MacRoscope (24 page)

He went to sit upon the edge of the last basin, holding the hand above it so that any moisture that dropped would fall inside. The nerves were out for the duration, that was evident; but there did not appear to be any further erosion. He had lost hair follicles and a scraping of skin: not serious.

What
would
happen if a person were only partially exposed? Could a limb be painlessly amputated and preserved in such fashion, in case of injury? He was sure it could. This, perhaps, had been the original purpose of the technique. There might even be instructions somewhere concerning the regeneration of such a limb. How little he knew about the process he had invoked!

Morbidly he watched Beatryx’s intestines come exposed. The light seemed to eat through the packed convolutions while it worried at the muscular bladder below them. What, indeed — what possible secrets could a woman have to hide, after the literal depth of her had been thus probed and vanquished? What physical act could approach the devastating intimacy of this association? There was her uterus, there the open channel of her vagina, there her anus and colon, seen from the inside in surgical cutaway. How was she different from Afra now?

How was
anyone
different from anyone else, in this ultimate reckoning?

And he had been embarrassed to touch Afra’s body! He was glad now that at least one woman had insisted on it. The memory of the feel of that firm whole flesh was about the only comfort he had now, knowing that that flesh was whole no more.

God! (both prayer and expletive) — was the salvation offered by the macroscope worth it?

The beam ceased, startling him. Beatryx was done.

He realized that he was alone. He had only to wait a few more hours, and the UN ship would fetch him in, and the adventure would be over. He would not have to take the terrible risk the others had taken; he could be sure, at least, of life.

He was not honestly tempted. The others had not yielded to their fears; indeed, they had trusted him so far as to undertake this bizarre transformation before him, risking horrible extinction for the sake of the mission.
His
mission. That was the stuff of heroes. That was the stuff he meant to prove to himself. He, Ivo — not the grandiose Schön he had been summoned to summon.

And it was, he realized now, the only way he could follow Afra. If the UN caught them now, the macroscope would be taken away, and the vats of protoplasm would, in the course of months, gradually deteriorate. A year was about the limit, for shelf-life, as he understood it. After that, reconstitution could become ugly.

He stripped awkwardly, because of his unconscious hand. He moved Beatryx beside her husband and covered her and tied her down. He positioned his own bath and climbed in.

Then he climbed out quickly, remembering something. The clothing of four people lay scattered recklessly. It could be dangerous when the rocket maneuvered. He bundled it all together, separating out coins and pens and wallets and keys and pins and women’s purses and placing them in separate storage bins.

He looked at the worn old penny he had saved so long, memento of a foolishly missed bus. He also still had the unused bus token. Suppose one of those were to drift loose during maneuvers, and drop into someone’s vat of jelly? Ouch!

He climbed in a second time. He would remain beneath the beam, of course, and it would come on again at any time after the minimum period had elapsed, provided that conditions were appropriate. That meant, in this case, normal gravity.

How could it tell what 1-G was, Earth definition? Too late to worry about that now!

Ready or not, he thought, not even frightened any more. Ready or not, here I—

Could experience be inherited? Lysenko, the Russian scientist of yore, had argued that it could. His theory of environment above heredity had seemingly been discredited by his own malfeasance and the winds of political change — but later researches had thrown the issue open again.

The alien beam melted down functional flesh and reduced it to quiescent cells that required little nourishment, surviving during their estivation largely upon their internal nutrient resources. The reconstitution would re-create the original individual —
along with all his memories
. All of it had to be in the cell — the lifetime of experience as well as the physical form. Only if that experience, right down to the most evanescent flicker of thought, were recorded in the chromosomes, the genes, or somewhere in the nucleus, of every tiny cell of the body — only thus could the complete physique and personality be restored.

The alien presentation said it could be done. The alien intellect was in a position to know.

Unless the flesh of Earthly creatures were not quite typical of that of the rest of the planetary species in the universe…

“Put up or shut up!” Ivo thought somewhere — before, after, during? — and waited for his answer.

What a joke if the alien were mistaken!

Here I
—

Swimming through a thick warm sea, an ocean of blood, smooth, delicious, eternal.

