MacRoscope (12 page)

“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.

A persistent rapping at the door brought Ivo out of an uncomfortable sleep. He was not used to the hammock, and the shock of what had happened was too fresh and raw. He had not forgotten that he occupied the apartment of a man whose mind was virtually dead; he felt like an intruder.

He righted himself and stumbled across the compartment. He crashed open the sliding door, rubbing his eyes.

Afra stood there, lovely in bathrobe and slippers. Her sunburst hair was tied under a nebulous kerchief, up and back in the manner of a busy housewife, and she wore no makeup, but to Ivo she was dazzling.

Her blue gaze smote him. “Special delivery,” she said without humor. “Telegram.” She held out an envelope.

Ivo accepted it, then became abruptly aware of his condition. He was standing before this beautiful girl in sleep-rumpled jockey shorts. “I — thanks. Must change.”

She put her hand against the door, preventing closure. “
Is
it yours?”

He looked at the address. It was a stylized representation of an arrow. Nothing else.

“Now that just might signify entropy,” she said, stepping forward and so forcing him to jump back. “Time’s Arrow, as it were. But I remembered that your first name, Ivo, is a variant of the Teutonic Ivon, meaning a military archer. And your last name—”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, ill at ease. If only he had something
on
!

“The feminine form would be Yvonne,” she continued blithely, pushing him back another step. “Names always derive from something interesting. Mine means ‘A greeter of people’ — Teutonic, again.”

He looked at her more carefully, suspicious of this brightness. Neither her voice nor her expression betrayed it at this moment, but he knew she was crazy with grief for Brad. Her eyes were shadowed and there was a mild odor of perspiration about her. Was she afraid to be alone, or did Brad’s room have a perverse attraction for her?

“But I suppose you’d better read it, just to be sure,” she said. “I found it beside the teletyper. The operator was asleep — very bad form, you know — so I took it…”

She was disturbed, all right. She must have been pacing from area to area, talking with anyone, grasping at any pretext to distract her attention from the horror in her memory. She cared nothing about Ivo Archer or his clothing; for the narrow present, the telegram was necessarily tantalizing.

He opened it while she whirled about the room, touching her hands to Brad’s things but not moving them. She glanced eagerly toward the message.

One word jumped out at him. Ivo crumpled the paper angrily.

“What are you doing! We’re not even sure it’s yours!”

“It’s mine.”

“What does it
say?
You can’t just—”

“I don’t know what it says. Just that it means trouble.”

“At least let me—”

“Sure,” he said, too curtly, and flipped the ball of paper at her. “I have to dress.”

She was oblivious to the hint. She spread out the sheet and concentrated on it while he turned his back and climbed hastily into trousers and shirt.

“Why — this is polyglot!” she exclaimed. “I thought you said you couldn’t—”

“I can’t.”

She glided to the little table and set down the message. “Who would send you a note like this? It’s fascinating!”

“It’s trouble,” he repeated. He came over to look at it again, actually only wanting to be near her.

The printing was plain enough: SURULLINEN XPACT SCHON AG I ENCAJE.

There was no signature.

“What a mishmash!” she said, producing a pencil. “I’m not sure I can put it all together, but I know it means something. If only Brad—”

She dropped her head, realizing, and he saw the dry sobs shake her shoulders. Then she lifted her face determinedly and refocused on the message. Ivo stood by, doing nothing, longing for the right only to touch her in comfort — and feeling guilty for that desire. What a girl she was!

“Schön — that’s German, of course. It—” She stopped again. “Schön! Brad’s friend from the project! You were supposed to take this to Brad for translation.”

“Could be.” He wondered whether he should have destroyed the note instead of letting her have it. She didn’t come close to Brad in intelligence, but she was not exactly slow.

“Schön — he’s the one who — if anybody can—”

Ivo grimaced behind his face, knowing that she was grasping at straws and would soon realize it. Even Schön could hardly regenerate his friend’s damaged brain tissue. That had to be accomplished internally, and such healing did not take place in the higher animals.

