MacRoscope (32 page)

“The convolutions would develop convolutions,” she said, “assuming that your line is infinitely flexible. May I draw a detail subsection?”

“You may.”

Carefully she rendered it:

“This would be shaped into larger loops,” she explained, “and the small ones could be subdivided similarly, until your circle is an impacted mass of threads. The diameter and flexibility of your line would be the only limitation of the process.”

“Excellent,” he said. “Sit down.”

She bristled momentarily, then remembered her place. She sat.

“Now assuming that this is an accurate cosmology,” he lectured, “note certain features.” He pointed with the chalk. “Our line touches itself at many points, both in the small loops and large ones. Suppose it were possible to pass across those connections, instead of traveling down the length of our line in normal fashion?”

“Down the line being traveled from one area to another in space? As from Earth to Neptune?” He nodded. “Why—” She hesitated, seeing the possibilities. “If Earth and Neptune happened to be in adjacent loops, you might jump from one to the other in — well, virtually,
no
time.”

“Let’s say that this is the case, and that those adjacent subloops are here.” He pointed to the top of the first major loop. “Assume that arrangements and preparations make the effective duration of any single jump a matter of a few hours. How long would it take to reach Alpha Centauri from Earth?”

“That depends on its position and the configuration. It might be possible in a single hop, or it might require several months of jumping. By the same token, it might be as easy to traverse the entire galaxy — if this representation of the nature of space is accurate.”

“The macroscope suggests this is the case.”

She caught on rapidly. “So the destroyer origin is theoretically within reach?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, life coming into her face. She, like Beatryx, had lost weight, but she was lovely yet. “How long have you worn that shirt?”

He stuttered, caught completely by surprise. “I — I don’t know. What — ?”

“Too long. May I?”

“I—”

She walked around him, pulling out his shirt and unbuttoning it. She removed it and bundled it under her arm. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and departed, leaving him somewhat stupefied.

It had been forcibly brought home to him who, if this were a game, had the ranking hand.

A mouse born into Leo was still a mouse, he remembered. Afra, however low she might sink, remained a stronger personality than he.

Six hours later his shirt was back, clean and fragrant.

He looked for Afra, not knowing what to say or whether to say it — and found her kneeling beside Brad’s grave, sweet-pea flowers in her hand, tears coursing down her cheeks.

And what had he expected?

Earth: city: “disadvantaged” neighborhood.

Children played in a tiny dirt yard, throwing rocks at a broken bottle. Their clothing was dirty and sodden with sweat; their feet were bare. All were thin, and posture and appearance hinted at malnutrition.

Inside the house, a sick child slept restlessly, flies crawling across his cheek and buzzing up whenever he moved. He lay on a ragged mattress, refuse collected beneath it. Roaches peered from the hole in the wall where the yellow plaster had fallen away.

In the next room a grizzled man sprawled before a bright television set, swigging now and then from a concave whisky bottle. He was as grimy as the children.

Ivo imagined the dialogue he might have with this man, were conversation possible:

“You’re going to pot here. Why don’t you move to a better neighborhood?”

“Can’t afford it. I’m in hock now.”

“Why don’t you look for a better job, then? The economy is booming; you could make a lot more money.”

“I tried that. Man said I needed more education.”

“Why don’t you go back to school, then? To one of the free technical universities?”

“They have a quota system; only so many per district, and this one’s full up until 1985.”

“Well, why don’t you move, then… oh, I see.”

Ivo removed the helmet and goggles and shook his head. This was the age of affluence, with a record GNP and excellent jobs begging for personnel. Yet the macroscope showed the truth: whether because of this particular vicious circle or some variant of it, people were living in poverty. The residence he had just viewed was typical of a growing — not shrinking — segment of the population.

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when only nonwhite Americans lived this way. There would come a time, not so very far removed, when only the affluent lived any other way.

Why should he have any regrets about leaving this area of space?

He did, though.

Groton watched the screen as Ivo guided the image into the disk of Neptune. The mighty vapors boiled at an apparent distance of a thousand miles, throwing up great gouts of color.

Five hundred miles, four hundred, and it was easy to fancy that they were aboard a ship actually coming in for a landing, and to feel the fierce spume of the methane storm. The dark dot he had centered on had now been clarified as the eye of a hurricane — the eye alone three hundred miles in diameter and awesomely deep. Hydrogen gas swirled thinly in its center, and thick methane weighted with ammonia crystals rushed around the rim. The wind velocity at the surface they could presently see was four hundred miles per hour.

The cliffs of the cloudwall rose up, titanic, translucent, deadly. Then shadow as he lost the funnel, recovered it, lost it again. A hundred miles down, the tube was only a few tens of miles across, narrowing rapidly, and it wavered. Finally it was gone for good: either too thin to pinpoint or dissipated in the thickening atmosphere five hundred miles below the opening. Some light remained, but it was fading rapidly with depth.

A thousand miles down: still the turbulent gases and flying storm crystals. Two thousand: the same. Three thousand — and no solid surface.

“Does this planet
have
a surface?” Ivo demanded in frustration.

“Got to,” Groton said. “Somewhere. Too dense overall to be all gas.”

Four thousand. Five.

“Sure your settings are tuned? Maybe we’re not as deep as we thought.”

“I’m sure. It’s the damn
planet
that’s wrong!”

Six, seven.

At eight thousand miles below the visible surface they encountered the first solid material: caked ammonia ice. The macroscope readings were becoming vague; in this cold there was too little radiation in the proper range.

At nine, genuine water-ice: rock-hard, opaque.