Here
—

Climbing on the cruel heavy land, a continent of bone, hot, chill, transient.

How to speak without a lung? To think, without a brain?

A jumble of sensation: curiosity, terror, hunger, passion, satiation, lethargy.

An eon passing.

“…come.” Ivo opened his eyes.

He was lying in the container, uncovered, bathed in lukewarm water. He felt fine. Even his hand was whole again.

He sat up, shook himself dry, and donned his clothing. Then he brought over the next coffin, able to tell by its weight and his own that gravity was 1-G, and removed the cover.

Inside was an attractive, vaguely layered semifluid. No bones showed. He withdrew.

The beam came on, illuminating the jellylike substance. The protoplasm quivered, but nothing obvious happened at first.

Patience
, he told himself.
It worked before
.

Gradually a speck developed within its translucent upper layer; a mote, a tiny eye, a nucleus. It drifted about; it expanded into a marble, a golf-ball. It opened into a flexing cup that sucked in liquid and spewed it out through the same opening, propelling it cautiously through the medium. The walls of it became muscular, until it resembled an animate womb perpetually searching for an occupant. Then the spout folded over, sealed across the center, and became two: an intake and an outgo. The fluid funneled through more efficiently, and the creature grew.

It lengthened, and ridges along its side developed into fins, and one hole gravitated to the nether area. Patches manifested near the front and became true eyes, and it was a fish.

The fins thickened; the body became stout, less streamlined. The fish gulped air through an ugly, horrendously-toothed mouth and heaved its snout momentarily out of the fluid, taking in a bubble of air. It continued to grow, and its head came into the air to stay. Its near eye fixed on Ivo disconcertingly. Now it was almost reptilian, with a substantial fleshy tail in place of the flukes, and claws on well-articulated feet. The mouth opened to show the teeth again, fewer than before, but still too many. It was large; its mass took up half the fluid at this stage.

Then it shrank to the size of a rodent, casting off flesh in a quick reliquefication. Hair sprouted where scales had been, and the teeth became differentiated. Ratlike, it peered at him, switching its thin tail.

It grew again, as though a suppressant had been eliminated. It developed powerful limbs, heavy fur, a large head. The snout receded, the eyes came forward, the ears flattened onto the sides of the head. The limbs lengthened and began to shed their hair; the tail shriveled; the forehead swelled.

It was beginning to resemble a man.

Rather, a woman: multiple teats assembled into two, traveling up along the belly to the chest. The hairy face became clear, the muscular limbs slim. The pelvis broadened, the midsection shrank. The hair of the head reached down; the breasts swelled invitingly.

Goddess of fertility, she lay upon her back and contemplated him through half-lidded eyes.

Age set in. Her middle plumpened; her fine mammaries lost their resiliency; her face became round.

The beam cut off.

“Is it over, Ivo?”

He started, ashamed to be caught staring. “Yes.”

He turned his back upon Beatryx so that she could dress in privacy. The reconstitution had not been as alarming as the dissolution, but it had had its moments. Worst was his impression of awareness throughout. The entire evolution of the species recapitulated in—

He checked the time.

— four hours. It had seemed like four minutes.

“I will fix lunch,” she said. That was how he knew that she did not want to watch any other reconstitutions.

Groton revived next, and this time Ivo knew it was four hours. Finally Afra, and it seemed like eight.

“Check me,” she said immediately. She had not forgotten.

The two men handled her in turn, hardly embarrassed this time around, and pronounced her real. “Yes,” she said. “I was sure I was.” The transformation was a subjective success.

Nothing was said about Brad. By mutual unspoken consent they let him remain as he was, in suspended animation or storage. What point reviving him now?

They sped toward Neptune, a scant two million miles distant. Ivo needed no instrument to contemplate its grandeur. From this point in space the planet had an apparent diameter twice that of Luna as seen from Earth, or a full degree. It was a great-banded disk of green speckled with dots and slashes, as though a godlike entity had played a careless game of sprouts upon its surface.

They were in free-fall, with Brad’s container sealed and aerated by an electric pump.

