MacRoscope (8 page)

“What about that man who brought me? Groton?”

“He can keep his mouth shut. But all he knew, then, was that I needed you, where to find you, and what to say to you once he got you alone.”

That explained the stalking. Groton hadn’t wanted to make contact in the crowd, though he had finally had to.

“But don’t misjudge him,” Afra said. “Harold and Beatryx are very warm people.”

Did that mean Groton was married? Ivo had not pictured that. It proved again how far off first impressions could be.

“Here’s the situation,” Brad said, bringing them to his room. “Senator Borland is on his way. He’s class-A trouble. Borland is a first-termer, but he’s on the make already for national publicity, and he’s ruthless. He isn’t stupid; in fact, there’s a distinct possibility he’s smart enough to get hooked by the destroyer sequence. It’s certain he’ll demand to see the show, and there will be merry hell if we try to fob off a substitute.”

“But you can’t show him the destroyer!” Afra exclaimed, alarmed.

“We can’t hold it from him, if he’s determined — and he is. He knows he’s on to something big, and he means to make worldwide headlines before he finishes with us. Kovonov put it to me straight: Borland is American, so he’s my baby. I have to neutralize him somehow until we can crack this thing open and get it under control, or the whole feculent mess will erupt.”

“When’s he due?” Ivo asked.

“Six hours from now. We only got the hint when he embarked, and it took until now to pin down his purpose. He’s a real old-fashioned loudmouth, but he can keep a secret when it pays him to and he’s no political amateur. He’s obviously had this in mind for some time, and now he’s coming to milk us for that vote-getting publicity.”

“Why not tell him the truth, then? If he’s that savvy, he should be willing to do something constructive for his votes, instead of—”

“The truth without the solution would wreck us — and put Borland on his party’s next Presidential ticket. He isn’t interested in
our
welfare, or in the future of space exploration. He’d be delighted to take credit for pulling America out of the macroscope.”

“But the other countries of the world would keep it going, wouldn’t they? Isn’t it under nominal UN control?”

“More than nominal. They might indeed — in which case we’d become a has-been power in a hurry, as other breakthroughs like my heat-shield are achieved. America can’t possibly match the alien science we know is there, once it becomes available. Or — the macroscope project might founder, frightened off by talk of a death-ray from space. The average populace has a profound distrust of advanced space science, perhaps because it doesn’t match the old, space-opera conception. People might accept the notion of astronauts plunging into space fearlessly in rockets, but the ramifications of relativistic cosmology and quantum physics—”

“How about just giving the senator what he wants — a gander at the sequence, if it comes to that?”

“What would it settle? Either it would pass him by, in which case he’d have ‘proof’ that we were killing off world-famous scientists by less exotic means than claimed — an international conspiracy, naturally — or it would bite him. Then we’d have five scientists
and
a U.S. senator to explain.”

Ivo shrugged. “I guess you’re stuck, then.”

“Our only chance is to crack the case before he gets here. For that we need Schön even more urgently.”

“There isn’t time to fetch him from Earth now,” Afra pointed out.

Brad did not reply.

“I’m not sure Schön would help, anyway,” Ivo said. “He might not care about America, or the macroscope.”

“What
does
he care about?” Afra demanded.

Brad cut off any reply. “Let’s take a break. We’re acting as though no one else in the station is concerned.”

Afra started to protest, but he put his ringer to her lips and forced her to subside. Ivo could see that she accepted from Brad what she would have taken from no other person. On the face of it, her objection was reasonable. Brad had dropped a bomb in their laps with a six-hour fuse, then called intermission as though the matter was of indifferent concern. How could this spirited creature know that Brad had already done his utmost to summon the cavalry, or that the break he recommended was hardly the nonchalance it appeared? Yet she trusted him.

Oh, to have a girl like that…

The “break” was in the form of a rather elegant dinner with the Grotons. Ivo had assumed that Harold Groton was an ad hoc emissary, and had to revise his impression of the man once again. Brad’s social taste was always good.

