Borland held up his hand as though in a classroom, reminding Ivo again of Groton’s experience. Now the spitwads were political. “Now a question, if you please. You tell me a beam of light passes through this gravity turbulence between two objects in space, and gets kinked a bit. But the way I figure it, there’s hardly a cubbyhole in the cosmos that doesn’t have gravitational equivalence of some sort; there are just too many stars, too many specks of dust, all with their little fields crossing into infinity. Your beam of light should have a thousand kinks, and kinks on kinks, if it travels any distance. So how do you figure which is which? Seems to me you’re better off just taking your light as is, through a regular telescope; that’s uncluttered, at least.”
It occurred to Ivo with a little shock that a very sharp mind lurked behind the senatorial façade.
“This is true, ordinarily,” Brad admitted carefully. “The ‘kinks’ our instrument detects are crowded. But while raw light is superior both for short work and long range, definition suffers in the intermediate range of say, one light-minute to a hundred thousand light-years. The macronic imposition, in contrast, is, for reasons we have yet to understand, more durable. We find the macrons in a beam emanating from a thousand light-years away to be almost as distinct as those from our own sun’s field. The same is true for virtually any galactic distance. As our range increases—”
“I’m with you. You can shout down the hall, but you need a phone for the next city, even if it sounds tinny, and it works the same for the next continent. Now that term you used — macron — that sounds like a thing, not a quality.”
“Yes. Our nomenclature is vague because our comprehension is vague. We appear to be dealing also with the particle aspect of light, more than with the wave, and perhaps with particles of gravitation. That may be the reason the effect appears to be independent of the square-cube law.”
“Mate a photon to a gravitron and breed a macron,” Borland remarked. “Damn interesting. I can see the implications of such interaction between light and gravity, untrained as I am in quantum mechanics.” Untrained but hardly ignorant, Ivo thought. “So you either get all your macron, or none of it,” the Senator continued after a pause. “But how can you get pictures of objects on or inside a planet, where there is no light?”
“The turbulence is removed from the source of the field, since it is equivalence that counts. Even an object in a planet has mass of its own, and its field interacts with that of the planet and of neighboring objects. At some point there will be an interaction that occurs in light — and some of the resultant macrons will reach us, however far away we are. It is only necessary for our receiver and equipment to be sufficiently sensitive. A computer stage is required for the initial rectification, and another to sort out and classify the myriad fragmentary images obtained. It is not a simple process. But once complete—”
“You are able, with your macroscope, to inspect any point in space — or on Earth?”
Brad nodded.
“I observed your emblem.”
“We do not use it that way,” Brad said shortly.
Ivo realized that they were talking about the platinum-plated shovel: the S D P S. Who could fathom its meaning by guesswork? Evidently the Senator understood the initials well enough. Perhaps he had prior information? He sounded less and less amateurish to Ivo. Had Brad met his match?
“Naturally not,” Borland was saying. “Certain persons might not take kindly to such observation. Some might even feel so strong a need to protect their privacy that they would institute stringent measures. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” Brad said, his tone showing his disgust. The gad had not been swatted yet, though the gadfly had merged with the background.
“No you don’t. Have you ever lived in one of facing tenements? Your window opening to a courtyard of windows?”
“No.”
“You missed a good education, lad.” Borland looked around. “Anybody else?”
The scientists of the station stood awkwardly.
“In a tenement,” he repeated softly. “Anybody.”
A brown hand went up from the doorway. It was Fred Blank, of the maintenance department, also table-tennis champion. His signal was tentative, as though he didn’t like calling attention to himself at such a gathering.
Borland faced him. “Ever use the glasses?”
Blank looked sullen.
“Or maybe a cheap telescope?” Borland persisted. “Yeah, you know what I mean. Ten, twenty, maybe a hundred windows, depending on your location, and maybe half with no shades. Who wastes dough on shades, on nigger wages? Some girls don’t know they’re putting on a show. Some don’t care. Some figure it’s good for business. Same for some men. And family fights are fair game for capacity audience.” He returned to Brad. “You know how you cure a scoper?”
“I’d call the police.”
Borland wheeled to point at Blank. “That right, soul brother?”
Blank shook his head no. He was, reluctantly, smiling now.
“Yeah, you know.” Borland had assumed complete control of the dialogue. “You was there, Kilroy. You had the education. Calling cop ain’t in the book.”
The scientists of the station stood mute, except for those translating for their companions. Borland was showing them all up for impractical theoreticians.
“Now you begin to follow, maybe. To put it in highbrow for you: mass voyeurism is a typical consequence of the cybernetic revolution, and you aren’t going to curb it by invoking prerevolution methods. Back in the old days when we were nomads scrunching in tents, anybody poke his snoot in your door uninvited, you bash it in with your horny fist. The agricultural revolution changed all that, made cities possible — and cities are by definition crowded. The industrial revolution, maybe five thousand years later, made it ten times worse, because then every Joe had the wherewithal to poke into his neighbor’s business with impunity. The cybernetic revolution really tied it, because then that average Joe had the wherewithal and the time to pry — and nobody pays for a canned show when there’s a live one free.