Ten: the same.

“We’re two-thirds of the way to the core — and nothing but
ice
?” Ivo demanded.

The traces were almost unreadable — but at almost twelve thousand miles depth they struck rock.

“Do you realize,” Groton whispered, “that Neptune proper is smaller than
Earth
? Less than an eight-thousand mile diameter core—” He looked at the indications, that abruptly showed clear. “But what a core! Tungsten, gold, platinum, iridium, osmium — the heaviest elements of the universe are packed in here! Think of what a gold mine this place is!” He paused. “Gold? Throw it away! The stuff here—” He gave up.

“Is it
all
precious metal?”

“Sorry — got excited. No, it’s seventy percent iron, and the rest mostly oxygen and silicon. The heavy stuff just leaped out at me. But there
is
a lot of it, compared to what we’re used to, and the proportion is bound to increase with depth. Mighty solid lithosphere. But then, it has to be. As I make it, something like two-thirds the mass of this planet has to be in the core — and the core’s no larger than our Earth. My God — I didn’t think! This core — it has to be ten, eleven times the average density of Earth, to make that mass.
Nothing’s
that solid.”

“Going down,” Ivo said.

It was that solid. The multiple heavy elements on the core-ball’s “surface” were floating there because the interior was several times their density.

It was composed of partially collapsed matter: the refuse, possibly, of an extinct dwarf star. Protons and neutrons were jammed together with only imperfect electron layers holding them apart.

“It seems,” Groton remarked, “that half our job has been done for us.”

Ivo nodded, satisfied.

Ivo began to explain their intent to the women.

“The idea is to utilize the principle of gravitational collapse. We have obtained schematics for a rather sophisticated variant of the gravity focuser, though this resembles what we have here on Triton about the way a hydrogen bomb resembles a matchstick. Assembly of the generators alone will take months, even with a full crew of waldoes, and the related safeguards—”

“What do you mean by ‘gravitational collapse’?” Afra interjected.

“Oh. Well, simplified, it is the effect gravitational attraction has on matter when taken to the extreme. Any object of sufficient mass tends to compress itself by its own gravity, and the more dense it is the stronger this force becomes. Actually the other forces, electromagnetic and nuclear, are far stronger on a unit basis than—”

“May I?” Groton put in. “I think I can simplify this for the benefit of those who haven’t been exposed to a galactic education.” Suddenly Ivo realized that “those” meant Beatryx. He had become used to Afra’s almost instant comprehension, and tended to forget that the other woman was slower, though as vitally concerned. He had forgotten, also, that he was now talking in a manner he would not have comprehended himself, not so long ago; despite his care not to fathom galactic meanings too deeply, he had picked up a considerable amount.

And of course that was the reason Afra had asked her question.
She
knew astronomy and physics far better than he did, and was aware that the other woman was being left behind.

“You see,” Groton said, “Triton is smaller than Earth, so we weigh less there — I mean
here
— or did, before we started changing things. Schön is smaller yet, so on it we hardly weigh anything at all. But it isn’t just size that counts. If Schön were made of osmium instead of ice, it would have about twenty-five times its present mass, and therefore more gravity. We would then weigh more there than we do, though still very little.”

Beatryx nodded. Ivo was impressed; he had not really appreciated what a real talent teaching was. Comprehension was one thing; converting one’s knowledge into a clear explanation for others was another.

“But a planet isn’t just pulling at
us
,” Groton continued. “It is pulling at itself, too. It is much more tightly packed in the center than at the edge, because of its own gravity. And if we squeezed Triton down into a little ball about the size of Schön, and stood on that we’d weigh more than we do now, just because it was so dense and because we were so much closer to its center.

“And if we squeezed it down into a ball the size of a pea — why then the gravity would be very strong indeed. It might even begin to squeeze itself down farther, because its own attraction was so powerful. That’s what’s known as the gravitational radius — the point at which an object begins to collapse in upon itself as though it were a leaking tire. Once that happens, it’s too late; nothing can stop it from going all the way.”

“But what
happens
to it?” Beatryx demanded, alarmed.

“That’s what we’d very much like to know. Ivo seems to have an answer from the macroscope, however.”

“It seems that matter can’t just collapse into singularity — that is, nothing,” Ivo said, doing his best to emulate Groton’s style. “That would violate fundamental laws of — well, it’s no go. So instead it punches through to another spot in the universe, following the line of least resistance.”

“Punches through…” Afra murmured, putting items together. “
That’s
how you mean to—”

“To jump to the galactic reaches. Yes. But there are some problems.”

“I should say so! You’re playing with the molecular, the atomic collapse of matter! Assuming that you have a process to force this, which for the sake of conjecture I’ll assume you do, exactly what happens to
people
compressed to pinhead size?”

“Worse than that,” Ivo said. “A two-hundred-pound man would have to squeeze down to one ten-billionth the size of—”

“One ten-billionth!”

“ — of the nucleus of an atom. That’s if he were to go it alone, of course; not so small if accompanied by other mass.”

“That’s very small, isn’t it,” Beatryx said.

“Very small,” Ivo agreed. “But a mass the size of, say, the sun would not have to reduce by the same ratio. The greater the mass, the easier it is. But about people, now — this entire program is taken from the major extragalactic station. It is the only one that carries anything of the sort, for some reason. Actually, it doesn’t carry anything
but
the technology related to such travel; its area of information is smaller than I thought at first. The melting is part of the preparation for it. This station says that animate flesh can survive the transformation, provided it is properly prepared.”