MacRoscope (26 page)

Groton spent a tedious month fashioning the first crude semielectronic prerobotic tool: a type of waldo adapted to respond to a galactic instruction-beam. This device greatly facilitated the detail work for other machines, and progress multiplied.

An alien factory melted the rock of Triton, mixed it with chemical elements extracted from the ocean and produced a fine, strong, airtight nonconductive material that bonded to itself in a matter of hours upon contact, regardless of ambient temperature. Other units carried huge blocks of this “galactite,” light in the quarter-gravity but still heavy as inertial mass, to the lakeside site Groton had selected for the human enclave. Soon there was a pyramid of dominoes fifty feet on a side, completely sealed. The airlocks were more complicated, but a week of signal-directed labor sufficed. This castle was pressurized and heated and lighted, and the human party was able to move in and reside in suitless comfort.

Meanwhile, Afra took her turn to babysit. Beatryx had the first several sessions, but the group felt that rotation was best, in the long run. Ivo was at this point transcribing the horrendously complicated data the early machines required. He hardly understood the terms or concepts, and had to consult with Groton frequently for lessons in elementary electronics. He did not dare augment his very limited comprehension through the program itself, because that might also let in the destroyer. He was forced to perform in ignorance, and it was hellishly fatiguing.

It was not easy to be alone with Afra, however. She was too bright, too beautiful, too bitter. Ivo could hardly blame her, yet it was hard to accept her subtle coldness with equanimity.

“You never knew your parents?” she inquired during one of the breaks.

“None of us did.” Evidently Beatryx had been talking to the others. Well, he hadn’t asked her not to.

“How many of you were there?”

“Three hundred and thirty. Of course, there may have been other groups, for other ages; we were all within a year of each other. A few months, actually.” Why had she grown so curious about his background? Or was it merely a ploy to fill time?

“So you and Brad and Schön are the same age?”

“Yes.” As he said it, he realized the trap. Brad had told her that the groups were separate, and he had just admitted that they were not.

She was silent for so long he felt moved to break the mood. “The idea was to combine—”

“I know!” Then, guilty at her own ferocity. “It is just so hard to believe that Brad could have been colored. I never suspected it.”

This vestigial bigotry in Afra, though he had suspected its existence, came as a nasty shock to Ivo. “We varied in appearance, but the ratios were similar. Brad happened to be very light-skinned, while some were considerably darker than me. Does it matter?” Foolish question.

“Yes. Yes it does, Ivo.” She turned away and looked out over the ice. “Oh, I know I’m supposed to say I’m a Georgia girl brought up in the twentieth century without prejudice. I
know
what a person
is
is what matters, not his lineage, and everyone is equal in our society. That the seeming inferiority of the nonwhite population stems from cultural and economic disadvantage and has no genetic basis. I understand that when Black Power burns its ghettos and pillages stores it’s only the frustration speaking that the complacent white majority has fostered for a century. That all we need to do is work together, all races and all subcultures, to build a better society and negate the evils of the past. But — but I wanted to
marry
him!”

She spun about to face him, gripping the handrail. “It just isn’t in me to love a Negro. I don’t even know why. All my experience—”

She let go and floated, both hands covering her face. “Oh, Brad, Brad, I
do
love you—”

Damned either way. Ivo kept his mouth shut, remembering the thousand little ways he had been advised of his own inferiority, once he left the project. The liberals liked to claim that discrimination was a thing of the past, but few of them were to be found residing near Negro families. Official segregation no longer existed, but he had discovered how unpleasant it could get, how rapidly, when the powerful unofficial guidelines were ignored. He had heard from others how suddenly positions advertised as “equal opportunity” became “filled” when a nonwhite applied — and reopened for subsequent whites. Brad had chosen to “pass” — and had risen too high, too fast for reprisal when the truth leaked out. And evidently the truth had not reached Afra’s ears, at the station. Ivo had chosen not to pass — and had paid the penalty. He was not one-third Caucasian, one-third Mongoloid; he was one-third
Negroid
, and that meant he was black.
1/3 C + 1/3 M + 1/3 N = N
. He was less intelligent than a purebred white, despite the white tests that said otherwise; he was less wholesome, though he washed as often and brushed his teeth with a popular white dentifrice; he was indefinably but definitely unequal and everybody in America knew it, whatever they might utter for public consumption. Whether it was “Get out of here, Nigger!” as it had been in 1960, or the rigid courtesy he had experienced in 1970, or selective blindness in 1980, he was an intruder upon society.

