MacRoscope (44 page)

Abruptly she disengaged. “I’m not doing any good here. Take it back, Ivo.”

And he was in it, oblivious to the others, using the goggles though the main screen remained on. He felt his way into the situation, reacting as though the computer were part of his own brain. There was no image directly from Earth — or from any other point in the galaxy. Except for the programs; they came through splendidly. What was the distinction between the tame macrons and the wild ones, that only the tame should pass?

The programs were artificial, generated by sophisticated Type II technology macronic equipment set up within a powerful gravitic field. He knew that much from the local stations, who discussed their techniques freely. Their signals, in effect, were polarized, stripped of wasteful harmonics and superficial imprints, and radiated out evenly. Natural impulses were weak and unruly, by contrast, and tangled with superimpositions. A wild macron could produce several hundred distinct pictures and a great deal of additional scramble; a cultured macron produced only one, or one integrated complex.

It was like the difference between a random splash and a controlled jet of water. The splash interacted with its environment more copiously, but the jet went farther and accomplished more in a particular manner.

What was the galactic environment?

Light. Gas. Energy.

“
Gravity
.”

It was Schön whispering in his ear. Communication between them was growing more facile, to Ivo’s distress. He preferred Schön thoroughly buried.

Gravity: cumulative in its gross effect, but divided within its originating body. Outside the massive galaxy—

Macrons: essences born of gravitic ripples, and subject to them. And what happened to those emerging from the galaxy itself, meeting the larger interactions of the universe?

He knew, now. The programs struck through, even as far as other galaxies, if properly focused, for they were beamed and streamlined and syncopated and unencumbered. But the wild impulses could not make it; they were too woolly, prickly, horny, disorganized. They felt the great galactic field, were bent by it (for they were creatures of gravity), hauled around as were the clusters, strained…

But not the light. Galactic gravity was not enough to prevent the light from escaping. And finally the light struck out into deep space, leaving its macrons behind, divorced. Like a cloak shed of its master, the mantle of macrons collapsed, compacted, lost form — but remained as lightspeed impulses, clumping to each other, billions where one had been before. Unable to escape the master field, they remained in orbit about the mighty primary, the galactic nucleus.

Thus, shotgun images at right angles to the disk of the galaxy.

Thus, no direct contemporary — within 30,000 years — news.

Thus — history.

Ivo narrowed the coded specifications to a classification of one: Earth. Earth, any time since life conquered its land masses. He swept the captive stream, searching for animation. He scored.

They were watching the screen, and he heard their joint outcry. Earth, yes—

The creature resembled in a certain fashion a crocodile, but its snout was short and blunt. Its body, with its stout round legs and powerful tail, was about seven feet long. A grotesque bridgework of bone and leather stood upon its back, like a stiff sail.

It was morning, and the animal rested torpidly at right angles to the rays of the sun, its eyes partially closed. Behind it was an edge of water clustered with banded stems, a number of them broken. Tall brush or alienistic trees stood in the background, and the ground seemed bleak because there was no grass.

“That,” said Afra, “is Dimetrodon. The sail-backed lizard of the Permian period of Earth, two hundred and fifty million years ago. The sail was used as a primitive temperature control mechanism before better means were found. Though Dimetrodon looks clumsy, that heat-control was an immense advantage, since reptiles tend to be dull when cold—”

“I don’t see how a sail could make it warm,” Beatryx said.

“Oh, it does, it does, and cool too. Broadside to the sun it soaks up heat; endwise it dissipates it. Reptiles don’t dare get too hot, either, you see. Quite clever, really — and it does make identification easy.”

“Paleontology is not my strong point,” Harold said, “but some such conjecture came to my mind, minus the nomenclature. Wasn’t the sail-back the ancestor to the dinosaurs?”

Ivo, wearing the goggles, could not see the expression on her face, but he could hear it. “What dinosaur practiced temperature control? Dimetrodon was a carnivorous pelycosaur, probably ancestral to the therapsids. Mammal-like reptiles, to you.”

