MacRoscope (60 page)

She wrenched herself out of it — and was out of the rope enclosure and passing through the door she had originally been running toward. She had escaped one vision only to return to another — unless she could also escape Schön and the galactic, the demonic, S′ device.

This room was thoroughly finite, at least, and well lighted. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment stood against the walls, and there were a number of screens flashing what she took to be broadcast patterns. This was, by her reckoning, a communications center. That suggested some kind of occupation of the station, at least at intervals. Automatic machinery would not be set up for viewing like this.

Schön was there ahead of her. He sat on a podium in the center of the room, behind a table whose white cloth extended down to touch the floor. He wore a high turban and stared into a shiny crystal ball. “Man,” he said grandiosely, “has the capacity to bring the entire universe within the purview of his mind.”

She had either to retreat into the original chamber or to pass directly by him. Neither alternative appealed, so she temporized. “I thought you were supposed to be a pugilist.”

“That, my dear, as I so tediously explained, was the ascendant. Now we are with the sun, and it behooves us to be more acute. My sun is in Aries 19, and so I am as you see me: A CRYSTAL GAZER. So it is written in the most authoritative text.” He stared into the ball. “I see that the referee has graded the first round on the ten-point must system: ten points to Fire, no points to Earth, who washed out. An excellent start — though it would be more entertaining if you were to at least put up some show of competition.”

So she hadn’t lost yet! “How do I know that’s an honest score?”

He shoved the ball in her direction. “Witness.”

She stepped up to look into it. Inside was a great-horned ram copulating with a frightened doe.

“Miscegenation is all I see,” she said. Then, saying it, she realized that the animals too were symbols: the ram of Aries and the goat of Capricorn. Schön had played his little prank on her. Two different species — somewhat as the two of them were of different races. A bald proposition, a dirty joke — or a threat. He had said that her own prejudice would cost her victory…

“Too bad nature forbids it,” she said in reply to his mocking gaze. She resented the implication that this was the only use for her — to submit to the sexual assault of the male — knowing it to be a conventional objection of womankind but still stirred by it. There was that about Schön that fascinated her in ways Ivo had not; yet she was not about to encourage his casual lewdness. In her mind was the remark Ivo had made about childhood sexual activity at their project: homo, hetero and group. She would contest the issue more fiercely in the coming rounds.

It was amazing what a difference the mind made. Schön did not resemble Ivo at all, though the body was the same.

“Yes, you would lecture on nature,” he remarked, as though that proved something. “Your symbol for Capricorn 12 is A STUDENT OF NATURE LECTURING.”

“How do you know?” she demanded, nettled again in spite of her disbelief in the personal relevance of such things.

“Dear little Ivo studied your horoscope. Now all that information is mine.” He grinned. “You are, you see, in my power. That chart has you laid out and nakedly displayed, and I can sample any part of you I desire. Fortunately I don’t desire your
mind
.”

She controlled her mounting irritation. “How much do you expect to accomplish, depending on astrology?” Again, she had to keep him talking, while waiting for an opportunity to gain some advantage. Genius he might be, but his youthful arrogance might defeat him yet.

“There are many ways to view existence,” Schön said. “Symbols are useful for minds of any potential, and astrology is an organized system of symbols as valid as any. I would accept it as readily as, say, religion. Of course, no symbol has validity apart from the values and qualities assigned to it by the user. What alternative would you prefer for your nuptial?”

“What makes you think the ram is so damned attractive to the doe?”

“What makes you think the ram is
trying
to be?”

“You imagine your word is my command?”

“Sister, there is no other functioning homo-sapiens
man
within fifty thousand light-years, and you can’t penetrate the destroyer field by yourself. I
can
. The question is, am I to be obliged, however clumsily, on my way home, or do I travel alone?”

Could
he travel alone? Even if he turned off the destroyer broadcast — a thing he might not be able to do, assuming it had safeguards against interference — he would not succeed in freeing the spaceways of its effect. Earth was in the field of another station, and in any event it would require at least fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to clear itself, limited as it was by light velocity.

Yet he was in control of his body and Ivo’s experience now. That meant he had found a way around the destroyer memory — and, therefore, the destroyer itself.

Or so he wanted her to believe.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t think you
can
go home without my help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be chasing me now, or trying so hard to impress me.”

“Or winning rounds against you. Maybe I’m too softhearted to leave you here alone. Are you calling my bluff again?” he inquired scornfully.

