MacRoscope (4 page)

“You see, it is all very carefully arranged,” Brad said as they waited for the man to complete his suit-checkout. “Thirty nations have put up the cash for this project, and each is allotted — but you must know that. We send in precise reports every day.”

“This is the American Hour?”

“No. Personnel here don’t bother with the official foolishness. This gentleman is not a gentleman — that is, not a Gentile. He’s an Israeli geologist doing work for Indonesia. Their own geologist is busy on a private project.”

“So somebody is paying off a favor?”

“Right. Indonesia will get the results, and the home state will never know the difference.”

“How is it we can horn in, then?”

“I preempted the slot for more important work. He understands.”

“Just to show me the macroscope? Brad, you can’t—”

The Israeli held up his glove. “It is quite all right, Mr. Archer,” he said. “We do not question Dr. Carpenter.” He put on the helmet, pressured his suit, and mounted to the airlock. Ivo detected no shock of air puffing out; there were no games of that kind here. Probably the man was hauling himself along one of the guy-chains, not trusting himself to any drift through the vacuum. That was the kind of sensible procedure Ivo preferred.

Brad settled into a control seat of some kind and began making adjustments with sundry instruments. Ivo tried to make some sense out of the battery of dials and lights, but failed; it was far too complicated.

“Okay, friend, we’re alone. No bugs here. I’m in a position to know.”

Once more the nervousness came upon him. This was it. “Why did you summon me?”

“We need Schön.”

Ivo met this with silence. He had known it.

“I don’t like to do this to you, believe me,” Brad said with genuine apology. “But this is crucial. We’re in bad trouble here, Ivo.”

“Naturally it wasn’t my amiable half-witted companionship you missed. Not just to show off your fancy technology and your fancy girl.”

Brad looked far more mature when serious, and he was far more serious now than the literal content of his speech indicated. “You know I like you, Ivo. You’re a damned Puritan at heart, and you’re afraid of anything that smacks too much of pleasure and what you’re doing here in the space age instead of the nineteenth-century Confederacy is beyond me to grasp. I
still
enjoy your company, more than that of Schön, and I wouldn’t change one jot of your archaic and poetic fancies. But this is — well, it sounds cliché, but it
is
a matter of world security. It’s frankly over my head. If your freak abilities were enough—”

“So playing a simple flute has become ‘freak,’ and—” But he knew what Brad meant, much as he didn’t want to. “And who is an ignorant lad straining at one twenty-five to proffer advice to model one sixty? Particularly when he knows that’s a lie for the only one in the project to be adjudged two hundred and—”

“Come off it, Ivo. You know better than anyone that those figures are meaningless. I tell you with all sincerity that the situation is
desperate
, and Schön is the only one I know with the potential to handle it. I have the privilege of calling him when I really need him. Well, it’s been twenty years, and I
do
need him.
Earth
needs him. You have to do it.”

“I’m not just thinking of myself. Brad, once you let the genie out of the bottle — you know what Schön is. Your work, your girl—”

“I may be giving up everything. I know that. I have no choice.”

“Well,
I
have a choice. You’ll darn well have to prove to me that the cure is not worse than the problem.”

“That’s why we’re here. I’ll have to acquaint you with the nature and function of the macroscope first, though, before I can make my point. Then—”

“Keep it simple, now. I can’t even read your dials.”

“Right. Basically the macroscope is a monstrous chunk of unique crystal that responds to an aspect of radiation unrelated to any man has been able to study before. This amounts to an extremely weak but phenomenally clear spatial signal. The built-in computer sifts out the noise and translates the essence into a coordinated image. The process is complex, but we wind up with better pictorial definition than is possible through any other medium, bar none. That was a major handicap at first.”

“Superior definition is a
problem
?”

“I’ll demonstrate.” Brad applied himself to the ponderous apparatus, donned a helmetlike affair with opaque goggles, and cocked his head as though listening. Ivo felt another pang of nervousness, and realized that this stemmed from the superficial similarity between the goggles and the sunglasses he had bought when trying to avoid Harold Groton. That entire past episode embarrassed him in retrospect; he had acted foolishly. He threw off the memory and concentrated on Brad’s motions.

