Macroscope

CHAPTER 9

“We have made,” Afra announced as though it were news, “five jumps — and we are now farther removed from the destroyer source than we were when we started.”

“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 cannot be coincidence that similar broadcasters of this nature are set up thirty-thousand light-years from each other, the range of each about eighteen thousand miles, presumably expanding in all directions at light velocity. Note how both skirt the middle edge of the galaxy. Six so placed, with a seventh in the center, would cover the vast majority of the stars available.”

“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 millennia, against all the species we know exist, otherwise.” He paused. “Do we go on?”

“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 beginning as the light of massed stars and terminating as the black of thinning dust. Not flat, not even; the ribbons were twisted, showing now broadside, now edgewise, resembling open mobius strips or the helix of galactic DNA.

And yes, he thought, yes — the galaxy was a cell, bearing its cosmic organelles and glowing in its animation; motile, warm-bodied, evolving, its life span enduring for tens of billions of years.

Ivo felt a physical hunger, and realized that he had been looking at the galaxy for many hours. He had been stupefied by it, as a worshiper was said to be blessedly stupefied by confrontation with his god.

He broke the trance and looked about him. Afra stood nearest, lovely in her mortal fashion, her eyes encompassing a hundred billion stars, her lungs inhaling cubic par-sees of space.

Harold turned to face him, and he noticed with a shock that the man, like the women, had lost weight sometime in the past few months. Everyone was changing! “Did you observe the globular clusters? Hundreds of them orbiting the galaxy, a million stars in each. Look!” He pointed. “That one must be within ten thousand light-years of us.”

Ivo saw what he had somehow missed before: a glob of light near at hand and about as far out from the galactic disk as they were. It resembled a small galaxy except that it was shapeless, a Rorschach blob of brilliance. It was as though some of the cotton had drifted free when the fabric of the main tapestry was woven. At its fringe, as with the main galaxy, the stars were sparse, but they thickened at the center, converting from blue to mid-range. This cluster was younger than the main body.

There were many others in sight, most closer in toward the galactic nucleus. Each, perhaps, was a cosmos in itself, possessing lifebearing planets and stellar civilizations. The overall pattern of the entire group of clusters was spherical — or at least hemispherical, since he could not see what lay on the far side of the main disk. Though he could not perceive individual motion, it struck him that the clusters were in fact orbiting the center of the galaxy — elliptical orbits, brushing very near to its rim and riding higher over its broad face. Some even seemed to be colliding with the galactic fringe, though that was so diffuse that it was a matter of interpretation.

Almost, he could picture the original ball of gas and dust, turning grandly in space and throwing out gauze and sparks. The majority of the material remained in the plane of rotation, to become the spiral arms and the overall disk-shape; but a few mavericks took separate courses, and were the clusters.

How did the universe appear to a creature looking out from a planet aboard one of these island systems? Did any cultures aspire to descend to the mighty mother complex? Was their god a whirlpool thirty thousand parsecs in diameter?

Beatryx emerged from the kitchen area, and Ivo realized that it had been the smell of cooking that had first brought his attention to his stomach. She was typically the bringer of nourishment. It was good that someone was practical!

At last Afra came out of it. “We are within the traveler field, but beyond the destroyer,” she said musingly. “We are thirty thousand light-years toward the traveler — so it will be passing Earth and the galaxy for at least that period in the future. Obviously it preceded the destroyers, too, or they would have started earlier and reached out this far. And that suggests—”

“That the point of the destroyer may be merely to suppress the alien beam,” Harold finished for her. “Since myriad local stations come through nicely, they cannot have incited the destroyer.”

“Talk of xenophobia!” she exclaimed. “Just because it proved that there was superior technology elsewhere — !”

Harold cocked his head at her. “Is that the way you see it? I might have reasoned along another line.”

“I am aware of your—”

“Soup’s on!” Beatryx called, once more abridging the discussion appropriately.

Because there was no destroyer here, they turned on the main screen to watch Ivo work. Afra could have used the macroscope herself, but there was now a certain group recognition that this was Ivo’s prerogative, and that practice had brought him to a level of proficiency no other person could match without a similar apprenticeship. It was his show.

He had stage fright.

He avoided the routine programs, now offered in such splendor and multiplicity that it would require years to Index them by hand. Their several language coding families were of course unfamiliar to the others; Ivo had mastered the basics only after intense concentration, though all were to some extent similar to the technique of the destroyer itself. He also avoided the traveler signal (when had that term come into use?); that would come in its own time. Instead he concentrated on the nonbroadcast band and searched for Earth: the world of Man as it was thirty thousand years ago.

And couldn’t pick it up.

He rechecked the coordinates derived from their telescopic sightings of the Andromeda Galaxy and selected Population II Cepheids of the Milky Way, and made due allowance for galactic rotation and the separate motions of the stars in the course of 30,000 years. Everything checked; he knew where to find Earth.

Except that it wasn’t there.

“Either I’ve lost my touch, or Earth didn’t exist thirty thousand years ago,” he said ruefully.

“Nonsense,” Afra said. “Let me try it.” She seemed eager.

Ivo gave place to her, feeling as though he had been sent to the showers.

Afra played with the controls for twenty minutes, focusing first on the Earth-locale, then elsewhere. The screen remained a mélange of color; no clear image appeared. At last she swung around to focus on one of the globular clusters outside the galaxy — and got an image.

She had set the computer to fix on any planetary surface encountered in a routine sweep of the views available, and it had done that. The picture was of a dark barren moon far from its primary. In the night sky above the horizon individual stars could be made out, and even the light band of massed distant stars.

“That’s no cluster!” Groton exclaimed. “You wouldn’t find a band like that in a spherical mass of stars.”

Afra fussed with the controls, adjusting the scene clumsily and finally losing it. She returned to the computer sweep, while Ivo chafed internally at the loss of the only picture they had landed, and such a mysterious one. The picture would not come in again. She began to show her temper.

“Something strange here,” Harold said. “The alignment of that image doesn’t check with the direct view of the cluster. And the scene was typical of a planet within the galaxy. That light band was the Milky Way!”

Afra set the computer for Earth-type planet selection, leaving the azimuth where it was, and waited while it filtered and sorted the crowded macrons. Ivo was anxious to take over again, but held himself back. The situation certainly was strange, and Afra obviously lacked the expertise necessary to solve the contradictions. But it would not be diplomatic to point this out.

A green landscape appeared, Earthlike but not Earth. Afra jumped to manual — and lost it. She swore in unladylike manner.

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.

The star was in business again, as a fast-living white dwarf.

But soon the helium ran out, and the tiny star faded into a blackened ball of matter no larger than a planet. It had come to a dismal end. It was dense with collapsed matter and peripheral heavy elements captured during its glory from galactic debris, but it was dead, a drifting ash.

