“I’m not just thinking of myself. Brad, once you let the genie out of the bottle — you know what Schön is. Your work, your girl—”
“I may be giving up everything. I know that. I have no choice.”
“Well, I have a choice. You’ll darn well have to prove to me that the cure is not worse than the problem.”
“That’s why we’re here. I’ll have to acquaint you with the nature and function of the macroscope first, though, before I can make my point. Then—”
“Keep it simple, now. I can’t even read your dials.”
“Right. Basically the macroscope is a monstrous chunk of unique crystal that responds to an aspect of radiation unrelated to any man has been able to study before. This amounts to an extremely weak but phenomenally clear spatial signal. The built-in computer sifts out the noise and translates the essence into a coordinated image. The process is complex, but we wind up with better pictorial definition than is possible through any other medium, bar none. That was a major handicap at first.”
“Superior definition is a problem?”
“I’ll demonstrate.” Brad applied himself to the ponderous apparatus, donned a helmetlike affair with opaque goggles, and cocked his head as though listening. Ivo felt another pang of nervousness, and realized that this stemmed from the superficial similarity between the goggles and the sunglasses he had bought when trying to avoid Harold Groton. That entire past episode embarrassed him in retrospect; he had acted foolishly. He threw off the memory and concentrated on Brad’s motions.
The left hand hovered over a keyboard of buttons resembling those of a computer input. It probably was the computer input, Ivo reminded himself. There was a strap over the wrist to prevent the hand from drifting away in the absence of gravity; buttons could be awkward to depress without the anchorage of bodily weight. The right hand held a kind of ball mounted on a thin rod, rather like an old-fashioned automobile gearshift. As the left fingers moved, a large concave surface glowed over Brad’s head.
“I’ll cut in the main screen for you,” Brad said. “Notice that my fingers control the computer settings; that covers direction, range and focus, none of it simple enough for human reflexes to handle. The vagaries of planetary motion alone, when that planet is not our own, are complicated to account for, particularly when we want to hold a specific focus on its surface.”
“I’m aware of planetary motion.” He remembered one of his old pet peeves. “I had to work it out when I wanted to criticize the concept of time travel. If a man were granted the miraculous ability to jump forward or backward in time, with no other travel, he’d arrive in mid-space or deep underground; because the Earth is always moving. It would be like trying to jump off a moving rocket and jump on again.”
“Nevertheless, we do travel in time, with the macroscope,” Brad said, smiling.
“Oh, so you’re going back to supervise your grandfather’s conception?”
“Delicacy forbids.” Brad’s hands flexed. “I’ll center on a precoded location: the planet Earth. The computer uses the ephemeris to spot all the planets and moons of the solar system exactly, and a good many of the asteroids and comets as well. The right-hand knob provides our personal tuning; once the difficult compensations have been made, we use this control to jog over several feet at a time, or to gain different angles of view. Right now we’re orbiting the sun about nine hundred thousand miles from Earth — right next door, as interplanetary distances go. Just out far enough to reduce the perturbations of the moon. There.”
The screen was a mass of dull red. “If that’s Earth, the political situation has deteriorated since I left,” Ivo observed.
“That is Earth — dead center. Per the coordinates.”
“Center? Literally?”
“Definition, problem of, remember. Our corrected coordinates nail the heart of the body. The image is on a one-to-one ratio.”
“Life size? It can—”
“The macroscope can penetrate matter, yes. As I told you, this isn’t exactly light we’re dealing with, though the time delay is similar. That’s a representation of the incandescent core of our planet as it was five seconds ago, muted by automatic visual safeguards and filters, of course. We’ll have to drift about four thousand miles off that point to hit the surface, which is what most people seem to assume is all the scope looks at. Right there, you can appreciate the implications for geology, mining, paleontology—”
“Paleontology?”
“Fossils, to you. We’ve already made some spectacular finds in the course of routine roving. Lifetime’s work there, for somebody.”
“Hold on! I ain’t that ignorant, perfessor. I thought the bones were widely spaced, even in good fossiliferous sediments. How can you tell one, when you’re in the middle of it, not looking down at it in a display case? You certainly couldn’t see it as such.”
“Trust me, junior. We do a high-speed canvass at a given level and record it on tape. The machine runs a continuous spectroscopic analysis and trips a signal when there’s anything we might want. And that’s only the beginning.”
“A spectroscopic analysis? You said the macroscope didn’t use light.”
“It doesn’t, exactly, but we do. We keyed it in on samples: every element on the periodic table. Thus we are able to translate the incoming impulse into a visual representation, much as any television receiver does. The truth is, the macrons are far more specific than light, because they don’t diffuse readily or suffer such embarrassments as red shift. Spectroscopy is really a superfluous step, but we do it because we’re geared to record and analyze light, here. Once we retool to orient on the original impulse, our accuracy will multiply a hundredfold.”
“It grinds that fine?”
“That fine, Ivo. We’re just beginning to glimpse the potential of this technique. The macroscope is a larger step toward universal knowledge than ever atomics were toward universal power.”
“So I have heard. But I’m sort of stupid, as you know. You were about to tell me what makes superior definition so difficult to adapt to, even with the computer guidance.”
“So I were. Here is the surface of Earth, fifty feet above sea-level, looking down. Another keyed-in location.”
The screen became a shifting band of color.
“Let me guess again. Your snoop is stationary, right? And the globe is turning at the equivalent of a thousand miles an hour. It’s like flying a jet at low altitude near the equator and peering out through the bombsight.”
“For a pacifist, you have violent imagery. But yes, just about. Sometimes over ocean, sometimes land, sometimes under mountains that rise above the pickup level. And if we move higher—” He adjusted the controls, and the scene jumped into focus.
“About a mile up,” Ivo said. “Makes the scene clear, but too far for intimate inspection. Yes.” He watched the land sliding by. “Why don’t we just see a panel of air? What we have now is a light image, perspective and everything.”
“What we see is the retranslation of the macronic image sponsored by visible radiation passing through that point in space. Maybe I’d better give you the technical data after all.”
“Uh-uh. Just answer me this: if it’s that sharp on planet Earth from five light-seconds, can it also handle other planets? Can it look at Jupiter from one mile up, or even Pluto? If it can—”