Macroscope

On the other hand, if she should somehow win — and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources — what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?

“You always were slow to get the message,” he said. “I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up.”

“You sent me a message!”

“Surely you didn’t think I needed to send Ivo one? I had to borrow his hand to type it.”

Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn’t care that this was what he had intended. “Then why didn’t you just tell him what you wanted?”

“He wouldn’t listen.”

That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo’s fault? Again, she doubted it.

“Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain — for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says — I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator’s demise and Brad’s discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn’t dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention you at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier’s “The Marshes of Gly

“Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t,” she snapped. “So what was the ‘real message’?”

“The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. ‘And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Gly

“What makes you so sure I would have told him?”

“Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too.”

She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she would have sacrificed Ivo… foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking — and her values.

“After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn’t exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through.”

“So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we’d be dependent on you to get us home again—”

“Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune is the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer’s main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit — but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that—”

“And a shorthand message once we were there,” she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases — as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion — as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she had missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it…

“But why did you want to take over if you couldn’t help Brad?” she asked him then. “Surely you didn’t care about the world crisis?”

“There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?”

She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. “Brad’s mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril — and you found it amusing?”

“Entertaining. There’s a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill—”

“Why did the Senator die? No one else did.”

“The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points.”

“And any you can’t or won’t answer will gain me points.” She hoped.

He shrugged. “More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) — so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists.”

“And what are you?” she inquired bitterly.

“I’m like the Senator, only more so. I’m smarter and less mature than he was. That was part of the challenge: to handle that alien signal, when its direct impact on me would have fried my brain — almost literally. I dare say I’m the brightest primitive ever to be spawned on Earth.”

She was not going to debate that. “You plan to do a lot of maturing in the next few hours — or whenever you decide to toddle off home?”

“Hardly. I’m happy the way I am. No point in going the way Brad did. I could, incidentally, have saved his life, there on Triton, had I been on hand. Not that you would have wanted me to.”

“What?” Afra knew that he was trying to shock her again. He was succeeding. He was also leading her on to more questions and so eroding her competitive position farther. Yet her recognition of this process did not halt it; she had to know. She was hooked on the bits of knowledge he injected.

“No, I don’t mean you were in love with Ivo then. You still were fixed on Brad, for what that was worth. But you wouldn’t have wanted him to live.”

She continued to stare at him, at his mercy.

Now his eyes dropped to the ball. “I see,” he murmured, “I see the evolution of man, from a speck of protoplasm to maturity. I see the free-swimming larvae of the echinoderms developing into the radially-symmetrical forms of adulthood. But I also see neoteny: the larval form preempting the reproductive capacity, and so bypassing maturity. I see a long evolution of such ambitious larval forms, extending even beyond the sea and onto land where true maturity becomes not merely impractical but impossible. Thus, instead of mature starfish, larval Man.”

“Are you trying to suggest—”

“You knew we derive from the Echinoderm superphylum. You know the characteristics of that type of life. What did you suppose would happen, when you interfered with the evolutionary reconstitution? By abolishing the timing mechanism, you permitted the subject to run its full course — without benefit of the proper terminal environment.”

“Oh, Brad!” she cried in anguish.

“But you wouldn’t have cared to marry a starfish, however mature. So — you arranged to kill him.”

“I didn’t know!”

“Sweetie, ignorance of the law is never an excuse — particularly the law of nature, and most particularly when you are supposed to be a student of nature lecturing.”

“But—”

“But even proper attention would not have reconstituted his blasted mind. Recycling can’t extirpate tissue damage; it merely reshapes what’s there. He would have made a very stupid starfish.”