After more millions of years this minuscule corpse was swept into the sphere of influence of a nascent star, a body forming from the more plentiful gas nearer the rim of the galaxy. As the new star, heedless of its degrading destiny, took on the characteristic brilliance of the long atomic conversion, this cinder became a satellite, sweeping up some of the gas for itself. It enhanced its mass and developed an atmosphere, but remained inert. Its day was done; it was never to regain its erstwhile grandeur.

“That’s Earth!” Afra said. Then, immediately: “No, it can’t be. Wrong composition, and the core is much too dense.” She was absorbing the symbols for material and density automatically, seeing the planet as it was.

A second ember was acquired by the young system, also representing the death of an ancient star. Then a third and a fourth, each accruing what pitiful lagniappe it could from the scant debris of space. The last two were much larger cores than the first, and acquired more atmosphere for their dotage, but had no hope of rejuvenation. Four planets orbited the star, each far older as entities than it was.

A neighbor had problems. The picture shifted to cover it for a geologic moment. This star was much larger than the original one and had consumed its hydrogen — and helium — lavishly. In a scant few million years it had run its course. But its mass, and therefore its internal heat, was such that the conversions did not stop at carbon. Oxygen, sodium, silicon, calcium — all the way down to iron, 26 on the atomic scale, the elements formed in this stellar furnace. A series of thermal intensifications — cataclysmic storms — broke through the shell of helium even before its breakdown was complete, producing trace amounts of heavy metals up to lead; but the basic, energy-releasing conversions predominated. The demise of a large star was not a quiet matter.

When nothing remained at the core lighter than iron, the gravitic collapse resumed. The heat ascended to a hundred billion degrees. Strength was drawn from this collapse, and energy poured back into the core to form new matter. The heavier elements all the way up to uranium now were manufactured in quantity.

But at this final collapse the star rebounded in an explosion that splattered its mass across the galaxy: a supernova. A splendid spectrum of heavy elements shot past the more conservative viewpoint star and through its satellite system, and some of this was captured while some fell into the star itself. The system was richer than it had been, feeding greedily upon the gobbets of its neighbor’s destruction.

The original planet intercepted a fair share of this largesse, and gained perceptibly thereby, as did the others. But the largest fragments, mostly iron, fell into orbit and coalesced into planets in their own right. Now three small satellites circled within the four large ones.

“Mars, Earth, Venus!” Afra said, caught up in this adventure. “And the first planet we saw is Neptune — our planet!”

Schön still did not bother to comment. Ivo felt Schön’s concentration as he identified and captured the diverse threads of the macronic tapestry and organized them into a coherent and chronological visual history. This was a task that required all of Schön’s powers, the artistic with the computational and linguistic. They were nevertheless exceptional powers for an exceptional undertaking; Ivo had tended to lose sight of just how potent a mind his mentor-personality possessed. If a mouse born into Leo remained a mouse, a lion confined to the harness of a mouse remained a lion. Or, in this case, a Ram.

More time passed, and the slow accretions continued. A billion years after the first, a second nova developed in the immediate neighborhood. More rich debris angled by, and the sun’s family levied another tax on it, acquiring material for two more inner planets and a number of major moons.

“Mercury and — Vulcan?” Afra inquired. “Or is that Pluto, misplaced?” For there were now five inner planets — one more than could be accounted for.

Schön kept on working.

From distant space, travelers came. Most passed, merely deflected by Sol’s gravity, not captured. One, however, lurched into a wobbly elliptical orbit that passed close to that of planet Jupiter.

“Six inner planets?” Afra demanded in a tone of outrage.

It was not to be. Jupiter wrestled the newcomer around in a harsh initiation, twisting it inward toward the sun… and toward the orbit of the next inward planet. Too close. They drifted, interacted — and came together.

And sundered each other before they touched.

“Roche’s Limit squared,” Afra murmured.

One fragment shot out to intercept planet Saturn, and was captured there — too close. Roche’s Limit exerted itself again: the apprentice moon shattered, and the tiny fragments gradually coalesced into a discernible ring.

A major fragment of the original demolition traveled farther. It intercepted Neptune, where it too broke up, forming two tremendous moons and some fragments. One moon escaped the planet but not the system, and became the erratic outer minion Pluto; the other hooked in close to Neptune and remained as Triton.

Another major fragment angled across an inner orbit and interacted there, too large for capture, too small to escape. The two bodies formed the binary planet known as Earth and Luna.

Then a close shot at almost normal time. The landscape of Earth, seven hundred million years ago: strange continents, strange life on both land and sea. The moon came then, sweeping terribly close, a tenth of the distance it was to have at the time of Man. No romantic approach, this, but the awful threat of another application of the Limit. The tides of Earth swelled into calamity, gaping chasms split the surface of Luna. Mounds of water passed entirely over the continents, obliterating every feature upon them and leaving nothing but bare and level land. No land-based life survived, even in fossil, and much of the higher sea-life also perished in that violence. The progression of animate existence on Earth had been set back by a billion years: the greatest calamity it was ever to know.

“And now we make love by the light of Luna,” Afra said, “and plot it into our horoscopes as ‘feeling.’ ”

It was Harold’s turn not to comment.

All this, stemming from the single trans-Mars wreckage — yet the bulk of the refuse dispersed as powder or spiraled into the sun, to have no tangible impact. Debris remained to form a crude ring around the sun in the form of the asteroid belt, and a number of chunks eventually became retrograde moonlets. It would be long before the disorder wrought by this accident was smoothed over.

A third nova, more distant, provided another cloud of dust and particles, adding several tiny moons. Some of the swirls become comets, but the complexion of the system did not alter in any important way. Sol had its family, collected from all over the galaxy, portions of which were older and portions newer than itself. Life recovered from its setback on Earth and individual species crawled back upon the reemerging land and drifting continents in the wake of a receding moon.

One thing more: a solitary traveler came from the more thickly-settled center-section of the galaxy. It was a planetary body moving rather slowly, as though its kinetic energies had been spent by encounters with other systems. It looped about Sol in an extraordinarily wide pass, hesitated, and settled down to stay, averaging seven billion miles out.

“What is that?” Afra inquired.

“That thing must be twice the size of Jupiter!” Harold said. “How could it be there, in our system, and we not know it?” But no one answered.

Ivo half-suspected Schön of joking.

The motion stopped. The picture remained: the contemporary situation, updated to within a million years. They had witnessed in summary the astonishing formation and history of the Solar System.

“Beautiful, Ivo!” Harold exclaimed. “If you can do that, you can do anything. Congratulations.”

Ivo removed the macroscope paraphernalia. They all were smiling at him, and Afra was getting ready to speak. “I didn’t do it,” he said.

“How can you say that!” Beatryx protested. “Everything was so clear.”

But Afra and Harold had sobered immediately. “Schön?” Harold asked with sympathy.

