“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
and drew a line between the top and the left, adding a spot to the center.
Groton connected the center spot to the isolated one.
Ivo made a loop over the top of the figure.
Groton shrugged and added to it.
Two more moves put an eye inside and a base below.
Ivo finished it off with an arc across the bottom, leaving Groton with two points but no way to connect them, since one was inside and the other outside.
“Now,” Groton said, “how about trying it for higher stakes? Say, five or six spots?”
“Five is the first player’s win, six—” he paused for a moment — “six is the second’s. It’s still no game.”
“How can you know that?”
Brad broke in. “Ivo’s special that way. He knows — and he can beat us all at sprouts, right now, I’m sure.”
“Even Kovonov?”
“Could be.”
Groton shook his head dubiously. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Ivo looked up and caught Afra looking at him intently. “Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I thought I explained about that. It’s nothing. Just a trick of reasoning. I’ve had it as long as I can remember.”
“You interest me,” Groton said. “Would you mind telling me when you were born?”
“Don’t do it, Ivo!” Brad said. “You’ll be giving away all your life secrets.”
“He will not!” Afra cried. “Why be ridiculous?”
Ivo looked at each of them, trying not to linger too long on Afra’s face, so lovely in its animation. “Have I missed something?” Again? he added internally.
“Harold is an astrologer,” Brad explained. “Give him your birthday to the nearest minute and he will draw up a horoscope that really has your number.”
Groton looked complacently pained. “Astrology is a hobby of mine. You may consider it a parlor game, but I’ll stand by its validity when properly applied.”
Ivo regretted his involvement in this dialogue, not because he was at all concerned with the subject but because he saw that he was being used to tease the man. He could not decide that he liked Groton, but cruelty, even this mild, was not in his nature. Brad sometimes seemed to be insensitive to the foibles of those less intelligent than he. “March 29th, 1955,” he said.
Groton noted it on a little pad. “Do you happen to know the exact time?”
“Yes. I saw it on the record, once. 6:20 a.m.”
Groton noted that too. “And I believe you mentioned that you were born in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania or Mississippi?”
Ivo tried to remember when he could have mentioned such a fact. “Pennsylvania. Does it make a difference?”
“Everything makes a difference. I could explain if you’re interested.”
“Let’s not make this a classroom session,” Afra said impatiently. Ivo could see that there were parameters of insensitivity about her, too; or perhaps it was merely impulsive emotion. She was like a race-horse, fretful, impatient to be moving, and unappreciative of the more devious concerns of others.
Why had Brad desired a race-horse?
Why did Ivo?
“Interesting figure of speech,” Groton said, seemingly unperturbed. “Astrology might well be taught in the classroom. I wish I had been exposed to it a dozen years earlier.”
“I don’t understand,” Afra said with measured frustration, “how a competent engineer like you can take up with a common superstition like that. I mean, really — !”
“Didn’t you teach in the classroom once, Harold?” Beatryx inquired, breaking in so gently that it took Ivo a moment to realize that she was intercepting a developing argument. Afra and Groton must have been through a similar dialogue before, and the good wife knew the signs. Ivo could read them himself: the stolid man replying seriously to facetious questions, never losing his temper, while the excitable girl worked herself into a frenzy. Perhaps Groton defended astrology merely because it was ludicrous, subtly or not-so-subtly baiting her.
Had he been sympathizing with the wrong person? Afra was beautiful and brilliant, but her temperament betrayed her. She might actually be at a disadvantage in this type of encounter.
No — Brad would have broken up any such contest. Groton had said something, and Afra had pounced on it, while his mind drifted, and now somehow Groton was launched into a narration of his teaching experience. This had, it developed, predated his marriage to Beatryx. Ivo listened, finding to his surprise that he was interested. There was much more to Groton than he had thought.
“…volunteered. I suppose quite a number of professional people were as naïve as I was. But the company I worked for then — remember, this was back in ’67 or ’68 — had no sympathy with the striking teachers, and offered time off with full pay for any employee who was willing to give it a try. And of course the temporary salary from the school system was extra. So a number of us engineers set out to show the dissident teachers that we valued a functioning school system, even if they didn’t, and that we were ready and able to preserve it, no matter h
ow long they threw their collective tantrum. After all, we were as qualified as they were, since we all had BA’s, MA’s or doctorates in our field, and plenty of practical experience too. That’s the way it looked to me at the age of twenty-seven, at any rate.”
He paused, and Afra did not break in with any irate remark this time. She was interested too. Beatryx had succeeded in pacifying things.
Twenty-seven. Two years older than Ivo was now. He could picture himself in that situation readily enough, however, assigned to fill in at a school where about half the regular teachers were out on their illegal strike. Technically, it was a mass resignation subject to withdrawal upon satisfaction… a transparent veil.
He dressed in a careful suit, trying to appear composed though his pulse raced with stage fright at the coming confrontation with a juvenile audience. Would he remember what to say? Would he be able to present clearly what was so well-defined in his own mind? It was so important that the material be properly covered.
This particular high school had not been able to keep all the classes going, and some of the lower grades were home, but there seemed to be kids everywhere. Boys were running down the halls and screaming, throwing books on the floor and collecting in noisy huddles: there seemed to be nobody with the authority to bring order. As Ivo waited with the other volunteers for briefing and specific assignments he observed some pretty heavy petting going on in a doorway, but the passing teachers ignored it. He had forgotten how mature, physically, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls were. Two boys broke out in a fight directly in sight of the principal’s office; the harried executive simply stuck his head out. yelled “Break it up!” and glared until they ran off. The lovers were also startled out of their preoccupation, and sidled to a more distant doorway before resuming their courtship. Otherwise, chaos reigned.
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