The left hand hovered over a keyboard of buttons resembling those of a computer input. It probably
was
the computer input, Ivo reminded himself. There was a strap over the wrist to prevent the hand from drifting away in the absence of gravity; buttons could be awkward to depress without the anchorage of bodily weight. The right hand held a kind of ball mounted on a thin rod, rather like an old-fashioned automobile gearshift. As the left fingers moved, a large concave surface glowed over Brad’s head.

“I’ll cut in the main screen for you,” Brad said. “Notice that my fingers control the computer settings; that covers direction, range and focus, none of it simple enough for human reflexes to handle. The vagaries of planetary motion alone, when that planet is not our own, are complicated to account for, particularly when we want to hold a specific focus on its surface.”

“I’m aware of planetary motion.” He remembered one of his old pet peeves. “I had to work it out when I wanted to criticize the concept of time travel. If a man were granted the miraculous ability to jump forward or backward in time, with no other travel, he’d arrive in mid-space or deep underground; because the Earth is always moving. It would be like trying to jump off a moving rocket and jump on again.”

“Nevertheless, we do travel in time, with the macroscope,” Brad said, smiling.

“Oh, so you’re going back to supervise your grandfather’s conception?”

“Delicacy forbids.” Brad’s hands flexed. “I’ll center on a precoded location: the planet Earth. The computer uses the ephemeris to spot all the planets and moons of the solar system exactly, and a good many of the asteroids and comets as well. The right-hand knob provides our personal tuning; once the difficult compensations have been made, we use this control to jog over several feet at a time, or to gain different angles of view. Right now we’re orbiting the sun about nine hundred thousand miles from Earth — right next door, as interplanetary distances go. Just out far enough to reduce the perturbations of the moon. There.”

The screen was a mass of dull red. “If that’s Earth, the political situation has deteriorated since I left,” Ivo observed.

“That
is
Earth — dead center. Per the coordinates.”

“Center? Literally?”

“Definition, problem of, remember. Our corrected coordinates nail the heart of the body. The image is on a one-to-one ratio.”

“Life size? It can—”

“The macroscope can penetrate matter, yes. As I told you, this isn’t exactly light we’re dealing with, though the time delay is similar. That’s a representation of the incandescent core of our planet as it was five seconds ago, muted by automatic visual safeguards and filters, of course. We’ll have to drift about four thousand miles off that point to hit the surface, which is what most people seem to assume is all the scope looks at. Right there, you can appreciate the implications for geology, mining, paleontology—”

“Paleontology?”

“Fossils, to you. We’ve already made some spectacular finds in the course of routine roving. Lifetime’s work there, for somebody.”

“Hold on! I ain’t that ignorant, perfessor. I thought the bones were widely spaced, even in good fossiliferous sediments. How can you tell one, when you’re in the middle of it, not looking down at it in a display case? You certainly couldn’t
see
it as such.”

“Trust me, junior. We do a high-speed canvass at a given level and record it on tape. The machine runs a continuous spectroscopic analysis and trips a signal when there’s anything we might want. And that’s only the beginning.”

“A spectroscopic analysis? You said the macroscope didn’t use light.”

“
It
doesn’t, exactly, but
we
do. We keyed it in on samples: every element on the periodic table. Thus we are able to translate the incoming impulse into a visual representation, much as any television receiver does. The truth is, the macrons are far more specific than light, because they don’t diffuse readily or suffer such embarrassments as red shift. Spectroscopy is really a superfluous step, but we do it because we’re geared to record and analyze light, here. Once we retool to orient on the original impulse, our accuracy will multiply a hundredfold.”

“It grinds that fine?”

“That fine, Ivo. We’re just beginning to glimpse the potential of this technique. The macroscope is a larger step toward universal knowledge than ever atomics were toward universal power.”

“So I have heard. But I’m sort of stupid, as you know. You were about to tell me what makes superior definition so difficult to adapt to, even with the computer guidance.”

