wouldn't I void the contract too?" I asked.
He shrugged. "You might. But I think you would not. You are a symbol to
him, Mr. Broadhead, and I believe he would trust you. You see, I think I
know what it is he wants from all this. It is to live the way you do, for
all that remains of his life."
He stood up. "I do not expect you to agree to this at once," he said.
"I have perhaps twenty-four hours before I must reply to Mr. Herter.
Please think about this, and I will speak to you in one day."
I shook his hand, and had Harriet order him a taxicart, and stood with
him in the driveway until it rolled up and bore him briskly away into the
early night.
When I came back into my own room Essie was standing by the window,
looking out at the lights on the Tappan Sea. It was suddenly clear to me
who her visitors had been this day. At least one had been her hairdresser;
that tawny Niagara of hair hung true and even to her waist once more, and
when she turned to smile at me it was the same Essie who had left for
Arizona, all those long weeks before.
"You were so very long with that little man," she remarked. "You must
be hungry." She watched me standing there for a moment, and laughed. I
suppose that the questions in my mind were written on my face, because she
answered them. "One, dinner is ready now. Something light, which we can
eat at any time. Two, it is laid out in our room whenever you care to join
me there. And, three, yes, Robin, I have Wilma's assurance that all of
this is quite all right. Am much more well than you think, Robin dear."
"You surely look about as well as a person can get," I said, and must
have been smiling because her pale, perfect eyebrows came down in a frown.
"Are you amused at spectacle of horny wife?" she demanded. "Oh, no! No,
it is not that at all," I said, putting my arms around her. "I was just
wondering a moment ago why it was that anybody would want to live the way
I do. Now I know."
Well. We made love tentatively and slowly, and then when I found out
she wasn't going to break we did it again, rougher and rowdier. Then we
ate most of the food that was waiting for us on the sideboard, and lounged
around and hugged each other until we made love again. After that we just
sort of drowsed for a while, spooned together, until Essie commented to
the back of my neck, "Pretty impressive performance for old goat, Robin.
Not too bad for seventeen-year-old, even."
I stretched and yawned where I lay, rubbing my back against her belly
and breasts. "You sure got well in a hurry," I commented.
She didn't answer, just nuzzled my neck with her nose. There is a sort
of radar that cannot be seen or heard that tells me true. I lay there for
a moment, then disengaged myself and sat up. "Dearest Essie," I said,
"what aren't you telling me?"
She lay within my arm, face against my ribs. "About what?" she asked
innocently.
"Come on, Essie." When she didn't answer, I said, "Do I have to get
Wilma out of bed to tell me?"
She yawned and sat up. It was a false yawn; when she looked at me her
eyes were wide awake. "Wilma is most conservative," she said, shrugging.
"There are some medicines to promote healing, corticosteroids and such,
which she did not wish to give me. With them there is some slight risk of
consequences many years from now-but by then, no doubt, Full Medical will
be able to cope, I am sure. So I insisted. It made her angry."
"Consequence! You mean leukemia!"
"Yes, perhaps. But most likely not. Certainly not soon."
I got out of the bed and sat naked on the edge so that I could see her
better. "Essie, why?"
She slipped her thumbs under her long hair and pushed it back away horn
her face to return my stare. "Because I was in a hurry," she said.
"Because you are, after all, entitled to a well wife. Because it is
uncomfortable to pee through a catheter, not to say unesthetic. Because
was my decision to make and I made it." She threw the covers off her and
lay back. "Study me, Robin," she invited. "Not even scars! And inside,
under skin, am fully functional. Can eat, digest, excrete, make love,
conceive your child if we should wish. Not next spring or maybe next year.
Now."
And it was all true. I could see it for myself. Her long pale body was
unmarked-no, not entirely; down her left side was an irregular paler patch
of new skin. But you had to look to see it, and there was nothing else at
all to show that a few weeks earlier she had been gouged, and mutilated,
and in fact dead.
I was getting cold. I stood up to find Essie's robe for her and put my
own on. There was still some coffee on the sideboard, and still hot "For
me too," Essie said as I poured.
"Shouldn't you be resting?"
"When I am tired," she said practically, "you will know, because I will
roll over and go to sleep. Has been very long time since you and I were
like this, Robin. Am enjoying it."
She accepted a cup from me and looked at me over the rim as she sipped
it. "But you are not," she observed.