“Dull,” Afra murmured facetiously. “Just a minor gas-giant nobody would miss.”

Dull? Ivo appreciated the irony, for he had never seen a more impressive object. As he concentrated he was able to discern more detail: the comparatively bright, yellowish equatorial belt, blue-gray bands enclosing it above and below, mottled green “temperate” sections merging into the black poles — a rather attractive effect. Earth, compared to this, was a bleak white nonentity. Neptune’s spots were concentrated in the central zone and were mostly dark brown or black, and he almost thought they moved, though he had no objective evidence. A single dark blue oval showed near the horizon in what he thought of as the northern hemisphere. The planet was not visibly oblate, yet his eye filled in what he thought was there. He imagined a celestial pair of hands compressing the planet so that its midriff bulged, the belt taut.

Now he studied the surrounding “sky.” It was seemingly sunless, with fiercely bright and crowded stars. The largest object, apart from Neptune itself, was a disk several diameters to the left.

“Triton,” Afra said, observing the direction of his glance. “Neptune’s major moon. There’s a smaller one, Nereid, that’s farther out than we are now. Nereid’s orbit is cometlike; very unusual for a planetary satellite. Of course, there may be other moons we haven’t discovered yet; new ones keep popping up around the major planets.”

“This is all very interesting,” Beatryx said, obviously only marginally interested. Ivo suspected that she still suffered from the shock of the melting procedure, but tended to internalize it. “But now that we’re here, what do we
do
?”

No one answered. Neptune loomed larger already, green monarch of the sea of space around them.

“It looks so big,” Beatryx said. “And — wild. Are you sure it’s safe?”

Groton smiled. “Neptune is seventeen or eighteen times as massive as Earth, but it is a lot less dense. What we see is not really the surface of the planet — it is the cloud cover. So it
is
large and wild, but don’t worry — we won’t try to land on it. We’ll take up orbit around it.”

“We’ll just
love
a year of free-fall,” Afra said.

Ivo watched the crumbs of their meal floating elusively in the currents of the forced-air circulation and knew what she meant. Free-fall was fun to visit, but not to stay. The space was too confined for long-term residence of four people, and muscles would atrophy in weightlessness if the body didn’t malfunction in other ways first. And keeping Brad aerated yet contained would be tedious, perhaps dangerous. The melting was supposed to be a high-gravity alleviant, and might be vulnerable to prolonged weightlessness.

No — an orbit around Neptune was no answer.

“How about Triton?” Groton said. “It’s about the size and mass of Mercury, I understand. Surface gravity should be about a quarter Earth-normal, and there might even be a little atmosphere. We’ll need a base of operations, if only to process hydrogen for the tanks. And it would be fairly simple to intercept Triton at this angle, since we’re coming up behind it.”

“That does sound very nice,” Beatryx said.

Groton was just warming up. “Now as I see it, our original purpose was to rescue the macroscope from deactivation or worse by the UN. To accomplish this it was necessary to remove the instrument from the immediate vicinity of Earth in a hurry. This much has been accomplished. Our main responsibility now is to keep ourselves advised of the situation at home, and to be ready to return the scope when the time is appropriate. Meanwhile, we can utilize the scope for reconnaissance.”

Ivo smiled. “You mean Super-Duper Poo—”

Afra quashed him with a glance. Oh, well. Call it reconnaissance or call it poop scooping, there was no sense going back blind.

“What’s this?” Afra demanded. They looked at her, startled. She had apparently been reorganizing her purse during the preceding dialogue, and now was looking at a page of a little stenographer’s notebook.

Ivo saw strange squiggles on the sheet.

“It’s in stenotype — a script version,” Afra said. “I never heard of such a thing! I use Gregg.”

“Oh, shorthand,” Groton said. “Can you make it out?”

Afra concentrated on the half-familiar symbols. “It doesn’t make much sense. It says ‘My pawn is pinned.’ ”

“Another message from Schön!” Beatryx exclaimed.

