“Now we’ve got the superscope, and we can diddle in our stellar neighbor’s business, as though our own weren’t enough. Now how do you figure a smart ET who likes his privacy is going to stop you from peeking — when there’s maybe a fifteen-thousand-year time-delay?”

The station personnel looked at each other in dismay. Obvious — yet none of them had thought of it! A mind-destroying logic-chain that wiped out the peeping tom, wherever and whenever he might be. The most direct and realistic answer to snooping.

Borland waited for the babel of translation and discussion to die away. The men who had studied him with veiled contempt showed respect now, and the Russian had stopped smiling. “Now, comrades, suppose we forget about preconceptions and tackle the main problem. I know most of your governments better than you do — yes, even yours, Ivan — because that is my profession. Politics. I also know something of human nature — the reality, not the theory — and thereby it figures I know something too of alien nature. You’re in trouble here, and so am I in certain respects you wouldn’t care about. Why don’t we forget our differences, pool our resources, and find out what we can come up with? Maybe we can help each other a little.”

Men looked at each other over the renewed murmur of the translations. Tentative smiles broke out. “Maybe we can, Senator,” Brad allowed.

Borland spoke to his helper. “Go hold a preliminary press conference, kid. Tell ’em what the Senator means to do — but stay well clear of the facts. Irritate ’em if they get nosy. You know the routine.” The flunky left without a word.

“Li’l wonder, ain’t he?” Borland remarked. “Took me years to find a foil like that. Now where’s this tape?”

“Tape?”

“Lad, my reconnaissance is not that clumsy. The recording you have of the destroyer. The one that clouds men’s minds, ha-ha-ha. The Shadow knows.”

“It isn’t a tape, or even a recording,” Brad said. “We can’t record it — at least, what we take down doesn’t have the effect. The — meaning doesn’t register.”

“But you can pipe it in here live, right? No sense inspecting a dead virus. We want to know what makes it kick. It only comes in on one station, right? And it’s continuous; you can tune it in any time?”

“One segment of the macroscopic band, yes. The center segment, where reception is strongest. The one we could use most effectively — if we could only tune the destroyer out.”

Brad showed the Senator to a smaller projection room. Most of the scientists and personnel dispersed, satisfied that the situation was coming under control. Afra appeared in blouse and skirt, making even plain clothing look elegant. Ivo tagged along, forgotten for the moment.

“This is where we set it up,” Brad explained tersely. “It amounts to a computer output, with the main signal processed at the receiver. There are electronic safeguards to guarantee that none of the effects penetrate beyond this room. This device is dangerous.”

“A program,” Borland said musingly. “A mousetrap in a harem. But why make up a show like that, instead of simply lobbing a detonator into the sun?”

“Evidently the originator isn’t against all life,” Brad said. “This is selective. It only hits the space-traveling, macroscope-building species like ourselves. The snoopers. So long as we keep our development below a certain level, we’re safe.”

“My sentiments too. That the kind of safety you care for?”

“No.”

“Let’s run it through again. I put out a theory, just to show you how it could be, but I’m not putting my money on it yet. GIGO, you know. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Maybe my notion is the right one, but let’s eliminate the others first. Like that song: ‘Oh why don’t I work like other men do? How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue? Hallelujah, I’m a bum!’ Feed that to a minister and he’ll tell you it’s profane. Should be ‘how the heck,’ the church-approved euphemism. Try it on a professor and he’ll tell you it’s agrammatical: should be ‘as other men do.’ But a worker will tell you the whole thing’s been censored. Should be ‘how the hell can I work when there’s no work to do!’ Us lowbrows get to the root, sometimes. Not always. You figure they’re afraid of the competition from some smart-aleck new species?”

“Fifteen thousand years late? And if we had a light-speed drive, which we never will, it would still take us another fifteen millennia to reach them. We can’t even reply to their ‘message’ sooner than that. So it’s really a delay of thirty thousand years. And I don’t see how they could be sure we’d be ready to receive or reply in that time.”

“Could be a long-term broadcast. For all we know, it’s been going on a million years,” Borland said. “Just waiting for us to catch up. Maybe time is slower for them? Like fifteen thousand years being a week or so, their way?”

“Not when the broadcast is on our time scheme. We haven’t had to adjust to it at all. If they lived that slowly, we’d have a cycle running a thousand years, instead of a few minutes.”

“Maybe. You figure they’re crazy with hate for any intelligent race, any time?”

“Xenophobia? It’s possible. But again, that time-delay makes it doubtful. How can you hate something that won’t exist for tens of millennia?”

“An alien might. His mind — if he has one — might work in a different way than mine.”

“Still, there are conceded to be certain criteria for intelligence. It isn’t reasonable—”

“Stop being reasonable. That’s a mistake. Try being philosophical.”

Brad looked at him. “What philosophy do you have in mind, Senator?”

“I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool, and that’s your problem. You figure your Scientific Method is the best technique you have for working things out, right? I tell you no.”

“Observe the facts, set up a hypothesis that accounts for them all, use it to predict other facts, check them out, and revise or scrap the original hypothesis if the new evidence doesn’t fit properly. I find it workable. Do Aristotle, Kant or Marx have a better overall system?”

“Yes. The primary concern of philosophy is not truth. It is meaning. The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis. You don’t begin with assumptions and piece them together according to the rules of mathematics; you question their implications, and you question your questions, until nothing at all is certain. Then, maybe, you are getting close to meaning.”

Brad frowned. “That make sense to you two?”

“No,” Afra said.

“Yes,” Ivo said.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you, so long as it opens your mind. This isn’t any game of chess we’re playing; we don’t even know the rules. All we know for sure is that we’re losing — and maybe we’d better start by questioning that. So this thing wipes out intelligence. Is that bad?”

“Cosmologically speaking, perhaps not,” Brad said. “But the local effect is uncomfortable. It would be easier to live with it if it erased our least intelligent, rather than—”

Borland frowned. “You’re talking about IQ type brains? ‘Intelligence Quotient defined as Mental Age divided by Chronological Age times 100’?”

“We think so. Of course we can’t be certain that a numerical IQ score reflects anything more than the subject’s ability to score on IQ tests, so we may be misinterpreting the nature of the destroyer’s thrust. A numerical score omits what may be the more important factors of personality, originality and character, and even when detail scores are identical—”

“It is no sure sign that the capabilities or performance of the people are identical,” Borland finished. “I know the book, and I am aware of the shortcomings of the system. I remember the flap fifteen or twenty years ago about ‘creativity,’ and I remember the vogue for joining high-IQ clubs. When I want a good man, I stay well clear of the self-professed egghead. I can tell just by looking at faces who’s a sucker for the club syndrome.”