Macroscope

The Senator was slumped farther down the table. The doctor went to him next and performed an intimate check.

“He’s dead,” he said.

CHAPTER 3

A persistent rapping at the door brought Ivo out of an uncomfortable sleep. He was not used to the hammock, and the shock of what had happened was too fresh and raw. He had not forgotten that he occupied the apartment of a man whose mind was virtually dead; he felt like an intruder.

He righted himself and stumbled across the compartment. He crashed open the sliding door, rubbing his eyes.

Afra stood there, lovely in bathrobe and slippers. Her sunburst hair was tied under a nebulous kerchief, up and back in the ma

Her blue gaze smote him. “Special delivery,” she said without humor. “Telegram.” She held out an envelope.

Ivo accepted it, then became abruptly aware of his condition. He was standing before this beautiful girl in sleep-rumpled jockey shorts. “I — thanks. Must change.”

She put her hand against the door, preventing closure. “Is it yours?”

He looked at the address. It was a stylized representation of an arrow. Nothing else.

“Now that just might signify entropy,” she said, stepping forward and so forcing him to jump back. “Time’s Arrow, as it were. But I remembered that your first name, Ivo, is a variant of the Teutonic Ivon, meaning a military archer. And your last name—”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, ill at ease. If only he had something on!

“The feminine form would be Yvo

He looked at her more carefully, suspicious of this brightness. Neither her voice nor her expression betrayed it at this moment, but he knew she was crazy with grief for Brad. Her eyes were shadowed and there was a mild odor of perspiration about her. Was she afraid to be alone, or did Brad’s room have a perverse attraction for her?

“But I suppose you’d better read it, just to be sure,” she said. “I found it beside the teletyper. The operator was asleep — very bad form, you know — so I took it…”

She was disturbed, all right. She must have been pacing from area to area, talking with anyone, grasping at any pretext to distract her attention from the horror in her memory. She cared nothing about Ivo Archer or his clothing; for the narrow present, the telegram was necessarily tantalizing.

He opened it while she whirled about the room, touching her hands to Brad’s things but not moving them. She glanced eagerly toward the message.

One word jumped out at him. Ivo crumpled the paper angrily.

“What are you doing! We’re not even sure it’s yours!”

“It’s mine.”

“What does it say? You can’t just—”

“I don’t know what it says. Just that it means trouble.”

“At least let me—”

“Sure,” he said, too curtly, and flipped the ball of paper at her. “I have to dress.”

She was oblivious to the hint. She spread out the sheet and concentrated on it while he turned his back and climbed hastily into trousers and shirt.

“Why — this is polyglot!” she exclaimed. “I thought you said you couldn’t—”

“I can’t.”

She glided to the little table and set down the message. “Who would send you a note like this? It’s fascinating!”

“It’s trouble,” he repeated. He came over to look at it again, actually only wanting to be near her.

The printing was plain enough: SURULLINEN XPACT SCHON AG I ENCAJE.

There was no signature.

“What a mishmash!” she said, producing a pencil. “I’m not sure I can put it all together, but I know it means something. If only Brad—”

She dropped her head, realizing, and he saw the dry sobs shake her shoulders. Then she lifted her face determinedly and refocused on the message. Ivo stood by, doing nothing, longing for the right only to touch her in comfort — and feeling guilty for that desire. What a girl she was!

“Schön — that’s German, of course. It—” She stopped again. “Schön! Brad’s friend from the project! You were supposed to take this to Brad for translation.”

“Could be.” He wondered whether he should have destroyed the note instead of letting her have it. She didn’t come close to Brad in intelligence, but she was not exactly slow.

“Schön — he’s the one who — if anybody can—”

Ivo grimaced behind his face, knowing that she was grasping at straws and would soon realize it. Even Schön could hardly regenerate his friend’s damaged brain tissue. That had to be accomplished internally, and such healing did not take place in the higher animals.

“I must know what it says. Then we can answer it…” She bent to the task with renewed vigor. The kerchief bobbed as her head nodded. “That last word — ENCAJE — that’s Spanish for ‘lace.’ And the next to last — I — could be English. It would be just like Brad to slip in a ‘straight’ term, and I understand Schön is even worse that way.” She filled in the English equivalents beneath the printed terms while Ivo watched, intrigued in spite of himself. He had never envied the geniuses their polylingual facility, but working on the message vicariously through Afra’s ability he could imagine himself caught up in the excitement of the chase. A search for a word could be as exciting as a manhunt, in the proper circumstance, he decided.

Even though he already knew the outcome.

“XPACT — that’s no Romance-language word, or Germanic,” she murmured. “Or Fi

She looked up, her blue eyes startlingly intense. Ivo wondered how it was that he had never appreciated the luster of such color before he had met her. “Acorn, I make it. Does that make sense?”

Ivo shrugged.

“And SURULLINEN — that’s Fi

Ivo chuckled, and she made a fleeting smile. “But that ‘lace’ is a noun,” she said, “so we don’t have it yet. No verb in it — it can’t be a sentence — not as we think of it. And that  ‘I’ doesn’t really fit — aha! That could be the Polish ‘and.’ ‘Beautiful mesh and lace’ contrasted with the miserable acorns.” She worried it some more, tongue appearing and disappearing between even white teeth.

What if she solved it? he wondered. Should he tell her the truth now, try to explain? That didn’t seem wise.

He saw her enthusiasm for the problem and decided to leave it with her a little longer.

“Gloomy oak, lovely plait and lace,” she said at last. “Something in that vein. I can’t take the words any farther, and I don’t know where to begin interpretation. God, I’m tired! Why would he go to the trouble of sending such a message to you?”

“Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven.” Ivo said.

She was on it immediately. “It does mean something to you. A line of poetry?”

“Yes.” She was too sharp; he had said too much.

“A work you’re both familiar with? Something you can quote from? Something that suggests the course you should follow?”

“Yes.” He knew she was about to ask which poet or which poem, and he was not ready to tell. She would identify it anyway, or… or what kind of persuasion would she turn on him?

“Now I can rest,” she said. She shuffled to the hammock and flopped upon it, her knees brought up to one side, letting her slippers droop and fall to the floor.

She had forgotten where she was — or didn’t care. Perhaps, he thought with unreasonable jealousy, she was used to sleeping here. In Brad’s room.

He looked at her, at the soft hair breaking free of the twisted kerchief, at the slender arm falling over the edge of the hammock and swaying as it rocked; at the embraceable shape of her curled body, the smooth white knees exposed, the firm round ankles and small feet. He felt ashamed for his yearnings.