MacRoscope (48 page)

The changes in the two women were quite noticeable now, as they stood side by side during that inevitable hesitation before proceeding further into the station. Both were well proportioned, Afra a little taller and more dynamic. Afra was modern — and it looked less well on her, in contrast to the more conservative motions of the other. Where Afra jumped, Beatryx stepped. The difference in their ages showed less in appearance than in attitude and posture and facial expression.

Finally he pinned down the elusive but essential distinction: what Afra had was sex appeal; what Beatryx had was femininity.

Ivo wondered whether he and Groton had changed similarly.

They were in a long quiet hall lighted from the ceiling, a hall that slanted gently downward. “Down” was toward the center of the sphere, not the rim; nothing so simple as centripetal pseudo-gravity here. The materials of the hall’s construction were conventional, as these things went; no scintillating shields, no compacted matter. If this were typical, the two-mile sphere could not possibly have the mass of a star, or even a planet. Somehow it generated gravity without mass.

The situation was not, on second thought, surprising. A potent gravitic field was no doubt necessary to power the destroyer impulse, and it should be a simple matter to allow some of it to overlap around the unit, providing for visitors. It was handy for holding down satellites too, even at distances similar to those prevailing in the Solar System itself. Earth was only eight light-minutes from Sol…

A hundred yards or so along, the hall widened into a level chamber. Here there were alcoves set in the walls, and objects resting within them.

Afra trotted to the nearest on the left side. “Do you think the exhibit is safe to touch?” she inquired, now hesitant.

“Do you see any DO NOT HANDLE signs, stupid?”

“Harold, one of these minutes I’m going to whisper nasty things about you into your wife’s docile ear.”

“She’s known them for fifteen years.” Groton put his arm around Beatryx, who smiled complacently.

Afra reached into the alcove and lifted out its artifact. It was a sphere about four inches in diameter, rigid and light, made of some plastic material. It was transparent; as she held it up to the light they all could see its emptiness.

“A container?” Groton conjectured.

“A toy?” Beatryx said.

Groton looked at her. “I wonder. An educational toy. A model of the destroyer?”

“Not without docking vents,” Afra said. She put it back and went on to the next. This was a cone six inches high with a flat base four inches across. It was made of the same transparent material, and was similarly empty.

“Dunce cap,” Ivo suggested.

She ignored him and went on. The third figure was a cylindrical segment on the same scale as the cone, closed off by a flat disk at each end. It was solid but light, the silver-white surface opaque but reflective. Afra turned it about. “Metallic, but very light,” she said. “Probably—”

Suddenly she dropped it back in the alcove and brushed her hands against her shorts as though they were burning.

The others watched her. “What happened?” Groton asked.

“That’s lithium!”

Groton looked. “I believe you are right. But there’s a polish on it — a coating of wax, perhaps. It shouldn’t be dangerous to handle.”

What was so touchy about lithium? Ivo wondered, but he decided not to inquire. Probably it burned skin, like an acid, or was poisonous.

Afra looked foolish. “I must be more nervous than I let on. I just never expected—” She paused, glancing down the wall. “Something occurs to me. Is the next one a silvery-gray pyramid?”

Groton checked. “Close. Actually it’s a tetrahedron, similar to the one we built originally on Triton. Your true pyramid has five sides, counting the bottom.”

“Beryllium.”

“How do you know?”

“This is an elemental arrangement. Look at—”

“
Elementary
arrangement,” Groton corrected her.

“
Elemental
. You
do
know what an element is? Look at these objects. The first is a sphere, which means it has only one side: outside. The second is a closed cone: two sides, one curved, one flat. The third, the cylinder, has three. Yours has four, and so on. The first two aren’t empty — they’re gases! Hydrogen and helium, first and second elements on the periodic table—”

“Could be,” Groton said, impressed.

“And likely to be so for
any
technologically advanced species. Lithium, the metal that’s half the weight of water, third. Beryllium, fourth. Boron—”

She broke off again and lurched for the sixth alcove — and froze before it.