“I must know what it says. Then we can answer it…” She bent to the task with renewed vigor. The kerchief bobbed as her head nodded. “That last word — ENCAJE — that’s Spanish for ‘lace.’ And the next to last — I — could be English. It would be just like Brad to slip in a ‘straight’ term, and I understand Schön is even worse that way.” She filled in the English equivalents beneath the printed terms while Ivo watched, intrigued in spite of himself. He had never envied the geniuses their polylingual facility, but working on the message vicariously through Afra’s ability he could imagine himself caught up in the excitement of the chase. A search for a word could be as exciting as a manhunt, in the proper circumstance, he decided.

Even though he already knew the outcome.

“XPACT — that’s no Romance-language word, or Germanic,” she murmured. “Or Finno-Ugric… of course! It’s in the Slavic group. Russian… no — well, it’s related. Let’s see.” She rewrote the word in more exotic script.

She looked up, her blue eyes startlingly intense. Ivo wondered how it was that he had never appreciated the luster of such color before he had met her. “Acorn, I make it. Does that make sense?”

Ivo shrugged.

“And SURULLINEN — that’s Finnish for ‘sad.’ One word left… I think it’s Turkish… ‘mesh,’ perhaps.” She sat back and read it off: “ ‘Sad acorns, beautiful mesh I lace.’ ”

Ivo chuckled, and she made a fleeting smile. “But that ‘lace’ is a noun,” she said, “so we don’t have it yet. No verb in it — it can’t be a sentence — not as we think of it. And that  ‘I’ doesn’t really fit — aha! That could be the Polish ‘and.’ ‘Beautiful mesh and lace’ contrasted with the miserable acorns.” She worried it some more, tongue appearing and disappearing between even white teeth.

What if she solved it? he wondered. Should he tell her the truth now, try to explain? That didn’t seem wise.

He saw her enthusiasm for the problem and decided to leave it with her a little longer.

“Gloomy oak, lovely plait and lace,” she said at last. “Something in that vein. I can’t take the words any farther, and I don’t know where to begin interpretation. God, I’m tired! Why would he go to the trouble of sending such a message to you?”

“Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven.” Ivo said.

She was on it immediately. “It
does
mean something to you. A line of poetry?”

“Yes.” She was too sharp; he had said too much.

“A work you’re both familiar with? Something you can quote from? Something that suggests the course you should follow?”

“Yes.” He knew she was about to ask
which
poet or which poem, and he was not ready to tell. She would identify it anyway, or… or what kind of persuasion would she turn on him?

“Now I can rest,” she said. She shuffled to the hammock and flopped upon it, her knees brought up to one side, letting her slippers droop and fall to the floor.

She had forgotten where she was — or didn’t care. Perhaps, he thought with unreasonable jealousy, she was
used
to sleeping here. In Brad’s room.

He looked at her, at the soft hair breaking free of the twisted kerchief, at the slender arm falling over the edge of the hammock and swaying as it rocked; at the embraceable shape of her curled body, the smooth white knees exposed, the firm round ankles and small feet. He felt ashamed for his yearnings.

Afra was the epitome of the feminine adorable, by Ivo’s present definition. It did not matter that the definition followed the fact, rather than the other way around. He had schooled himself not to resent more alert intelligence than his own, but also not to expect it in the girl he might marry. Not to require supreme beauty, not to dwell on small character defects… a hundred little cautions, in the interests of probability and practicality. He was not an extraordinary man, apart from that one unique aspect that negated any purpose he might have had in life, and it was not to be anticipated that he would win an extraordinary woman.
Any
woman, really.

He knew now that he had disastrously underrated his susceptibility to sheer physical beauty. He had loved Afra the moment he saw her, before he knew anything fundamental about her. Vanquished, he could only hope for compassionate terms.

“I thought nothing could hurt me again,” she murmured sleepily into the small pillow-cushion, “after I lost my father. But now Brad — almost the same way, really…”

Ivo did not speak, knowing that no reply was wanted. She was oblivious to him, her mind encapsulated within an isolated episode juggled to the surface by misery. The news surprised him, however; there had been no prior hint of tragedy in her background. Her father must have died, or lost his sanity suddenly, so that she spoke of him only under extreme stress. Now it had happened to Brad. He made a mental note never to mention the subject of parents to her.

