anyway, since we had no parents or relatives, some of us invented them. It got to be quite a serious thing. We’d pick figures from history and trace the lineage and work out a line of descent for ourselves. We had the whole world to choose from, of course — all times and all races. We’d show how these ancestors resembled us in some way, or vice versa. Anyway, my white ancestor was Sidney Lanier.”

“I think that’s very sweet, Ivo. But what made you decide he was the one?”

“I suppose it was the flute playing. Lanier was a fine flutist, you know — perhaps the finest in the world at that time. He earned his living for several years as first flutist for a prominent orchestra, even though he had tuberculosis, before he got more serious as a poet.”

She frowned. “The flute? I don’t see — Ivo! You play the flute!”

He nodded.

“Did you bring it with you? You must be a very good musician!”

“Yes, I brought it with me — the only thing I did bring. That’s the way Lanier would have done it. I guess music is my strong point. A single talent, like my math-logic talent. I never really worked at it, but I could play the flute better than any of the others.”

After another session with the macroscope, he yielded to her importunings, assembled his flute and played for her. The notes were oddly distorted in the confined space and trace-gravity air, but she listened raptly.

For her? He was playing for himself, too, for he loved the flute. He caressed the instrument, letting the music flow through his being as though they were merely two stops between composer and audience. He lived each note, feeling his soul expand and renew, animated by the melody. This was the theme that brought him closer to his ancestor.

After that it became a regular routine between them, for he felt comfortable while playing and her pleasure was genuine. He played the cold out of the bleak Schön-moonlet landscape; he played mighty Neptune up over the Triton horizon (Triton never turned a new face to Neptune, but Schön’s revolution about it caused a regular eclipse of impressive dimension); he played the spirit of Earth into their exile.

Sometimes, too, he took time off from the galactic bands to survey Earth and pick up the headlines from a New York newspaper, because Beatryx liked to know what was going on locally. In many respects, these sessions with her were as comfortable as anything he had known.

Meanwhile, below, developments were impressive. If flute-playing was Ivo’s genius, machinery was Groton’s.

“The problem is this,” Groton had explained. “Information does not equal gadgetry. The amount of detail work required to build even a crude shelter at a place like this, with temperature, gravity and atmosphere problems, is appalling. Cutting, fitting, finishing, sealing, installing, testing — many thousands of man-hours, not to mention the equipment! So I need to know how a party our size, with a macroscope and an atomic engine and a planetary module and a few hand tools can terraform a world like Triton within, oh, six months. There must be a program for it somewhere. Find me that program!”

Ivo found it. One of the far galactic stations had a complete A-to-Z presentation beginning with a way to tie down a Type I technology rocket so that the heat and power of the blasting motor could be utilized planetside, and ending with the proper etiquette for the housewarming party.

Groton spent a tedious month fashioning the first crude semielectronic prerobotic tool: a type of waldo adapted to respond to a galactic instruction-beam. This device greatly facilitated the detail work for other machines, and progress multiplied.

An alien factory melted the rock of Triton, mixed it with chemical elements extracted from the ocean and produced a fine, strong, airtight nonconductive material that bonded to itself in a matter of hours upon contact, regardless of ambient temperature. Other units carried huge blocks of this “galactite,” light in the quarter-gravity but still heavy as inertial mass, to the lakeside site Groton had selected for the human enclave. Soon there was a pyramid of dominoes fifty feet on a side, completely sealed. The airlocks were more complicated, but a week of signal-directed labor sufficed. This castle was pressurized and heated and lighted, and the human party was able to move in and reside in suitless comfort.

Meanwhile, Afra took her turn to babysit. Beatryx had the first several sessions, but the group felt that rotation was best, in the long run. Ivo was at this point transcribing the horrendously complicated data the early machines required. He hardly understood the terms or concepts, and had to consult with Groton frequently for lessons in elementary electronics. He did not dare augment his very limited comprehension through the program itself, because that might also let in the destroyer. He was forced to perform in ignorance, and it was hellishly fatiguing.

It was not easy to be alone with Afra, however. She was too bright, too beautiful, too bitter. Ivo could hardly blame her, yet it was hard to accept her subtle coldness with equanimity.

“You never knew your parents?” she inquired during one of the breaks.

“None of us did.” Evidently Beatryx had been talking to the others. Well, he hadn’t asked her not to.

“How many of you were there?”

“Three hundred and thirty. Of course, there may have been other groups, for other ages; we were all within a year of each other. A few months, actually.” Why had she grown so curious about his background? Or was it merely a ploy to fill time?

“So you and Brad and Schön are the same age?”

“Yes.” As he said it, he realized the trap. Brad had told her that the groups were separate, and he had just admitted that they were not.

She was silent for so long he felt moved to break the mood. “The idea was to combine—”

“I know!” Then, guilty at her own ferocity. “It is just so hard to believe that Brad could have been colored. I never suspected it.”

This vestigial bigotry in Afra, though he had suspected its existence, came as a nasty shock to Ivo. “We varied in appearance, but the ratios were similar. Brad happened to be very light-skinned, while some were considerably darker than me. Does it matter?” Foolish question.

“Yes. Yes it does, Ivo.” She turned away and looked out over the ice. “Oh, I know I’m supposed to say I’m a Georgia girl brought up in the twentieth century without prejudice. I know what a person is is what matters, not his lineage, and everyone is equal in our society. That the seeming inferiority of the nonwhite population stems from cultural and economic disadvantage and has no genetic basis. I understand that when Black Power burns its ghettos and pillages stores it’s only the frustration speaking that the complacent white majority has fostered for a century. That all we need to do is work together, all races and all subcultures, to build a better society and negate the evils of the past. But — but I wanted to marry him!”