Ivo nodded. “He said it would take me two weeks, and he was right. He said he could do it in an hour. So I dared him to, I guess.”

“Wasn’t that — dangerous?” Afra asked.

“Yes. But I retained possession.”

Harold was not satisfied. “My chart indicates that a person like Schön would be unlikely to put that amount of effort into a project unless he expected to gain personally. What was his motive?”

“So it was Schön who called me ‘stupid,’ ” Afra murmured.

“I think he has found a way to get around the destroyer,” Ivo said carefully. “The memory trace in my mind, I mean, and maybe the rest too. I think he can take over, now — and I guess he wants to.”

“Are you willing to let him?” Harold asked, not looking at him.

“Well, that is in the contract, you might say. If the rest of you feel I should.” He said it as though it were a routine decision, but it was only with considerable effort that he kept his voice from shaking. It was extinction he contemplated, and it terrified him.

When Afra had feared loss of identity she had fallen back on physical resources and demanded the handling. Irrational, perhaps, but at least it had satisfied her. What did he have to bolster his courage?

“So Schön was merely making a demonstration for us,” Harold said. “An impressive one, I admit. Proving that he can make good on his claims. That he can get us to the destroyer, and with the advance information we need. All we have to do is ask him.”

Afra’s eyes were on Harold now, but she remained silent. Ivo wondered in what spheres her thoughts were coursing, and was afraid to guess. She was intent and exquisite.

“Is it necessary to take a vote?” Harold asked, casually. Thus readily did they accept the prospect of a companion’s departure.

“Yes,” Afra said.

“Secret ballot?”

She nodded agreement.

How badly did she want that destroyer?

Harold leaned over and filched the note-pad from Afra’s purse. Ivo wondered idly why he didn’t use his own pad for the dirty work. Harold tore out a sheet, folded it, creased it between his fingernails, tore and retore it. He handed out the ballots.

“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 unconnected, and the machine had picked it up as “I” and “V” and added the “O.” Thus the word became his name.

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 beginning. Perhaps our channel runs closer to another destroyer.”

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—”

“Let’s begin with the satellites,” she said. “I think they’re the battleships.”

“Satellites?”

“I told you. The destroyer is ringed with hundred-foot spheres — six of them, about five light-minutes out, north-south-east-west-up-down.”

“You did not, girl, tell me. You implied that you could not obtain such detail with optics. This complicates the problem.”

“I did tell you. Where were you when I said ‘destroyer complex’?”

“Who was it who said ‘There is no faith stronger than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own infallibility’?”

“Cabell said it. But he also implied that a bad-tempered woman needs an even-tempered man.” Both smiled.

Ivo went on eating, but Beatryx’s excellent cooking had become tasteless. Afra and Groton!

No — he was jumping to an unfounded suspicion. A ludicrous one! Their open banter merely reflected the increasing intimacy of the little group. It was almost the way the project had been, when he and Brad and all the others had batted inanities back and forth while pursuing deeper studies. Afra and Groton had had to work closely together ever since Triton — particularly when Ivo himself had skipped off to Tyre and left them stranded in deep space. And there had developed a kind of father-daughter relation between them since the trial. Afra had lost her own father somehow, so—

Groton and his waldoes and machines performed their miracles of construction again, and in due course Neptune had a planetary cannon. The bore was thirty-five feet across and two miles long, bottomed by the field-distortion mechanism. Slender tubes opened to the atmospheric surface of the planet in a circle many miles across, and fed into the nether sections of the bore. Great baffles stood ready to redirect the force of the gases that would converge the moment the generators opened the tunnel to space.

They gathered in the control room to watch the launching. Neptune was rotating, relative to the destroyer complex, and the action had to be properly timed. Afra had done the calculations, querying Ivo only for verification. She had made it plain, in similarly subtle ways, that the relation between them had changed. She was not dependent on him for such work.

Groton manipulated his controls, that seemed to be almost as intricate as those of the macroscope maintenance, and on the screen the monster dummy-ship was lifted into place. This was a breech-loading cannon with a clip of four; further expenditures on dummies had been deemed a waste of time.

Groton fired. The gravity-diffusion field came on, taking a moment to develop full intensity. It was generated by a different unit than theirs of the residential area, since it was essential that they continue to be shielded from the full gravity and pressure of the planet. Then gas hurtled through the pipes and smashed into the base of the projectile, itself abruptly weightless. The control chamber shuddered.

Above, atmosphere imploded into the column of null, meeting the baffles there and forming into an instant hurricane with an eye that was a geyser of methane snow. All the pressure of Neptune’s atmosphere drove that bullet forward: one million pounds per square inch, initial.

Out from ammonia and water, both vaporized by the friction; through hydrogen and beyond the mighty atmosphere: a thousand miles beyond the apparent surface of the planet the motor cut in. The rocket accelerated at a rate that would have terminated any fleshly occupants and shattered unprotected equipment. It was a temporary motor, designed for power and not duration, and it consumed itself as it functioned; and it got the ship up to a velocity that would bring it to the destroyer in days instead of months.

“Certainly looks like a ship from here,” Afra said with admiration. “Are you sure you didn’t put Joseph in that lock by mistake?”

“Drone ship, on my honor. It only weighs a tenth as much as Joseph, and that galactic formula would asphyxiate our type of life as soon as it ignited, not to mention the fact that it burns its own guts. You can do a lot with chemical drive if you don’t have to sit on top of it.”

The watch began. Each person tracked the drone for four hours, ready to sound the alarm when anything happened. A light-day was a very small distance compared to those they had become accustomed to, but even galactically sponsored chemical drive was very weak. The rocket achieved its top velocity and coasted, an empty shell. Their vigil lasted a fortnight.

The drone passed the nearest satellite and angled toward the destroyer itself. Nothing happened. It came within a light-minute of the main sphere and curved around it as though bent by a tremendous gravitational force, but did not stop. It passed another satellite on the way out.

“Either they’re dead or playing possum,” Groton said. “Do we try another?”

Another two weeks of eventless waiting, Ivo thought, but certainly the wisest course.

“I’m satisfied,” Afra said. “Obviously there are no functioning automatic defenses. I’m sorry we wasted this much time. Let’s move in ourselves.”

Ivo thought of objecting, then decided not to. She had spoken and it was so, impetuous or not. This project was hers, now.

They were space-borne again, and it was a strange sensation. Not since they put down on Schön, erstwhile moon of a moon, had they taken Joseph out of planetary control for any extended period. In the passing months the old reflexes had faded, if they had ever been really implanted, making free-fall unfamiliar, making them have to stop and think out their actions.

“I like it,” Afra said. “Neptune is home, of course, but this is vacation.”

Why was she so buoyant? Ivo wondered. They were near the termination of their grisly mission, in whatever guise that mission existed now, and he would have expected it to remind her forcefully of the fate of her supposed fiancé. Instead she acted as though she had found new love. She hardly seemed to care about the destroyer itself, though it was the instigator of all of this.