Suddenly she was afraid again, and could not answer. Ivo’s body had been possessed by a demon. How important
was
this peculiar contest, and how badly was she losing? Evidently the verbal interchange was part of it, and she was at a disadvantage there. Brad had always been able to twist around her statements and confuse her, and Schön had the same ability.

On the other hand, if she should somehow win — and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources — what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?

“You always were slow to get the message,” he said. “I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up.”

“You sent
me
a message!”

“Surely you didn’t think I needed to send
Ivo
one? I had to borrow his hand to type it.”

Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn’t care that this was what he had intended. “Then why didn’t you just
tell
him what you wanted?”

“He wouldn’t listen.”

That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo’s fault? Again, she doubted it.

“Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain — for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says — I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator’s demise and Brad’s discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn’t dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention
you
at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn” in polyglot, sticking to languages you could interpret. I thought you’d be smart enough to follow that up and get the
real
message.”

“Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t,” she snapped. “So what
was
the ‘
real
message’?”

“The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. ‘And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.’
Anybody
with a note of savvy could see that what swam below Ivo’s Glynn was Schön, and of course a Georgia girl would be familiar with the poem. Once
you
fluttered your pale pink eyelashes and told him to give over—”

“What makes you so sure I would have told him?”

“Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too.”

She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she
would
have sacrificed Ivo… foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking — and her values.

“After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn’t exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through.”

“So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we’d be dependent on you to get us home again—”

“Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune
is
the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer’s main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit — but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that—”

“And a shorthand message once we were there,” she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases — as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion — as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she
had
missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it…

“But why did you want to take over if you couldn’t help Brad?” she asked him then. “Surely you didn’t care about the world crisis?”

“There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?”

She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. “Brad’s mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril — and you found it amusing?”

“Entertaining. There’s a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill—”

“Why
did
the Senator die? No one else did.”

“The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points.”

“And any you can’t or won’t answer will gain
me
points.” She hoped.

He shrugged. “More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) — so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists.”

“And what are you?” she inquired bitterly.

“I’m like the Senator, only more so. I’m smarter and less mature than he was. That was part of the challenge: to handle that alien signal, when its direct impact on me would have fried my brain — almost literally. I dare say I’m the brightest primitive ever to be spawned on Earth.”

She was not going to debate that. “You plan to do a lot of maturing in the next few hours — or whenever you decide to toddle off home?”

“Hardly. I’m happy the way I am. No point in going the way Brad did. I
could
, incidentally, have saved his life, there on Triton, had I been on hand. Not that you would have wanted me to.”

“What?” Afra knew that he was trying to shock her again. He was succeeding. He was also leading her on to more questions and so eroding her competitive position farther. Yet her recognition of this process did not halt it; she
had
to know. She was hooked on the bits of knowledge he injected.

“No, I don’t mean you were in love with Ivo then. You still were fixed on Brad, for what that was worth. But you wouldn’t have wanted him to live.”

She continued to stare at him, at his mercy.

Now his eyes dropped to the ball. “I see,” he murmured, “I see the evolution of man, from a speck of protoplasm to maturity. I see the free-swimming larvae of the echinoderms developing into the radially-symmetrical forms of adulthood. But I also see neoteny: the larval form preempting the reproductive capacity, and so bypassing maturity. I see a long evolution of such ambitious larval forms, extending even beyond the sea and onto land where true maturity becomes not merely impractical but impossible. Thus, instead of mature starfish, larval Man.”

“Are you trying to suggest—”

“You knew we derive from the Echinoderm superphylum. You know the characteristics of that type of life. What did you suppose would happen, when you interfered with the evolutionary reconstitution? By abolishing the timing mechanism, you permitted the subject to run its full course — without benefit of the proper terminal environment.”

“Oh, Brad!” she cried in anguish.

“But you wouldn’t have cared to marry a starfish, however mature. So — you arranged to kill him.”

“I didn’t know!”

“Sweetie, ignorance of the law is never an excuse — particularly the law of nature, and most particularly when you are supposed to be a student of nature lecturing.”

“But—”

“But even proper attention would not have reconstituted his blasted mind. Recycling can’t extirpate tissue damage; it merely reshapes what’s there. He would have made a very stupid starfish.”

“Stop it!” she cried.

“
You
stop it. You know how — if you have the courage.”

And she was in the supermarket again, still terrified.

The sound of the gun’s explosion was fresh in her ears. There was a struggle occurring at the counter. The checkout girl screamed, a man fell. The silk hat rolled across the floor toward Afra. It was huge, and it grew larger as it came, swelling as though to crush her beneath its turning mass.