She spun about to face him, gripping the handrail. “It just isn’t in me to love a Negro. I don’t even know why. All my experience—”

She let go and floated, both hands covering her face. “Oh, Brad, Brad, I do love you—”

Damned either way. Ivo kept his mouth shut, remembering the thousand little ways he had been advised of his own inferiority, once he left the project. The liberals liked to claim that discrimination was a thing of the past, but few of them were to be found residing near Negro families. Official segregation no longer existed, but he had discovered how unpleasant it could get, how rapidly, when the powerful unofficial guidelines were ignored. He had heard from others how suddenly positions advertised as “equal opportunity” became “filled” when a nonwhite applied — and reopened for subsequent whites. Brad had chosen to “pass” — and had risen too high, too fast for reprisal when the truth leaked out. And evidently the truth had not reached Afra’s ears, at the station. Ivo had chosen not to pass — and had paid the penalty. He was not one-third Caucasian, one-third Mongoloid; he was one-third Negroid, and that meant he was black. 1/3 C + 1/3 M + 1/3 N = N. He was less intelligent than a purebred white, despite the white tests that said otherwise; he was less wholesome, though he washed as often and brushed his teeth with a popular white dentifrice; he was indefinably but definitely unequal and everybody in America knew it, whatever they might utter for public consumption. Whether it was “Get out of here, Nigger!” as it had been in 1960, or the rigid courtesy he had experienced in 1970, or selective blindness in 1980, he was an intruder upon society.

It had been impossible not to react. Hatred bred hatred, and the ghostly white skin of a stranger had come to make him tense up momentarily and think “White!” however objective he tried to keep himself. Yet he had been pitched calamitously into love at sight of the whitest skin of all…

Afra had come out of it. “I am wrong. I know it. But I can’t just change it, presto. I can call myself a white bigot and feel guilty, but that’s still my nature.” She looked at him in a way that hurt him. “You and Brad and Schön — all together?”

“Yes.”

“The color and the IQ and the sex — all at once?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he lie to me!” she cried in anguish.

That required no answer.

“And you, Ivo — you’re lying to me too!”

“Yes.” A half-truth was also a half-lie.

“You were in this free-love thing too. You’ve had more experience—”

“The project broke up when we were fifteen.”

“Stop it! I can read you, Ivo. Tell me the truth. Tell me about you and Brad and Schön.”

“It isn’t—” He stopped. What she was after, she would get, however much he might temporize. “There were a hundred and seventy boys and a hundred and sixty girls. We were raised together from infancy — one big dormitory, no segregation between sexes. We chose our own rooms and roommates and there were no hours.”

“A commune,” she said tersely.

“A commune. But the adults always appeared when there was real trouble, so everyone knew we were watched all the time. It didn’t matter. Most of the kids were pretty smart.”

“They were selected for that,” Afra said. “The complete man was supposed to be a genius.”

“Genetics and environment and statistics indicated that there would be something like genius somewhere within that group, yes. Every day there was education, starting as soon as a child could react to stimulation. Maybe before that — I don’t remember. We were fed high-potency diets and protected against every disease known to man and given constant physical and intellectual stimulation. I think there were as many adult supervisors as children, but they only showed up for the teaching. Almost everyone could speak and read by the age of three, even the slow ones.”

“Group dynamics,” she said. “It was competitive.”

“I guess so. But they were always snooping — the adults, I mean. That was another game — to fool them. Rigging the scores, faking sleep, that sort of thing. They were so gullible. Maybe it was because they were all so educated. They had too much faith in their tests and their bugs and their bell-shaped curves.”

“I can imagine. What about the girls?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “They knew they were female. A number of the kids were precocious that way too. But children four years old don’t see sex the same way as adults do. The anal element—”

“And Schön? That’s where he got his name, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We named ourselves; we were just numbers to the adults. To keep it impartial, I suppose. That’s why my name is a pun. Schön — he got interested in language early—”

“How early?”

“Nobody knows. It just seemed he learned six or seven languages at once, along with English, and I understand he could write them too. I didn’t know him then — or ever, for that matter. I think he knew a dozen by the time he was three.”

Afra digested this in silence.

“And he was very pretty. So he roomed with lots of kids, and they all liked him at first. So he was sehr schon. I think the sehr means—”

“I see. Just how far can four-year-olds go?”

“Sexually? As far as anybody, the motions. I think. At least, Schön could, and the… girls. But he got bored with it pretty soon.”

“You’re still lying by indirection, but I can’t pin it down. How did Brad fit into this?”

“He was Schön’s best friend. His only friend at the end, perhaps. Schön didn’t really need anybody. I guess it was because they were the two smartest, though Schön was really in a class by himself.”

She was silent again, and he knew she was thinking of Brad’s 215 IQ. “They were — roommates.”

“Yes.” Then he grasped the direction of her thinking. “You have to understand — there weren’t any social conventions from outside. No restrictions.” But it bothered him as sharply as it bothered her; he was defending it from necessity. “It was all play — homo or hetero or group—”

“Group!”

Ivo shrugged. “What’s wrong with it, objectively?”

“I seem to have more prejudices than I thought.” Ivo was discovering how much more reasonable a shared prejudice seemed.

“But there wasn’t any challenge to that. It didn’t mean anything. So most of our energies were concentrated on learning, and outwitting the fumbling adults.”

“How intelligent was the average child, if the supervisors didn’t know?”

“I don’t know either. But I’d guess the adults thought it was one twenty-five, while actually it was 25 or 30 points above that.”

She became thoughtful once more, perhaps pondering existence in a group where she would have been barely average. But her next words proved otherwise: “Your ‘experts’ didn’t do their homework well enough. Didn’t they know what happens to children deprived of their family life?”

“It wasn’t possible to have—”

“Yes it was, if they’d really wanted to take the trouble. They could have placed each child in an adoptive home, or at least foster care, with the formal training and stimulation and what-have-you provided centrally. Similar in that respect to the way the Peckham Experiment functioned.”

Ivo tried to conceal his surprise at her reference. She was better educated than he had thought, despite what he already knew of her abilities. “They weren’t trying for family harmony. They wanted brains.”

“So they defeated themselves by precipitating an unrestrained peer-group. When parental guidance is absent, the standards of the peer-group take over early — and they aren’t always ‘nice’ standards. If the average American child is perverted to some extent by the increasing preoccupation, neglect and absence of his parents, and by the violence of TV and news headlines, and the viciousness of deprived peers that are his chief contact with the world, think how much worse it would be for the children who never had families at all! No incentive to excel at useful tasks, no development of conscience. You need a father in the house for that, or a good strong father-substitute. And the notion that only persons with masters degrees in education are qualified to raise children — no wonder they came up with someone like Schön!”