“Oops, wrong family tree,” he said without rancor. “Still, a surprising manifestation, considering that we are only thirty thousand light-years out. I don’t see how it could actually be Earth.”

“It
is
Earth,” Ivo said, remembering that the others had not been privy to his deliberations. “The macrons are in orbit around the galaxy. They’ve clumped together until they have something like mass in themselves, but we can still read them when we catch them. These must have circled a thousand times. I don’t dare mess with the orientation; reception is largely a matter of chance, since there’s so much to choose from. All space and all time, as it were.”

And as he spoke, the picture faded. The vagaries of macronics had washed out the reception. He reset the sweep and angled back and forth, searching for a steadier pulse.

“Two hundred and fifty million years!” Afra said. “The galaxy should have completed a full revolution in that period.”

“Galactic revolution shouldn’t be relevant,” Harold said. “We’re out from the flat face of it, not the edge. The macron orbiting here must be at right angles to the galactic rotation, and not circular at all. I wonder whether it isn’t more like a magnetic field?”

Ivo had another picture on the screen: an animal resembling a deer, but with doglike paws. It stood about a yard high, and poked its nose through the low brush as though searching for vegetable tidbits.

“Mammalian,” Afra said. “Oligocene, probably. I don’t quite place the—”

Then it happened: one of those breaks that mock probability. There was a concerted gasp.

A monstrous beak stabbed down into the picture, followed by a tiny malignant eye and white headfeathers. It was the head of a bird — almost, in itself, the size of the full torso of the deerlike animal. The cruel beak gaped, stabbed, and closed on the deer’s quivering neck.

Now the rest of the predator came into view. It was indeed a bird: nine feet tall and constructed like a wingless and huge-legged hawk. Three mighty claws pierced turf with every step, each scaly and muscular.

“Phororhacos!” Afra exclaimed, awed. “Miocene, in South America. Twenty million years ago—”

“How horrible!” That was Beatryx.

“Horrible? Phororhacos was a magnificent specimen, one of the pinnacles of avian evolution. Flightless, to be sure — but this bird was supreme on land, in its territory. If diversity of species is considered, aves is more successful than mammalia—”

They watched the bird lift its prey by the neck and shake it into unconsciousness or death. Ivo felt the pangs of the onslaught, and had to refrain from putting his hand against his neck. Then beak and talon disemboweled the carcass, and the gory feeding began. Now Ivo felt the taste of warm blood in his toothless mouth.

The picture faded again.

“We skipped two hundred million years between images,” Afra said. “How about one in between — like a dinosaur?”

“In time, we should be able to fill in Earth’s entire history, from this debris,” Ivo said. “But the selection is largely random, for any one scene. The macrons aren’t uniformly distributed, though they seem to be reasonably well ordered within the clumps. I can keep trying, though.” He, too, was fascinated by this widening of their horizon. No longer did they have to jump enormous distances in order to see the preman past.

All space and all time…

“I hate to break this up,” Harold said, “but we do have more serious concerns. We are drifting far outside our galaxy, and a wrong jump could lose us entirely.”

That brought them to attention, and he continued more specifically: “I gather that the pictures would be less random if their scope were not so limited, no pun intended. Suppose we look at the Solar System as a whole, and try to get some clue to the finer alignment of our macronic streams? If we can learn to manipulate our reception properly, the significant history of our entire galaxy will be open to us. That means—”

“That means we can trace the onset of the destroyer!” Afra broke in. “Discover what species did it, and why.” She paused. “Except that it hasn’t reached this far out yet.”

“That’s why we are free to experiment. Once we know what we’re doing, we can slide in closer and pick it up again. We won’t have to approach that generator blind.”

“Is that right, Ivo?” she asked. “Would a Solar System fix — the entire system — promote uniform reception?”

There had been a time when she did not ask his opinion on anything technical. “Yes. I could put the screen on schematic, and there would be a much broader band to work with. It would be excellent practice, though I can’t guarantee the results at first.”