“So I were. Here is the surface of Earth, fifty feet above sea-level, looking down. Another keyed-in location.”

The screen became a shifting band of color.

“Let me guess again. Your snoop is stationary, right? And the globe is turning at the equivalent of a thousand miles an hour. It’s like flying a jet at low altitude near the equator and peering out through the bombsight.”

“For a pacifist, you have violent imagery. But yes, just about. Sometimes over ocean, sometimes land, sometimes
under
mountains that rise above the pickup level. And if we move higher—” He adjusted the controls, and the scene jumped into focus.

“About a mile up,” Ivo said. “Makes the scene clear, but too far for intimate inspection. Yes.” He watched the land sliding by. “Why don’t we just see a panel of air? What we have now is a
light
image, perspective and everything.”

“What we see is the retranslation of the macronic image sponsored by visible radiation passing through that point in space. Maybe I’d better give you the technical data after all.”

“Uh-
uh
. Just answer me this: if it’s that sharp on planet Earth from five light-seconds, can it also handle other planets? Can it look at Jupiter from one mile up, or even Pluto? If it can—”

The headgear tilted as Brad nodded somberly. “You begin to comprehend what a magnificent tool we have here. Yes, we can explore the other planets of our solar system, from one mile above ground level — those that have ground — or one inch or anywhere inside. We can also explore similarly the planets of other systems, with so little loss of definition that distance can be ignored.”

“Other systems…” This was distinctly more than he had anticipated. “How far — ?”

“Almost anywhere in the galaxy. There is interference from overlapping images near the galactic center that complicates things tremendously, I admit, but the evidence is that there is more than enough of interest elsewhere to hold us for a few centuries of research.”

Ivo shook his head. “I must be misunderstanding you. As I make it, our Milky Way galaxy is over a hundred and ten thousand light-years across, and we’re about thirty-five thousand light-years from the center. Are you claiming that you can get a life-sized image from ground level of a planet orbiting a star, oh, fifty thousand light-years away?”

“Yes, theoretically.”

“Then that’s the key to interstellar exploration — without the need for physical travel. Why drive to the show when you can see it on TV?”

“Precisely. But we are hampered by those mundane practicalities just discussed. We can compensate to a considerable extent for rotary and orbital and stellar motions — but not every planet is the sitting duck Earth is.” He twitched a finger and the fifty-foot elevation resumed, this time motionless. “Properly programmed, the computer can direct a traveling focus and follow the dizzy loops of a particular planetary locale, as it is doing now, and provide a steady image. It’s a pretty fine adjustment, but that’s what the machinery is for. At least we know the necessary compensations.”

“And you don’t know the motions of planets the regular telescopes can’t pick up. But you should be able to figure them out soon enough from the—”

“We can’t even
find
those planets, Ivo. It’s the old needle-in-haystack problem. Do you have any proper idea how many stars and how much dust there is in the galaxy? We can’t begin to use our vaunted definition until we know exactly where to focus it. It would take us years of educated searching to spot any significant proportion of the planets beyond our own system, and there’s such a demand for time on this instrument that we can’t afford to waste it that way.”

“Um. I remember when I dropped a penny in an overgrown lot. I knew where it was, within ten feet, but I had to catch a bus in five minutes. Don’t think I’ve ever been so mad and frustrated since!” His fingers felt the coin in his pocket again: he had missed the bus but found the penny, and he still had it.

“Make that penny a bee-bee shot, and that lot the Sahara desert, and instead of a bus, a jet-plane strafing you, and you have a suggestion of the picture.”

“
Now
who’s using violent imagery? I’ll buy the bee-bee and the desert — but the jet fighter?”

“I’ll get to that pretty soon. That’s why we need Schön. Anyway, we’d need thousands of macroscopes to afford that type of exploration, and even this one is precariously funded. There’s more important research afoot.”

“More important than geology, when the Earth’s resources are terminal? Than the secrets of the universe? Than questing into space in the hope that somewhere there is intelligent life; than the possible verification that we are not unique in the universe, not alone?” He paused, abruptly making a quite different connection. “Brad, you don’t mean there’s political interference?”