“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.