Macroscope

“I — don’t think I’d better vote,” Ivo said, refusing his ballot. “Three can’t tie.” Did they realize — ?

Harold shrugged and marked his paper. “The question is, do we ask for Schön, yes or no,” he said.

The two women marked theirs and folded them deliberately. Harold picked up the ballots, shuffled them without looking and handed the three to Ivo. “Read the verdict.”

“But I’ll recognize the script. It won’t be secret.”

The truth was that he was afraid to look. This was another nightmare, where everybody took things casually except himself, he being the only one to properly appreciate the nature of the chasm over which he leaned.

“Have the computer read them, then,” Harold said. How could he be so indifferent?

Ivo dumped the slips into the analyzer hopper and punched SUMMARIZE. There was a scramble inside the machine as it assimilated the evidence.

The printout emerged. Ivo tore it off, forcing himself to read:

NO

NO

NO

IVO

LOVE

The relief was so great he felt ill. It took him a moment to realize that somebody had voted more than once, and another to discern the other oddities about the listing. Someone had written “NO” carelessly so that the first stroke of the “N” was unco

He was unable to explain how the last word had come about.

Harold stood up. “Was there any doubt?” he asked. “I don’t think we’ll need to do this again. Let’s get back on the job. We have a lot to do and none of us are geniuses.”

Only after they were gone did he realize that he still held the printout — that he had not read aloud or shown to any of them.

Reentry into the galaxy — was anticlimactic. Group confidence was on the ascendant. They had been unable to pinpoint the destroyer’s moment of origin; there had been nothing, then everything, and there was no emanation from the area except those terrible “tame” macrons. Apparently the destroyer broadcaster had been set up rapidly by a task force that jumped into location and away again in a few hours, and whose technicians could somehow interfere with wild macronic emission. Unless the observer happened to land at the very fringe of the broadcast, its inception could not be caught. But still they had confidence, sure somehow that the worst was over.

They centered on the destroyer source nearest Earth, jumping toward it and away again, but gaining from experience. The jumpspace map was sketchy, but it helped, and overall their approach was steady. Five thousand light-years from it; eight thousand, one thousand, seven thousand, four hundred, two thousand, seventy, twenty.

There they paused. “We can’t get any closer,” Afra said. “Our minimum jump is fifty years, and that would put us thirty years on the other side, or worse.”

“Nothing to do but back off and make another pass,” Harold said. “Shuffle the alignment and hope.”

“Schön says he can—”

“If he wants to give us the info, fine,” Harold said. “If he’s using it to buy his way into this enterprise, tell him to get lost. We idiots can muddle through on our own.”

They retreated and made another pass, coming within ten light-years. The third try was worse, but the fourth was very close: less than a parsec, or just over three light-years.

“This is probably about the best our luck has to offer,” Afra said. “We could renovate Joseph and row across, as it were. A few years in melt—”

“We’d have to reconstitute every year, for safety,” Ivo reminded her. “The melt’s shelf-life isn’t guaranteed indefinitely.”

“I am not a gambling man,” Harold said, “but I’d rather gamble. That is, try some more passes. I don’t want to approach the destroyer in the melted state. I want my wits about me, not my protoplasm.”

They gambled — and lost. Six more passes failed to bring them within five light-years of the target. That parsec had been their best, and they couldn’t even find that track again. Jumpspace was too complex a puzzle.

“Schön says—”

“Shut up!” This time it was Afra, and her vehemence gave him another warm feeling. He remembered the word LOVE in the balloting, and dared to wonder. His love for her had changed its nature but never its certainty; he knew her well, now, and understood her liabilities as well as her assets, and loved them all. It was a love without illusion; he expected nothing of her, and drew his pleasure solely from being near her. Or so he told himself.

But — had she written the word? Harold would not have done it, and Beatryx should not have thought of it. Still—

“I think,” said Harold, “we had better give up on this one. There are several others in the galaxy, and for our purpose any one of them should do for a begi

That much they had verified, coming down into the Milky Way: there were a number of destroyers. Their devastating signals had intercepted the human party at about eighteen thousand light-years, wherever they moved within or near the galaxy. Once they had had two destroyers in “sight” simultaneously, and had verified the similarity of the signals by superimposing one on the other.

They gambled again, going for a new target. Once more their luck changed. Their second pass at the second destroyer brought them to just within one light-day.

At last they learned why it had been so difficult to obtain normal macroscopic information about any destroyer. Here virtually all macronic impulses were overridden by the artificial signal; or perhaps they were preempted for its purpose. Only one flux emanated from this area of space, and hardly anything coherent entered it. Apart from the destroyer signal itself, it was blackout. The macroscope, for the first time, was out of commission.

Except for the traveler signal. That, oddly, came through as strongly as ever. This was one more evidence of the superiority of the extragalactic technology: the traveler could not be jammed or blocked or diverted.

“Damn lucky, too,” Harold said. “Think of the trouble we’d have getting out of here, otherwise.”

Afra busied herself with the telescopes while the others set about demothballing Joseph. The ship had been buried within Triton, which in turn was buried in Neptune, and extricating it and themselves whole was no offhand matter. Fortunately — though Harold denied that chance had been involved in such an engineering decision — they had also mothballed the heavy equipment. Harold had constructed it on macroscopic plans, and what could be done could be undone enough for storage. Anything not deposited well within the Triton drillhole had been melted down during the Neptune approach, of course.

“I have photographed the destroyer complex,” Afra reported at lunch. “Can’t actually see anything with these inefficient optical instruments, but as I make it the center unit is almost two miles in diameter and spherical. Definitely artificial. Metallic surface. Since we can’t use the macroscope on it, we’ll have to go inside ourselves.”

“We seem to be getting blasé about galactic technology,” Harold said. “Now we complain about imperfect detail vision at a distance of one light-day! Still, why not go inside, then?”

“Because they might tweak our tailfeathers with a contraterrene missile, that’s why not,” she said. “So I suggest we make a dry run first.” She appeared uncommonly cheerful, as though, perversely, a weight had lifted from her mind.

“How?” Harold asked her. “Joseph is all we have.”

“Catapult, stupid,” she said, smiling. “We have a spot gravity nullifier, remember? And plenty of material.”

Harold knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. He, too, seemed uncharacteristically lighthearted. “Of course! We can shape a mock ship and launch it toward the destroyer—”