Macroscope

Ivo nodded thoughtfully, looking about for some dry shorts. “But he’s still got more knowledge and ability than any adult.”

She brought the shorts. “A sixteen-year-old boy has better reflexes than most mature men, and more knowledge about automotive engineering — turbo or electric or hydraulic — but he’s still the world’s worst driver. It takes more than knowledge and ability; it takes control and restraint. Obviously Schön doesn’t have that.”

“If he began driving — what a crash he could make!”

“Let’s just defuse the destroyer first,” she said, smiling grimly. “You were right all along: we’re better off without Schön.”

CHAPTER 9

“We have made,” Afra a

“Schön says he can get us there within another six,” Ivo said. “He has been figuring the configurations.”

“How does he know them? I thought he didn’t have access to — no, I see he does. He’s there when we pinpoint our distance by Earth history, and he probably picks up everything you hear when you’re on the scope. Though how he can figure anything meaningful from the pitiful information we have—”

“Let’s review,” Harold said. “Obviously there is something we have missed — unless Schön is lying.”

“He could be lying,” Ivo said. “But he probably wouldn’t bother. He wouldn’t be interested in coming out unless he were sure he could accomplish something — and he wouldn’t have the patience to go through many more jumps.”

“Our first jump was about fifty years, to 1930,” Harold said. “Our second was almost three thousand years, to 930 BC as we make it. A 2,860 year difference, but actually a larger jump because it landed us on the opposite side of Earth, spacially. Then another fifty-year jump to 890 BC, slantwise. This could get confusing if it were not so serious! Finally, jumps to 975 and 975 BC — just sliding around the arc, getting nowhere. But apparently Schön can make something of it.”

Afra turned to Ivo. “You have his computational ability. Can’t you map the pattern he sees?”

“No. He’s using more than mathematics, or at least is making use of more factors than I know how to apply. He can be a lot more creative than I can; his reasoning is an art, while mine is conventional.”

“Maybe he’s using astrology,” Afra said sourly.

Harold shook his head. “Astrology doesn’t—”

“Chances are he knows it, though,” Ivo said. “So it’s no joke. If it is possible to make a space-curvature map of the galaxy by astrological means, Schön can do it. He—”

“Forget it,” Afra snapped.

But Harold was thoughtful. He believes, Ivo thought, having this come home to him personally for the first time, though of course he had known it intellectually before. He really believes.

And suppose Schön believed too?

How was any one person to know what was valid and what was not? Even if astrology were a false doctrine, Harold had already applied it to better effect than Afra had her doctrines.

“I wonder whether we haven’t taken too naïve a view of jumpspace,” Afra said after a pause. “We’ve been thinking of a simple string-in-circle analogy — but a four-dimensional convolution would be a system of a different order. We can’t plot it on a two-dimensional map.”

“I could build a spatial-coordinates box,” Harold said. “Intersecting lines and planes of force to hold the items in place, the whole thing transparent so we can study any section from any angle. If we plotted our five known points of tangency and looked for an applicable framework, we might be able to begin deriving equations—”

Afra grabbed his arm, abruptly excited. “How soon?”

The sixth jump was a large one, but that was the least of it.

They contemplated the figures and could not deny them.

“It is a different destroyer,” Afra said.

They were another five thousand light-years slantwise from Sol, and Earth history stood at approximately 4,000 BC. The destroyer signal that bathed Earth in 1980-81 was gone — but sixteen thousand light-years down a divergent azimuth was the point source of a second emission virtually identical to the first.

“I suspect,” Harold said, “that we are up against a genuine galactic conspiracy. A paranoiac’s delight.”

“I’m ecstatic,” Afra said.

He cocked a finger at her warningly, as though she were a child of five. “It ca

“Which seems to prove that their target is all civilization, Earth’s being incidental,” Afra agreed.

“Which may also mean that those sources are armed,” Ivo said. “Physically, I mean. They couldn’t have stood up for all these mille

“Yes we go on!” Afra said so fiercely it alarmed him. Every so often she still furnished such a reminder of her personal involvement in this mission. Her memory of Brad — the god-prince who had died and not returned to life.

They were becoming blasé about galactic travel, or at least inured; but the tenth jump amazed them all. It was about thirty-five thousand light-years — and it placed them entirely outside the Milky Way Galaxy by approximately thirty thousand. They had jumped almost vertically out of the great disk.

There were no destroyer sources in evidence.

The party gathered to look at their galaxy on the “direct vision” screen. This was actually an image relayed from sensors set into orbit around Neptune. Harold had not been idle during the intervals of recuperation between hops, and he had sophisticated machinery to play with. The mini-satellites even survived the jumps without disturbance, once the anchor-field had been modified to account for such motion.

Below them it lay, filling well over a ninety-degree arc: the entire galaxy of man’s domicile, viewed broadside by man for the first time. The pallid white of the stars and nebulae deflowered by Earth’s atmosphere existed no more; the colossal fog of interstellar gas and dust had been banished from the vicinity of the observer. The result was a view of the Milky Way Galaxy as it really existed — ten thousand times as rich as that perceivable from Earth.

Color, yes — but not as any painter could represent, or any atmosphere-blinded eye could fathom. Red in the center where the old lights faded; blue at the fringe where the fierce new lights formed. A spectrum between — but also so much more! Here the visible splay extended beyond the range for which nomenclature existed, and rounded out the hues for which human names did exist. A mighty swirl, a multiple spiral of radiance, wave on wave of tiny bright particles, merged yet discrete. The Milky Way was translucent, yet mind-staggeringly intricate in three, in four dimensions.

At the fringe it was wafer-thin, sustained largely by the masses of cosmic dust that smeared out thousands of stars with every hideously compelling wisp and whorl. Within this sparse galactic atmosphere, nestled in tentacles of gas, floated Sol and its solar debris: hardly worthy of notice, compared to the main body; indeed, invisible without magnification.

And, clear from this exquisite vantage, the pattern of the stellar conglomeration that was the galaxy emerged: the great spiral arms, coiling outward from the center, doubled bands of matter begi