It had been impossible not to react. Hatred bred hatred, and the ghostly white skin of a stranger had come to make him tense up momentarily and think “White!” however objective he tried to keep himself. Yet he had been pitched calamitously into love at sight of the whitest skin of all…

Afra had come out of it. “I am wrong. I know it. But I can’t just change it, presto. I can call myself a white bigot and feel guilty, but that’s still my nature.” She looked at him in a way that hurt him. “You and Brad and Schön — all together?”

“Yes.”

“The color and the IQ and the sex — all at once?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he lie to me!” she cried in anguish.

That required no answer.

“And you, Ivo — you’re lying to me too!”

“Yes.” A half-truth was also a half-lie.

“You were in this free-love thing too. You’ve had more experience—”

“The project broke up when we were fifteen.”

“Stop it! I can read you, Ivo. Tell me the truth. Tell me about you and Brad and Schön.”

“It isn’t—” He stopped. What she was after, she would get, however much he might temporize. “There were a hundred and seventy boys and a hundred and sixty girls. We were raised together from infancy — one big dormitory, no segregation between sexes. We chose our own rooms and roommates and there were no hours.”

“A commune,” she said tersely.

“A commune. But the adults always appeared when there was real trouble, so everyone knew we were watched all the time. It didn’t matter. Most of the kids were pretty smart.”

“They were selected for that,” Afra said. “The complete man was supposed to be a genius.”

“Genetics and environment and statistics indicated that there would be something like genius somewhere within that group, yes. Every day there was education, starting as soon as a child could react to stimulation. Maybe before that — I don’t remember. We were fed high-potency diets and protected against every disease known to man and given constant physical and intellectual stimulation. I think there were as many adult supervisors as children, but they only showed up for the teaching. Almost everyone could speak and read by the age of three, even the slow ones.”

“Group dynamics,” she said. “It was competitive.”

“I guess so. But they were always snooping — the adults, I mean. That was another game — to fool them. Rigging the scores, faking sleep, that sort of thing. They were so gullible. Maybe it was because they were all so educated. They had too much faith in their tests and their bugs and their bell-shaped curves.”

“I can imagine. What about the girls?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “They knew they were female. A number of the kids were precocious that way too. But children four years old don’t see sex the same way as adults do. The anal element—”

“And Schön? That’s where he got his name, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We named ourselves; we were just numbers to the adults. To keep it impartial, I suppose. That’s why my name is a pun. Schön — he got interested in language early—”

“
How
early?”

“Nobody knows. It just seemed he learned six or seven languages at once, along with English, and I understand he could write them too. I didn’t know him then — or ever, for that matter. I think he knew a dozen by the time he was three.”

Afra digested this in silence.

“And he was very pretty. So he roomed with lots of kids, and they all liked him at first. So he was
sehr schon
. I think the
sehr
means—”

“I see. Just how far can four-year-olds go?”

“Sexually? As far as anybody, the motions. I think. At least, Schön could, and the… girls. But he got bored with it pretty soon.”

“You’re still lying by indirection, but I can’t pin it down. How did Brad fit into this?”

“He was Schön’s best friend. His only friend at the end, perhaps. Schön didn’t really need anybody. I guess it was because they were the two smartest, though Schön was really in a class by himself.”

She was silent again, and he knew she was thinking of Brad’s 215 IQ. “They were — roommates.”

“Yes.” Then he grasped the direction of her thinking. “You have to understand — there weren’t any social conventions from outside. No restrictions.” But it bothered him as sharply as it bothered her; he was defending it from necessity. “It was all play — homo or hetero or group—”

“Group!”