She did not answer, so he set it up. The image in his goggles and on the screen became a cartoon diagram coordinated by the computer and his own general guidance. The sun was represented by a white disk of light, and the planets by colored specks traveling dotted orbits, with their moons in similarly marked paths. The scale was not true, but the identities and positions were clear enough.

“I’ll try for a system history,” Ivo said. “But it will take some time to map the macron streams, assuming they are reasonably consistent. Then I’ll have to patch together recordings, since I won’t have chronological order at first. No point in your watching.”

“We are with you, Ivo,” Afra said with sudden warmth. “We’ll watch. Maybe we can help.”

He knew she was being impersonally practical, but the gesture still warmed him considerably. This was the way he preferred her: working
with
him, not trying to buy him. He bent to the task, searching for comprehensible traces. He had a macroscopic patchwork ahead of him.

“
Let me do it, clubfingers
,” Schön. said in his ear. “
I can post it all in an hour. You’ll take two weeks, and you’ll miss a lot
.”

Ivo had already discovered the magnitude of the task. He did not want to be embarrassed by the inevitable tiring of his audience as the unproductive hours went by. “Do it, then,” he replied irritably, and gave Schön rein. More and more was becoming possible, between them.

Yet — if Schön could do this, using the macroscope — what had happened to the destroyer? The entire basis of Ivo’s refusal to free Schön was being thrown into question.

Perhaps — was it a hope? — he would fail.

Schön had not been bluffing. He expanded into Ivo’s brain and body and applied his juvenile but overwhelming intellect to the problem. Ivo watched his left fingers dance over the computer keys while his right ones flexed on the knob, and wondered whether he had not made a serious mistake. He had not freed Schön — but Schön might free himself, given this leeway. He was clever enough…

The screen cleared. The indicated scale expanded to two light-years diameter and a representation of cosmic dust appeared.

“What are you doing?” Afra demanded. “That’s no stellar system.”

“Primeval hydrogen cloud, stupid,” Schön replied with Ivo’s lips and tongue, while Ivo winced.

Afra shut up and the show went on. Had he not been observing from so intimate a spot, Ivo would have suspected it of being entirely fanciful. As it was, he knew that Schön had actually manipulated the macroscope to pick up impulses dating back five or ten billion years; the representation, though indirect, bridged and abridged, was an honest one.

The cloud of primitive gas swirled and contracted, the time scale showing the passage of roughly a million years every 25 seconds. In the course of ten million years the gas cloud compressed itself into a diameter of a hundred million miles, then to a scant one million, and then it flared into life and became a star. The compression had raised its temperature until the hydrogen/helium “ignition” point was achieved; now it was drawing enormous energy from the conversion of hydrogen atoms to a quarter the number of helium atoms.

“It’s like trying to cram four glasses of liquor into a fifth,” Afra explained to Beatryx. “A quart won’t fit into a fifth, so—”

“Doesn’t it depend on the size of the fifth glass?” Oh no, Ivo thought. Once more the two women had crossed signals. Harold would have to untangle them, as he always did. Eventually Beatryx would be made to understand that four hydrogen atoms had a combined atomic weight of 4.04, while a single helium atom’s weight was 4.00. The combination of four hydrogens to make one helium thus released the extra .04 as energy: the life of stars.

Only one percent of the new atom released — but so great was the aggregate that it halted the collapse of the huge cloud/star pictured on the screen and stabilized it for a period. Most of the light of the universe derived from this same process; the myriad stars of the Milky Way Galaxy were merely foci for hydrogen/helium conversion.

Several billion years passed in a few intense minutes. At last the fuel ran low, and the sun swelled into a vast red giant a hundred times its prior diameter.

“That can’t be Sol!” Harold objected. “Our sun is only halfway through its life cycle.”

Schön did not dignify this with a reply. Ivo did not comprehend the situation either, but still knew the image was accurate.

The star, having exhausted its available hydrogen, collapsed again. But within it now was a core of almost pure helium, the product of its lifelong consumption of hydrogen. As it contracted to a much tighter ball than before, the internal temperature increased to ten times that of the earlier conversion. Something had to give. It did: the helium began to break down into carbon. A new fuel had been discovered.