The others followed. There lay a four-inch cube — six sides — of a bright clear substance.

Groton picked it up. “What’s number six on the table? Six protons, six electrons… isn’t that supposed to be carbon?” Then he too froze, eyes fixed on the cube. The light refracted through it strongly.

Then Ivo made the connection. “Carbon in crystalline form — that’s diamond!”

They gazed upon it: sixty-four cubic inches of diamond, that had to have been cut from a much larger crystal.

A single exhibit — of scores in the hall.

Then Afra was moving down the length of the room, calling off the samples. “Nitrogen — oxygen — fluorine — neon…”

Groton shook his head. “What a fortune! And they’re only samples, shape-coded for ready reference. They—”

Words failed him. Reverently, he replaced the diamond block.

“Scandium — titanium — vanadium — chromium—” Afra chanted as she rushed on. “They’re all here! All of them!”

Beatryx was perplexed. “Why shouldn’t they put them on display, if they want to?”

Groton came out of his daze. “No reason, dear. No reason at all. It’s just a very expensive exhibit, to leave open to strangers. Perhaps it is their way of informing us that wealth means nothing to them.”

She nodded, reassured.

“The rare earths, too!” Afra called. She was now on the opposite side of the room, working her way back. “Here’s promethium — pounds of it! And it doesn’t even occur in nature!”

“Does she know
all
the elements by heart?” Ivo muttered.

“Osmium! That little cube must weigh twenty pounds! And solid iridium — on Earth that would sell for a thousand dollars an ounce!”

“Better stay clear of the radioactives, Afra!” Groton cautioned her.

“They’re glassed in. Lead glass, or something; no radiation. I hope. At least they don’t have
them
by the pound! Uranium — neptunium — plutonium—”

“Saturnium — jupiterium — marsium,” Ivo muttered, facetiously carrying the planetary identifiers farther. It seemed to him that too much was being made of this exhibit. “Earthium — venusium — mercurochrome—”

“Mercury,” Groton said, overhearing him. “There
is
such an element.”

Oh.

Afra came back at last, subdued. “Their table goes to a hundred and twenty. Those latter shapes get pretty intricate…”

“You know better than that, Afra,” Groton said. “Some of those artificial elements have half-lives of hours, even minutes. They can’t sit on display.”

“Even seconds, half-life. They’re still here. Look for yourself.”

“Facsimiles, maybe. Not—”

“Bet?”

“No.” Groton looked for himself. “Must be some kind of stasis field,” he said dubiously. “If they can do what they can do with gravity—”

“Suddenly I feel very small,” she said.

But Ivo reminded himself that such tricks were nothing compared to the compression of an entire planet into its gravitational radius, and the protection of accompanying human flesh. This exhibit was impressive, but hardly alarming, viewed in perspective. He suspected that there was more to it than they had spotted so far.

The hall continued beyond the element display, slanting down again. Ivo wondered about such things as the temperature. Sharp changes in it should affect some of the element-exhibits, changing them from solid to liquid, or liquid to gas. Yet the exhibit had been geared to a comfortable temperature for human beings, and was obviously a permanent arrangement. The layout, too — convenient for human beings, even to the height of the alcove.

Had this been the destroyer station closest to Earth, there could have been suspicion of a carefully tailored show. But this one was almost fifty thousand light-years distant. It could not have been designed for men — unless there were men in the galaxy not of Earth. Or very similar creatures.

The implications disturbed him, but no more than anything else about this strange museum. He knew it had been said that a planetary creature had to be somewhat like man in order to rise to civilization and technology, and that long chains of reasoning had been used to “prove” this thesis — but man’s reasoning in such respects was necessarily biased, and he had discounted it. Yet if it were true —
if
it were true — did it also hold for man’s
personality?
The greed, the stupidity, the bloodthirst — ?

Was that Schön laughing again?

The passage opened into a second room. This one was much larger than the first, and the alcoves began at floor-level.

