“We’ll still have the programs; most of them are galactically dated. And of course there’ll be the destroyer signal. Ill-wind department; we want to abolish it, so we use it for orientation.”
“What makes you believe there is only one destroyer?”
Again Ivo and Groton exchanged glances. “We can always fix on the Solar system,” Groton said. “We’re pretty familiar with that. We can estimate how far we’ve gone by judging how Earth appears, and of course the fix on Earth will establish our direction. With azimuth and measurement—”
“With all due respect, gentlemen,” Afra said briskly, “you are sadly inundated if not totally submerged. You may not even be able to locate ol’ Sol from fifteen thousand light-years’ removal. The configurations will be entirely different, and Sol’s absolute magnitude is not great. Let alone the strong possibility of obscuration by intragalactic dust and gas. As it is, we can only see, telescopically, one-thousandth of the Milky-Way center, and the dust is worse at the fringes. The macroscope is much better, of course, but—”
“Translation:” Groton said. “ ‘We men are all wet; we’ll get lost in a hurry.’ ” Beatryx gave him a smile — and, surprisingly, so did Afra.
“How would you handle it?” Ivo asked her.
“First I would orient on some distinctive extragalactic landmark such as the Andromeda galaxy. That’s two million light-years away, in round figures, and if we jump farther than that we won’t need to worry anymore about local affairs like destroyers. Then I’d fix on certain Cepheids, and look for the configurations typical of this general area — say, within a thousand light-years of Sol. Once I had identified the Pole Star I’d be within a hundred parsecs—”
“Andromeda being another galaxy like our own, only larger,” Groton said to Beatryx. “We should be able to see it from almost anywhere, because it is outside of and broadside to ours. The Cepheid variables—”
“I’ll explain what I mean, thank you,” Afra said. “A Cepheid is a bright star that gets brighter every so often — regularly, as though it has a heartbeat. And the longer a star’s period — that is, the time it takes to go from dim to bright and back again — the greater its absolute magnitude. Its real brightness. So all we have to do is measure its brightness as seen from our location and keep track of its period and we can figure out how far away it is. Because a star that is far away looks dimmer than one that is close.”
“Why yes,” Beatryx said, pleased. “That’s very clear.”
Ivo said nothing, not wanting to admit that he had not known what a Cepheid variable was, or how it could be used to ascertain galactic distances. He had produced technological wonders during their stay on Triton, and the principles Groton had applied to his machinery were in advance of anything known by Earthbound specialists. Ivo had increased his awareness considerably during all this, but his participation had been that of a stenographer. He had no real idea of content. He had done it, but he didn’t understand it. The result was detailed technical knowledge in some areas buttressed by appalling gaps in related areas. He could talk about gravitational collapse, yet not know what a Cepheid was.
And how much of Earth’s civilization was exactly like that, he wondered. Doing Without comprehending — even when this was tantamount to suicide?
“When,” Beatryx said, “do we go?”
It was four months of intense effort, mental, physical and emotional — but the group was in harness again, and profiting thereby. The members lived and worked in comfort, but the hours were savage. No longer did anyone do laundry or cooking by hand; that wasteful practice had been shoved aside in the rush.
Beatryx became mistress of the automated life-services equipment so that the others were free for full-time labors. She also learned how to supervise the connection-soldering machines and circuit-assemblers, making sure that each quality-control dial registered favorably for each completed unit.
Ivo traveled the galaxy via the macroscope in search of critical bits of information, since the intergalactic broadcast seemed to assume that the supportive techniques were already known; he also transcribed ponderous amounts of backup data.
Afra received much of this material and spent many days with the macroscope computer verifying tolerances, vectors and critical ratios. She admitted that the essential theory of it was beyond her; she was merely adapting established processes to their needs and confirming its applications.
Groton took her results, made up diagrams of his own, and tuned in the waldoes. He also supervised a complete survey of the globe of Triton, and selected particular locations with extreme care for the construction of enormous mechanical complexes. A visitor would have thought the planet to be the site of a burgeoning industrial commitment. In certain respects it was.
They were participating in superscience: Type III technology. None of them comprehended more than a fraction of it But by accident or cosmic design, they were a team that could do the job, with the overwhelming assistance of the supervising programs from space. The first crude waldoes had given way to tremendous mechanical beasts that roved Triton as though the human element had been dispatched, and computers superior to the one the macroscope employed were now in routine service — but the incentive lay with the human component. Ivo, Afra and Groton became immersed in their separate areas and did not communicate directly with each other for days at a time, and too often the contacts were irritable, for all were chronically overextended. Beatryx, with her invariably ameliorative personality, kept them in touch, and this was as necessary a function as any of the others.
The action became impersonal, for the project was much larger than they were, and the entire group had become merely the implementing agency. Yet Ivo watched what was happening and took pride in it, and he was sure the others did too. He knew that though Earth had largely forgotten their spectacular theft — the news had leaked out, making them momentarily infamous — the completion of their effort would leave the Earth-based astronomers and physicists gaping.
The nature of the work shifted. Excavators burrowed into the lithosphere of Triton, casting up fragments of rock in a null-gravity field. A hole formed, deepening day by day: a deep hole, braced by immense metallic tubing. The borer advanced at the rate of just over ten miles per day, the ejecta spouting forth in a geyser of grit and raining down steadily upon the normal-gravity torus surrounding the hole.
In time the tunnel, sixty feet in diameter, achieved the limit of depth the planet would tolerate. Metallic alloys could not prevent implosion beyond this point, and a force-field was unpractical in the neighborhood of the existing null-G field.
The machines finished their business and retired. For a time activity diminished. Triton was at peace again.
Then the shield of force that maintained an Earth environment around the tetrahedron home disintegrated. The foreign atmosphere puffed out, crystallized, and settled languidly upon the ground, dead as the erstwhile vegetation. The tetrahedron remained, sealed, in desolation.
A figure trekked from the disaster area, encased in a space suit. It paused where a grave lay frozen and passed on to the waiting module. It entered; the vehicle blasted away, and Triton was uninhabited.
On the moonlet Schön the reintegration of units occurred, and Joseph mated again with the macroscope housing. The ties cast loose; the ship-assembly drifted free of the ice, and Schön too was vacant.