Ivo hadn’t seen it that way before, but it made sense to him now. What he was experiencing here, with Harold and Beatryx and Afra herself, was actually a family situation. Already it had stimulated him to performance far beyond anything he had approached before. And — he liked it. Argument, danger, grueling work and continued friction there might be — but they were all pulling together, and it was better than the life he had known on Earth.

“Didn’t that adult-baiting game bore Schön pretty soon too? What did he do about it?”

Back to specifics. “He left.”

“From a monitored dormitory? An enclosed camp? Where did he go?”

“Nobody knew, exactly. He was just gone.”

“You’re lying again. Brad knew.”

“I guess so.”

“And you — you knew. You still know! Even Brad couldn’t fetch him, but you could — except you wouldn’t!”

Ivo did not answer.

“And it’s all tied in somehow with that poem of yours, and the planet Neptune, and that damned pinned pawn.”

Had she assembled the puzzle? Schön evidently wanted her to. Did she know how readily she could summon the genie, knew she but its abode? Could she suspect the consequence of too rash a conjuration?

The pyramid — actually a tetrahedron — became a splendid center under the patter of little metal feet supervised by instructions from space. One face was flush with the ground, and a triangle of triangles pointed at Neptune. Dull, impervious blocks on the outside gave way to twenty-first century comfort on the inside. Each person had a room — Groton and Beatryx an apartment, with electric accommodations and sophisticated plumbing. Spongy warm rugs lined the floors, and the walls were painted attractively.

With power and a machine shop, and the incoming galactic program, Groton directed an irregular stream of wonders. He produced a device that converted Tritonian soil into protein, and another that generated a field of force that would enclose a larger area outside the tetrahedron and retain an Earthlike atmosphere. Yet another served to focus gravity and bring their weight, in this limited area of the planet, up to Earth-normal.

Matter-conversion, force-field, gravity control — these things staggered Ivo’s imagination. They had assumed that galactic technology would exceed that of Earth, but the fact was somewhat overwhelming. How many decades — how many centuries — would be required for Earth to develop such things on its own? The proboscoids of Sung had never achieved this level. They, of course, had not been able to penetrate the destroyer and receive the programs beyond it. Otherwise, many of their problems could have been materially alleviated.

The recurring question: why, then, did the destroyer exist? And the recurring answer: data insufficient.

Ivo tried to compliment Groton on his achievements. “I’m just an engineer following instructions,” the man said blithely. It was to a considerable extent the truth, since his position had become analogous to that of a child turning on a television set and sitting back to watch experts at work. But however detailed the program, Groton deserved credit for making it applicable to their situation. It was his heyday.

No longer were they required to walk the barren surface in space suits. An artificial sun replaced the minuscule original star in the sky, and light and heat blazed down upon the landscape twelve hours of each twenty-four, riding the fringe of the force-field. Beatryx planted beans from the ship’s food supplies, and they sprouted in a garden stocked with the protein soil-mockup beside a reservoir of H₂O — i.e., a genuine crescent-lake.

Ivo, for his contribution to the good life, arranged to photograph images on the main screen of the macroscope, and made regular prints of Earth newspapers, magazines and books. These the others could read without danger of encroachment by the destroyer, since only its “live” image killed. Far from being a lonely, frozen exile, their stay on Triton had become, in a few active months, an independent vacation.

Groton finally took his turn with Ivo at the macroscope, refusing to claim indefinitely the privilege of moon-side duty that his continuing performance had warranted. “Do the machines good to have time off,” he remarked. “I told ’em to be back on the job 8 a.m. Monday and sober.” For the first time since the onset of this adventure, the two men were together privately when there was time to converse.

Ivo suspected there was a reason for it, since Groton still had important other chores to do and had already proven himself to be an indefatigable worker. Afra had been overshadowed and relegated to the role of technical assistant, and of course Beatryx had been the chief babysitter. Had Groton made time now for a reason?

He had. “You remember I’m interested in astrology,” he said.

That was not the subject Ivo had anticipated. “Yes, you took my birth date and a significant experience.” So long ago, it seemed! Back the other side of the melting — a whole separate existence, receding into memory. And did it make a difference, for the astrological discipline, that the childhood Ivo had made his own was that of Sidney Lanier? He felt a twinge of guilt, but was afraid that an explanation at this point would be awkward. “I also overheard you discussing it with Afra, way back when.”

“Yes. Brilliant girl, but her mind is resistant to certain concepts.” Ivo had become aware of that, too. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t require that anyone else accept my values, and I am confident that astrology can stand on its own merits. But I have been casting horoscopes for each of the members of this party, and there is a certain mystery about you.”

Ivo wondered when the man had found time for this, in the face of the colossal job he had been doing on Triton. Here he shared Afra’s perplexity: how was it that such a competent and realistic engineer was able to take a pseudo-science seriously? Groton did not seem to differentiate between the real and the unreal, yet his approach to all things seemed to be totally practical.

“If you don’t mind,” Groton said after an interval, “I’d like to discuss this with you.”

“Why not? I can’t say I believe in astrology any more than Afra does, but I don’t mind questions.”

“Can you say you know enough about astrology to believe or disbelieve intelligently?”

Ivo smiled. “No. So I guess I’m neutral.”

“It is surprising how certain most people are about what they like or don’t like, or believe or don’t believe, when their information is really too scanty for any meaningful decision. If I had chosen before the fact to disbelieve in the possibility of a signal from space that could build advanced machinery, our residence on Triton would be less comfortable than it is. Prejudice is often expensive.”

It occurred to Ivo that he had just had another lesson in open-mindedness. He had objected to Afra’s views on race, but his own mind had been as one-sided in the matter of astrology. And, like Afra, he still couldn’t reverse his standing attitudes; astrology, to him, was essentially fakery. He was as prejudiced as she.

“Still, that’s irrelevant,” Groton said. “What I want to do is give you portions of two descriptions, and have you judge which one fits you best. It’s a kind of psychological exercise — but don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to psychoanalyze you. This may help me to clear up my problem, and perhaps show you a little of what astrology is in practice.”

“Fire at will.”