“And he told me how to — I can’t remember — something else about Schön…”

Suddenly it had become relevant to himself. “He” had to mean Brad. What had Brad told her about Schön? Ivo listened tensely, but she had drifted into silence. Her eyes were closed, tears on the lashes.

Brad’s girl…

Ivo let himself out, leaving because it hurt him to watch her. He grieved for Brad too, but it was not the same.

He made his way to the infirmary.

Six figures occupied the chairs. It was as though they never moved from them, for this was station night.

“Hello, Dr. Johnson,” he murmured as he passed. The patriarch stared past him. “Hello, Dr. Smith. Dr. Sung. Mr. Holt. Dr. Carpenter.”

The male nurse appeared, yawning. “What do you want?”

Ivo continued to watch Bradley Carpenter, mercifully asleep. Merciful for the observer, for his friend no longer had the intellect to care what had happened to him.

Why had Brad done it, knowing the penalty he would pay? It had been an act of suicide; he could have fended off the Senator’s demand, had he chosen to. A subpoena would have entailed substantial publicity, but would still have been a far smaller evil. This death was more horrible because it was partial. The mind was gone, lobotomized, while the flaccid body remained, a lifetime burden to society and torment to those who had known and loved Brad in his entirety.

“Oh — you were his Earthside friend,” the nurse said, recognizing him. “Too bad.”

Brad woke. The lax features quivered; the eyes fought into focus. The lips pursed loosely. Almost, some animation came into the face.

“Sh-sh-sh…” Brad said.

The nurse placed a reassuring hand upon his shoulder. “It’s all right, Dr. Carpenter. All right. Relax. Relax.” Aside, to Ivo: “It isn’t good to work them up. They may be capable of some regeneration of personality, if the condition isn’t aggravated. We just don’t know yet, and can’t take any chances. You understand. You’d better go.”

Brad’s eyes fixed with difficulty on Ivo. “Sh-sh—”

“Schön,” Ivo said.

The straining body relaxed.

The nurse’s brow wrinkled. “What did you say?”

“It’s German,” Ivo explained unhelpfully.

“He was trying to — that’s astonishing! It’s only been a few hours since—”

“It meant a lot to him.”

Brad was asleep again, his ultimate accomplished. “The others couldn’t even try for several days,” the nurse said. “He can’t have been hit as bad. Maybe he’ll recover!”

“Maybe.” Ivo walked away, sure that the hope was futile. Only a transcendent effort, perhaps the only one he would ever be capable of, had brought forth that word, or that attempt at the word. It was clear now, in awful retrospect: Brad had sacrificed himself in an effort to force the summoning of Schön. He had been that certain that only Schön could nullify the destroyer and handle the problem of the macroscope.

It had been for nothing. How could he introduce Schön to this tremendous source of knowledge and power — knowing how much worse the world would be, if Schön’s amoral omnipotence replaced the Senator’s ambition? He could not do it.

He met Groton in the hallway near the common room. “Ivo,” the man said, stopping him. “I know this is a bad time for you, but there is some information I need.”

“No worse than any other time.” The truth was that he was relieved for some pretext to take his mind off the present disaster. He knew now that Groton was not an obtuse engineer; the man had important feelings about important things, as the school-teaching narration had shown. It was always dangerous to be guided by prejudice, as he saw himself to have been guided at his first meeting with Groton. “What kind of information? I don’t know much.”

“I’ve been working on your horoscope — couldn’t sleep right now — and, well, it would help if you could describe certain crises in your life.”

So Groton, too, felt it. Every person had his own ways of reacting to stress. No doubt astrology was as good a diversion as any.

“Like
this
crisis? I’m not objective yet.” Did he really want to contribute further to this exercise? Still, what he had just reminded himself about prejudice should hold for this too. The fact that Ivo Archer found astrology unworthy of serious consideration did not mean that discourtesy was justified; Harold Groton obviously was sincere. There were stranger hobbies.

“I was thinking of your past experience. Perhaps during your childhood something happened that changed your life—”

“I thought your charts told you all that, from the birth date.” Or was that an unkind remark?

“Not exactly. It is better to obtain corroborative experience. Then we can understand the signals more precisely. Astrology is a highly confirmatory science. We apply the scientific method, really.”