Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  He thought of it as basically nothing more than a gigantic nose, sniffing out the secrets of the galaxy. It still daunted him.

  He landed at last, almost afraid his momentum would jar the machine out of line. Brad came down behind him, controlling his spin to land neatly on his feet. Ivo decided he would have to master that technique; his own touchdown had been awkward.

  Brad took his hand so that they could communicate readily. “We’ll have to wait for admittance. Could be several minutes if he’s in a taping sequence. Just relax and admire the scenery.”

  Ivo did. He peeked cautiously toward the sunside, knowing that Sol was much fiercer here in space than to an observer sheathed in Earth’s atmosphere.

  A monster rocket floated there, similar to one he remembered.

  “What’s a Saturn VI doing here? A complete one, I mean. I thought the booster-stage never got out of orbit.”

  “Correct. This one’s in orbit.”

  “Earth orbit, mister innocent. This is sun orbit, if I’m not totally confused.”

  “Oh, it can travel far — if refueled. That’s Joseph, our emergency vehicle. Enough power there to blast us all to safety in a hurry — if ever necessary. Personally, I’d call space safer than tempestuous, seam-splitting Earth. Joseph is actually the tug that nudged the scope into this orbit. Now he’s semiretired; no point in sending the old gent home empty.”

  “Must be quite a lot of oomph when you click your flint under his tail. No gravity—” The thrust, he knew, would not change; but here none of it would he counteracted by planetary drag, so the net effect had to be a much larger payload or higher velocity.

  “To be sure. We’ve been tinkering with him on the QT. He still uses hydrogen as the working fluid, but stores it solid. But no ignition — combustion in a chemical engine is only a means, not an end. It is the velocity of the expelled propellant that counts, you know, rather than the per se heat of the engine, although—”

  “Sorry, Brad. I don’t know. If you must get technical—”

  “I can make it simple for you, Ivo. I just can’t resist bragging a little, because I was the lucky lad who happened to pick the key out of the scope.”

  “You’re actually getting technology from—”

  Brad moved a finger in their old-time code for caution. That implied that the question had awkward aspects that could only be cleared up more privately, which in turn implied that their present conversation might be overheard somehow. Perhaps through a pickup in the macroscope housing. And the implications of that—

  Ivo shut up. Cloak and dagger did not thrill him; it brought back the restlessness in his stomach. Too much had happened in the past few hours.

  “We’ve had the basic theory to adapt a gaseous-core atomic reaction to propulsion for years, but the thing is fraught with peril. We can mix the working fluid — that’s the hydrogen we belch from the tail of the rocket to make it go — directly with the fissioning uranium in the chamber. That raises the gas to a temperature that makes possible a specific impulse ten times the best we can do with chemical combustion. But it’s too hot. It melts any containing material we know of. What I discovered was a heat-shielding technique that — well, Joseph may look ordinary to you, but he’s a Saturn VI in outline only. His engine produces a thrust you’d call over ten gravities — and he can keep it up for almost a week before he runs out of hydrogen. He never runs out of heat, of course. If you could only appreciate by what factor that outperforms the best Earth has known before—”

  “Brad, I am appreciating with fervent fervor. But I’m still a layman. I never had technical training. I’ll be happy to take your word it can do the job, whatever the job is.”

  Speech lapsed. Ivo knew that Brad’s feelings were not hurt. They had merely taken the dialogue beyond the danger point — its relevance to the macroscope? — so that it was safe to drop it.

  His attention had been on immediate things hitherto, but now he stared beyond the rim of the station, away from the uncomfortably brilliant sun, and saw the stars. He found to his surprise that they were familiar.

  Ursa Major — the Big Dipper — was evident, with its dip pointing to Ursa Minor. And just who was Ursa? he always asked himself. That was no lady, that was the wife of a bear! he always replied. Draco the Dragon curled around the Little Dipper. Following the line the Big Dipper pointed on past the Pole star, he could travel at multiple-lightspeed all the way to Aquarius, perpetually chasing Capricornus. The runner was so close, but fated never to catch up. Somehow that saddened Ivo; there seemed to be a special, personal tragedy in it, though he could not determine why he felt that way.

