MacRoscope Read Online Free PDF Page B

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