“He must know about it. What about that message — ‘My pawn is pinned’? He knew then.”
Ivo, bouncing up and down to warm up, halted. The wet floor was slippery under his bare toes. “I didn’t think of that. He must be lying.”
“That doesn’t make sense either. If he knew the destroyer would get him, why should he expose himself to it? And if he knows it won’t, why not say so? This isn’t a game of twenty questions.”
“Now that I think of it,” Ivo admitted, “he didn’t sound much like a genius to me, I’ve never actually talked directly with him before, but — it was more like a kid bargaining.”
“A child.” She brought a towel and started patting him dry, and he realized that for the first time he had undressed unselfconsciously before her. They had all seen each others’ bodies during the meltings, but this was not such an occasion. Barriers were still coming down unobtrusively. “How old was he when — ?”
“I’m not sure. It took some time to — to set me up. I remember some events back to age five, but there are blank spots up until eight or nine. That doesn’t necessarily mean he took over then—”
“So Schön never lived as an adult.”
“I guess not, physically.”
“Or emotionally. You matured, not he. Is it surprising, then, that he appears childish to us? His intelligence and talent don’t change the fact that he is immature. He likes to play games, to send out mysterious messages, create worlds of imagination. For him, right and wrong are merely concepts; he has no devotion to adult truth. No developed conscience. And if the notion of the destroyer frightens him — why, he puts it out of his mind. He no longer admits its danger. He thinks that he can conquer anything just by tackling it with gusto.”
Ivo nodded thoughtfully, looking about for some dry shorts. “But he’s still got more knowledge and ability than any adult.”
She brought the shorts. “A sixteen-year-old boy has better reflexes than most mature men, and more knowledge about automotive engineering — turbo or electric or hydraulic — but he’s still the world’s worst driver. It takes more than knowledge and ability; it takes control and restraint. Obviously Schön doesn’t have that.”
“If he began driving — what a crash he could make!”
“Let’s just defuse the destroyer first,” she said, smiling grimly. “You were right all along: we’re better off without Schön.”
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.