  The light he perceived at this instant had been generated by many of those stars over a century ago, or even much longer. Perhaps one of those brilliancies dated from the time he, as a lad of fourteen, had organized a company of some fifty youths like himself, to train with bows and arrows. Thus “Archer” — so fiercely patriotic, as the clouds of national dissension gathered, signifying the end of life as he had known it. Yet he might as readily have been named for the flute with which he used to serenade the young ladies. “Tutor,” when he later taught at college, had indeed been corrupted to “tooter” by the students. Or “Plowman,” because of the passages he liked to quote from Piers Plowman…

  He had been cultured then, polite, affable, dignified, replete with moral refinement. Not quite fifteen, he had entered Oglethorpe University at Midway, Georgia, parting his fair hair to the side and brushing it behind the ears. He wore good, but not ostentatious, apparel. Already a hint of a stoop to the shoulders, but brisk of gait. He had no taste for athletics.

  There were fifty students at the college.

  Music and books were his dearest companions — but those fair young ladies were never quite forgotten.

  Once a student misunderstood him and denounced him as a liar. He struck that person immediately, though he was not himself strong. The student drew a knife and stabbed an inch deep into his left side, but he did not capitulate. Never was he known as a coward, then.

  “What do you think of Afra?” Brad asked him.

  That name brought him instantly back. What availed past courage, when the present battle was lost? “You’re serious about her?”

  “Who wouldn’t be? You saw her.”

  “Brad, she’s a hundred and two per cent cauc in the shade!”

  “I’ll say! Her DAR pedigree goes back to the Saxon conquest.”

  Ivo smiled dutifully. “The project—”

  “The project’s over. You know that. We’re free citizens now.”

  “You can’t erase the past. If she knew—”

  Brad looked at him oddly. “I told her there were several projects, related but discrete. That I was a washout from the IQ set.”

  “A washout!”

  “What would you call an intelligence quotient of one hundred and sixty, when the target was two hundred?”

  “I see. And where did you tell her I was from?”

  “Nothing but the truth, Ivo. That a private foundation gathered together selected stock from every corner of the sphere and—”

  “And bred back to the multiracial ancestor they presumed mankind started from. So I’m Paleolithic.”

  “Not exactly, Ivo. You see—”

  They were interrupted by the lifting of a panel. Admittance was at hand.

  The interior was a cramped mass of panels, but there was room for several people if they watched their elbows. A short tunnel beyond the airlock opened into a roughly spherical compartment. Ivo’s first impression was of machinery; there were dials and levers everywhere, projecting from every side. He found it hard to orient because there was no gravity here and no visual “up.” Wherever he planted his feet was ground; the slight magnetism that had held him to the outer hull remained effective.

  The technician in charge was already getting into his suit. Brad spoke to him in a foreign language, received a curt reply, and said: “Ivo Archer — American.” The man
nodded politely.

  “You see, it is all very carefully arranged,” Brad said as they waited for the man to complete his suit-checkout. “Thirty nations have put up the cash for this project, and each is allotted — but you must know that. We send in precise reports every day.”

  “This is the American Hour?”

  “No. Personnel here don’t bother with the official foolishness. This gentleman is not a gentleman — that is, not a Gentile. He’s an Israeli geologist doing work for Indonesia. Their own geologist is busy on a private project.”

  “So somebody is paying off a favor?”

  “Right. Indonesia will get the results, and the home state will never know the difference.”

  “How is it we can horn in, then?”

  “I preempted the slot for more important work. He understands.”