“Now we’ve got the superscope, and we can diddle in our stellar neighbor’s business, as though our own weren’t enough. Now how do you figure a smart ET who likes his privacy is going to stop you from peeking — when there’s maybe a fifteen-thousand-year time-delay?”
The station personnel looked at each other in dismay. Obvious — yet none of them had thought of it! A mind-destroying logic-chain that wiped out the peeping tom, wherever and whenever he might be. The most direct and realistic answer to snooping.
Borland waited for the babel of translation and discussion to die away. The men who had studied him with veiled contempt showed respect now, and the Russian had stopped smiling. “Now, comrades, suppose we forget about preconceptions and tackle the main problem. I know most of your governments better than you do — yes, even yours, Ivan — because that is my profession. Politics. I also know something of human nature — the reality, not the theory — and thereby it figures I know something too of alien nature. You’re in trouble here, and so am I in certain respects you wouldn’t care about. Why don’t we forget our differences, pool our resources, and find out what we can come up with? Maybe we can help each other a little.”
Men looked at each other over the renewed murmur of the translations. Tentative smiles broke out. “Maybe we can, Senator,” Brad allowed.
Borland spoke to his helper. “Go hold a preliminary press conference, kid. Tell ’em what the Senator means to do — but stay well clear of the facts. Irritate ’em if they get nosy. You know the routine.” The flunky left without a word.
“Li’l wonder, ain’t he?” Borland remarked. “Took me years to find a foil like that. Now where’s this tape?”
“Tape?”
“Lad, my reconnaissance is not that clumsy. The recording you have of the destroyer. The one that clouds men’s minds, ha-ha-ha. The Shadow knows.”
“It isn’t a tape, or even a reco
rding,” Brad said. “We can’t record it — at least, what we take down doesn’t have the effect. The — meaning doesn’t register.”
“But you can pipe it in here live, right? No sense inspecting a dead virus. We want to know what makes it kick. It only comes in on one station, right? And it’s continuous; you can tune it in any time?”
“One segment of the macroscopic band, yes. The center segment, where reception is strongest. The one we could use most effectively — if we could only tune the destroyer out.”
Brad showed the Senator to a smaller projection room. Most of the scientists and personnel dispersed, satisfied that the situation was coming under control. Afra appeared in blouse and skirt, making even plain clothing look elegant. Ivo tagged along, forgotten for the moment.
“This is where we set it up,” Brad explained tersely. “It amounts to a computer output, with the main signal processed at the receiver. There are electronic safeguards to guarantee that none of the effects penetrate beyond this room. This device is dangerous.”
“A program,” Borland said musingly. “A mousetrap in a harem. But why make up a show like that, instead of simply lobbing a detonator into the sun?”
“Evidently the originator isn’t against all life,” Brad said. “This is selective. It only hits the space-traveling, macroscope-building species like ourselves. The snoopers. So long as we keep our development below a certain level, we’re safe.”
“My sentiments too. That the kind of safety you care for?”
“No.”
“Let’s run it through again. I put out a theory, just to show you how it could be, but I’m not putting my money on it yet. GIGO, you know. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Maybe my notion is the right one, but let’s eliminate the others first. Like that song: ‘Oh why don’t I work like other men do? How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue? Hallelujah, I’m a bum!’ Feed that to a minister and he’ll tell you it’s profane. Should be ‘how the heck,’ the church-approved euphemism. Try it on a professor and he’ll tell you it’s agrammatical: should be ‘as other men do.’ But a worker will tell you the whole thing’s been censored. Should be ‘how the hell can I work when there’s no work to do!’ Us lowbrows get to the root, sometimes. Not always. You figure they’re afraid of the competition from some smart-aleck new species?”
“Fifteen thousand years late? And if we had a light-speed drive, which we never will, it would still take us another fifteen millennia to reach them. We can’t even reply to their ‘message’ sooner than that. So it’s really a delay of thirty thousand years. And I don’t see how they could be sure we’d be ready to receive or reply in that time.”
“Could be a long-term broadcast. For all we know, it’s been going on a million years,” Borland said. “Just waiting for us to catch up. Maybe time is slower for them? Like fifteen thousand years being a week or so, their way?”
“Not when the broadcast is on our time scheme. We haven’t had to adjust to it at all. If they lived that slowly, we’d have a cycle running a thousand years, instead of a few minutes.”
“Maybe. You figure they’re crazy with hate for any intelligent race, any time?”
“Xenophobia? It’s possible. But again, that time-delay makes it doubtful. How can you hate something that won’t exist for tens of millennia?”
“An alien might. His mind — if he has one — might work in a different way than mine.”
“Still, there are conceded to be certain criteria for intelligence. It isn’t reasonable—”
“Stop being reasonable. That’s a mistake. Try being philosophical.”
