“Mammalian,” Afra said. “Oligocene, probably. I don’t quite place the—”
Then it happened: one of those breaks that mock probability. There was a concerted gasp.
A monstrous beak stabbed down into the picture, followed by a tiny malignant eye and white headfeathers. It was the head of a bird — almost, in itself, the size of the full torso of the deerlike animal. The cruel beak gaped, stabbed, and closed on the deer’s quivering neck.
Now the rest of the predator came into view. It was indeed a bird: nine feet tall and constructed like a wingless and huge-legged hawk. Three mighty claws pierced turf with every step, each scaly and muscular.
“Phororhacos!” Afra exclaimed, awed. “Miocene, in South America. Twenty million years ago—”
“How horrible!” That was Beatryx.
“Horrible? Phororhacos was a magnificent specimen, one of the pinnacles of avian evolution. Flightless, to be sure — but this bird was supreme on land, in its territory. If diversity of species is considered, aves is more successful than mammalia—”
They watched the bird lift its prey by the neck and shake it into unconsciousness or death. Ivo felt the pangs of the onslaught, and had to refrain from putting his hand against his neck. Then beak and talon disemboweled the carcass, and the gory feeding began. Now Ivo felt the taste of warm blood in his toothless mouth.
The picture faded again.
“We skipped two hundred million years between images,” Afra said. “How about one in between — like a dinosaur?”
“In time, we should be able to fill in Earth’s entire history, from this debris,” Ivo said. “But the selection is largely random, for any one scene. The macrons aren’t uniformly distributed, though they seem to be reasonably well ordered within the clumps. I can keep trying, though.” He, too, was fascinated by this widening of their horizon. No longer did they have to jump enormous distances in order to see the preman past.
All space and all time…
“I hate to break this up,” Harold said, “but we do have more serious concerns. We are drifting far outside our galaxy, and a wrong jump could lose us entirely.”
That brought them to attention, and he continued more specifically: “I gather that the pictures would be less random if their scope were not so limited, no pun intended. Suppose we look at the Solar System as a whole, and try to get some clue to the finer alignment of our macronic streams? If we can learn to manipulate our reception properly, the significant history of our entire galaxy will be open to us. That means—”
“That means we can trace the onset of the destroyer!” Afra broke in. “Discover what species did it, and why.” She paused. “Except that it hasn’t reached this far out yet.”
“That’s why we are free to experiment. Once we know what we’re doing, we can slide in closer and pick it up again. We won’t have to approach that generator blind.”
“Is that right, Ivo?” she asked. “Would a Solar System fix — the entire system — promote uniform reception?”
There had been a time when she did not ask his opinion on anything technical. “Yes. I could put the screen on schematic, and there would be a much broader band to work with. It would be excellent practice, though I can’t guarantee the results at first.”
She did not answer, so he set it up. The image in his goggles and on the screen became a cartoon diagram coordinated by the computer and his own general guidance. The sun was represented by a white disk of light, and the planets by colored specks traveling dotted orbits, with their moons in similarly marked paths. The scale was not true, but the identities and positions were clear enough.
“I’ll try for a system history,” Ivo said. “But it will take some time to map the macron streams, assuming they are reasonably consistent. Then I’ll have to patch together recordings, since I won’t have chronological order at first. No point in your watching.”
“We are with you, Ivo,” Afra said with sudden warmth. “We’ll watch. Maybe we can help.”
He knew she was being impersonally practical, but the gesture still warmed him considerably. This was the way he preferred her: working with him, not trying to buy him. He bent to the task, searching for comprehensible traces. He had a macroscopic patchwork ahead of him.
“Let me do it, clubfingers,” Schön. said in his ear. “I can post it all in an hour. You’ll take two weeks, and you’ll miss a lot.”
Ivo had already discovered the magnitude of the task. He did not want to be embarrassed by the inevitable tiring of his audience as the unproductive hours went by. “Do it, then,” he replied irritably, and gave Schön rein. More and more was becoming possible, between them.
Yet — if Schön could do this, using the macroscope — what had happened to the destroyer? The entire basis of Ivo’s refusal to free Schön was being thrown into question.
Perhaps — was it a hope? — he would fail.
Schön had not been bluffing. He expanded into Ivo’s brain and body and applied his juvenile but overwhelming intellect to the problem. Ivo watched his left fingers dance over the computer keys while his right ones flexed on the knob, and wondered whether he had not made a serious mistake. He had not freed Schön — but Schön might free himself, given this leeway. He was clever enough…
The screen cleared. The indicated scale expanded to two light-years diameter and a representation of cosmic dust appeared.
“What are you doing?” Afra demanded. “That’s no stellar system.”
“Primeval hydrogen cloud, stupid,” Schön replied with Ivo’s lips and tongue, while Ivo winced.
Afra shut up and the show went on. Had he not been observing from so intimate a spot, Ivo would have suspected it of being entirely fanciful. As it was, he knew that Schön had actually manipulated the macroscope to pick up impulses dating back five or ten billion years; the representation, though indirect, bridged and abridged, was an honest one.
