MacRoscope (6 page)

Ivo thought about that a moment and elected not to answer.

“I had a dream the other night,” Brad said, still wearing the helmet and goggles though he obviously did not need to supervise the continuing image. It made him resemble some futuristic visitor from space, in contrast to his words. “I was standing on the top of a mountain, admiring the miracles my people had wrought upon the face of the Earth and on the structure of neighboring space, and I saw a live prob. It was a male proboscoid, very old and large and ugly, and it stood there upon a tremendous mountain of garbage and slag and bones and looked at me. Then it flopped down into the sludge of refuse and splashed it in my direction so that I flinched, and lifted its trunk and laughed. It laughed through its nose with the sound of a mellow horn, multiphonically, so that the melody seemed to come at me from all directions.

“At first I thought it was amused at my upright, stout-legged stance that we have always assumed was necessary for any truly competent creature. Then it seemed that the mirth was directed at my entire species, my world itself. The peals of it went on and on, and I realized that it was saying to me, in effect, ‘We’ve been this route and now we’re gone. It is your turn — and you are too foolish even to learn by our example, that we spread out so plainly for you!’ And I tried to answer it, to refute it, to stand up for my people, but its humor overwhelmed me and I saw that it was already too late.”

“Too late?”

“Look at the statistics, Ivo. There may have been a quarter of a billion people in the world at the time of the birth of Christ. Today there are that many in the United States alone, and it is sparsely populated compared to some. The population of the world is increasing at a record rate, and so are its concurrent ills: hunger, frustration, crime. If our projections are accurate — and they are probably conservative — we have barely one more generation to go before it starts. That means that you and I will be on hand for it — and at a vulnerable age.”

“Before
what
starts?
What
will we be on hand for, apart from the affluence of the twenty-first century?”

“The inevitable. You saw it with the probs. And a few glimpses at the ghettos of the world — and some entire nations are ghettos — through the macroscope… I tell you, Ivo, things are going on right now that are horrifying. Remember Swift’s
A Modest Proposal
?”

“Look. Brad, I’m
not
a professor. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Ivo, I’m not trying to tease you with my erudition. Some statements just aren’t comfortable to make too baldly. Jonathan Swift wrote, facetiously, of a plan to use the surplus babies of Ireland for food. The irony was, he made a pretty good case for it — if you took him literally, as a certain type of person might. He suggested that ‘a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…’ He attributed the information to an American, incidentally, and perhaps his tongue wasn’t so firmly in his cheek as he would have us believe. He commented that such consumption would lessen the population — Ireland being severely crowded at the time — and give the poor tenants something of value to sell while lessening the expense of maintaining their families.”

Ivo developed that unpleasantly familiar tingle in limbs and stomach. “Exactly what have you seen?”

“There is already a going business in the ghettos of certain populous countries. A bounty is paid on each head, depending on the size and health of the item. Certain organs are sold black market to hospitals — heart, kidneys, lungs and so on — who don’t dare inquire too closely into the source. The blood is drained entirely and preserved for competitive bidding by institutions in need. The flesh is ground up as hamburger to conceal its origin, along with much of the—”

“
Babies?
”

“Human babies. Older bodies are more dangerous to procure, and suffer from too many deficiencies, though there is some limited traffic in merchandise of all ages. Most are stolen, but some actually are sold by desperate parents. It is cheaper than abortion. The going rate varies from a hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on the area. It really does seem to be a better thing for some families than trying to feed another mouth; their lives are such that existence is no blessing. But of course they get nothing when their children are stolen.”

“I can’t believe that, Brad. Not cannibalism.”

“I have seen it, Ivo. On the macroscope. There was nothing I could do, since no government on Earth will admit the problem, and an accusation of this nature would backlash to suppress the use of the scope itself. People demand their right for self-delusion, particularly when the truth is ugly. But as I was saying, in another generation it will become a legal institution, as it did with the probs. A proposal no longer so modest.”

Ivo kept his eyes on the screen. “I don’t see that what happened to the probs
has
to happen to us. The danger exists, sure, okay, but inevitable? Just because
they
came to it?”

Brad’s fingers moved over the controls. Ivo saw that the section for the macroscope-picture was comparatively simple; most of the massed equipment was probably for unrelated adjustments. The scene shifted.

“You’re being subjective,” Brad said. “Compare these.”

And the screen showed an angelic humanoid face, feminine and altogether lovely. The eyes were great and golden, the mouth small and sweet. Above the still features flowed a coiffure of down, neither hair nor feathers, greenish but softly harmonious. Below the face a silken robe covered a slender body, but Ivo could tell from its configuration that the gentle curves of the torso were not precisely mammalian. It was as though a human woman had evolved into a more sublime personage, freed from the less esthetic biological functions.

It was a painting; as Brad decreased the magnification the frame came into view, then the columns and arches of an elegant setting. A museum, clean and somber, styled by a master architect.

“Intelligent, civilized, beautiful,” Ivo murmured. “But where are the living ones?”

“There are no living creatures on Planet Mbsleuti. This is a royal tomb, as nearly as we can ascertain — one of the few to be buried deeply enough to endure.”

“Endure
what
?”

Suddenly the scene was a heaving sea of sludge, breaking against a barren beach. Ivo could almost smell the contamination of the smoky atmosphere.

“Total pollution,” Brad said. “Earth, air, water. We have analyzed the content and determined that all of it is artificial. They became dependent on their machines for their existence, and could not control the chemical and atomic waste products. Want to bet where they got their fresh meat, just before the end? But it only hastened their extinction as a species.”

The picture of the royal woman was back, mercifully, but Ivo still saw her devastated world. “Because they overextended their resources?” he asked, requiring no answer. “Would not limit themselves until Nature had to do it for them?” He shook his head. “How long ago?”

