Pierce Anthony - Macroscope

The last leg of the journey was routine. The car moved down the interstate under self-control at almost a hundred miles an hour, and the flat expanse of marsh and scrub was monotonous.

Ivo studied his companion discreetly. Groton no longer seemed quite so fleshy or pallid. Somehow it made a difference that the man had been sent by Brad. Actually, there had been no reason for his initial aversion.

Well, yes, there had been — but not a valid reason. Once Ivo had been free of prejudice; he had allowed some to creep into his attitudes. That was not good. He, of all people, should know better.

“That’s what you might call coasting on ninety-five,” Ivo remarked, glancing at the speedometer after an hour’s silence.

Groton’s heavy head rotated slowly, brow furrowing. “Interstate 95, yes,” he said. “But we’re not exactly coasting.”

“What I meant was, we’re doing ninety-five miles per hour down the Florida coast,” Ivo explained, chiding himself for a puerile attempt at wit. Groton wasn’t stupid; it was the pun that was at fault. He had tried to make a friendly overture, perhaps in apology for his initial suspicion, and had bungled it.

Coasting on ninety-five , he thought, and winced inwardly. About time he learned that that kind of complicated punning was not amusing to most people — people past twenty-five or so, anyway. Brad, of course, would have picked it up and shot it back redoubled — but Brad was scarcely typical, even in their age group. Ivo suddenly felt extremely young.

“Oh,” Groton was saying. “Yes, of course.”

Ivo turned away in the awkward silence and brooded upon the landscape again. They were well below Jacksonville, and the slender palmettos were increasingly evident, though still outmassed by the southern pine. A sign promoted ST. AUGUSTINE — OLDEST TOWN IN AMERICA — NEXT EXIT EAST. He wished it were possible to travel for any distance anywhere without constant commercial importunings, but he knew that industrial and other pressures had forced an increasingly liberal interpretation of permissible billboard advertising along the interstate system. Motels, gasoline, batteries, restaurants, points of public interest (as defined, mainly, by private enterprise) — these had seemed justified originally. But once the precedent had been set, erosion had been continuous until public interest was assumed to include even hard liquor, soft hallucinogens and intimate feminine hygiene.

Ahead he spied one of the old-fashioned series signs, clumps of words printed upon each square. He read it sleepily:

WHAT THE CLOUD DOETH

THE LORD KNOWETH

THE CLOUD KNOWETH NOT

Ivo smiled, wondering how this was going to relate to the public service of smoother shaving.

WHAT THE ARTIST DOETH

THE LORD KNOWETH

KNOWETH THE ARTIST NOT?

He snapped awake. Groton sat stolidly beside him, reading a newspaper. Nothing but brush and gravel and occasional plastic containers lined the highway here. That had been no series sign, even in his imagination; it was an excerpt from a poem he knew well, by a poet he had studied well.

Yes, man possessed free-will, unlike the cloud. The artist was responsible for his creation. Predestination did not apply to the sentient individual.

Yet Ivo Archer was traveling to a place he had never seen, obedient to the subtly relayed directive of another person. Free-will?

THIS TOO SHALL PASS, a sign said, a real one this time. He sighed, closed his eyes, and gave in to sleep.

He woke over water: Groton had assumed manual control and was driving across the bridge toward, presumably, the cape. Though Ivo was not enchanted by the mystery surrounding his summons to this place, he could not repress a feeling of excitement. If the end of this journey were not the cape, it had to be—

One of the orbiting space stations?

They were on State route 50. A sign at the far end of the bridge identified Merritt Island; then, shortly, the Kennedy Space Center Industrial Area. This was a neat layout of city blocks with parklike landscaping and elegant buildings, the whole reminding him somewhat of a modern university campus.

“Newest town in America — next exit up,” he murmured.

“Close enough,” Groton agreed, again mistaking the reference. “There’s a post office here, and a telephone exchange, bank, hospital, sewage conversion plant, power station, railroad yard, cafeterias, warehouses, office buildings—”

“Any room for the spacecraft?”

“No,” Groton said seriously. The man seemed impervious to irony. “Fifty thousand people work here daily. The vehicles are constructed and assembled elsewhere, and of course the launch pads are safely removed. We’re just stopping here for the normal red tape — security clearance, physical examination, briefing and so on. Necessary evils.”

“I’m healthy, and I can’t be much of a security risk because I was born in Philadelphia, raised hydroponically, and have no idea what I’m doing here.”

“Want to gamble that you’re in condition to withstand ten gravities acceleration? That your system can sustain intermittent free-fall without adverse reaction, such as violent nausea? That you’re not allergic to—”

“I never gamble,” Ivo said with sudden certainty.

“As for the security clearance: it isn’t what you know now that counts, but how you’ll react to what you learn. Good intentions and partial information can lead to the most extraordinary—”

“I get the point. When’s liftoff?”

“Just about six hours from now. The shuttle is already being assembled.”

“Assembled! What happened to the regular one?”

Groton ignored the question, this time evidently taking sincere uneasiness for humor.

Four hours and a multitude of tests later they were conducted to the Vehicle Assembly Building, a structure of appalling volume. “Largest single building in the world, at the time it was built,” Groton said, and Ivo could believe it. “We have two of them now. The Saturn launch vehicles are put together here—”

“Saturn? I thought the Saturn shot took off three years ago.”

Groton paused to look at him, then smiled. “You’re thinking of the planet Saturn. You’re right; that was an instrumented economy mission set up in ’77. A one-shot bypass of all four gas giants. It’s adjacent to the planet Saturn right now, and will terminate at Neptune in six years. The same goes for the concurrent Soviet shot, of course.”

“So what’s with Saturn here ?”

“The Saturn VI is the name of our vehicle . Its major components are assembled here in an upright position, then carried on its mobile launcher to the pad. That enables us to use our facilities efficiently.”

“I see,” Ivo said, not seeing, but hesitating to blare out his ignorance again. Why was Groton giving him this little lecture-tour, instead of taking him directly to the shuttle?

Away from the giant gray and black Assembly Building he saw a peculiar structure with caterpillar treads. It stood about twenty feet tall and was approximately the size and shape of half a football field. “What’s that?”

“Crawler-transporter. Weighs around six million pounds, travels loaded at a good mile an hour.”

“I like that space-age speed.” Then, before the man had another chance to miss the humorous intent: “Where does it crawl? What does it transport?”

“It crawls over the Crawlerway. It transports the Mobile Launcher.”

Ivo refused to give up. “Where does the crawlerway expire? What does the mobilauncher launch?”

“The pad. Us.”

“Oh.”

A short drive beside the pebbled Crawlerway — a handsome dual track resembling the interstate highway, except that its surface was loose — brought them to the Pad: an irregular octagon over half a mile across. In its center was an elevated pedestal of steel and concrete with a deep trench running through it. Perched upon it, squatting over the trench like a man about a private call, was a platform and tower of metal beams, steadying a rocket three hundred fifty feet tall.