"Yes I am!" And I was; but honesty made me add, "I puzzle myself
sometimes, Essie. Why is it that when you show me love it comes out in my
head feeling like guilt?"
She put down her cup and lay back. "Do you wish to tell me about it,
dear Robin?"
"I just have." Then I added, "I suppose, if anybody, I should call up
old Sigfrid von Shrink and tell him."
"He is always available," she said.
"Hum. If I start with him God knows when I'd ever finish. Anyway, he's
not the program I want to talk to. There's so much going on, Essie! And
it's all happening without me. I feel left out."
"Yes," she said, "am aware this is how you feel. Is something you wish
to do, so will not feel left out any more?"
"Well-maybe," I said. "About Peter Herter, for instance. I've been
fooling around with a kind of an idea that I'd like to talk over with
Albert Einstein."
She nodded. "Very well, why not?" She sat up on the edge of the bed..
"Hand me my slippers, please. Let us do this now."
"Now? But it's late. You shouldn't be..."
"Robin," she said kindly, "I too have talked with Sigfrid von Shrink.
Is good program, even if not written by me. Says you are good man, Robin,
well adjusted, generous, and to all of this I also can testify, not to add
excellent lover and much fun to be with. Come into study." She took my
hand as we walked into the big room looking over the Tappan Sea and sat
before my console in the comfortable loveseat. "However," she went on,
"Sigfrid says you have great talent for inventing reasons not to do
things. So I will help you get off dime. Daite gorod Polymat." She was not
talking to me, but to the console, which sprang at once into light
"Display both Albert and Sigfrid programs," she ordered. "Access both
files in interactive mode. Now, Robin! Let us pursue questions you have
raised. After all, I am quite interested too."
This wife of so many years, this S. Ya. Lavorovna I married, she
surprises me most when I least expect it. She sat quite comfortably beside
me, holding my hand, while I talked quite openly about doing the things
that I had most wanted not to want. It was not just a matter of going to
Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory and stopping old Peter Herter from
messing up the world. It was where I might go after that
But at first It did not look as though I were going anywhere. "Albert,"
I said, "you told me that you had worked out a course setting for Heechee
Heaven from Gateway records. Can you do that for the Food Factory too?"
The two of them were sitting side by side in the PV tank, Albert
puffing on his pipe, Sigfrid, hands clasped and silent, attentively
listening. He would not speak until I spoke to him, and I was not doing
that. "'Fraid not," Albert said apologetically. "We have only one known
setting for the Food Factory, Trish Bover's, and that's not enough to be
sure. Maybe point-six probable that it would get a ship there. But then
what, Robin? It couldn't come back. Or at least Trish Bover's didn't." He
settled himself comfortably, and went on, "There are, of course, certain
alternatives." He glanced at Sigfrid von Shrink beside him. "One might so
manipulate Herter's mind by suggestion that he would change his plans."
"Would that work?" I was still talking to Albert Einstein. He shrugged,
and Sigfrid stirred but did not speak.
"Oh, do not be such a baby," Essie scolded. "Answer, Sigfrid."
"Gospozha Lavorovna," he said, glancing at me, "I think not. I believe
my colleague has raised this possibility only so that I might dismiss it.
I have studied the records of Peter Herter's transmissions. The symbolism
is quite obvious. The angelic women with the raptor beaks-what is a
'hooked nose', gospozha? Think of Payter's childhood, and what he heard of
the 'cleansing' of the world of the evil Jews. There is also the violence,
the punitive emotions. He is quite ill, has in fact already suffered one
coronary attack, and is no longer rational; he has, in fact, regressed to
quite a childish state. Neither suggestion nor appeals to reason will
work, gospozha. The only possibility would be perhaps long-term analysis.
He would not likely agree, the shipboard computer could not well handle it
and, in any case, there is not time. I cannot help you, gospozha, not with
any real chance of success."
Long and long ago I spent a couple of hundred mostly very unpleasant
hours listening to Sigfrid's reasonable, maddening voice, and I had not
wanted ever to hear it again. But, you know, it wasn't all that bad.
Beside me, Essie stirred, "Polymath," she called, "have fresh coffee
prepared." To me she said, "I think will be here for some time."
"I don't know for what," I objected. "I seem to be stymied."