Groton clapped his hand on Afra’s shoulder, sending her skidding in the weightlessness. “Girl, if you don’t get on those computations before I reorganize our gear, I’ll have the cap’n hurl you into the brig!”

They had tied down their equipment and pushed out from Neptune slowly, without the benefit of full gravity nullification. This had been expensive in working fluid, but far safer for man and machine. Now the ship was scooping in more hydrogen and compressing it, at the fringe of the Neptune atmosphere, so that they would have full tanks for the main haul. They were ready to retool for straight space flight.

They had to melt, despite Groton’s earlier objection; there was no other way to cover such a distance. The cycle was routine, however, once their course had been set. They revived in good condition light-seconds from one of the satellites. It had seemed wiser to investigate the minion before the master.

Ivo had been lulled by the somewhat cavalier attitude affected by the others, but the sight of the alien sphere looming so close — telescopically — reminded him with a shock that this was to be their first physical contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial civilization. A malignant one.

It was monstrous as they approached, not so much in its hundred-foot diameter (Afra had done expert photographic work and analyzing, to pinpoint that size at a distance of a light-day, even allowing for the superior equipment sponsored by galactic technology) as in its suggestion of implacable power. The surface was pocked, as though it had been subject to spatial debris for many millions of years. Portions of it projected, reminiscent of cannon.

Afra took over the telescope to make detail photographs. Now, while her attention was wholly taken up, he could watch her. She was radiant; her hair was bound in a single braid that drifted over one shoulder and down her front, red against the white of her blouse. She had recovered the weight she had lost and was now in vibrant health. Her lips were parted, half-smiling in her concentration. Light from the equipment played over her high cheekbone and across her perfect chin, caressing her face with shadow.

Was it the single rose he smelled again?

“Moonstruck,” Brad had termed him, setting that emotional snare, and Afra was that moon. Ivo knew he would have loved her anyway, whatever her color, whatever her intelligence. It was perhaps her appearance more than her personality; he had disillusioned himself long ago about his romantic values and hers. Still, the love he felt encompassed all of her, the violent along with the beautiful. All, no matter what.

She jerked her head up, eyes widening in shock, showing that blue again. Ivo jumped guiltily, thinking she had caught him staring, but her exclamation banished such inconsequential alarm immediately.

“It’s tracking us!”

Groton and Beatryx seemed to materialize beside her.

“It’s live!” Afra said with the same shock. “It has a range-finder on us.”

“Since we’re a sitting duck, all we can do is quack,” Groton said, but he did not look as complacent as he sounded.

Beatryx ventured one of her rare technical comments: “Wouldn’t it have done something, if it meant to?”

Afra smiled, as she did so readily and prettily now. “You’re right,” Tryx. I’m getting hysterical after the fact. We’d be smithereened by now if we were going to be. We’re within fifty thousand miles, and you can bet that’s well within its sphere of control. So eradication just isn’t in our horoscope for today.”

The strange antenna continued to track as they came close. It was a bowl-shaped spiral of wire about two feet in diameter, with beads strung on the outermost spire. There was no other sign of life. Ivo felt the cold sweat on his palms and wiped it off, embarrassed by it and what it signified. Was he the only one to feel old-fashioned fear?

The journey via melting and ten-G acceleration had reduced the problems of deceleration and docking to elementary ones; maneuvering was nothing after distance had been conquered. Afra piloted them into a companion orbit — the destroyer-sphere five light-minutes distant, small as it was, was the primary for both — and let Joseph drift. None of them had conjectured how an object two miles in diameter could have a gravitational field about it equivalent to that of a small star. Galactic technology had done it, utilizing gravity as a tool, and that was explanation enough.

“Someone should stay on the ship,” Groton said. “We can’t be sure what is waiting — there.”

“Ivo should stay,” Afra said. “If anything happens, he’s the only one who can get the ship out. Neptune, rather.” She said it as though he were a fixture, a commodity; she hadn’t asked his opinion. “Give me one companion, though; I’m afraid of the dark.”

“I’ll stay,” Beatryx said. “You go, Harold.”

Ivo could find no legitimate objection to make.

The two got into their suits and departed via the airlock at the appropriate time. Ivo was alone with Beatryx for the first time since their last conversation on satellite Schön, seemingly so long ago. In the interim he had traveled into Earth’s historic past, and into its geologic past, and beyond the fringe of the galaxy. His body had run through the astonishing liquefication and reconstitution so many times that the process had become routine, even tedious. He had lived many lifetimes, and many of his basic certainties had been annulled.

Why, then, did it bother him so much that Afra and Groton should be together?

He tried to say something to Beatryx, but realized that he could not ask her advice without undermining her own framework. She had proper faith in her husband.

He looked at her, realizing in this isolated moment of association and reflection how much she had changed. She had been plump and fortyish when he met her at age thirty-seven; in the period of the Triton trouble she had become emaciated and fortyish. Now she was thirty-eight — and had regained her health without her former avoirdupois. She looked thirtyish. Her hair had brightened into full blonde, her limbs were sleek, her torso reminiscent of the goddess she had been momentarily during the first re-constitution. It had happened gradually, this change in her; the surprise was that it had taken him so long to recognize it.

“You have changed, Ivo,” she said.

“I’ve changed?”

“Since your visit to Tyre. You were so young at first, so unsure. Now you’re more mature.”

“I don’t feel mature,” he said, flattered but disbelieving. “I’m still full of doubts and frustrations. And Tyre was nothing but violence and intrigue — not my type of life at all. I don’t see how it could have changed me.”

She only shrugged.

He glanced at the screen again, reminded that half their party was in the alien structure. Groton and Afra—

“She has let go of Bradley Carpenter,” Beatryx said. “Have you seen the difference? She’s changed so much. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Was there such a thing as being too generous? True, the two were risking their lives by attempting personal contact with aliens likely to be powerful and hostile; but the human interaction could not be entirely ignored. “I’ve noticed the difference, yes.”

“And she gets along so much better with Harold. I’m sure he has been good for her. He’s very steady.”

Ivo nodded.

“She’s such a lovely girl,” Beatryx said. There was no malice in her tone; nothing but concerned pleasure.

“Lovely.”

“You look tired, Ivo. why don’t I keep watch while you rest?”

“That’s very kind of you.” He went to his hammock and strapped himself in. It was an anchor rather than a support, in this weightlessness.

It was this about Beatryx, he thought: she was happy. There was no place in her philosophy for jealousy or petty conjecture. She did not worry about her husband because she had no internal doubts.

How much could the group have accomplished, without her? The ingredients of strife had been abundantly present, particularly with the strong personalities of Groton and Afra clashing at the outset, and the background specter of Schön, but somehow every flareup had been diverted or pacified. Beatryx had done it… and profited in the doing. Intelligence, determination, skill — these would have come to nothing without that basic stability.

