MacRoscope (64 page)

Schön stood dazed. He had received it.

“What are you?” she asked, frightened herself but aware that this might be her only opportunity to make this contact. Only while she rode the crest—

And it came at her again, a torrent of information, projected into her mind in the same fashion the melting cycle had acted on the cells of her body. The passing portions of the Traveler beam triggered nerve synapses in her brain and spoke to her in true telepathy.

In essence, this: Just as interstellar travel required the reduction of solid life to liquid life, and thence to gaseous life, so true intergalactic travel required one further stage: radiation life. The Traveler was not a broadcast beam;
it was a living, conscious creature
. Originally it had evolved from mundane forms, but its technology and maturity had enabled it to achieve this unforeseeable level, freeing it of any restraint except the limitation of the velocity of radiation through space. Even that could be circumvented by using the jumpspace technique — once space had been cartographically explored by lightspeed outriders.

There was nowhere in the universe this species could not range.

But very few life-forms ever achieved this level. Why? The Travelers investigated and discovered that in the confined vicious cauldron that was the average life-bearing galaxy, the first species to achieve gaseous-state jumpspace capacity acted to suppress all others — then stagnated for lack of stimulus. The problem was that technology exceeded maturity. Only if more species could be encouraged to achieve true maturity could universal civilization become a fact. They needed time — time to grow.

And so the Travelers became missionaries. Each individual jumped to a set spot in space and underwent the transposition to radiation, retaining awareness throughout. Physical synapses became wave-synapses, thought occurring from the leading edge backwards, but lucidly. And each individual personally brought jumpspace capacity to Type II technologies resident in individual galaxies.

It was the Milky Way as a whole that was being cultivated. The Traveler beneficence resembled that of the destroyer: it seemed cruel, but actually fostered an acceleration of maturity.
Species
might suffer, but
galaxies
were prodded into growth. Those galaxies that achieved control over their immature elements — so strikingly defined by their actions in the face of jumpspace temptation — were on their way to success. The Milky Way, after several failures, had finally gained that self-control, and was on the verge of true maturity — as an entity. This was the gift of the Traveler: the passport to the universe, and to universal civilization.

“The white man bringing his god to the ignorant natives,” Schön muttered. “Big deal.” He stepped into the next chamber.

“It
is
a big deal, even if you’re too immature to admit that extragalactic aliens can do things
you
can never hope to do,” she cried, pursuing him. “And mankind, too, may share in that distinction, if it survives its own adolescence. Not by becoming smarter, but by maturing. We—”

Schön was in a soldier’s uniform, unkempt, and in his hand was a bottle of cheap whisky. If he had a post to guard, he was derelict in duty. Somewhere he had made an error, a nondiscriminating decision, and the consequence was upon him.

Afra was in a glorious gown, a golden-haired goddess, as she swept into the room. She observed banks of computerlike machinery, and took it for the sensitive, quality-control mechanism of the station, but she was intent on her personal opportunity. Schön’s deviation was her reward, his faithlessness to the common welfare her good fortune — so long as she proceeded with confidence.

He lifted the bottle to her in a drunken salute. “My candle burneth over,” he said. “You won again.”

Then that elusive special memory unlocked itself and emerged from its dungeon of security: something Bradley Carpenter had told her. In times of stress it had pushed up, only to retreat before scrutiny. Now at last she had it. “Schön is dangerous — make no mistake about that. He has no scruples. But there is a way to bring him under control, if the need exists and the time is proper. Now I’m going to describe it to you, but I want you to tell no one — particularly not Ivo.”

“Who is Ivo?” she had inquired, for this was before it all had started.

“He’s my contact with Schön. But this is the one thing about Schön he doesn’t know. I’m going to implant in you a hypnotic block against divulgence.”

And he had done so, skilled as he had been in such matters. She had not remembered it until this moment — this moment of discovering Schön in his weakness, knowing that his vulnerability was temporary, dictated only by transitory animation of symbols. Schön still led her in points, and she knew what tremendous resources he possessed; she would never overcome him if she did not finish him now. Uranus or Neptune might swing the pendulum back to him, and with it the initiative and the final victory.

“Do you remember Yvonne?” she asked him.

The image vanished. Schön turned on her, the bottle in his hand replaced by S′, and it was as though the fire of his essence took physical form. “Brad, you bastard!” he cried. “You told!”

But he was in his weakness, she in her strength. “You have a memory like mine, one you can’t face,” she said. “It is the reason you could not take over control from Ivo, whatever else you managed. It is the knowledge that gives me power over you.” But only if the circumstance were appropriate — and that could be a matter of definition.