“Odd you should choose that wording.” Groton paused to collect his thoughts. “Here is the first description: This person is determined to get on the inside of things and to control the machinery of life. This position always encourages a conscious response to the undercurrents of the moment. At his best he is able to recognize the basic unity of experience, or to bring unsuspected and helpful relations into play; at his worst he is apt to cultivate suspicion or encourage half-baked effort. Life for him must be exciting, and he must be self-reliant. He is essentially fearless, and likes to move quickly and positively, taking the full consequence of whatever he does. He does not care much for abstract considerations, and gives little thought to other people.”

Groton paused. “Now here is the second one: This person is determined to test the mettle of reality in every possible sort of hard effort He desires to bring everything down to a utilitarian basis. At his best he is able to organize or redirect the energies of himself and others to an increased advantage; at his worst he is apt to become wholly malcontent and unsocial. Life for him must be purposeful; he is readily stimulated. He is high-visioned, optimistic, gregarious to a fault and often gullible. He must be challenged to do his best, or he becomes dogmatic and jealous. He is a realist in minor things, a do-or-die idealist otherwise.”

Ivo thought about it. “They’re both so general, and I’m not sure I like either one too much. But the second seems closer. I do like to help people, but too often it doesn’t work out. And I’d much rather earn my way by hard work than do something dramatic. I’m certainly not fearless.”

“This is my impression. Human traits are not portioned off precisely, and we all have a little of everything, so character summations are necessarily vague in spots. But the first hardly describes you. It is Aries the Ram in the twelfth house. Aries is part of the fire element — that’s why I commented on your figure of speech.”

“My — ?”

“You said ‘fire at will.’ ”

“Oh.”

“The second is Aquarius the Water Carrier in the sixth house — air element. I could go on with the other planets — this was the sun, of course — but this differentiation is typical. You appear to fit Aquarius, not Aries.”

“And my birth date?”

“Aries.”

“So I’m a misfit. Don’t know where I belong. Whose birthday is Aquarius?”

“I played a hunch from something my wife mentioned. Sidney Lanier.”

Ivo felt a nasty emotional shock. Pseudo-science or not, this was striking pretty close. “So you say I should be fire when I seem to be air. Could you have miscalculated?”

“No. That’s the mystery. I rechecked very carefully and it stands. Your personality is entirely different from the one indicated by your horoscope, and your personal episode only corroborates that difference. I could be mistaken in detail, but hardly to this extent. So: assuming my tenets to be valid, either your birth date is not the one you gave me, or—”

“Or — ?”

“Do you play chess?”

“No.” Ivo did not challenge the abrupt change of subject.

“It happens that I do. I’m not very good at it, but I used to play quite a bit, before I found more important uses for my time. So I believe I know what that message means.”

“Message?”

“Schön’s last. You remember: ‘My pawn is pinned.’ That’s a chess expression.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I think you would, Ivo, but I’ll explain. Each piece in chess has a different motion and a different value. A pawn is a minor piece reckoned at one point and it moves straight ahead, one step at a time. The knight and the bishop are worth three points each, and their motions are correspondingly more intricate and far-ranging. The castle is worth five, and the queen nine or ten, so you see she is a very powerful piece. The pointages are only general guides to strategic value; no numerical score is kept, of course. The queen moves as far as she wants in any direction; it is her mobility that gives her strength, and her presence changes the entire complexion of the game.”

“I don’t entirely follow the explanation, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, you dare not ignore the queen. She can strike from any distance, while a pawn is severely limited. So the queen can check and even mate the king without danger to herself, but the pawn has to be guarded.”

“Mate? Guard?”

Groton sighed. “You really don’t know chess, do you! Here.” He brought out a blackboard and made a checkerboard on it in chalk. Blackboards seemed to be popular among engineers. “The squares are black and white, but forget that for now.” He added some letters. “Here’s the black queen — she’s circled. It could be a black bishop, of course; principle’s the same. She’s on king’s-rook-eight, while all the whites are set up on the seventh and eight ranks, so.” He ignored Ivo’s confusion. “Now white’s pawn is about to be queened, but can’t because it is pinned. That’s what Schön is talking about.”

Ivo contemplated the illustration. “I’m glad it makes sense to you.”

Groton pursued his logic relentlessly. “The king is the game, you see. You can’t allow him to move into check. Your opponent will call you down for incorrect play if you do; there are no pitfalls of that nature in chess. Look — pawn moves up like this, next it’s black’s move and queen checks king. So pawn can’t move, not while it’s pinned. It has to protect the king.”

“That much I follow. I think. The pawn is like a bodyguard — if it steps out, assassination.”

“Close enough. But here is the rest of it: the pawn is a special piece, especially in this position, because if it gets to the back row it changes into a queen, or any other piece it chooses to. That can change the whole course of the game, because an extra queen in the end-game is a terror.”

“It does look pretty bad for that king, bottled in the corner like that.”

“White pawn promotes into a white queen; that’s good for this king. Matter of fact, it means white can win the game — if that pawn can only move up. That’s why the pin has to be broken; it is the crux of the game.”

“We’re white?”

“Right. And black is some alien intelligence fifteen thousand light-years deep in the galaxy.”

“The destroyer?”

“That’s what I mean. Somebody set up that alien queen, and she has our king threatened, all the way across the board. And all we have are pawns to hold her off.”

“And we’ve lost six pawns already.”

“Right Our seventh and eighth are on the board at the seventh rank. And one of them is pinned — the important one. The one in a position to queen.”

“Which one is that — in life, I mean.”

“That one.” Groton aimed a heavy finger at Ivo.

“Me? Because I can use the macroscope a little?”

“Because you can fetch the white queen. Schön.”

“But how am I pinned?” Groton, now that he was on the trail, was as persistent as Afra.

“I have been wondering about that. You are obviously Schön’s pawn, and he has confirmed his involvement by sending us cryptic little messages. My guess is that he would come to us if he could. He told us why he can’t, if we can only make sense of it.” Groton looked at his diagram. “Now that pawn is pinned by the queen, so that’s you pinned by the destroyer. If that pawn could move even one step, it would be another queen. So it is in effect a queen that is pinned, in the guise of a pawn. They are the same; the one is inherent in the other.”

“I suppose so, but—”

“And that explains several things, such as the dichotomy in my charts. So it must be right.”

“So what must be right?”

“That you are Schön. The fire element.”