He must have slept, for he was Sidney Lanier again: poor, ill, his aspirations unrecognized. He did some more teaching, but the pupils were unruly, the employers exacting. It was the Reconstruction, and it was bad; the carpetbaggers corrupted everything. “Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,” he wrote, “we lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.”

But the love of Mary Day, now Mary Day Lanier, sustained him. She was as ill as he, and as hard put upon, but their marriage was an unqualified blessing. His son Charles delighted him, for he loved children though he did not really understand them.

In 1869 James Wood Davidson published a survey of two hundred and forty-one Southern writers. Lanier was listed, though largely for completeness; much more space was devoted to others considered more notable.

But you were the greatest of them all! Ivo cried. If only your contemporaries had opened their minds—

But nothing changed. The mind of Ivo was prisoner to the situation of another person; he could watch, he could know, but he could not influence.

As Schön was watching him even now…

At Macon they spoke of Sidney Lanier as “A young fool trying to write poetry.” They paid no attention to his dialect poems — a form whose origin was later to be credited to another man — or his cautions against the shiftless, shortsighted Georgia Cracker ways. Cotton was destroying the land; wheat and corn were far better crops, but the farmers refused to change.

He put his sentiment at least into a major poem, “Corn,” and sent it off to the leading literary magazine of the day, Howells’ Atlantic Monthly.

Howells rejected it.

Lanier was crushed by this response. He believed in his work, yet the unambitious efforts of others achieved readier acceptance. “In looking around at the publications of the younger poets,” he was later to remark, “I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even attempt anything great. The morbid fear of doing something wrong or unpolished appears to have influenced their choice of subjects.”

Not only in poetry! Ivo thought. The entire society is governed by mediocrity. We never learn.

Several other prominent magazines rejected “Corn.”

Were they absolutely blind?

At last Lippincott’s Magazine accepted it. Publication made Lanier’s poetic fame; henceforth he was known, though still poor and ill.

The year was 1875, and he was thirty-three years old. He would not live to forty.

Ivo must have slept, for the exploratory party was back already.

“What a bomb!” Afra exclaimed. “There’s enough armament there to blast a fleet. Chemical, laser, and things we won’t invent for centuries! All of it on standby.”

“I don’t understand,” Beatryx said.

“It’s a battlewagon, dear,” Groton explained. “But somebody turned it off. All but the sensory equipment.”

“It could have blasted Neptune to bits!” Afra said. The potential violence seemed to fascinate her. “It has — I think they’re gravity-bombs. Devices that would throw the fields associated with matter into complete chaos. Whoever built that wagon really knew how to fight a war!”

Ivo decided to get into the conversation. “It must be there to protect the destroyer. But why would they deactivate it? If enemies had boarded it and turned it off, they would have gone on to squelch the destroyer too.”

“And why build such an arsenal, if not to be used?” Groton said. “I can’t make sense of it either.”

Afra was not fazed. “We know where the answer is.”

“Did it occur to you that we may not much like the answer, when and if we find it?” Groton, at least, seemed to be taking the matter seriously.

“It’s in the stars. Who am I to object?”

The two-mile bulk of the destroyer itself seemed more like a small planet, compared to the satellite. Though the gravitic field about it was monstrous, intensity had not increased proportionately as they approached its surface, and the weight of the ship was only a quarter what it would have been on Earth. This still made for tricky maneuvering, since the macroscope housing was vulnerable in gravity. But indentations in the sides of the sphere resembled docking facilities, so they piloted Joseph in instead of establishing a tight orbit. The builders had evidently expected visitors, and had made the approach convenient.

Ivo gave up counting the incongruities of the situation. Better simply to accept what offered, as the others were doing.

The dock was a tubelike affair open at each end, as though a missile had passed cleanly through the rim. The gravity was minimal inside — just enough to hold Joseph in place at the center of the tube. The macroscope housing thus never had to rest in an awkward position; the ship was able to “land” with it attached.

Groton and Afra donned their suits again and went out first. Ivo watched him boost her into the lock with a familiar hand on the rear.

Three minutes later their cheerful reports began coming in. “Very well organized,” Groton remarked. “Very businesslike. There seem to be magnetic moorings we can attach to the hull. Why not?”

“And pressure-locks,” Afra said, her voice girlishly thrilled. “Harold, you anchor Joseph while I figure out the settings.”

“Right.” The sounds of his exertions came through, and the clank of tools, audible without benefit of earphone. Ivo wondered how this was possible, in the exterior vacuum, then realized that the sonic vibrations were being transmitted through the hardware and into the. ship. Groton was holding on to something, and standing somewhere, so contacts were plentiful.

Then came the knock of another contact with Joseph’s hull. The ship had been secured.

“I’m setting it for Earth-normal pressure and composition,” Afra said. “I don’t even have to remember the oxygen-nitrogen ratio or the fine points; it has a gas-analyzer. One sample puff from my suit—”

“Let’s not trust it too far,” Groton cautioned. “Don’t forget this is the destroyer.”

“Don’t get worked up, daddy. If it let us get this far, it isn’t going to trick us with a mickey now. I’m going in.”

Ivo wondered. Wasn’t it possible that the destroyer cared less about infringing individuals than about dangerous species or cultures? This had the aspect of flypaper — or, if occupied, of the spider’s lair.

But if it had them, it had them. No incidental caution could protect them within its bowels, if personal malignance waited. They could be snuffed out in a thousand casual ways. Had they wanted security, they should have stayed well clear of the destroyer. Thousands of light-years clear.

“Removing suit,” Afra said. A pause. “Air’s good. Shall I go on into the interior?”

“Not without checking it!” Groton said. “That’s only the airlock, you know. What’s inside could ruin your delicate complexion. It might be hundred percent ammonia at five degrees Kelvin.”

“No it mightn’t. The system has been keyed to the lock. The entire wing has been pressurized to match my sample. I tell you, these galactics are experienced.”

“What do you think, folks?” Groton asked dubiously.

Ivo remembered that he was on this circuit too. “She’ll have to get out of the lock before anybody else uses it. Might as well go in.”

“You, dear?” Groton inquired.

“Whatever you think, dear,” Beatryx said. She had faith in her husband’s judgment, and Ivo envied her that.

“Come on out, then, both of you. We should take on this particular adventure as a group. I’ll wait here for you while Miss Impetuous shows the way.”

“Goats are naturally inquisitive,” Afra said.

Goat = Capricorn, her astrological sign, Ivo thought. Groton must have showed her her chart, during one of their… private discussions. And did Beatryx know that she was Pisces — a poor fish?

They dressed and climbed out. Ivo assisted Beatryx, but not with any palm on the bottom.