Ivo shrugged. “What’s wrong with it, objectively?”

“I seem to have more prejudices than I thought.” Ivo was discovering how much more reasonable a shared prejudice seemed.

“But there wasn’t any challenge to that. It didn’t mean anything. So most of our energies were concentrated on learning, and outwitting the fumbling adults.”

“How intelligent
was
the average child, if the supervisors didn’t know?”

“I don’t know either. But I’d guess the adults thought it was one twenty-five, while actually it was 25 or 30 points above that.”

She became thoughtful once more, perhaps pondering existence in a group where she would have been barely average. But her next words proved otherwise: “Your ‘experts’ didn’t do their homework well enough. Didn’t they know what happens to children deprived of their family life?”

“It wasn’t possible to have—”

“Yes it was, if they’d really wanted to take the trouble. They could have placed each child in an adoptive home, or at least foster care, with the formal training and stimulation and what-have-you provided centrally. Similar in that respect to the way the Peckham Experiment functioned.”

Ivo tried to conceal his surprise at her reference. She was better educated than he had thought, despite what he already knew of her abilities. “They weren’t trying for family harmony. They wanted brains.”

“So they defeated themselves by precipitating an unrestrained peer-group. When parental guidance is absent, the standards of the peer-group take over early — and they aren’t always ‘nice’ standards. If the average American child is perverted to some extent by the increasing preoccupation, neglect and absence of his parents, and by the violence of TV and news headlines, and the viciousness of deprived peers that are his chief contact with the world, think how much worse it would be for the children who never had families at all! No incentive to excel at useful tasks, no development of conscience. You need a father in the house for that, or a good strong father-substitute. And the notion that only persons with masters degrees in education are qualified to raise children — no wonder they came up with someone like Schön!”

Ivo hadn’t seen it that way before, but it made sense to him now. What he was experiencing here, with Harold and Beatryx and Afra herself, was actually a family situation. Already it had stimulated him to performance far beyond anything he had approached before. And — he liked it. Argument, danger, grueling work and continued friction there might be — but they were all pulling together, and it was better than the life he had known on Earth.

“Didn’t that adult-baiting game bore Schön pretty soon too? What did he do about it?”

Back to specifics. “He left.”

“From a monitored dormitory? An enclosed camp? Where did he go?”

“Nobody knew, exactly. He was just gone.”

“You’re lying again. Brad knew.”

“I guess so.”

“And
you
— you knew. You still know! Even Brad couldn’t fetch him, but
you
could — except you wouldn’t!”

Ivo did not answer.

“And it’s all tied in somehow with that poem of yours, and the planet Neptune, and that damned pinned pawn.”

Had she assembled the puzzle? Schön evidently wanted her to. Did she know how readily she could summon the genie, knew she but its abode? Could she suspect the consequence of too rash a conjuration?

The pyramid — actually a tetrahedron — became a splendid center under the patter of little metal feet supervised by instructions from space. One face was flush with the ground, and a triangle of triangles pointed at Neptune. Dull, impervious blocks on the outside gave way to twenty-first century comfort on the inside. Each person had a room — Groton and Beatryx an apartment, with electric accommodations and sophisticated plumbing. Spongy warm rugs lined the floors, and the walls were painted attractively.

With power and a machine shop, and the incoming galactic program, Groton directed an irregular stream of wonders. He produced a device that converted Tritonian soil into protein, and another that generated a field of force that would enclose a larger area outside the tetrahedron and retain an Earthlike atmosphere. Yet another served to focus gravity and bring their weight, in this limited area of the planet, up to Earth-normal.

Matter-conversion, force-field, gravity control — these things staggered Ivo’s imagination. They had assumed that galactic technology would exceed that of Earth, but the fact was somewhat overwhelming. How many decades — how many
centuries
— would be required for Earth to develop such things on its own? The proboscoids of Sung had never achieved this level. They, of course, had not been able to penetrate the destroyer and receive the programs beyond it. Otherwise, many of their problems could have been materially alleviated.