“Sure. And the pin?” Careless words — but the game was over.

“You sat through the sequence that put away Brad and killed the senator. You survived it, probably because you came below its critical limit. But Schön is buried in your mind, unconscious or penned in somewhere. He doesn’t get burned because your mind takes the brunt, and you’re just a pawn. But the moment he comes out — when you turn queen — that memory is there, waiting to blast him. And he knows it. So he can’t come out; his pawn is pinned.”

Ivo nodded. “You take your time, but you do get there.”

“So you were aware of it? I thought it might be hidden from you.” Groton glanced out the port at the frigid plateau, not seeming gratified at his success. “Your horoscope pointed the way, of course. There had to be an explanation for the chart’s failure to match observation, and as is so often the case, the error was in the observation. So now the question is, how do we remove the pin? We can’t get at the queen and we don’t have many pieces on our board. Of course it’s not so simple as I have it — this illustration has loopholes even taken purely as chess — but I could set up a sounder analogy if it were worth the trouble. It seems that the four of us will have to do it if it’s going to be done at all. Do you agree?”

“I think so. But how do you wipe out a memory? And even if you could, Schön probably couldn’t use the macroscope himself. Not with that signal still there.”

“I don’t know. That falls beyond the province of engineering, I fear. But we might hold a meeting on it, let Afra take a crack at it. But one other consideration—”

“I know. What happens when Schön comes. To me.”

“Right.”

“I’m gone. The truth is, I only exist in Schön’s imagination.”

“This, again, is what your horoscope suggested. It spelled out, in the sometimes perplexing way they do, Schön rather than Ivo. Nevertheless you seem pretty real to me.”

“I’m not. When Schön got fed up and decided to leave — which happened when he was about five years old — he did it by inventing an innocuous personality and setting it loose. Someone not too bright, so that the project supervisors wouldn’t be attracted, but not suspiciously stupid either. Someone more or less colorless, but again, not suspiciously. Someone average in his exceptionality, if you see what I mean. So he worked it out and set it up in one aspect of his mind, and went to sleep. I am what remains — a genuine programmed personality. Somehow he cleared it with all the kids who knew him, and they forgot what he had been like and thought I had always been there. Except for Brad, of course. He sort of watched over me. But I was born full-blown at the age of five and never had a project childhood.”

“Most people would consider ages five to ten the flower of childhood.”

“Not at 330 Pecker Place! It was all over when I got there. That’s what I meant when I told you before that I had no childhood episode for you. Everything was — set.”

Groton let that sidelight drop. “And Schön never came back?”

“Well, he has to be summoned. That’s my job — to judge when the time is right. But he had no reason to return. Ordinary life is unbearably tedious to him, so he leaves the mundane maintenance to me.”

“He left just because of tedium? But that isn’t very likely, is it? Why would things have to be tedious for Schön? And why would he make his return involuntary — on his part, I mean? I’d be inclined to suspect some more urgent reason for that setup.”

“What else could there be?” Ivo asked uneasily. His own understanding of the conditions of his existence was beginning to seem insufficient to him.

Groton plainly was not satisfied. “I may take a more careful look at the chart.”

“Best luck. Meanwhile, I’ll just muddle along as well as I can.”

“Muddle? I’d call it a mature adjustment to reality on your part.”

“That’s the nicest description for desperation I’ve heard today! When he wakes — and he’ll have to wake, if the time comes — I’ll be reintegrated into his total personality, and all my memories and aspirations with me, and I’ll be gone. It’s like a planetoid falling into the sun.”

“I was afraid of that. When the pawn queens, it isn’t a pawn any more, not even in part. I can see why you never were anxious to invoke Schön.”

“I’m selfish, yes. Now that I’m here, I want to live. I want to prove myself. I don’t like Schön.”

“I believe I would feel the same way.” Groton thought for a moment more. “That trick with the sprouts—”

“That’s one of the few talents Schön bequeathed me in the name of not being a complete nonentity. That, and the flute playing. The supervisors had a ball analyzing the reasons I was so advanced in those areas and so retarded in others. I think they developed a whole new theory of child-potential, deciding that in a normal family situation both talents would have been suppressed. I don’t really know. Anyway, that’s where you see Schön’s full power — except that he’s like that in just about every area.”

“And you wiped out the sprouts champion of the station, after one practice game, without even sweating.”

“I wouldn’t say that. There are limits, and sprouts gets pretty complicated.”

“Uh-huh. And my wife says you play the flute better than any person she’s heard. And she has heard the masters; she’s a classical music nut.”

“She never told me that.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Well, I didn’t expect to keep the secret forever.”

“One by one we pry into your qualities. The Triton situation is too intimate for proper privacy.”

“That’s the way Purgatory is, I guess.”

“No. That’s the way friendship is. A great sharing, a good sharing.” He paused again, troubled. “Look, Ivo, despite all that, I don’t much like this particular turn of the wheel. Maybe I prefer Aquarius to Aries. Afra will catch on soon enough anyway. What say we let it ride for a while, see what develops?”

Gratefully, Ivo nodded.

Base operations continued apace, until the physical plant was complete. Then, with the urgency gone, the isolation pressed in again. Triton was not Earth, no matter how luxurious it became, and all of them were increasingly aware of it. The news from Earthside was depressing; hope faded that any return was politically feasible within a span of years.

Ivo spent his allotted time at the macroscope, transcribing processes for which they had only theoretical use. There were truly potent force-fields capable of compressing solid rock into a state of degenerate matter; there were heavy-duty robotoids capable of constructing duplicate macroscopes. For what purpose, such miracles? They already had everything they needed except home.

Groton enlarged the atmospheric screen and made other nominal improvements. Beatryx cooked and did their laundry by hand (though they easily could have had food and clothing that needed neither treatment) and cultivated and weeded her garden, while the galactic devices for such tasks stood idle.

Afra reacted most strenuously. She set up a formidable laboratory and buried herself in it for many hours at a time. She demanded a search for specialized galactic medical techniques, and pored over what Ivo obligingly produced until her eyes were sunken and staring. She insisted on an extension of the macroscope screen for her lab, though they all knew it would have been suicidal for her to watch it. The great glass vat in which she had arranged to store Brad’s protoplasm (bubbling eerily because of the aeration) rested upon a shelf, morbidly overlooking her efforts.

