MacRoscope (28 page)

“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.