“He must have planted notes all over the station,” Groton said. “That polyglot, then the Neptune-symbol, and now this. He could have written them all at once and distributed them for us to find randomly—”

“But why didn’t he come to us directly?” Beatryx wanted to know. “If he was close enough to get into Afra’s purse—”

“Schön is devious,” Ivo said. But the explanation sounded insufficient, even to him. What other little surprises did the genius have in store for them?

Neptune had grown monstrously by the time the ship braked down to something resembling orbital velocity. The planet’s disk was fifteen times the apparent diameter of Luna from Earth, and its roiling atmospheric layers were horrendously evident. The great bands of color hardly showed now; instead there was a three-dimensional mélange of cloud and gas and turbulence suggesting a photograph of a complex of hurricanes. The spectators were still too far removed to perceive the actual motion, and could contemplate at leisure the awesome extent of the frozen detail.

Ivo felt as though he were peering into a cauldron of layered oils recently disturbed by heating. He had a vision of Brad’s basin perched on a furnace — and suppressed it, shocked at himself. Gray-blue bubbles a thousand miles across seemed to rise through the pooled, heavy gases, while slipstreams of turbulence trailed at the edges. In one place the recent passage of a bubble had left a beautifully defined cutaway section of gaseous strata, yellow layered on green on pink and black. In another, masses of whitish substance — hydrogen snow — were depressing the seeming ocean beneath, ballooning downward in a ponderous inversion. He was reminded of hot wax flowing into cool water.

No, there would be no landing in that.

Afra had retreated to the bowels of Joseph to supervise the maneuvering. They had cut inside Triton’s retrograde orbit and were overhauling the moon at a rate that was rapid in miles per hour but seemed slow because of the immensity of the scale. The thirty-one-thousand-mile disk of Neptune dwarfed everything, and its rainbow hues rendered its satellite drab.

Yet baby Triton had its share of intrigue. Only a tenth the diameter of Neptune, it was still one and a half times the span of Luna, and three and a half times Luna’s mass. Triton, mass considered, was the true giant of the moons of the Solar system, though there were others with a larger diameter. It expanded until its disk was the size of that of the mighty Neptune, then larger, and it was as though the two were sister planets. But where Neptune was stormy and bright, Triton was still and dark, from this angle. Its surface was tunelessly rigid.

“Rigid ridges,” Ivo murmured, half expecting Afra to say “What?” But she was not at hand.

There were craters: mighty broken rings of rock, shadowed in the middle, some pocked by smaller craters within. There were mountains: overlapping wrinkles across the surface. There was a brief atmosphere hazing the planetary outlines. And there were oceans.

“Must be some compound of oxygen and nitrogen,” Groton said. “Water is out of the question.” Intrigued, he had Ivo focus the macroscope on it and code in a spectroscopic analysis. “Atmosphere is mostly neon and nitrogen,” Groton said as he studied the result. “With a little oxygen and trace argon. The ocean is a liquefied compound of—”

Then they spied the object in space.

“Alert!” Groton snapped into the intercom. “We’re overhauling something, and I don’t mean Triton.”

“A ship?” Afra’s voice came back. “Schön?”

Ivo centered the small finder-telescope upon it. The thing leaped into focus: a fragment of matter about forty miles in diameter. “Too big,” he announced. “It’s rock or another solid — and it’s irregular.” He checked the specific indications, since they were passing it rapidly enough to measure parallax. “About fifty miles long, thirty-five wide at the thickest point.”

“I see it!” Afra cried. “We have it on Joseph’s screen now. We —
that thing is in orbit
!”

“Not around Neptune,” Groton protested. “It’s heading in toward the planet. Couldn’t—” He paused to take in his breath. “A moon of a
moon?
I don’t believe it.”

But it had to be believed. Due observation and analysis showed that it was a satellite of Triton, orbiting at about ten thousand miles distance with its broad side facing its primary. Its direction was “normal” — opposite to that of retrograde Triton. Its composition: H
₂
O.

It was a solid mass of ice, so cold that its surface would be harder than steel — and at the edges it was translucent. The light of stars shone through it, separating into prismatic (though very faint) flashes of color, a constant peripheral display.

“What a beauty!” Afra exclaimed. “Whatever shall we name it?”