“Machinery!” Groton exclaimed with the same kind of excitement Afra had expressed before. He went to the first exhibit: a giant slab of metal, shaped like a wedge of cheese. As he approached, a ball fell on it and rolled off. Nothing else happened.

“Machine?” Ivo inquired.

“Inclined plane — the elementary machine, yes.”

Well, if Groton were satisfied…

The second item was a simple lever. Fulcrum and rod, the point of the latter wedged under a large block. As they came up to it, the rod moved, and the block slid over a small amount. Groton nodded, pleased, and Ivo followed him to the next. The two women walked ahead, giving only cursory attention to this display.

The third resembled a vise. A long handle turned a heavy screw, so that the force applied was geared down twice. “Plane and lever,” Groton remarked. “We’re jumping ahead about fifty thousand years each time, as human technology goes.”

“So far.”

The fourth one had a furnace and a boiler, and resembled a primitive steam engine — which it was. The fifth was an electric turbine.

After that they became complicated. To Ivo’s untrained eye, they resembled complex motors, heaters and radio equipment. Some he recognized as variants of devices he had blue printed via the macroscope; others were beyond his comprehension. Not all were intricate in detail; some were deceptively smooth. He suspected that an old automobile mechanic would find a printed-circuit board with embedded micro-transistors to be similarly smooth. One thing he was sure of: none of it was fakery.

Groton stopped at the tenth machine. “I thought I’d seen real technology when we terraformed Triton,” he said. “Now — I am a believer. I’ve digested about as much as I care to try in one outing. Let’s go on.”

The girls had already done so, and were in the next chamber. This contained what appeared to be objects of art. The display commenced with simple two- and three-dimensional representations of concretes and abstracts, and went on to astonishing permutations. This time it was Beatryx who was fascinated.

“Oh, yes, I see it,” she said, moving languidly from item to item. She was lovely in her absorption, as though the grandeur and artistry of what she perceived transfigured her own flesh. Now she outshone Afra. Ivo had not realized how fervent her interest in matters artistic was, though it followed naturally from her appreciation of music. He had assumed that what she did not talk about was of no concern to her, and now he chided himself for comprehending shallowly — yet again.

The display did not appeal to him as a whole, but individual selections did. He could appreciate the mathematical symbolism in some; it was of a sophisticated nature, and allied to the galactic language codes.

A number were portraits of creatures. They were of planets remote from Earth, but were intelligent and civilized, though he could not tell how he could be sure of either fact. Probably the subtle clues manifested themselves to him subliminally, as when Brad had first shown him alien scapes on the macroscope. Description? Pointless; the creatures were manlike in certain respects and quite alien in certain others. What mattered more was their intangible symmetry of form and dignity of countenance. These were Greek idealizations; the perfect physique with the well-tutored mind and disciplined emotion. These were handsome male, females and neuters. They were represented here as art, and they
were
art, in the same sense that a rendition of a finely contoured athlete or nude woman was art by human terms.

The rooms continued, each one at a lower level than the one preceding, until it seemed that the party had to be at the second lap of a spiral. One chamber contained books; printed scrolls, coiled tapes, metallic memory disks. Probably all the information the builders of the station might have broadcast to space was here, the reply to anyone who might suspect that the destroyer was merely sour grapes delivered by an ignorant culture. It was, in retrospect, obvious that that had never been the case.

One room contained food. Many hours and many miles had passed in fascination; they were hungry. Macroscopic chemical identifiers labeled the entrees, which were in stasis ovens. The party made selections as though they were dining at an automat, “defrosting” items, and the menu was strange but good.

Nowhere was there sign of animate habitation. It was as though the builders had stocked the station as a hostel and center of information, and left it for travelers who could come in the following eons. Yet it was also the source of the very signal that banished travel. What paradox was this?

The hall opened at last to a small room — and abruptly terminated. There were no alcoves, no exhibits; only a pedestal in the center supporting a small intricate object.

They walked around it indecisively. “Does it seem to you that we are being led down the garden path?” Afra inquired. “The exhibits are impressive, and I
am
impressed — but is this
all?
A museum tour and a dead end?”