“I don’t like this,” Groton said privately to the others. “She can’t he thinking of reconstituting Brad and operating on him herself. But I’m afraid she is.”

“Does she have surgical training?” Ivo asked.

“No. She’s trying to learn it all now, on her own. She’ll kill him.”

“What is she going to do?” Beatryx asked, worried.

“As I make it, she means to remove his damaged nervous tissue and grow it back or replace it with galactic substitutes. As though she were grafting an artificial hand.”

“But it’s his brain that’s burned…” Beatryx said.

Ivo mulled the point. How could it be possible to replace any portion of the brain, without drastically changing the personality? Even if Afra were to accomplish it, the result would not be the Brad she had known. And the civilization that set up the destroyer would surely have known about feasible corrective techniques, and arranged to make them useless, lest its barricade be breached. Salvation could not lie in that direction.

Or was he rationalizing, jealous of the possible return of a rival? Had there not been something about becoming dogmatic and jealous, in that Aquarius portrait Groton had provided?

“She can’t reconstitute him unless I tune in the station,” Ivo remarked.

“Are you sure? Don’t forget, she supervised his melting. She insisted on having a macroscope-screen extension. And that reconstitution signal tunes in itself, as it has to to revive a melt when nobody’s around to supervise. I’d say she can do it — and will.”

“I don’t know. I’d hate to risk it.”

This, too, had to ride. They were pinned. Any interference was as likely to provoke calamity as to alleviate it.

Afra’s preparations neared completion. They could tell by the way she hummed in her laboratory, by her air of expectancy, though she turned aside all questions.

When the tension became unbearable, Groton went to reason with her — but she had locked them out. “Could get around that soon enough,” he muttered, since he had directed the building of room, door and lock, and still had functioning mechanicals available. “But what’s the point? She means to see it through, and she’s an imperious lass. All fire and earth.”

Ivo was beginning to recognize astrological allusions. Fire burned and earth endured — or something like that. “Should we let her do it?”

“All in favor of stopping her by sheer physical force,” Groton said, and shrugged. Neither Ivo nor Beatryx cared to register a vote.

“But we should watch her,” Ivo said. “We know it’s disaster, but we don’t know exactly what kind. There will be pieces to pick up.”

“Literally,” Groton agreed. “Ours, if we break in.”

“I was thinking of the macroscope.”

Groton’s eyes widened. “Let’s go!” he cried. “Beatryx, you stay here — but don’t go in after her, no matter what you hear. Unless she calls for help.”

Frightened, she nodded. She looked, in that moment, haggard; she had lost sleep and weight. Ivo had not realized until this glance how deeply involved in this crisis Beatryx, the only other woman on Triton, felt herself to be. Why did he so often forget that other people had emotions as pressing as his own?

The two men scrambled into their suits, checked each other hastily, and ran heavily into the domed garden. Tall wheat and barley waved in the intermittent artificial breeze (Beatryx insisted that it seemed just like a real breeze to her, but it derived from machinery and not meteorology), and green potato plants clustered near the exit. The heart-shaped, orange-tinted foliage of a sweet-potato vine angled toward the floating sun. Controlled mutation was theoretically available through galactic programming, but Beatryx would have none of it; she wanted only the plants of Earth that could be enticed to germinate from the stores.

They charged down the garden path (gravel, with invaluable weeds arranged adjacently) and plunged through the atmospheric force-screen in a shower of crystals: the air carried across with them dropped almost instantly to a temperature that made its survival as gas impossible, and its water vapor solidified and shattered. Inside the dome of enclosure, behind them, the momentary backlash froze the nearest plants and created a localized snow flurry.

Beyond the transparent shield the surface of Triton remained as before, a barren waste a hundred and eighty degrees below zero centigrade. The sea of cold oxygen-nitrogen picked up where the lake of warm oxygen-hydrogen left off, the field insulating the one from the other all the way to the bottom.

The planetary module stood in isolation two miles distant. They ran toward it clumsily, still within the area of 1-G. A hundred yards beyond the dome this eased to slightly below Triton-normal. The gravity-focuser concentrated the attraction of an area a hundred miles square into a circle a few hundred yards square, taxing the major area for the benefit of the minor. It was not possible for this equipment to remove all gravity from any section, nor to magnify it without limit; this was a channelizer rather than a shield or amplifier. Much more powerful processes were available, but as Groton pointed out during one of their technical discussions, extremes were not advisable. A strong unbalance could destroy the atmosphere and much of the surface of Triton, and even jog the moon from its present orbit. Why risk it?

The men made long bounds, keeping them shallow for speed, and moved rapidly through ¼-G toward the module. Through they had been waiting almost idly for weeks, Ivo felt now as though a single wasted minute could make them too late. He reached the module first, ascended the ladder by bounds, and entered the airlock. It seemed so clumsy, after the sophistication of the force-field! They had been benefiting from the gimmicks of Type II technologies, and now were thrown back to their own Type I.

He pressured the lock and went on into the interior, clearing the chamber for Groton’s entry. He activated the internal heating mechanism, not for the occupants’ sake but to insure proper functioning of the equipment. This machinery was suppose to operate at “comfortable” temperatures — say, within fifty degrees of freezing.

Ivo now knew how to use the module, though he was not a sure pilot. The controls were deliberately simple, and the frequent trips to the Schön base had educated him rapidly in the subject of Type I space jockeying. Takeoff was routine.

Finally they floated into the macroscope housing. This was maintained at a constant temperature and pressure because of the intricate sensory apparatus and the connected computer. They stripped to light clothing and settled down to work. Neither was concerned about the destroyer, since Ivo knew how to shield his mind from its influence and Groton had long since experimented under controlled conditions and verified that he was not affected unless he really concentrated.

Groton had also tried to use the scope himself, in order to facilitate early construction, but had found that the same limit that protected him from mind-ravaging prevented him from assimilating the alien signals beyond. The typical mind was receptive to both or to neither. Ivo was a fluke — perhaps because he was not a complete person.

It had been a long time since he practiced at such close range, though he knew that theoretically the macroscope could pick up anything, even its own functioning apparatus, if the proper adjustments were made. Definition in such cases was poor, however; too strong a signal was worse than too weak. He set the range for minimal and concentrated on the moon below.