Groton stood on a platform resembling that of a train station. Massive cables reached from the rounded ceiling to Joseph on either side.

“Just swing over on the spare,” Groton recommended. “The gravity increases near the lock. You could jump, but why take chances?”

Ivo wondered again whether the humor were conscious. How much difference could one more chance make, now?

They swung over. This was his first physical contact with an alien artifact, since he had not visited the satellite, and he was vaguely disappointed both at its ordinary substance and at the continuing casualness with which the others adjusted to the situation. This was supposed to be the moment of climax — Alien Contact! — and nobody noticed.

Or was he merely put out because he had become a minor figure in a major adventure? After this, if they survived, Afra would be able to handle the travel signal (at least until they reencountered the existent destroyer field, which would take thousands of years to dissipate even at light speed;) and so she would have no further need of Ivo.

“Okay, I’ll go through and you follow in turn,” Groton said. “No problem with these controls—” He went on to demonstrate.

“Hurry up!” Afra said from the inside. “I’m itching to look about in here.”

Had this degenerated into a child’s game of “Spaceman”? Girl astronaut wanted them to hurry because she was impatient to explore!

He thought he heard Schön laughing. Little Ivo had thought to manage this adventure himself, and only succeeded in making himself unimportant. Ivo was no Lanier, he was not likely to achieve fame on his own. Schön, on the other hand—

They don’t need you, either, he thought furiously at the lurking personality. Schön did not reply.

The interior was, as Afra had claimed, pressurized. He and Beatryx joined the other two in summer clothing, depositing their suits in binnacles provided for them adjacent to the lock. Regular tourist facilities!

The changes in the two women were quite noticeable now, as they stood side by side during that inevitable hesitation before proceeding further into the station. Both were well proportioned, Afra a little taller and more dynamic. Afra was modern — and it looked less well on her, in contrast to the more conservative motions of the other. Where Afra jumped, Beatryx stepped. The difference in their ages showed less in appearance than in attitude and posture and facial expression.

Finally he pinned down the elusive but essential distinction: what Afra had was sex appeal; what Beatryx had was femininity.

Ivo wondered whether he and Groton had changed similarly.

They were in a long quiet hall lighted from the ceiling, a hall that slanted gently downward. “Down” was toward the center of the sphere, not the rim; nothing so simple as centripetal pseudo-gravity here. The materials of the hall’s construction were conventional, as these things went; no scintillating shields, no compacted matter. If this were typical, the two-mile sphere could not possibly have the mass of a star, or even a planet. Somehow it generated gravity without mass.

The situation was not, on second thought, surprising. A potent gravitic field was no doubt necessary to power the destroyer impulse, and it should be a simple matter to allow some of it to overlap around the unit, providing for visitors. It was handy for holding down satellites too, even at distances similar to those prevailing in the Solar System itself. Earth was only eight light-minutes from Sol…

A hundred yards or so along, the hall widened into a level chamber. Here there were alcoves set in the walls, and objects resting within them.

Afra trotted to the nearest on the left side. “Do you think the exhibit is safe to touch?” she inquired, now hesitant.

“Do you see any DO NOT HANDLE signs, stupid?”

“Harold, one of these minutes I’m going to whisper nasty things about you into your wife’s docile ear.”

“She’s known them for fifteen years.” Groton put his arm around Beatryx, who smiled complacently.

Afra reached into the alcove and lifted out its artifact. It was a sphere about four inches in diameter, rigid and light, made of some plastic material. It was transparent; as she held it up to the light they all could see its emptiness.

“A container?” Groton conjectured.

“A toy?” Beatryx said.

Groton looked at her. “I wonder. An educational toy. A model of the destroyer?”

“Not without docking vents,” Afra said. She put it back and went on to the next. This was a cone six inches high with a flat base four inches across. It was made of the same transparent material, and was similarly empty.

“Dunce cap,” Ivo suggested.

She ignored him and went on. The third figure was a cylindrical segment on the same scale as the cone, closed off by a flat disk at each end. It was solid but light, the silver-white surface opaque but reflective. Afra turned it about. “Metallic, but very light,” she said. “Probably—”

Suddenly she dropped it back in the alcove and brushed her hands against her shorts as though they were burning.

The others watched her. “What happened?” Groton asked.

“That’s lithium!”

Groton looked. “I believe you are right. But there’s a polish on it — a coating of wax, perhaps. It shouldn’t be dangerous to handle.”

What was so touchy about lithium? Ivo wondered, but he decided not to inquire. Probably it burned skin, like an acid, or was poisonous.

Afra looked foolish. “I must be more nervous than I let on. I just never expected—” She paused, glancing down the wall. “Something occurs to me. Is the next one a silvery-gray pyramid?”

Groton checked. “Close. Actually it’s a tetrahedron, similar to the one we built originally on Triton. Your true pyramid has five sides, counting the bottom.”

“Beryllium.”

“How do you know?”

“This is an elemental arrangement. Look at—”

“Elementary arrangement,” Groton corrected her.

“Elemental. You do know what an element is? Look at these objects. The first is a sphere, which means it has only one side: outside. The second is a closed cone: two sides, one curved, one flat. The third, the cylinder, has three. Yours has four, and so on. The first two aren’t empty — they’re gases! Hydrogen and helium, first and second elements on the periodic table—”

“Could be,” Groton said, impressed.

“And likely to be so for any technologically advanced species. Lithium, the metal that’s half the weight of water, third. Beryllium, fourth. Boron—”

She broke off again and lurched for the sixth alcove — and froze before it.

The others followed. There lay a four-inch cube — six sides — of a bright clear substance.

Groton picked it up. “What’s number six on the table? Six protons, six electrons… isn’t that supposed to be carbon?” Then he too froze, eyes fixed on the cube. The light refracted through it strongly.

Then Ivo made the connection. “Carbon in crystalline form — that’s diamond!”

They gazed upon it: sixty-four cubic inches of diamond, that had to have been cut from a much larger crystal.

A single exhibit — of scores in the hall.

Then Afra was moving down the length of the room, calling off the samples. “Nitrogen — oxygen — fluorine — neon…”

Groton shook his head. “What a fortune! And they’re only samples, shape-coded for ready reference. They—”

Words failed him. Reverently, he replaced the diamond block.

“Scandium — titanium — vanadium — chromium—” Afra chanted as she rushed on. “They’re all here! All of them!”

Beatryx was perplexed. “Why shouldn’t they put them on display, if they want to?”

Groton came out of his daze. “No reason, dear. No reason at all. It’s just a very expensive exhibit, to leave open to strangers. Perhaps it is their way of informing us that wealth means nothing to them.”

She nodded, reassured.

“The rare earths, too!” Afra called. She was now on the opposite side of the room, working her way back. “Here’s promethium — pounds of it! And it doesn’t even occur in nature!”

“Does she know all the elements by heart?” Ivo muttered.