“Schön,” Groton said succinctly.

Ivo waited for Afra to object, but there was no reply from the intercom. Presumably she was waiting for
him
to object. The implications—

“This,” said Groton, “is a break. We won’t have to set up an orbit; one is waiting here for us.”

“But we
have
to land on Triton,” Ivo protested. “Schön couldn’t possibly provide the gravity we need. Schön-
moon
, I mean.” He had been made edgily aware of the unsatisfied curiosity about Schön-
person
that continued to nag at the others’ minds.

“No question there. But we can’t simply settle down with the macroscope on Joseph’s nose. We’re geared for space; a landing would crush us.”

“But if the ship stood up under ten G’s, and this is only a quarter G—”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. The ten G’s were steady and uniform; the drop would be another matter. The effect of it would be many times ten G.”

“Oh.” At least Groton wasn’t superior about his knowledge. “But if the ship can’t land, and
we
can’t stay in free-fall—”

“Planetary module. We’ll get down all right. It will actually be easier to shuttle back and forth, and we won’t have to risk the macroscope on land. Just so long as we don’t lose Joseph in the sky after we desert him. But with an object as big and bright as Schön to zero in on, we won’t have a problem. We’ll be able to spot that in the sky without a telescope, any time.”

The reasoning evidently appealed to Afra, because they were already phasing in on Schön. The block of ice seemed to drift closer, and the pits and bumps of its frigid surface magnified. The moonlet filled the screen, until it seemed as though they were coming in for a landing on a snowbound arctic plane — except that there was no discernible gravity.

Gently Afra closed with it, guiding the ship in by means of the tiny chemical stabilizer jets set in the sides. Ivo wondered what would happen when they came to rest, since the macroscope housing bulged well beyond the girth of Joseph — then remembered that with so little attraction there would be no particular stress. Actually, they were closer to synchronous orbit than to a “landing,” and it would be wise to tie the ship down.

At fifty miles an hour, relative velocity, they approached, coming up underneath the moonlet; then twenty, and down to five. Schön seemed near enough to touch and the sense of being underneath it had dissolved; it was now like drifting
down
in a blimp. Finally, at barely one mile an hour, they covered the last few feet and jolted into contact. They were down.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” Groton suggested as the two women came forward. “The recondensing water vapor will anchor the ship as it cools, and that won’t be long at all. We have no responsibilities, for the moment.”

They went out upon the surface, and it was like flying. It was a vacation from reality. The trace vapors generated by the leaking warmth of their suits buoyed them up, away from the cold surface, and they had to use their gas jets to control their motion. A single push, and Ivo sailed along at a ten-foot elevation, feeling both powerful and insecure. To have a physical landscape so close, yet not to be bound by it…

Schön, like Triton, was locked to its primary. They had landed upon the “downward” face, and this accentuated the wrongness. Triton was too big, too close; when they looked at it they seemed to be above it, and when they drifted too high it was like falling, except that they fell, instead,
up
toward Schön. Was it the stuff of dreams — or of nightmares?

Ivo approached the horizon, and it did not recede from him. He drifted over the edge and had to correct as the “ground” dropped away from him, a new horizon a mile ahead. This really was a flat world; it
was
possible to fall off the edge, though the fall would be away rather than down. He navigated the intervening mile and found a third horizon, half a mile distant. One more, he thought; one more, then quiet. This experience was tiring.

But, fascinated, he traversed two more — and there was Neptune.

He knew that the ruling planet was no larger than it had appeared from the ship. He reminded himself of that. But then he had been closed in, protected; here he was exposed, and seemingly ready to plunge directly into it. The gaping face of it appalled him, so close, so fierce — the aspect of a physical destroyer. God of the sea — terror of man.

Ivo fired his jet and retreated hastily.

They had to take the ship into space again — a mile or so — to effect the separation of the module; then Afra piloted the chemical craft while Groton brought Joseph back to Schön. Ivo and Beatryx watched the entire maneuver from the landed macroscope housing, and he was not certain which of them was more nervous. An accident, even a slight mishap — and they could be stranded where they were for the duration. Until death did them part — shortly.