"And if you are," she said comfortably, "we need not drink the coffee
but can go back to bed. Meanwhile am quite enjoying this, Robin."
Well, why not? I was strangely no more sleepy than Essie appeared to
be. In fact, I was both alert and relaxed, and my mind had never been
clearer. "Albert," I said, "is there any progress on reading the Heechee
books?"
"Not much, Robin," he apologized. "There are other mathematical volumes
such as the one you saw, but as yet no language. Yes, Robin?"
I snapped my fingers. The vagrant thought that had been in the back of
my mind had come to the fore. "Gosh numbers," I said. "Those numbers the
book showed us. They're the same as the ones the Dead Men call 'gosh
numbers.'"
"Sure thing, Robin," he nodded. "They are basic dimensionless constants
of the universe, or at least of this universe. However, there is the
question of Mach's Principle, which suggests..."
"Not now, Albert! Where do you suppose the Dead Men got them?"
He paused, frowning. Tapping out his pipe, he glanced at Sigfrid before
he said, "I would conjecture that the Dead Men interfaced with the Heechee
machine intelligence. no doubt there was some transmission both ways."
"My very thought! What else do you conjecture the Dead Men might know?"
"That is very difficult to say. They are very incompletely stored, you
know. Communication was extremely difficult at best and has now been
interrupted entirely."
I sat up straight. "And what if we got back in communication? What if
somebody went to Heechee Heaven to talk to them?"
He coughed. Trying not to be patronizing, he said, "Robin, several
members of the Herter-Hall party, plus the boy, Wan, have failed to get
clear answers from them on these questions. Even our machine intelligence
has succeeded only poorly though," he said politely enough, "that is
primarily because of the necessity to interface with the shipboard
computer, Vera. They are poorly stored, Robin. They are obsessive,
irrational and often incoherent."
Behind me Essie was standing with the tray of coffee and cups-I had
hardly heard the bell from the kitchen to say it was ready. "Ask him,
Robin," she commanded.
I did not pretend to misunderstand. "Hell," I said, "all right,
Sigfrid. That's your line of work. How do we trick them into talking to
us?"
Sigfrid smiled and unlaced his hands. "It is good to speak to you
again, Robin," he said. "I would like to compliment you on your very
considerable progress since we spoke last..."
"Get on with it!"
"Of course, Robin. There is one possibility. The storage of the female
prospector, Henrietta, seems rather complete, except for her one
obsession, that is, with the unfaithfulness of her husband. I think that
if a machine program were written from what we know of her husband's
personality and interfaced with her..."
"Make a fake husband for her?"
"Essentially, yes, Robin," he nodded. "It wouldn't have to be exact.
Because the Dead Men in general are so poorly stored, any responses that
were inappropriate might be overlooked. Of course, the program would be
quite..."
"Stow it, Sigfrid. Can you write a program like that?"
"Yes. With help from your wife, yes."
"And then how do we get it in contact with Henrietta?"
He looked sidewise at Albert. "I believe my colleague can help there."
"Sure thing, Sigfrid," Albert said cheerily, scratching one foot with
the toe of the other. "One. Write the program, with ancillaries. Two. Read
it into a PMAL-2 flip processor, with a gigabit fast-access memory and
necessary slave units. Three. Put it in a Five and fire it off to Heechee
Heaven. Then interface it with Henrietta and start the interrogation. I'd
give that, oh, maybe a point-nine probability of working."
I frowned. "Why ship all that machinery around?"
Patiently he said, "It's c, Robin. The speed of light. Lacking an FTL
radio, we have to ship the machine to where the job is."
"The Herter-Hall computer has an FTL radio."
"Too dumb, Robin. Too slow. And I haven't told you the worst part. All
that hardware is pretty big, you know. It would just about fill a Five.
Which means it arrives naked and undefended at Heechee Heaven. And we
don't know who is going to meet it at the dock."
Essie was sitting beside me again, looking beautiful and concerned,
holding a cup of coffee. I took it automatically and swallowed a gulp.
"You said 'just about'," I pointed out "Does that mean a pilot could go
along?"
"'Fraid not, Robin. There's only room for about another hundred and
fifty kilos."
"I only weigh half that!" I felt Essie tense beside me. We were getting
right down to it, now. I felt more clear-headed and sure of myself than in
weeks. The paralysis of inaction was loosening every minute. I was aware
of what I was saying, and very conscious of what it meant to Essie-and
unwilling to stop.