A section of the interior of Triton appeared: blank rock. Then, as he found his level, the surface showed, slightly fuzzy but readable. He shot across craters and clefts and oceans, guiding the pickup toward the dome while Groton watched. This type of exploration Groton could have handled, since it was of the basic nonintellectual level. But practice had given Ivo far greater skill, and they were in a hurry.

“Coasting on ninety-five,” Groton remarked. Ivo realized that the man had never had occasion to watch this particular maneuver before.

“We’re not exactly coasting. Faster this way than computing the exact coordinates of the camp. I wouldn’t try it on a distant target, though.” Something nagged him about Groton’s remark, but he was too preoccupied to place it.

Then they were in the dome. He slowed, feeling his way into the pyramid, and on toward the laboratory. There was a flash of Beatryx sitting nervously in the kitchen, and Groton grunted. He does love her, Ivo thought, finding that a revelation though he knew it had always been obvious.

At last he closed on Afra’s laboratory and brought the entire room into reasonably clear perspective. She was there, lying on a bunk; she had not yet started her… project. “We’re in time,” he said. “I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.”

“Good I can appreciate. Why bad?”

“Because we’re too far away to do anything if there’s trouble — and I guess there will be. All we can do from here is watch.”

Groton nodded thoughtfully. “You’re in love with her.”

The observation did not seem impertinent or out of place, now. “Since I saw her first. Brad introduced her — ‘Afra Glynn Summerfield’ — and I was — well, that was it.”

“Why would Brad do that?”

“Do what? It was our first meeting.”

“Make up a name. Didn’t you know?”

“You mean her name isn’t Afra? Or Summerfield? I don’t understand.”

“Isn’t Glynn. I don’t know what her middle name is, but it isn’t that. I believe it is a family designation, Jones or Smith or something.”

Ivo sat stricken. “Brad! He did it on purpose!”

“Did what?”

“The name, don’t you see? He set it up for me.”

“You’ve lost me, Ivo. You didn’t fall in love with a name, did you?”

Ivo’s gaze was anchored to Afra where she lay. He remembered the time she had lain in his hammock, tormented and lovely, so soon after the destroyer disaster. “You didn’t hear about me and Sidney Lanier? I told Beatryx, and you made that horoscope—”

“My wife is circumspect about personal information. She must have felt that the details were confidential. All she mentioned was that you admired Lanier’s poetry. Unfortunately I’m not familiar with his actual writings.”

“Oh. Well, I have this thing about the poet. I’ve studied his life and works, and anything that relates to him, and I react automatically to any reference—”

“Oh-oh. That key sentence I fed you, back at the dawn of time. That was—”

“A quotation from Lanier’s The Symphony — perhaps his greatest piece. The moment I heard that, I knew Brad wanted me, and that he was serious. There’s a special kind of — uh, brotherhood, between members of the project — peer-group compulsion, it’s called. It’s extremely strong, irresistible, maybe. I couldn’t question such a call.”

“Oh, yes — the children of the kibbutzim have that, too. And that name, what was it — ?”

“Glynn. From another major poem, The Marshes of Glynn.”

Groton strained to remember. “Didn’t we drive by — ?”

“The marshes of Glynn. In Georgia. Yes. The same ones Lanier drew his inspiration from. His poem was published anonymously at first, but it received such acclaim — anyway, that’s why I was in the area, instead of looking for some high-paying Northern position, the way many of the others did. I spent years running down his historic travels.”

“Like that, eh?”

“Like that, yes. And Brad understood that perfectly.”

“So he wasn’t just playing a game with names. He wanted you to fix on Afra. She’s even Georgian, like your marshes.”

“Lanier was Georgian. He fought in the War of the Rebellion — civil war, to you — Confederate.”

“I don’t understand Brad’s motivation. Afra says she and Brad were engaged to be married. Why would he want to stir up trouble like that?”

“Maybe because he wanted Schön that bad. He knew I wouldn’t walk out while Afra was around, and she wouldn’t walk out while he was around. He even — he even threw us together, just to make sure the virus took hold. Having her show me around the station… It doesn’t take much, with a girl like her. And I never caught on!”

“Love is blind.”

“Good and blind. It was all so obvious! Insurance, in case he lost out to the destroyer. Ivo pinned to Afra’s sleeve — and the only way I could get off it was to turn Schön loose.”

“You can call up Schön? When you decide?”

“I can. But I can’t put him down again, once I do.”

“And Schön wouldn’t give a damn about Afra?”

“Not a damn. Schön might be intrigued by someone on his own level, but Afra—”

“A moron. I can see why he got bored at the age of five. No one in the world he could — say! ‘My pawn is pinned!’ — could that have meant you and Afra? You can’t let go because then you’d lose her?”

Ivo thought about it. “It could. But I think that’s incidental. Love is nothing to Schön.”

“And not much to Brad, methinks. That’s as sinister a piece of handiwork as I’ve come across. Using his own fiancé—”

“That wasn’t the way he described their relation,” Ivo said dryly. “Still, that’s another reason I hesitate to uncork Schön. He’s totally unscrupulous. He could probably solve our problem with the alien signal, but—”

“But you can’t be sure which color the queen might see herself? I appreciate your caution more and more.”

Ivo appreciated the appreciation, after having kept his secret so long. His initial impression of Groton had been so negative — and so wrong. He had seen a fat white slob, when he should have seen his own prejudice. Now the man — not fat at all! — was his closest ally. In similar fashion he had come to appreciate the individual qualities of Beatryx, who demonstrated so plainly and in such contrast to Afra that there were other things besides intelligence and beauty. Afra—

Afra still slept or rested, her breathing even. “I guess it wasn’t as late as we thought. Maybe we should take turns watching, until something happens.”

“Good idea. I’ll snooze for a couple hours, then you can.” And Groton pushed off and floated in the air as though it were a mattress, utterly relaxed.

Ivo watched the laboratory. He felt a twinge of guilt for his snooping, but he was afraid to do otherwise. He did not want anything to happen to her. Brad’s trick had been obvious — in retrospect — but devastatingly effective. Afra had indeed captured Ivo’s imagination, and he felt a thrill every time he looked at her or thought about her. She was an impressive woman and she was from Georgia, whatever her faults might be. Call it foolishness, call it prejudice: he was committed for the duration.