“Osmium! That little cube must weigh twenty pounds! And solid iridium — on Earth that would sell for a thousand dollars an ounce!”

“Better stay clear of the radioactives, Afra!” Groton cautioned her.

“They’re glassed in. Lead glass, or something; no radiation. I hope. At least they don’t have them by the pound! Uranium — neptunium — plutonium—”

“Saturnium — jupiterium — marsium,” Ivo muttered, facetiously carrying the planetary identifiers farther. It seemed to him that too much was being made of this exhibit. “Earthium — venusium — mercurochrome—”

“Mercury,” Groton said, overhearing him. “There is such an element.”

Oh.

Afra came back at last, subdued. “Their table goes to a hundred and twenty. Those latter shapes get pretty intricate…”

“You know better than that, Afra,” Groton said. “Some of those artificial elements have half-lives of hours, even minutes. They can’t sit on display.”

“Even seconds, half-life. They’re still here. Look for yourself.”

“Facsimiles, maybe. Not—”

“Bet?”

“No.” Groton looked for himself. “Must be some kind of stasis field,” he said dubiously. “If they can do what they can do with gravity—”

“Suddenly I feel very small,” she said.

But Ivo reminded himself that such tricks were nothing compared to the compression of an entire planet into its gravitational radius, and the protection of accompanying human flesh. This exhibit was impressive, but hardly alarming, viewed in perspective. He suspected that there was more to it than they had spotted so far.

The hall continued beyond the element display, slanting down again. Ivo wondered about such things as the temperature. Sharp changes in it should affect some of the element-exhibits, changing them from solid to liquid, or liquid to gas. Yet the exhibit had been geared to a comfortable temperature for human beings, and was obviously a permanent arrangement. The layout, too — convenient for human beings, even to the height of the alcove.

Had this been the destroyer station closest to Earth, there could have been suspicion of a carefully tailored show. But this one was almost fifty thousand light-years distant. It could not have been designed for men — unless there were men in the galaxy not of Earth. Or very similar creatures.

The implications disturbed him, but no more than anything else about this strange museum. He knew it had been said that a planetary creature had to be somewhat like man in order to rise to civilization and technology, and that long chains of reasoning had been used to “prove” this thesis — but man’s reasoning in such respects was necessarily biased, and he had discounted it. Yet if it were true — if it were true — did it also hold for man’s personality? The greed, the stupidity, the bloodthirst — ?

Was that Schön laughing again?

The passage opened into a second room. This one was much larger than the first, and the alcoves began at floor-level.

“Machinery!” Groton exclaimed with the same kind of excitement Afra had expressed before. He went to the first exhibit: a giant slab of metal, shaped like a wedge of cheese. As he approached, a ball fell on it and rolled off. Nothing else happened.

“Machine?” Ivo inquired.

“Inclined plane — the elementary machine, yes.”

Well, if Groton were satisfied…

The second item was a simple lever. Fulcrum and rod, the point of the latter wedged under a large block. As they came up to it, the rod moved, and the block slid over a small amount. Groton nodded, pleased, and Ivo followed him to the next. The two women walked ahead, giving only cursory attention to this display.

The third resembled a vise. A long handle turned a heavy screw, so that the force applied was geared down twice. “Plane and lever,” Groton remarked. “We’re jumping ahead about fifty thousand years each time, as human technology goes.”

“So far.”

The fourth one had a furnace and a boiler, and resembled a primitive steam engine — which it was. The fifth was an electric turbine.

After that they became complicated. To Ivo’s untrained eye, they resembled complex motors, heaters and radio equipment. Some he recognized as variants of devices he had blue printed via the macroscope; others were beyond his comprehension. Not all were intricate in detail; some were deceptively smooth. He suspected that an old automobile mechanic would find a printed-circuit board with embedded micro-transistors to be similarly smooth. One thing he was sure of: none of it was fakery.

Groton stopped at the tenth machine. “I thought I’d seen real technology when we terraformed Triton,” he said. “Now — I am a believer. I’ve digested about as much as I care to try in one outing. Let’s go on.”

The girls had already done so, and were in the next chamber. This contained what appeared to be objects of art. The display commenced with simple two- and three-dimensional representations of concretes and abstracts, and went on to astonishing permutations. This time it was Beatryx who was fascinated.

“Oh, yes, I see it,” she said, moving languidly from item to item. She was lovely in her absorption, as though the grandeur and artistry of what she perceived transfigured her own flesh. Now she outshone Afra. Ivo had not realized how fervent her interest in matters artistic was, though it followed naturally from her appreciation of music. He had assumed that what she did not talk about was of no concern to her, and now he chided himself for comprehending shallowly — yet again.

The display did not appeal to him as a whole, but individual selections did. He could appreciate the mathematical symbolism in some; it was of a sophisticated nature, and allied to the galactic language codes.

A number were portraits of creatures. They were of planets remote from Earth, but were intelligent and civilized, though he could not tell how he could be sure of either fact. Probably the subtle clues manifested themselves to him subliminally, as when Brad had first shown him alien scapes on the macroscope. Description? Pointless; the creatures were manlike in certain respects and quite alien in certain others. What mattered more was their intangible symmetry of form and dignity of countenance. These were Greek idealizations; the perfect physique with the well-tutored mind and disciplined emotion. These were handsome male, females and neuters. They were represented here as art, and they were art, in the same sense that a rendition of a finely contoured athlete or nude woman was art by human terms.

The rooms continued, each one at a lower level than the one preceding, until it seemed that the party had to be at the second lap of a spiral. One chamber contained books; printed scrolls, coiled tapes, metallic memory disks. Probably all the information the builders of the station might have broadcast to space was here, the reply to anyone who might suspect that the destroyer was merely sour grapes delivered by an ignorant culture. It was, in retrospect, obvious that that had never been the case.

One room contained food. Many hours and many miles had passed in fascination; they were hungry. Macroscopic chemical identifiers labeled the entrees, which were in stasis ovens. The party made selections as though they were dining at an automat, “defrosting” items, and the menu was strange but good.

Nowhere was there sign of animate habitation. It was as though the builders had stocked the station as a hostel and center of information, and left it for travelers who could come in the following eons. Yet it was also the source of the very signal that banished travel. What paradox was this?

The hall opened at last to a small room — and abruptly terminated. There were no alcoves, no exhibits; only a pedestal in the center supporting a small intricate object.

They walked around it indecisively. “Does it seem to you that we are being led down the garden path?” Afra inquired. “The exhibits are impressive, and I am impressed — but is this all? A museum tour and a dead end?”

“It is all we are supposed to see,” Groton said. “And somehow I do not think it would be wise to force the issue.”

“We came to force the issue!” Afra said.

“What I meant to say was, let’s not start hammering at the walls. We could discover ourselves in hard vacuum. Further exploration in an intellectual capacity should be all right.”