The cloud of primitive gas swirled and contracted, the time scale showing the passage of roughly a million years every 25 seconds. In the course of ten million years the gas cloud compressed itself into a diameter of a hundred million miles, then to a scant one million, and then it flared into life and became a star. The compression had raised its temperature until the hydrogen/helium “ignition” point was achieved; now it was drawing enormous energy from the conversion of hydrogen atoms to a quarter the number of helium atoms.
“It’s like trying to cram four glasses of liquor into a fifth,” Afra explained to Beatryx. “A quart won’t fit into a fifth, so—”
“Doesn’t it depend on the size of the fifth glass?” Oh no, Ivo thought. Once more the two women had crossed signals. Harold would have to untangle them, as he always did. Eventually Beatryx would be made to understand that four hydrogen atoms had a combined atomic weight of 4.04, while a single helium atom’s weight was 4.00. The combination of four hydrogens to make one helium thus released the extra .04 as energy: the life of stars.
Only one percent of the new atom released — but so great was the aggregate that it halted the collapse of the huge cloud/star pictured on the screen and stabilized it for a period. Most of the light of the universe derived from this same process; the myriad stars of the Milky Way Galaxy were merely foci for hydrogen/helium conversion.
Several billion years passed in a few intense minutes. At last the fuel ran low, and the sun swelled into a vast red giant a hundred times its prior diameter.
“That can’t be Sol!” Harold objected. “Our sun is only halfway through its life cycle.”
Schön did not dignify this with a reply. Ivo did not comprehend the situation either, but still knew the image was accurate.
The star, having exhausted its available hydrogen, collapsed again. But within it now was a core of almost pure helium, the product of its lifelong consumption of hydrogen. As it contracted to a much tighter ball than before, the internal temperature increased to ten times that of the earlier conversion. Something had to give. It did: the helium b
egan to break down into carbon. A new fuel had been discovered.
The star was in business again, as a fast-living white dwarf.
But soon the helium ran out, and the tiny star faded into a blackened ball of matter no larger than a planet. It had come to a dismal end. It was dense with collapsed matter and peripheral heavy elements captured during its glory from galactic debris, but it was dead, a drifting ash.
After more millions of years this minuscule corpse was swept into the sphere of influence of a nascent star, a body forming from the more plentiful gas nearer the rim of the galaxy. As the new star, heedless of its degrading destiny, took on the characteristic brilliance of the long atomic conversion, this cinder became a satellite, sweeping up some of the gas for itself. It enhanced its mass and developed an atmosphere, but remained inert. Its day was done; it was never to regain its erstwhile grandeur.
“That’s Earth!” Afra said. Then, immediately: “No, it can’t be. Wrong composition, and the core is much too dense.” She was absorbing the symbols for material and density automatically, seeing the planet as it was.
A second ember was acquired by the young system, also representing the death of an ancient star. Then a third and a fourth, each accruing what pitiful lagniappe it could from the scant debris of space. The last two were much larger cores than the first, and acquired more atmosphere for their dotage, but had no hope of rejuvenation. Four planets orbited the star, each far older as entities than it was.
A neighbor had problems. The picture shifted to cover it for a geologic moment. This star was much larger than the original one and had consumed its hydrogen — and helium — lavishly. In a scant few million years it had run its course. But its mass, and therefore its internal heat, was such that the conversions did not stop at carbon. Oxygen, sodium, silicon, calcium — all the way down to iron, 26 on the atomic scale, the elements formed in this stellar furnace. A series of thermal intensifications — cataclysmic storms — broke through the shell of helium even before its breakdown was complete, producing trace amounts of heavy metals up to lead; but the basic, energy-releasing conversions predominated. The demise of a large star was not a quiet matter.
When nothing remained at the core lighter than iron, the gravitic collapse resumed. The heat ascended to a hundred billion degrees. Strength was drawn from this collapse, and energy poured back into the core to form new matter. The heavier elements all the way up to uranium now were manufactured in quantity.
But at this final collapse the star rebounded in an explosion that splattered its mass across the galaxy: a supernova. A splendid spectrum of heavy elements shot past the more conservative viewpoint star and through its satellite system, and some of this was captured while some fell into the star itself. The system was richer than it had been, feeding greedily upon the gobbets of its neighbor’s destruction.
The original planet intercepted a fair share of this largesse, and gained perceptibly thereby, as did the others. But the largest fragments, mostly iron, fell into orbit and coalesced into planets in their own right. Now three small satellites circled within the four large ones.
“Mars, Earth, Venus!” Afra said, caught up in this adventure. “And the first planet we saw is Neptune — our planet!”
Schön still did not bother to comment. Ivo felt Schön’s concentration as he identified and captured the diverse threads of the macronic tapestry and organized them into a coherent and chronological visual history. This was a task that required all of Schön’s powers, the artistic with the computational and linguistic. They were nevertheless exceptional powers for an exceptional undertaking; Ivo had tended to lose sight of just how potent a mind his mentor-personality possessed. If a mouse born into Leo remained a mouse, a lion confined to the harness of a mouse remained a lion. Or, in this case, a Ram.