  “Just to show me the macroscope? Brad, you can’t—”

  The Israeli held up his glove. “It is quite all right, Mr. Archer,” he said. “We do not question Dr. Carpenter.” He put on the helmet, pressured his suit, and mounted to the airlock. Ivo detected no shock of air puffing out; there were no games of that kind here. Probably the man was hauling himself along one of the guy-chains, not trusting himself to any drift through the vacuum. That was the kind of sensible procedure Ivo preferred.

  Brad settled into a control seat of some kind and began making adjustments with sundry instruments. Ivo tried to make some sense out of the battery of dials and lights, but failed; it was far too complicated.

  “Okay, friend, we’re alone. No bugs here. I’m in a position to know.”

  Once more the nervousness came upon him. This was it. “Why did you summon me?”

  “We need Schön.”

  Ivo met this with silence. He had known it.

  “I don’t like to do this to you, believe me,” Brad said with genuine apology. “But this is crucial. We’re in bad trouble here, Ivo.”

  “Naturally it wasn’t my amiable half-witted companionship you missed. Not just to show off your fancy technology and your fancy girl.”

  Brad looked far more mature when serious, and he was far more serious now than the literal content of his speech indicated. “You know I like you, Ivo. You’re a damned Puritan at heart, and you’re afraid of anything that smacks too much of pleasure and what you’re doing here in the space age instead of the nineteenth-century Confederacy is beyond me to grasp. I still enjoy your company, more than that of Schön, and I wouldn’t change one jot of your archaic and poetic fancies. But this is — well, it sounds cliché, but it is a matter of world security. It’s frankly over my head. If your freak abilities were enough—”

  “So playing a simple flute has become ‘freak,’ and—” But he knew what Brad meant, much as he didn’t want to. “And who is an ignorant lad straining at one twenty-five to proffer advice to model one sixty? Particularly when he knows that’s a lie for the only one in the project to be adjudged two hundred and—”

  “Come off it, Ivo. You know better than anyone that those figures are meaningless. I tell you with all sincerity that the situation is desperate, and Schön is the only one I know with the potential to handle it. I have the privilege of calling him when I really need him. Well, it’s been twenty years, and I do need him. Earth needs him. You have to do it.”

  “I’m not just thinking of myself. Brad, once you let the genie out of the bottle — you know what Schön is. Your work, your girl—”

  “I may be giving up everything. I know that. I have no choice.”

  “Well, I have a choice. You’ll darn well have to prove to me that the cure is not worse than the problem.”

  “That’s why we’re here. I’ll have to acquaint you with the nature and function of the macroscope first, though, before I can make my point. Then—”

  “Keep it simple, now. I can’t even read your dials.”

  “Right. Basically the macroscope is a monstrous chunk of unique crystal that responds to an aspect of radiation unrelated to any man has been able to study before. This amounts to an extremely weak but phenomenally clear spatial signal. The built-in computer sifts out the noise and translates the essence into a coordinated image. The process is complex, but we wind up with better pictorial definition than is possible through any other medium, bar none. That was a major handicap at first.”

  “Superior definition is a problem?”

  “I’ll demonstrate.” Brad applied himself to the ponderous apparatus, donned a helmetlike affair with opaque goggles, and cocked his head as though listening. Ivo felt another pang of nervousness, and realized that this stemmed from the superficial similarity between the goggles and the sunglasses he had bought when trying to avoid Harold Groton. That entire past episode embarrassed him in retrospect; he had acted foolishly. He threw off the memory and concentrated on Brad’s motions.

  The left hand hovered over a keyboard of buttons resembling those of a computer input. It probably was the computer input, Ivo reminded himself. There was a strap over the wrist to prevent the hand from drifting away in the absence of gravity; buttons could be awkward to depress without the anchorage of bodily weight. The right hand held a kind of ball mounted on a thin rod, rather like an old-fashioned automobile gearshift. As the left fingers moved, a large concave surface glowed over Brad’s head.

  “I’ll cut in the main screen for you,” Brad said. “Notice that my fingers control the computer settings; that covers direction, range and focus, none of it simple enough for human reflexes to handle. The vagaries of planetary motion alone, when that planet is not our own, are complicated to account for, particularly when we want to hold a specific focus on its surface.”