Beatryx, Harold’s wife, was a plumpish, smiling woman somewhere in her forties, light-haired and light-eyed but probably never lovely in the physical sense. Their apartment was quite neat in an unobtrusive manner, as though the housekeeper cared more for convenience than for appearance, in contrast to the tale told by Afra’s habitat. Ivo had the impression of stepping into an Earth-building, and thought he might glimpse a street or yard if he looked out a window. If he could find a window.

He found something better. The Grotons were situated at the edge of the torus, where the white-walls would be on a tire. The station was oriented broadside to the sun, so that one wall continuously faced the light and the other remained in shadow. This was the dark side. There was a large port looking directly out into the spatial night.

“It varies with the season,” Brad said, noting the direction of his attention. “The station is a planet, technically, and does have an annual cycle. It rotates to provide weight for the personnel, and that rotation gives it gyroscopic stability. It maintains its orientation in an absolute sense while revolving about the sun, so its day becomes sidereal. Three months from now that view will be twilight, and in six it will be full noon, and they’ll have to block it off with hefty filters.”

Ivo looked out at the uncannily steady stars of this arctic night. “They’re moving!” he exclaimed, then felt foolish. Of course they seemed to be moving; the torus was spinning, so that the heaven as viewed from this window rolled over in a complete circle every few minutes as though tacked to a cosmic hub. They were the same stars and constellations he had seen from the macroscope housing, but this porthole vantage changed his perspective entirely. It was, literally, a dizzying sight.

They all were smiling. “It’s hard to believe they’re exploding outward, those stars,” he said somewhat lamely. “Most of the ones you see aren’t,” Afra said. “They’re members of our own Milky Way galaxy, a comparatively steady unit. Even the other galaxies of our local group are maintaining their positions pretty well.”

Ivo realized that he had stepped from one inanity into a worse one. But Beatryx, coincidentally, came to his rescue. “Oh,” she inquired. “I thought every galaxy was flying away from every other one at terrible speed. Because of that big argument.”

“The so-called big bang,” Brad said, without smiling this time. “You are right, Tryx.
Groups
of galaxies are moving apart, or at least appear to be from our lookout. But this should be a temporary state, and the reversal may already be in process, since our universe is finite and falls within the calculated gravitational radius. A few more years of observation with the macroscope, and we’ll have a better idea. Assuming we can get around the galactic interference limitation.”

“Reversal?” Beatryx was worried. “Do you mean everything will start flying
together
?”

“Afraid so. It will be quite crowded, by and by.”

“Oh,” she said, distressed.

“Yes, five or six billion years from now things may really be hopping.”

Brad was teasing her, a little cruelly Ivo thought, and it was his own turn to come to the rescue. “What’s this galactic interference? You’re not talking about the—”

“No, not about the destroyer. This is less blatant. Within the galaxy the scope of the macroscope is absolute — but we can’t seem to get any meaningful images from other galaxies. No natural ones, that is. Nothing but a confused jumble that fades in and out. So our assorted telescopes are still superior for the million and billion light-year range.”

“The Big Eye and the Big Ear are better for long distance than the Big Nose,” Ivo observed.

“We’re confident that advances in the state-of-the-art will bring the macroscope up to snuff, however.”

“Meanwhile, I suppose you can make do with the local galaxy,” Ivo said. “With a hundred billion or more stars to sniff in three or four dimensions.”

“And every planet and speck of dust, given time,” Brad agreed. “We can see them all, virtually — assuming we get the scopes and manpower to look.”

“Four dimensions?” Beatryx again.

“Space-time continuum,” Brad said. “Or, in human terms, our old problem of travel-time. The farther away the star we’re looking at, the older it is, because of the time it takes our macrons to get here. This doesn’t matter much when we snoop Earth, because the delay is only five seconds. The entire diameter of our solar system is only a matter of light-hours. But Alpha Centauri is four years away, and an intriguing monster like Betelgeuse — ‘Beetle-juice’ to cognoscenti — is three hundred. That civilized species on Sung, the probs, that I showed Ivo today is ten thousand years away. So our galactic map, the moment we made it, would be out of date by a variable factor ranging up to seventy thousand years. Unless we recognize that added dimension of time, we’re hopelessly fouled up.”