For there had been a third genius of the project, one falling between Brad and Schön. Yvonne — “The Archer” — and there had been intense conflict.

They were five years old when the culmination came, both having experienced more of life in all areas than had most adults, but both remaining children emotionally. It was the classic case of two scorpions in a bottle, two nations with nuclear overkill and insufficient patience: two children with the powers of adults. Because they were male and female, there was a certain mitigating attraction; but their rivalry was stronger, and when the camaraderie ended they put it on the line: a game, a contest, more than physical, more than intellectual, whose precise rules no other person comprehended. For a day and a night they had faced each other, locked in a private room, and in the end Schön had won and Ivo had committed suicide.

Then Schön, protecting himself, had operated on the body and made it resemble a mutilated version of his own in certain ways that would deceive the outside world. He had arranged an impressive “accident” of conflagratory nature that made the deception complete, and had then assumed her place in the project community. Thus he had become Ivo, and somehow managed to alter the records to confuse the prying adults. It seemed to them that a male child had died, yet the count did not confirm this; instead one male had been mislabeled female. Yet if a female had been lost, which one? Schön had gotten away with murder. But he had not confused his contemporaries. They were not as clever as he, but they knew him, and they knew the score. They were his peer-group, and it operated with unprecedented force. They did not report his crime to the adults, for that was not the peer-code; they
did
pass the word informally and judge him themselves and impose a sentence on him. He
became
Ivo, then. No longer could he masquerade as another person by choice and convenience. For the group had this special power over its members, part ethics, part force, part religion, part family: what the group decreed, the individual honored. It could not be otherwise, even for Schön.

The secret had been kept, but he had been punished. Even after the project disbanded, the peer-power remained, the inflexible code, a geis on him he could not break.

Only Ivo himself could set him loose when the need arose — and Ivo had never known the truth, and was stubborn to boot. Ivo had thought it was the tedium of daily existence that kept Schön buried originally. He had never heard of Ivo.

As the Traveler disciplined the universe; as the destroyer disciplined the galaxy; as circumstance disciplined mankind; so the peer-group disciplined Schön.

And nothing else!
Schön still had the galactic instrument, S′, and this was not Earth-locale, and Afra was not a peer of the project. “You cannot get home without me,” he said. “The sentence cannot be invoked, here; there is still need for me.”

So the grand ploy had failed, and now that pendulum was swinging back, restoring his power, diminishing hers. It was her turn to retreat.

The next room was another highly technical one: a strange conduit admitted something invisible, and stranger equipment manipulated it.

“Conversion,” Schön remarked with some of his old confidence. “Channeled gravitrons adapted to macrons for the broadcast.” He touched S′.

Five people stood on an Earthscape in the sunshine. A woman and two men faced south; two women — one older, one younger — stood fifty feet away, in the trio’s line of sight.

For the first time Afra saw the symbols and remained in doubt as to which one was hers. The woman in the northern group might be herself; the men might be Schön and Ivo. One of the southern pair was an old-fashioned woman; the other was an up-to-date girl. The one pinched, stiff; the other alert, open-faced. Their clothing and manner identified their types — but which of the three women, really, was Afra?

This seemed to be the time for indecision, and Schön evidently shared the mood. “Am I so bad?” he demanded somewhat plaintively. “I never tortured to death an animal, and not many who pass through conventional childhood can say that. I never shot a man, and not many who served in the armed forces can say that. All I did was play a fair game for high stakes and win. Had I lost,
I
would have died. I have always abided by the rules of the game.”

Then Afra knew that the woman between the two men was Ivo, as she might have been at maturity. Schön was bracketed by his past, and by competing demands, and it was not in her to condemn him out of hand.

But Afra was bracketed too. She had witnessed the history of the galaxy and absorbed its significance. Was she now to return to her old, narrow ways and attitudes, or was she to open her mind and personality to change, movement, spontaneity? Which woman was she? There was advantage in conventionality, but also in initiative.

She had never realized before that her own prejudice against Negroes stemmed at least in part from that chase in her childhood by a well-meaning supermarket employee. She had remembered that pursuit subconsciously and associated it with the sudden, crushing death of her father, fatally wounded that day, and she had somehow blamed all Negroes for it. Yet it had been a white man who fired the shot, attempting to hold up the cashier. It had been a Negro who had tried to help, even to the extent of expressing an unjustified confidence in her father’s health. The strongest elements of the experience had been the killing and the Negro, and her subconscious had made a connection her conscious had not. No doubt the climate of her upbringing had promoted this, too…

There were no answers for either of them here. They moved to the next room.