  “I’m aware of planetary motion.” He remembered one of his old pet peeves. “I had to work it out when I wanted to criticize the concept of time travel. If a man were granted the miraculous ability to jump forward or backward in time, with no other travel, he’d arrive in mid-space or deep underground; because the Earth is always moving. It would be like trying to jump off a moving rocket and jump on again.”

  “Nevertheless, we do travel in time, with the macroscope,” Brad said, smiling.

  “Oh, so you’re going back to supervise your grandfather’s conception?”

  “Delicacy forbids.” Brad’s hands flexed. “I’ll center on a precoded location: the planet Earth. The computer uses the ephemeris to spot all the planets and moons of the solar system exactly, and a good many of the asteroids and comets as well. The right-hand knob provides our personal tuning; once the difficult compensations have been made, we use this control to jog over several feet at a time, or to gain different angles of view. Right now we’re orbiting the sun about nine hundred thousand miles from Earth — right next door, as interplanetary distances go. Just out far enough to reduce the perturbations of the moon. There.”

  The screen was a mass of dull red. “If that’s Earth, the political situation has deteriorated since I left,” Ivo observed.

  “That is Earth — dead center. Per the coordinates.”

  “Center? Literally?”

  “Definition, problem of, remember. Our corrected coordinates nail the heart of the body. The image is on a one-to-one ratio.”

  “Life size? It can—”

  “The macroscope can penetrate matter, yes. As I told you, this isn’t exactly light we’re dealing with, though the time delay is similar. That’s a representation of the incandescent core of our planet as it was five seconds ago, muted by automatic visual safeguards and filters, of course. We’ll have to drift about four thousand miles off that point to hit the surface, which is what most people seem to assume is all the scope looks at. Right there, you can appreciate the implications for geology, mining, paleontology—”

  “Paleontology?”

  “Fossils, to you. We’ve already made some spectacular finds in the course of routine roving. Lifetime’s work there, for somebody.”

  “Hold on! I ain’t that ignorant, perfessor. I thought the bones were widely s
paced, even in good fossiliferous sediments. How can you tell one, when you’re in the middle of it, not looking down at it in a display case? You certainly couldn’t see it as such.”

  “Trust me, junior. We do a high-speed canvass at a given level and record it on tape. The machine runs a continuous spectroscopic analysis and trips a signal when there’s anything we might want. And that’s only the beginning.”

  “A spectroscopic analysis? You said the macroscope didn’t use light.”

  “It doesn’t, exactly, but we do. We keyed it in on samples: every element on the periodic table. Thus we are able to translate the incoming impulse into a visual representation, much as any television receiver does. The truth is, the macrons are far more specific than light, because they don’t diffuse readily or suffer such embarrassments as red shift. Spectroscopy is really a superfluous step, but we do it because we’re geared to record and analyze light, here. Once we retool to orient on the original impulse, our accuracy will multiply a hundredfold.”

  “It grinds that fine?”

  “That fine, Ivo. We’re just beginning to glimpse the potential of this technique. The macroscope is a larger step toward universal knowledge than ever atomics were toward universal power.”

  “So I have heard. But I’m sort of stupid, as you know. You were about to tell me what makes superior definition so difficult to adapt to, even with the computer guidance.”

  “So I were. Here is the surface of Earth, fifty feet above sea-level, looking down. Another keyed-in location.”

  The screen became a shifting band of color.

  “Let me guess again. Your snoop is stationary, right? And the globe is turning at the equivalent of a thousand miles an hour. It’s like flying a jet at low altitude near the equator and peering out through the bombsight.”

  “For a pacifist, you have violent imagery. But yes, just about. Sometimes over ocean, sometimes land, sometimes under mountains that rise above the pickup level. And if we move higher—” He adjusted the controls, and the scene jumped into focus.