MacRoscope (3 page)

Ivo grinned, feeling awkward for no reason he could say. What was this piece, to him?

“Ivo, this is Afra Glynn Summerfield.”

She smiled. Sunrise over the marsh.

Brad went on talking, but Ivo did not hear the words. In a single photographic flash the whole of her had been imprinted upon his ambition.

Afra Glynn Summerfield: prior impressions, prior liaisons — these were nothing. She wore a dress of slightly archaic flavor, with silvery highlights, and her shoes were white slippers.

The lines of her:

Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl.

As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl.

Afra: inward and outward, firm sweet limbs, hair the color of the Georgia sunset. Glynn: silver-wrought friend of his friend. Summerfield: his fancy lingered and curled.

Afra Glynn Summerfield: at this glance, beloved of Ivo.

He had thought himself practical about romance, with disciplined dreams. He had accepted the fact that love was not feasible for a person in his unique situation.

Feasibility had been preempted by reality.

“Hey, moonstruck — wake up!” Brad exclaimed cheerfully. “She hits everyone like that, the first time. Must be that polished-copper hair she flaunts.” He turned to Afra. “I’d better get him out of here till he recovers. He gets tongue-tied around beautiful girls. See you in an hour, okay?”

She nodded and breathed him a kiss.

Ivo trailed him back into the hall, hardly aware. He
was
shy with girls, but this was of a different magnitude. Never before had he been so utterly devastated.

“Come on. The ’scope will settle your stomach.”

Somehow they were already on the first level. They donned light pressure-suits and entered what Ivo took to be an airlock. It was a tall cylinder less than four feet in diameter set pointing toward the center of the doughnut, but at an angle, and it terminated in a bubblelike ceiling.

Brad touched buttons, and the air about them was drawn off and replaced by a yellowish fog. “Now stand firm and clench your gloves together, like this,” Brad said, demonstrating. “Make sure your balance is good, and hold your elbows out, but tense, as though you expect to be hanging from them. Let out half your breath and hold it, and don’t panic. Okay?” His voice was distorted by the sealed helmets.

Ivo obeyed, knowing that his friend never gave irrelevant instructions. Brad drew out a transparent tube with a filter on one end and poked a tiny sphere into it. He screwed a springy bulb to the filter-end.

“Pea-shooter,” he explained. “I am young at heart.” He aimed the tube directly up and squeezed the bulb sharply.

Ivo saw the streak as the shot went up. Then he was launched into space, somersaulting uncontrollably. The giant torus of the station careened about him, a faceless mouth, the monster bands of its segment-junctures reminding him of the vertical cracks in parched, pursed lips.

A hand caught his foot and steadied him. “You didn’t listen,” Brad said reprovingly, straight-faced within the bubble-helmet. “I told you to watch your balance.” His voice seemed to come from the depths, now conducted only via the physical contact between them.

“I didn’t listen,” Ivo agreed ruefully. He looked about and found that they were flying toward the center of the station: the fifty-foot metallic ball guyed by nylon wires extending to the inner rim of the torus. He and Brad were still rotating slowly, some of his motion having been imparted to his friend, but in free-fall this was inconvenient rather than distressing. He had to keep adjusting in order to keep his gaze on the destination.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Ivo said when it was clear that Brad was not going to explain. “You popped a — a bubble, and the atmospheric pressure squirted us out. Since your airgun-spacelock is aimed at the center—”

“I see you have recovered a wit or two. Actually, I was showing off a little; that isn’t exactly the approved technique. Wastes gas and is dangerous for the inexperienced, to name a couple of objections. We’re supposed to wait for the catapult. Nobody does, of course. Even so, you’re wrong about the aim. The tube is tilted to compensate for angular momentum; otherwise we’d miss the target every time because of the spin of the torus. Apart from all that, your guess was fair.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now watch your footing as we land.” Brad removed his hand, nudging the foot just enough to counter the remaining spin and send Ivo slightly ahead, and he fell upright toward the dark surface of the artificial planetoid.

He saw now that the guys were actually light chains. They merely anchored the mass in place, so that arrivals and departures such as theirs did not jog it out of alignment. Each hooked to a traveling roller magnetically attached, so that the rotation of the doughnut imparted no spin to the ball.

“This is the macroscope proper?” he inquired before remembering that his voice would not carry through the vacuum, now that contact was gone. Obviously it
was
the ’scope, painstakingly isolated from unwanted motions and intrusions. He had no doubt that their approach was being observed, or that it had been cleared well in advance.

The macroscope was the most expensive, important device ever put into space by man. The project had been financed and staffed internationally as research in the public interest: meaning that while no single government had cared to expend such considerable resources on such a farfetched speculation, none could afford to leave the potential benefits entirely to others.

Compromise had accomplished mighty things. The macroscope was functioning, and each participant was entitled to a share of its use proportionate to the investment, and a similar weighted share of all information obtained. That was most of what Ivo knew about it; exactly what hours fell to whom was classified information. Much of the result was general: details of astronomic research that had the astronomers gaping. The scope, it seemed, ground out exceeding fine pictures. Much was concealed from the common man, but the awe this instrument nevertheless inspired was universal.

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.