“Fifteen thousand years.”

“All right,” Ivo said defensively. “That’s two. Any other technological species on tap?”

“One more.” Brad adjusted again, and a landscape of ruins came into view. After a time a grotesque four-legged creature shambled along a pathway between two overgrown mounds of rubble. Matted hair concealed its sensory organs, and it walked with its toes curled under — like a gorilla, Ivo thought. It looked sick and hungry.

“As we make it, civilization collapsed here less than five hundred years before this picture,” Brad said. “Population reduced from about ten billion individuals to no more than a million, and is declining. There
still
isn’t enough to eat, you see, and naturally no medicine. Most surviving plants are diseased themselves…”

Ivo did not bother to inquire whether the hunched creature was a descendant of the dominant species. Obviously it had once been bipedal.

Of course three samples did not make a conclusive case. They could be three freaks. But, unwillingly, he was coming to accept the notion that Man might well be a fourth such freak. Overpopulation, pollution of environment, savagery — he refused to believe that it
had
to proceed to species extinction, but certainly it
could
.

Yet the sample
was
atypical, for there were no neolithic-era cultures. Chance would place many more species in this stage.

“It was from the probs I got the heat-shielding technique,” Brad said, allowing the subject to shift. He had brought the picture back to Sung, their planet. “We’re still working on their books and equipment, and we’re learning a great deal. And if we’re lucky, one day we’ll discover a
really
advanced civilization, one that has licked this problem of overbreed, and learn how to undo the damage we have done to our own planet. The macroscope has the potential to jump our science ahead more in days than it has progressed in centuries hitherto.”

“I yield the point. This is major. But—”

“But why am I wasting time on you, instead of researching for the solutions to the problems of mankind? Because something has come up.”

“I gathered as much,” Ivo replied with gentle irony. “
What
has come up?”

“We’re receiving what amounts to commercial broadcasts.”

Ivo choked over the letdown. “You can’t even tune out local interference? I thought you operated on a different wavelength, or whatever.”

“Alien broadcasts. Artificial signals in the prime macroscopic band.”

Ivo digested this. “So you
have
made real contact.”

“A one-way contact. We can’t send, we can only receive. We know of no way to tame a macron, but obviously some species does.”

“So some stellar civilization is sending out free entertainment?” His words sounded ridiculous as he said them, but he could think of no better immediate remark.

“It isn’t entertainment. Instructional series. Coded information.”

“And you can’t decode it? That’s why you need Schön?”

“We comprehend it. It is designed for ready assimilation, though not in quite the manner we anticipated.”

“You mean, not a dit-dot building up from 2 ÷ 2 or forming a picture of their stellar system? No, don’t go into the specifics; it was rhetorical. Is it from a nearby planet? A surrender ultimatum?”

“It originates about fifteen thousand light-years away, from the direction of the constellation Scorpio. No invasion, no ultimatum.”

“But we weren’t civilized fifteen thousand years ago. How could they send us a message?”

“It is spherical radiation. That’s another surprise. We assumed that any long-reaching artificial signal would be focused, for economy of power. This has to be a Type II technology.”

“I don’t—”

“Type I would be equivalent to ours, or to the probs’ level of power control. Type II means they can harness the entire radiation output of their star. Type III would match the luminous energy of an entire galaxy. The designations have been theoretical — until recently. Presumably this message is intended for all macroscope-developing cultures within its range.”

“But — that’s deliberate contact between intelligent species! A magnificent breakthrough! Isn’t it?”

“Yes it is,” Brad agreed morosely. On the screen, the hulking mound of indolent probs continued its futile activity. “Right when we stand most in need of advice from a higher civilization. You can see why all the other functions of the macroscope have become incidental. Why should we make a tedious search of space, when we have been presented with a programmed text from a culture centuries ahead of us?”

Ivo kept his eyes on the screen. “The probs had the macroscope, and this program should have been around for at least five thousand years then. Why didn’t they use it? Or were they in the opposite direction, so it hadn’t reached them yet?”

“They received the program. So did the humanoids, we believe. That was part of the trouble.”

“You told me that they stopped using their macroscope, though. That strikes me as learning to read, then burning all your books. They should have used the alien instruction and benefited from it, as we should. The alternative — or are you saying that we’ll wash out if we have to take advice from an elder civilization?”

“No, we’re agreed here at the station that the benefits of a free education are worth the risks. Mankind isn’t likely to get flabby that way. For one thing, we’d be pursuing all other avenues of knowledge at the same time, on our own.”

“What’s stopping you then?”

“The Greek element.”

“The — ?”

“Bearing gifts; beware of.”

“You said the knowledge would not hurt us by itself — and what kind of payment could they demand, after fifteen thousand years?”

“The ultimate. They can destroy us.”

“Brad, I may be a hick, but—”

“Specifically, our best brains. We have already suffered casualties. That’s the crisis.”

Ivo finally turned away from the prob scene. “Same thing happen to them?”

“Yes. They never solved the problem.”

“What is it — a death-beam that still has punch after ten or fifteen thousand years? Talk about comic books—”

“Yes and no. Our safeguards prevent the relay of any physically dangerous transmission — the computer is interposed, remember — but they can’t protect our minds from dangerous information.”

“I should hope not! The day we have thought control—”

“Forget the straw men, Ivo. We
do
have drug-induced thought control, and have for years. But this — five of the true geniuses of Earth are imbeciles, because of the macroscope. Something came through — some type of information — that destroyed their minds.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t something internal? Overwork, nervous breakdown…?”

“We are sure. The EEG’s — I’d better explain that—”

“You simplified things for me with that pepped-up rocket you call Joseph. You simplified them again describing the macroscope. It’s like income-tax forms: I don’t think I can take another explanation.”