Brad looked at him. “What philosophy do you have in mind, Senator?”
“I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool, and that’s your problem. You figure your Scientific Method is the best technique you have for working things out, right? I tell you no.”
“Observe the facts, set up a hypothesis that accounts for them all, use it to predict other facts, check them out, and revise or scrap the original hypothesis if the new evidence doesn’t fit properly. I find it workable. Do Aristotle, Kant or Marx have a better overall system?”
“Yes. The primary concern of philosophy is not truth. It is meaning. The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis. You don’t begin with assumptions and piece them together according to the rules of mathematics; you question their implications, and you question your questions, until nothing at all is certain. Then, maybe, you are getting close to meaning.”
Brad frowned. “That make sense to you two?”
“No,” Afra said.
“Yes,” Ivo said.
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you, so long as it opens your mind. This isn’t any game of chess we’re playing; we don’t even know the rules. All we know for sure is that we’re losing — and maybe we’d better start by questioning that. So this thing wipes out intelligence. Is that bad?”
“Cosmologically speaking, perhaps not,” Brad said. “But the local effect is uncomfortable. It would be easier to live with it if it erased our least intelligent, rather than—”
Borland frowned. “You’re talking about IQ type brains? ‘Intelligence Quotient defined as Mental Age divided by Chronological Age times 100’?”
“We think so. Of course we can’t be certain that a numerical IQ score reflects anything more than the subject’s ability to score on IQ tests, so we may be misinterpreting the nature of the destroyer’s thrust. A numerical score omits what may be the more important factors of personality, originality and character, and even when detail scores are identical—”
“It is no sure sign that the capabilities or performance of the people are identical,” Borland finished. “I know the book, and I am aware of the shortcomings of the system. I remember the flap fifteen or twenty years ago about ‘creativity,’ and I remember the vogue for joining high-IQ clubs. When I want a good man, I stay well clear of the self-professed egghead. I can tell just by looking at faces who’s a sucker for the club syndrome.”
Borland peered at faces. He pointed a gnarled finger at Afra. “You!”
She jumped guiltily. “You belong, right?” he said. Without waiting for her startled nod of agreement he moved on. “You — no,” he said to Brad. “That big Russky who just left — no.” He looked at Ivo. “They wouldn’t let you in.” He returned to Brad. “But IQ is the only practical guide we have to the generalized potential of large numbers of people, so we have to use it until we have something better. Let’s just define it as the ability to learn, and say that a person with IQ one twenty is probably smarter overall than his brother with IQ one hundred. It’s only a convenience so we can get down to the important stuff. OK?”
Brad laughed. “Oll Korrect, Senator. Apply your philosophy.”
“Now you tell me this signal is nonlinguistic, so anybody can follow it, but it has a cutoff point. You have to be pretty smart, by one definition or another, for it to hit you. Does it hit the smarty sooner than the marginal one, or is it like the macrons: you get it or you don’t?”
“It seems to hit the brighter minds sooner. Intelligence is such an elusive quality that we can’t be sure, but—”
“Right. So let’s run this through in some kind of order. You have an IQ of two fifteen—”
“What?” Afra demanded, shocked.
“That isn’t—”
“I know. I know, I know,” Borland said. “Figures don’t mean anything, but if they did they still wouldn’t apply to you, because you’re smarter than the Joe who tries to test you. But remember we’re talking convenience, not fact. No, I haven’t seen your data-sheet; I do my own interpolation. If the figures did register for you, that’s about the way it would read, right?”
Brad did not deny it, and Afra did not look at him. Ivo knew what she was thinking. She had supposed he might be 175 or 180, still somewhere within range of her own score. Scores would be very important to her. Suddenly she kn
ew he was as far above her as she was above the average person — and the average, to her, was almost unbearably dull.
“So chances are that of this group, you would be the first to be hit by it,” Borland said. “So let’s put you at the head of the table. Now I’m comparatively stupid — at least, about fifty points below your figure, and that’s a military secret, by the way, ’cause brains are a nonsurvival trait in the Senate — and your girl here runs about ten points below that. This lad—”
“About one twenty-five,” Ivo said. “But it’s unbalanced. I have—”
“There went another military secret,” Brad muttered. “I don’t think Mr. Archer should—”
“I insist on taking my place in your theoretic lineup,” Ivo said seriously.
“Good. You’re here, and it’s a nice gradient, so might as well use you,” Borland said. “Now let’s bring in someone who sits at one hundred even to round it out.”
“There’s nobody on the station—” Afra began.
“Ask Beatryx,” Brad murmured.
“Ask — !”
“It is no insult to be average, intellectually,” Brad told her gently. “The rest of us are freaks, statistically.” Afra flushed and went out.
“High-tempered filly there,” Borland observed. “Technical secretary?”
“More — until two minutes ago.”
“Let’s get with it. You can activate that relay right now, right?”
“You seem to be assuming that we’re really going to watch it.”
Macroscope Page 9