More time passed, and the slow accretions continued. A billion years after the first, a second nova developed in the immediate neighborhood. More rich debris angled by, and the sun’s family levied another tax on it, acquiring material for two more inner planets and a number of major moons.
“Mercury and — Vulcan?” Afra inquired. “Or is that Pluto, misplaced?” For there were now five inner planets — one more than could be accounted for.
Schön kept on working.
From distant space, travelers came. Most passed, merely deflected by Sol’s gravity, not captured. One, however, lurched into a wobbly elliptical orbit that passed close to that of planet Jupiter.
“Six inner planets?” Afra demanded in a tone of outrage.
It was not to be. Jupiter wrestled the newcomer around in a harsh initiation, twisting it inward toward the sun… and toward the orbit of the next inward planet. Too close. They drifted, interacted — and came together.
And sundered each other before they touched.
“Roche’s Limit squared,” Afra murmured.
One fragment shot out to intercept planet Saturn, and was captured there — too close. Roche’s Limit exerted itself again: the apprentice moon shattered, and the tiny fragments gradually coalesced into a discernible ring.
A major fragment of the original demolition traveled farther. It intercepted Neptune, where it too broke up, forming two tremendous moons and some fragments. One moon escaped the planet but not the system, and became the erratic outer minion Pluto; the other hooked in close to Neptune and remained as Triton.
Another major fragment angled across an inner orbit and interacted there, too large for capture, too small to escape. The two bodies formed the binary planet known as Earth and Luna.
Then a close shot at almost normal time. The landscape of Earth, seven hundred million years ago: strange continents, strange life on both land and sea. The moon came then, sweeping terribly close, a tenth of the distance it was to have at the time of Man. No romantic approach, this, but the awful threat of another application of the Limit. The tides of Earth swelled into calamity, gaping chasms split the surface of Luna. Mounds of water passed entirely over the continents, obliterating every feature upon them and leaving nothing but bare and level land. No land-based life survived, even in fossil, and much of the higher sea-life also perished in that violence. The progression of animate existence on Earth had been set back by a billion years: the greatest calamity it was ever to know.
“And now we make love by the light of Luna,” Afra said, “and plot it into our horoscopes as ‘feeling.’ ”
It was Harold’s turn not to comment.
All this, stemming from the single trans-Mars wreckage — yet the bulk of the refuse dispersed as powder or spiraled into the sun, to have no tangible impact. Debris remained to form a crude ring around the sun in the form of the asteroid belt, and a number of chunks eventually became retrograde moonlets. It would be long before the disorder wrought by this accident was smoothed over.
A third nova, more distant, provided another cloud of dust and particles, adding several tiny moons. Some of the swirls become comets, but the complexion of the system did not alter in any important way. Sol had its family, collected from all over the galaxy, portions of which were older and portions newer than itself. Life recovered from its setback on Earth and individual species crawled back upon the reemerging land and drifting continents in the wake of a receding moon.
One thing more: a solitary traveler came from the more thickly-settled center-section of the galaxy. It was a planetary body moving rather slowly, as though its kinetic energies had been spent by encounters with other systems. It looped about Sol in an extraordinarily wide pass, hesitated, and settled down to stay, averaging seven billion miles out.
“What is that?” Afra inquired.
“That thing must be twice the size of Jupiter!” Harold said. “How could it be there, in our system, and we not know it?” But no one answered.
Ivo half-suspected Schön of joking.
The motion stopped. The picture remained: the contemporary situation, updated to within a million years. They had witnessed in summary the astonishing formation
and history of the Solar System.
“Beautiful, Ivo!” Harold exclaimed. “If you can do that, you can do anything. Congratulations.”
Ivo removed the macroscope paraphernalia. They all were smiling at him, and Afra was getting ready to speak. “I didn’t do it,” he said.
“How can you say that!” Beatryx protested. “Everything was so clear.”
But Afra and Harold had sobered immediately. “Schön?” Harold asked with sympathy.
Ivo nodded. “He said it would take me two weeks, and he was right. He said he could do it in an hour. So I dared him to, I guess.”
“Wasn’t that — dangerous?” Afra asked.
“Yes. But I retained possession.”
Harold was not satisfied. “My chart indicates that a person like Schön would be unlikely to put that amount of effort into a project unless he expected to gain personally. What was his motive?”
“So it was Schön who called me ‘stupid,’ ” Afra murmured.
“I think he has found a way to get around the destroyer,” Ivo said carefully. “The memory trace in my mind, I mean, and maybe the rest too. I think he can take over, now — and I guess he wants to.”
“Are you willing to let him?” Harold asked, not looking at him.
“Well, that is in the contract, you might say. If the rest of you feel I should.” He said it as though it were a routine decision, but it was only with considerable effort that he kept his voice from shaking. It was extinction he contemplated, and it terrified him.
When Afra had feared loss of identity she had fallen back on physical resources and demanded the handling. Irrational, perhaps, but at least it had satisfied her. What did he have to bolster his courage?
“So Schön was merely making a demonstration for us,” Harold said. “An impressive one, I admit. Proving that he can make good on his claims. That he can get us to the destroyer, and with the advance information we need. All we have to do is ask him.”
Macroscope Page 37