Ivo was looking at the device on the pedestal. It was about eighteen inches long, and reminded him vaguely of the S D P S: an object of greater significance than first appeared. It was in basic outline cylindrical, but within that general boundary was a mass of convoluted tubings, planes, wires and attachments. It seemed to be partly electronic in nature, but not entirely a machine; partly artistic, but not a piece of sculpture. Yet there was a certain familiarity about it; some quality, some purpose inherent in it that he felt he should recognize.

He picked it up, finding the weight slight for so intricate an object: perhaps two pounds, and deviously balanced. The incipient recognition of its nature struck him more strongly. He ought to know what it was.

Something happened.

It was as though there were the noise of a great gong, but with vibrations not quite audible to human ears. Light flared, yet his eyes registered no image. There was a shock of heat and pressure and ponderosity that his body could not discern definitely, and some overwhelming odor that his nostrils missed.

The others were looking at him and at each other, aware that something important had been manifested — and not aware of more.

Ivo still held the instrument.

“Play it, Ivo,” Beatryx said.

And all were mute, realizing that in all the chambers there had been no musical devices.

Ivo looked at it again, this time seeing conduits like those of a complex horn; fibers like those of stringed instruments; drumlike diaphragms; reeds. There was no place to blow, no spot to strike; but fingers could touch controls and eyes could trace connections.

The object was vibrating gently, as though the lifting of it had activated its power source. It had come alive, awaiting the musician’s imperative.

He touched a stud at random — and was rewarded by a roll of thunder.

Beatryx, Afra, Groton: they stared up and out, trying instinctively to trace the source, to protect themselves if the walls caved in… before realizing what had happened. Multiphonal sound!

“When you picked it up,” Groton began—

“You touched a control,” Afra finished. Both were shaken. “The BONG button.”

“And now the thunder stud,” Beatryx said.

Ivo slid one finger across a panel. A siren wail came at them from all directions, deafening yet melodious.

He explored the rest of it, producing a measured cacophony: every type of sound he could imagine was represented here, each imbued with visual, tactile and olfactory demesnes. If only he could bring this sensuous panorama under control—

And he could. Already his hands were responding to the instrument’s ratios, achieving the measure of it, growing into the necessary disciplines. This was his talent, this way with an organ of melody. He had confined himself to the flute — Sidney Lanier’s choice — but the truth was that all of Schön’s gift was his. Probably there was no human being with greater natural potential than his own — should he choose to invoke it.

Ivo could not call out the technical aspects or discuss the theory knowledgeably; that was not part of it. He could not even read musical notation, for he had never studied it, choosing instead to learn by ear. But with an instrument in his hands and the desire to play, he could produce a harmony, and he could do it precisely, however complicated the descriptive terms for what he performed.

Now he developed that massive raw talent, bringing all his incipient skill to bear. He picked a suitable exercise, adapting for the flute at first, hearing the words as the song became animate. It was not from Lanier; that would come when he had command. One had to practice with lesser themes first. A trial run only…

Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss within the cup and I’ll not ask for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine;

But could I of Jove’s nectar sip, I would not change for thine.

The others stood as the simple haunting melody surrounded them, marvelously clear, almost liquid, possessed increasingly of that éclat, that soul that was the true artist’s way. The galactic instrument brought also the suggestion of a heady nectar… and the touch of magic lips.

Afra was staring raptly at him, never having heard him play before. Had that been his worst blunder? Not to employ the real talent he had?

Groton was staring at Afra…

No, he was staring beyond her! The blank wall blocking the continuation of their tour was dissolving, revealing another passage. The way was open again!

“The free ride is over,” Groton murmured. “Now we have to participate.”

They moved down it then in silence, Ivo still carrying the instrument. This hall opened into a tremendous chamber whose ceiling was an opaque mist and whose floor was a translucency without visible termination. There were no walls; the sides merely faded into darkness, though there was light close at hand.

They walked within it, looking in vain for something tangible. But now even the floor was gone. Physically gone: it too had dissolved and left them in free-fall, hanging weightless in an atmosphere. Their point of entry, too, had vanished; they tried to swim back through the pleasant air, but there was nothing to locate. They were isolated and lost.

“So it was a trap,” Afra said, seemingly more irritated than frightened.

“Or — a test,” Groton said. “We had to demonstrate a certain type of competence to gain admittance, after the strictly sightseeing sections were finished. Perhaps we shall have to demonstrate more, before being permitted to leave.”

They looked at Ivo, who was floating a little apart from the others, and he looked at the thing in his hands.

“Try the same tune you did before,” Afra suggested. “Just to be sure.”

He played “Drink to Me Only” again. Nothing happened. He tried several other simple tunes, and the sound came at them from all over the unbounded chamber, not simple at all, but they remained as they were: four people drifting in nebulosity.

“I persist in suspecting that the key is musical,” Groton said. “Why else that instrument, obviously neither toy nor exhibit. So far we may only have touched on its capability.”

“Do you know,” Ivo said thoughtfully, “Lanier believed that the rules for poetry and music were identical, and he tried to demonstrate this in his work. His flute-playing was said to be poetically inspired, and much of his poetry was musically harmonious. He even—”

“Very well,” Afra said, unsurprised and still unworried, though the web of the spider seemed to be tightening. “Let’s follow up on Lanier. He wrote a travelogue of Florida, one poor novel, and the poems ‘Corn,’ ‘The Marshes of Glynn,’ The Symphony’—”

“The Symphony!” Groton said it, but they all had reacted to the title. “Would that be — ?”

“Play it, Ivo!” Beatryx said.

“The Symphony” was poetry, not music; there was no prescribed tune for it. But Ivo lifted the instrument and felt the power come into his being, for he had dreamed of setting this piece to music many times. He had never had the courage to make the attempt, on his own initiative. But here was his chance to make something of himself and his talent; to find out whether he could open, musically, the door to the riddle that was the destroyer.

There was music in meaning, and meaning in music, and they were very close to one another in the work of Sidney Lanier and in this poem in particular. Each portion of it was spoken by a different instrument, personified, and the whole was the orchestral symphony…

The macroscopic communications systems he had experienced shared this trait. Music, color, meaning — all were interchangeable, and he was sure some species communicated melodically on their homeworlds. A translation was possible, if he borrowed from galactic coding — and if he had the skill to do it accurately. He had learned to comprehend galactic languages, but he had never tried to translate into them. The music charged his hands and body — but could he render the poetry?

The others waited, knowing his problem, searching for some way to help. Harold Groton, whose astrological interpretations could do no good in this situation; Afra Summerfield, whose physical beauty and analytical mind were similarly useless; Beatryx Groton, whose empathy could not enchant his suddenly uncertain fingers.

Analysis, empathy, astrology…

Then he saw that they could help, all of them. Just by being available.

Ivo began to play.