The light he perceived at this instant had been generated by many of those stars over a century ago, or even much longer. Perhaps one of those brilliancies dated from the time he, as a lad of fourteen, had organized a company of some fifty youths like himself, to train with bows and arrows. Thus “Archer” — so fiercely patriotic, as the clouds of national dissension gathered, signifying the end of life as he had known it. Yet he might as readily have been named for the flute with which he used to serenade the young ladies. “Tutor,” when he later taught at college, had indeed been corrupted to “tooter” by the students. Or “Plowman,” because of the passages he liked to quote from Piers Plowman…
He had been cultured then, polite, affable, dignified, replete with moral refinement. Not quite fifteen, he had entered Oglethorpe University at Midway, Georgia, parting his fair hair to the side and brushing it behind the ears. He wore good, but not ostentatious, apparel. Already a hint of a stoop to the shoulders, but brisk of gait. He had no taste for athletics.
There were fifty students at the college.
Music and books were his dearest companions — but those fair young ladies were never quite forgotten.
Once a student misunderstood him and denounced him as a liar. He struck that person immediately, though he was not himself strong. The student drew a knife and stabbed an inch deep into his left side, but he did not capitulate. Never was he known as a coward, then.
“What do you think of Afra?” Brad asked him.
That name brought him instantly back. What availed past courage, when the present battle was lost? “You’re serious about her?”
“Who wouldn’t be? You saw her.”
“Brad, she’s a hundred and two per cent cauc in the shade!”
“I’ll say! Her DAR pedigree goes back to the Saxon conquest.”
Ivo smiled dutifully. “The project—”
“The project’s over. You know that. We’re free citizens now.”
“You can’t erase the past. If she knew—”
Brad looked at him oddly. “I told her there were several projects, related but discrete. That I was a washout from the IQ set.”
“A washout!”
“What would you call an intelligence quotient of one hundred and sixty, when the target was two hundred?”
“I see. And where did you tell her I was from?”
“Nothing but the truth, Ivo. That a private foundation gathered together selected stock from every corner of the sphere and—”
“And bred back to the multiracial ancestor they presumed mankind started from. So I’m Paleolithic.”
“Not exactly, Ivo. You see—”
They were interrupted by the lifting of a panel. Admittance was at hand.
The interior was a cramped mass of panels, but there was room for several people if they watched their elbows. A short tunnel beyond the airlock opened into a roughly spherical compartment. Ivo’s first impression was of machinery; there were dials and levers everywhere, projecting from every side. He found it hard to orient because there was no gravity here and no visual “up.” Wherever he planted his feet was ground; the slight magnetism that had held him to the outer hull remained effective.
The technician in charge was already getting into his suit. Brad spoke to him in a foreign language, received a curt reply, and said: “Ivo Archer — American.” The man nodded politely.
“You see, it is all very carefully arranged,” Brad said as they waited for the man to complete his suit-checkout. “Thirty nations have put up the cash for this project, and each is allotted — but you must know that. We send in precise reports every day.”
“This is the American Hour?”
“No. Personnel here don’t bother with the official foolishness. This gentleman is not a gentleman — that is, not a Gentile. He’s an Israeli geologist doing work for Indonesia. Their own geologist is busy on a private project.”
“So somebody is paying off a favor?”
“Right. Indonesia will get the results, and the home state will never know the difference.”
“How is it we can horn in, then?”
“I preempted the slot for more important work. He understands.”
“Just to show me the macroscope? Brad, you can’t—”
The Israeli held up his glove. “It is quite all right, Mr. Archer,” he said. “We do not question Dr. Carpenter.” He put on the helmet, pressured his suit, and mounted to the airlock. Ivo detected no shock of air puffing out; there were no games of that kind here. Probably the man was hauling himself along one of the guy-chains, not trusting himself to any drift through the vacuum. That was the kind of sensible procedure Ivo preferred.
Brad settled into a control seat of some kind and began making adjustments with sundry instruments. Ivo tried to make some sense out of the battery of dials and lights, but failed; it was far too complicated.
“Okay, friend, we’re alone. No bugs here. I’m in a position to know.”
Once more the nervousness came upon him. This was it. “Why did you summon me?”
“We need Schön.”
Ivo met this with silence. He had known it.
“I don’t like to do this to you, believe me,” Brad said with genuine apology. “But this is crucial. We’re in bad trouble here, Ivo.”
“Naturally it wasn’t my amiable half-witted companionship you missed. Not just to show off your fancy technology and your fancy girl.”
Brad looked far more mature when serious, and he was far more serious now than the literal content of his speech indicated. “You know I like you, Ivo. You’re a damned Puritan at heart, and you’re afraid of anything that smacks too much of pleasure and what you’re doing here in the space age instead of the nineteenth-century Confederacy is beyond me to grasp. I still enjoy your company, more than that of Schön, and I wouldn’t change one jot of your archaic and poetic fancies. But this is — well, it sounds cliché, but it is a matter of world security. It’s frankly over my head. If your freak abilities were enough—”
“So playing a simple flute has become ‘freak,’ and—” But he knew what Brad meant, much as he didn’t want to. “And who is an ignorant lad straining at one twenty-five to proffer advice to model one sixty? Particularly when he knows that’s a lie for the only one in the project to be adjudged two hundred and—”
“Come off it, Ivo. You know better than anyone that those figures are meaningless. I tell you with all sincerity that the situation is desperate, and Schön is the only one I know with the potential to handle it. I have the privilege of calling him when I really need him. Well, it’s been twenty years, and I do need him. Earth needs him. You have to do it.”
“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.