Macroscope

“I can imagine. What about the girls?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “They knew they were female. A number of the kids were precocious that way too. But children four years old don’t see sex the same way as adults do. The anal element—”

“And Schön? That’s where he got his name, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We named ourselves; we were just numbers to the adults. To keep it impartial, I suppose. That’s why my name is a pun. Schön — he got interested in language early—”

“How early?”

“Nobody knows. It just seemed he learned six or seven languages at once, along with English, and I understand he could write them too. I didn’t know him then — or ever, for that matter. I think he knew a dozen by the time he was three.”

Afra digested this in silence.

“And he was very pretty. So he roomed with lots of kids, and they all liked him at first. So he was sehr schon. I think the sehr means—”

“I see. Just how far can four-year-olds go?”

“Sexually? As far as anybody, the motions. I think. At least, Schön could, and the… girls. But he got bored with it pretty soon.”

“You’re still lying by indirection, but I can’t pin it down. How did Brad fit into this?”

“He was Schön’s best friend. His only friend at the end, perhaps. Schön didn’t really need anybody. I guess it was because they were the two smartest, though Schön was really in a class by himself.”

She was silent again, and he knew she was thinking of Brad’s 215 IQ. “They were — roommates.”

“Yes.” Then he grasped the direction of her thinking. “You have to understand — there weren’t any social conventions from outside. No restrictions.” But it bothered him as sharply as it bothered her; he was defending it from necessity. “It was all play — homo or hetero or group—”

“Group!”

Ivo shrugged. “What’s wrong with it, objectively?”

“I seem to have more prejudices than I thought.” Ivo was discovering how much more reasonable a shared prejudice seemed.

“But there wasn’t any challenge to that. It didn’t mean anything. So most of our energies were concentrated on learning, and outwitting the fumbling adults.”

“How intelligent was the average child, if the supervisors didn’t know?”

“I don’t know either. But I’d guess the adults thought it was one twenty-five, while actually it was 25 or 30 points above that.”

She became thoughtful once more, perhaps pondering existence in a group where she would have been barely average. But her next words proved otherwise: “Your ‘experts’ didn’t do their homework well enough. Didn’t they know what happens to children deprived of their family life?”

“It wasn’t possible to have—”

“Yes it was, if they’d really wanted to take the trouble. They could have placed each child in an adoptive home, or at least foster care, with the formal training and stimulation and what-have-you provided centrally. Similar in that respect to the way the Peckham Experiment functioned.”

Ivo tried to conceal his surprise at her reference. She was better educated than he had thought, despite what he already knew of her abilities. “They weren’t trying for family harmony. They wanted brains.”

“So they defeated themselves by precipitating an unrestrained peer-group. When parental guidance is absent, the standards of the peer-group take over early — and they aren’t always ‘nice’ standards. If the average American child is perverted to some extent by the increasing preoccupation, neglect and absence of his parents, and by the violence of TV and news headlines, and the viciousness of deprived peers that are his chief contact with the world, think how much worse it would be for the children who never had families at all! No incentive to excel at useful tasks, no development of conscience. You need a father in the house for that, or a good strong father-substitute. And the notion that only persons with masters degrees in education are qualified to raise children — no wonder they came up with someone like Schön!”

Ivo hadn’t seen it that way before, but it made sense to him now. What he was experiencing here, with Harold and Beatryx and Afra herself, was actually a family situation. Already it had stimulated him to performance far beyond anything he had approached before. And — he liked it. Argument, danger, grueling work and continued friction there might be — but they were all pulling together, and it was better than the life he had known on Earth.

“Didn’t that adult-baiting game bore Schön pretty soon too? What did he do about it?”

Back to specifics. “He left.”

“From a monitored dormitory? An enclosed camp? Where did he go?”

“Nobody knew, exactly. He was just gone.”

“You’re lying again. Brad knew.”

“I guess so.”

“And you — you knew. You still know! Even Brad couldn’t fetch him, but you could — except you wouldn’t!”

Ivo did not answer.

“And it’s all tied in somehow with that poem of yours, and the planet Neptune, and that damned pi

Had she assembled the puzzle? Schön evidently wanted her to. Did she know how readily she could summon the genie, knew she but its abode? Could she suspect the consequence of too rash a conjuration?

The pyramid — actually a tetrahedron — became a splendid center under the patter of little metal feet supervised by instructions from space. One face was flush with the ground, and a triangle of triangles pointed at Neptune. Dull, impervious blocks on the outside gave way to twenty-first century comfort on the inside. Each person had a room — Groton and Beatryx an apartment, with electric accommodations and sophisticated plumbing. Spongy warm rugs lined the floors, and the walls were painted attractively.

With power and a machine shop, and the incoming galactic program, Groton directed an irregular stream of wonders. He produced a device that converted Tritonian soil into protein, and another that generated a field of force that would enclose a larger area outside the tetrahedron and retain an Earthlike atmosphere. Yet another served to focus gravity and bring their weight, in this limited area of the planet, up to Earth-normal.

Matter-conversion, force-field, gravity control — these things staggered Ivo’s imagination. They had assumed that galactic technology would exceed that of Earth, but the fact was somewhat overwhelming. How many decades — how many centuries — would be required for Earth to develop such things on its own? The proboscoids of Sung had never achieved this level. They, of course, had not been able to penetrate the destroyer and receive the programs beyond it. Otherwise, many of their problems could have been materially alleviated.

The recurring question: why, then, did the destroyer exist? And the recurring answer: data insufficient.

Ivo tried to compliment Groton on his achievements. “I’m just an engineer following instructions,” the man said blithely. It was to a considerable extent the truth, since his position had become analogous to that of a child turning on a television set and sitting back to watch experts at work. But however detailed the program, Groton deserved credit for making it applicable to their situation. It was his heyday.

No longer were they required to walk the barren surface in space suits. An artificial sun replaced the minuscule original star in the sky, and light and heat blazed down upon the landscape twelve hours of each twenty-four, riding the fringe of the force-field. Beatryx planted beans from the ship’s food supplies, and they sprouted in a garden stocked with the protein soil-mockup beside a reservoir of H2O — i.e., a genuine crescent-lake.

Ivo, for his contribution to the good life, arranged to photograph images on the main screen of the macroscope, and made regular prints of Earth newspapers, magazines and books. These the others could read without danger of encroachment by the destroyer, since only its “live” image killed. Far from being a lonely, frozen exile, their stay on Triton had become, in a few active months, an independent vacation.