Free MacRoscope by Piers Anthony Page B

fact, there’s a distinct possibility he’s smart enough to get hooked by the destroyer sequence. It’s certain he’ll demand to see the show, and there will be merry hell if we try to fob off a substitute.”
    “But you can’t show him the destroyer!” Afra exclaimed, alarmed.
    “We can’t hold it from him, if he’s determined — and he is. He knows he’s on to something big, and he means to make worldwide headlines before he finishes with us. Kovonov put it to me straight: Borland is American, so he’s my baby. I have to neutralize him somehow until we can crack this thing open and get it under control, or the whole feculent mess will erupt.”
    “When’s he due?” Ivo asked.
    “Six hours from now. We only got the hint when he embarked, and it took until now to pin down his purpose. He’s a real old-fashioned loudmouth, but he can keep a secret when it pays him to and he’s no political amateur. He’s obviously had this in mind for some time, and now he’s coming to milk us for that vote-getting publicity.”
    “Why not tell him the truth, then? If he’s that savvy, he should be willing to do something constructive for his votes, instead of—”
    “The truth without the solution would wreck us — and put Borland on his party’s next Presidential ticket. He isn’t interested in
our
welfare, or in the future of space exploration. He’d be delighted to take credit for pulling America out of the macroscope.”
    “But the other countries of the world would keep it going, wouldn’t they? Isn’t it under nominal UN control?”
    “More than nominal. They might indeed — in which case we’d become a has-been power in a hurry, as other breakthroughs like my heat-shield are achieved. America can’t possibly match the alien science we know is there, once it becomes available. Or — the macroscope project might founder, frightened off by talk of a death-ray from space. The average populace has a profound distrust of advanced space science, perhaps because it doesn’t match the old, space-opera conception. People might accept the notion of astronauts plunging into space fearlessly in rockets, but the ramifications of relativistic cosmology and quantum physics—”
    “How about just giving the senator what he wants — a gander at the sequence, if it comes to that?”
    “What would it settle? Either it would pass him by, in which case he’d have ‘proof’ that we were killing off world-famous scientists by less exotic means than claimed — an international conspiracy, naturally — or it would bite him. Then we’d have five scientists
and
a U.S. senator to explain.”
    Ivo shrugged. “I guess you’re stuck, then.”
    “Our only chance is to crack the case before he gets here. For that we need Schön even more urgently.”
    “There isn’t time to fetch him from Earth now,” Afra pointed out.
    Brad did not reply.
    “I’m not sure Schön would help, anyway,” Ivo said. “He might not care about America, or the macroscope.”
    “What
does
he care about?” Afra demanded.
    Brad cut off any reply. “Let’s take a break. We’re acting as though no one else in the station is concerned.”
    Afra started to protest, but he put his ringer to her lips and forced her to subside. Ivo could see that she accepted from Brad what she would have taken from no other person. On the face of it, her objection was reasonable. Brad had dropped a bomb in their laps with a six-hour fuse, then called intermission as though the matter was of indifferent concern. How could this spirited creature know that Brad had already done his utmost to summon the cavalry, or that the break he recommended was hardly the nonchalance it appeared? Yet she trusted him.
    Oh, to have a girl like that…
     
    The “break” was in the form of a rather elegant dinner with the Grotons. Ivo had assumed that Harold Groton was an ad hoc emissary, and had to revise his impression of the man once again. Brad’s social taste was