Macroscope

He broke off, staring at the spreading oak in consternation. It was the poem of Schön’s first message, the one that lead up to the terminal thought. If Afra were to hear it and identify it—

He calmed himself. It was, after all, only a poem; it bore only obliquely on his secret. Why should he hide it? Afra must already have caught on to the truth. Significantly, she had stopped pressing him on the matter of Schön. “It goes on like that. I was looking at a tree, on Earth, and it reminded me.”

“It’s very nice,” Beatryx agreed.

He had his fix: that mighty live-oak in the marshes of Gly

Ready — to penetrate to the bowels of Triton, to be entombed there, to undertake, while the entire moon decelerated, the melting… and gasifying… and collision with Neptune… and compression… and…

The scene opened on his fix: the magnificent live-oak, extending its rotund branches as though to embrace all the world. The tree was hardly changed, except — yes, it was smaller, more vigorously leafed. Still bearded with Spanish moss, it was a young adult rather than a patriarch. The oval green leaves were more shiny, the acorns seemed richer in their scaly cups.

“When lovers pace timidly down through the green colo

And, astoundingly, there were lovers! A young man in what Ivo took to be a farmer’s outfit and a rather pretty girl, her looks spoiled somewhat for Ivo by the dated cut of her dress. They were just leaving a bower, perhaps having completed their liaison there.

Dated dress? Ivo reproved himself. He was thinking in late twentieth century terms. He cared nothing for fashion, dictated as it was by commercially-minded foreigners, yet somehow anything not contemporary was less attractive than it should be. He suspected that he would have been quite satisfied, had he lived in this girl’s time, with her costume. It decorated, after all, the timeless attributes of the sex.

He followed them past a mighty white-oak that had been a rotting stump before and into a swampy glade where two and three foot high red-flowered knotweeds bloomed, and white-flowered arrowhead plants, and bright yellow buttercups. At the edge of an open pond stood yard-high pickerelweeds with glossy spadelike leaves as long as a spread-fingered hand, the blue flowers just forming on the upright spike; and upon the water lay the great green disks of the water-lily, not yet in bloom.

The season was late spring or early summer, Ivo decided. June, perhaps. Late enough for the first pickerel-weed, too early yet for goldenrod.

He left the couple to their silent dialogue and traveled deeper into the swamp. Yes, there was an alligator in pursuit of fish, as graceful a swimmer as any. Emerging near the city, he passed cottontail rabbits and flickers browsing for beetles in the fields. It was amazing how much closer nature came to civilization, here.

He traversed the city, and found a creosoting plant, a box factory, a conventional ca

They had jumped fifty light-years from Earth.

And those lovers — in their early seventies, now. It was a wonderful and somewhat painful thought.

Another jump, another fix: the scene differed: The terrain was still marshy, but no trace of either the stately live-oak or huge white-oak remained. Instead it was bright dawn upon white cedars, the average tree perhaps eighty feet tall, crowded together and cutting off much of the light of the sun so that it did not touch the ground directly.

Ivo paused to consider the implications. Cedar preferred freshwater swamps, and the marshes of Gly

Either his fix was off or there had been a serious change in the landscape. The computer was responsible for the fix, establishing it by the gravitic and magnetic qualities of the planet: a complex and indirect process, but thorough. The location checked out. Therefore—

How big a jump had they taken?

“Continental drift?” Afra inquired, her voice seeming to emerge from the cedar grove. It was not hard to picture her standing there, just behind a tree.

“Drift?” Back to the stupids again.

“The movement of the continents in the course of geologic time,” she explained. “If the expression on your face means what it surely means, your landscape has changed. You might be a mile or so from where you thought you were, and it wouldn’t be the scope’s fault. The continent itself could have shifted. Or orogeny could have—”

“Could be. I seem to be in a freshwater swamp, inland from where I was, and the fix checks. But how much time — ?”

“Oh, a few million years or so.”

He drew off the goggles and stared at her. She was smiling, as he had suspected. “Such a jump is possible, you know,” he said, nettled.

“Certainly. But not this time. Our stellar configuration establishes our continued residence within the Milky-Way galaxy, so we have to be within seventy thousand light-years or so of Earth. I would judge within ten thousand, actually. And it is also possible for rivers to change course and for beaches to submerge. A few thousand years would be enough to change your flora and fauna perceptibly.”

Ivo replaced the goggles with something less than good grace and sped toward Brunswick. His exploration, he knew now, was confirmatory only; Afra had already worked out the position by astronomical means. The very process of locating Earth established its distance, though only his own investigation could pin it down precisely. The macroscope had a sweep-adjustment that enabled it to select for a certain type of image; that was one of a number of refinements courtesy of galactic broadcasts. Otherwise the problem of locating Earth would be horrendously complicated.

There was nothing at the Brunswick location except scrub forest. “It’s pre-1771, anyway.”

He heard the rustle of her leaning forward. How he wished she would do that when his eyes were on her, when there was no technical business at hand. But she belonged to a dead man yet, however the live might yearn for her.

She murmured: “As I make it, the jumps should be gradated sharply. Probably fifty years is the minimum — forty-nine, actually — because you can’t jump from the end of one loop to the middle of the one adjacent, or from place to place within your own. The larger loops should be multiples of these, since they’re made out of looplets, and then there could be multiples of those — we don’t know how far it extends. Even a slight change in the angle of our jump could shift us from the smalls to the mediums or worse. If we assume each level is the square of the prior one, first level being roughly fifty years, the second would be two and a half thousand years and the third six and a quarter million — light-years. So just keep calm until you know which level it is.”

“Six and a quarter million?” he repeated, comprehending her reason for the private discussion. “That — that could put us in another galaxy!”

“Not likely. Probably in intergalactic space. But as I said, the local light survey places us definitely within a galactic structure, and since you found Earth where it was supposed to be, the odds are it is our own. I conjecture level two, therefore.”

“Two and a half thousand.” It was still appalling — and she wasn’t sure. It was possible, if unlikely, that this was merely an Earthlike planet occupying the same spot in another galaxy or cluster that Earth occupied in the Milky Way. Perhaps every galaxy was laid out on a common plan. Cepheid variables, novas, planets, all fitting into their destined slots…