Had Brad really been in love with her, or even, as he had put it, infatuated? Ivo doubted it now. He had allowed himself to forget how cynical Brad could be about human relations. Many of those raised in the project were like that. They tended to be strong on capability and weak on conscience, especially when dealing with the outside world, with Schön the logical extreme. They were independent, morally as well as intellectually and financially. To Brad the challenge had always been more important than the individual. Afra might simply have been the handiest entertainment available for off-hours at the station, intriguing as a classic WASP — and useful for special purposes, such as the tethering of Schön’s pawn. A Georgia girl for the Georgia historian.

If she should succeed in reviving Brad as the man she had known, that in itself might represent disaster. No doubt her current fever of activity had been brought about by guilt over her own prejudice. Brad was like Ivo: tainted. He had Negroid blood in his veins, melanin in his skin. If she lost him, she would convince herself that it was due to her rejection of his racial makeup.

Yet — bless her for that sensation of guilt! Was not that in essence conscience? Normal persons were held in bounds by limitations of pride and guilt; abnormal ones were defective in these qualities, and were thus dangerous to society. Even the subtle racism of the educated Southern white had its rules and restrictions; it was not inherently evil.

Schön, on the other hand, had neither intellectual nor ethical limitations. He had no guilt, no shame. He would be a terror.

Afra stirred. She stretched in a manner she would not have essayed in public and walked to the adjacent bathroom. This was not in the field of vision, and Ivo did not follow her. He was not, thanks to his guilt, a voyeur.

In a few minutes she emerged and walked to the counter. Electronic equipment was set up above it, and he saw that she had adjusted her extension-screen to aim straight down from head-height. She contemplated the transparent vat for ninety seconds, then stooped to manhandle out the basin from a lower compartment.

No doubt now: it was about to begin.

“Harold.”

Groton woke, windmilling his arms for a moment before adjusting to the free-fall state. They watched.

Afra opened the valve and let the thick liquid flow into the basin. She stood back, watching it. Ivo tried to imagine her thoughts, and could not. It was Bradley Carpenter that swirled into the container: her beloved.

“I don’t see any instruments,” Groton said. “If it’s surgery she has in mind—”

True. There was no special equipment in evidence. But if she had given up on that, what did she plan? Certainly she did not intend to nurse him indefinitely.

The protoplasm, freed from confinement and placed in a suitable environment, seemed to respond. It rippled and sparkled. Afra flushed the glass container out with water and allowed the rinse to pour into the basin too. And — the beam came on.

Here they were, using the macroscope to spy on her — yet the alien signal was able to transmit itself through the system simultaneously. This was a property Ivo had not known it had.

Once more the eye formed, the jellyfish, the pumping tunicate, the evolving vertebrate.

“You know,” Groton said, “there’s such a simple answer — if it works. What would happen if the process could be stopped a moment early? Just a tiny fraction of a lifetime—”

“So the destroyer never happened?” It was simple… too simple. Why hadn’t the galactic manual recommended it?

“She could be running him through once or twice, just to isolate the spot. To zero in on it. When she locates it — well, she must have something ready. He might be short some recent memories, but she could fill them in easily enough.”

The form continued to develop, achieving the air-breathing stage.

“Or,” Groton conjectured, “she might experiment with changes in the mixture. If it were possible to isolate the damaged cells in the fluid state and substitute healthy protoplasm—”

“But it would be protoplasm with some other lineup of chromosomes!” Ivo said. “And where would she get it?” Neither man cared to conjecture.

Afra trotted out a machine with pronged electrodes. Ivo remembered fetching the specifications for it from the macroscope, but had no comprehension of its purpose. Evidently Afra had studied its application more carefully. He saw now that the basin she was employing was metal, not plastic; it would conduct electric current.

“A jolt just before the destroyer,” Groton said. “To freeze the process right there—”

“But the melting occurred after the destroyer,” Ivo said, still namelessly disturbed. “The way the process works, every experience is part of the plasma. You can’t take it away by timing — not without shaking up the entire system, and that’s dangerous. I wouldn’t—”

“We’re about to find out,” Groton said. “Watch.” Somehow the four hours of the reconstitution had elapsed already. Helplessly, Ivo watched. Afra placed one electrode upon the rim of the basin and fastened it there; she laid the other, a disk, upon the metamorphosing head. Timing it apparently by intuition, she touched the power switch.

There was current. Ivo saw the figure in the vat stiffen. “Shock therapy?” Groton murmured. “That makes no sense to me.”

Afra cut off the power and removed the disk. She stepped back.

The figure, now recognizably Brad, ceased its evolution. The eyelids wavered, the chest expanded.

“Can she have done it?” Groton said disbelievingly.

“She’s done something. But I’m still afraid that destroyer experience is in him somewhere, waiting to take effect; Maybe after he’s been around a few hours or days—” Or was it his jealous hopes speaking?

“Oh-oh.”

There was certainly trouble. The shape in the basin, instead of coming fully alert, was changing again. “It’s regressing!” Ivo cried. “She didn’t stop it, she reversed it!”

“Then it should melt, shouldn’t it?”

“It isn’t melting!”

Whatever was happening, it was no part of the cycle they had seen before. The beam remained on, and Afra watched, hand to her mouth, helpless. The change accelerated.

The head swelled grotesquely, the legs shrank. The body drew into itself. Hands and feet became shapeless, then withdrew into mere points. The figure began to resemble a giant starfish, complete with suckers upon the lower surfaces of the projections.

And there it stopped, absolutely unhuman.

Afra screamed. Ivo could see her mouth open, lips pulled back harshly over the even white teeth, tongue elevated. He saw her chest pumping again and again, and could almost hear her desperate, ghastly sounds. She screamed until the spittle became pink.

In the basin, the star-shaped thing struggled and heaved. It raised a tentacle as if searching for something, then dropped it loosely over the edge. The beam was off now, further evidence that this was the end. For a moment the creature convulsed, almost raising its body from the bottom; then it shuddered into relaxation and the five limbs uncurled.

Slowly it changed color, becoming gray. It was dead.