“Oh.”

“If we had some form of instantaneous travel — and that isn’t in the cards, in this framework of reality — we’d still have the darndest time visiting that Sung civilization, presuming that it existed today,” Brad continued. “We’d have to assume that our instant system was posted on universal rest, and that’s trouble right there. Our galaxy is moving and spinning at a considerable rate. A star thirty thousand light-years distant would be nowhere near our mapped coordinates — even if they were entirely accurate by our present frame of reference.”

“Why not orient on the galaxy, then?” Ivo asked. “The stars are pretty stable relative to each other inside it, aren’t they?”

“Too easy, Ivo. That implies that the galactic rotation can be ignored, and it can’t. You jump thirty thousand light-years toward galactic center and you carry a sizable energy surplus with you. Angular momentum must be conserved. It’s like the Coriolis force, or Ferrel’s Law on Earth. You—”

“If I may,” Harold Groton said, interrupting him politely. “I have been this route myself. Ivo, did you ever whirl a noisemaker at the end of a string?”

“No, but I know what you mean.”

“And you know what happens when you pull it short?”

“Buzzes around twice as fast.”

“That’s what happens when you pull in toward the center of the whirling galaxy.”

“
If
we had instantaneous transport,” Brad said. “But the problem is academic, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if our maps are outdated before we can make them up.”

The meal was done, and Ivo realized that he had enjoyed it without paying any attention to what it was. Chocolate cake for dessert, and—

“Come on, Bradley,” Groton said. “Relax your top-heavy mind with a sprout.” And light wine, and—

Brad laughed. “You never give up. Why don’t you take on Ivo?”

Groton obligingly turned to Ivo. “Are you familiar with the game?”

“And mashed potatoes—” Ivo said, then blushed as they glanced at him in concert. He had to stop letting his thoughts run away with him! “Uh, the game. I guess not, since I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Afra was looking restless again, and now Ivo was also beginning to wonder. Brad
knew
he wasn’t going to have Schön for the coming crisis with officialdom. Why did he persist in this party-game banter? It was costing crucial time. Brad should be setting things up to divert the senator and postpone disaster.

Still, what could any of them do, but play along? Brad’s mind operated far more subtly than most people suspected, and he never gave up on a problem.

Groton brought out a sheet of paper and two pencils. “Sprouts is an intellectual game that has had an underground popularity with scientists for a number of years. There are several variants, but we’ll stick to the original one this time; it’s still the best.” He put three dots on the paper. “The rules are simple. All you do is connect the dots. Here, I’ll take the first turn.” He drew a line between two dots, then added a new dot in the center of that line. “One new spot each time, you see. Now you connect any two, or loop around and join one to itself, and add a spot to your line. You can’t cross a line or a spot, or join a spot that already has three lines connected to it. The new ones formed on the lines actually have two connections already made, you see.”

“Seems pretty simple to me. How is the winner determined?”

“The winner is the one who moves last, before the spots run out. Since two are used up and only one added, each turn, there is a definite limit.”

Ivo studied the paper. “That’s no game,” he protested. “The first player has a forced win.”

Brad and Afra laughed together. “Nabbed you that time, Harold, you old conniver,” Brad said.

“I’ll be happy to play second,” Groton said mildly. “Suppose we start with a simple two-dot game, to get the feel of it?”

“That’s a win for the second player.”

Groton glanced at him speculatively. “You sure you never played this game before?”

“It’s not a game. There’s no element of chance or skill.”

“Very well. You open a three-spot game, and I’ll take my luck with that nonexistent chance or skill.”

Ivo shrugged. He marked a triangle of dots