"That's true, Robin," Albert conceded, "but do you want to get there
dead? There's food, water, air. Your round-trip standard allowance, with
all provision for regeneration, comes to more than three hundred kilos,
and there simply is not..."
"Cut it out, Albert," I said. "You know as well as I do that we're not
talking about a round trip. We're talking about, what was it? Twenty-two
days. That was flight time for Henrietta. That's all I need. Enough for
twenty-two days. Then I'll be on Heechee Heaven and it won't matter."
Sigfrid was looking very interested, but silent. Albert was looking
concerned. He admitted, "Well, that's true, Robin. But it's quite a risk.
There's no margin for error at all."
I shook my head. I was way ahead of him-way ahead, at any rate, of
where he was willing to go by himself. "You said there's a Five on the
Moon that will accept that destination. Is there a what-do-you-call-it
PMAL there too?"
"No, Robin," he said, but added sadly, "However, there is one at
Kourou, ready for shipment to Venus."
"Thank you, Albert," I said, half a snarl because it was like pulling
teeth to get it out of him. And then I sat back and contemplated what had
just been said.
I was not the only one who had been listening intently. Beside me Essie
set down her coffee cup. "Polymath," she commanded, "access and display
Morton program, in interactive mode. Go ahead, Robin. Do what you must
do."
There was the sound of a door opening from the tank, and Morton walked
in, shaking hands with Sigfrid and Albert as he glanced over his shoulder
at me. He was accessing information as he stepped, and I could tell by his
expression that he didn't like what he was finding out. I didn't care. I
said, "Morton! There's a PMAL-2 information processor at the launch base
in Guiana. Buy it for me."
He turned and confronted me. "Robin," he said stubbornly, "I don't
think you realize how rapidly you're eating into capital! This program is
costing you over a thousand dollars a minute alone. I'll have to sell
stock..."
"Sell it!"
"Not only that. If you're planning to ship yourself and that computer
to Heechee Heaven. Don't! Don't even think of it! First place, Bover's
injunction still prevents it. Second place, if you should manage to get
around that, you'd be liable to a contempt citation and damages that..."
"I didn't ask you about that, Morton. Suppose I got Bover to lift his
injunction. Could they stop me then?"
"Yes! But," he added, softening, "although they could, there is some
chance they would not. At least not in time. Nevertheless, as your legal
advisor, I have to say..."
"You don't have to say anything. Buy the computer. Albert and Sigfrid,
program it the way we discussed. You three get out of the tank; I want
Harriet. Harriet? Get me a flight, Kourou to the Moon, same ship as the
computer Morton's buying for me, soon as you can. And while you're doing
that see if you can locate Hanson Bover for me. I want to talk to him."
When she nodded and winked away I turned to look at Essie. Her eyes were
damp, but she was smiling.
"You know something?" I said. "Sigfrid never called me 'Rob' or 'Bobby'
once."
She put her arms around me and hugged me close. "Maybe he thinks you
are not to be treated like an infant now," she said. "And neither am I,
Robin. Do you think I wanted to get well only so we could make love
quickly? No. It was also so you would not be held prisoner here by a wife
you thought it wicked to leave. And so that I would be well able to deal
with it," she added, "when you left anyway."
We landed at Cayenne in pitch dark and pouring rain. Bover was waiting
for me as I cleared Customs, half asleep in a foam armchair by the baggage
terminal. I thanked him several times for meeting me, but he shrugged it
off. "We have only two hours," he said. "Let us get on with it."
Harriet had chartered a chopper for us. We took off over the palms just
as the sun was coming up from the Atlantic. By the time we reached Kourou
it was full daylight, and the lunar module was erect beside its support
tower. It was tiny compared to the giants that climb up from Kennedy or
California, but the Centre Spatial Guyanais gets one-sixth better
performance out of its rockets, being almost on the equator, so they don't
have to be as big. The computer was already loaded and stowed, and Bover
and I got aboard at once. Slam. Shove. Retching taste of the breakfast I
shouldn't have eaten on the airplane rising in my throat, and then we were
under way.
It takes three days for the lunar flight. I spent as much of it as I
could sleeping, the rest talking to Bover. It was the longest time I had
spent out of reach of my comm facilities in at least a dozen years, and I
thought it would hang heavy on my hands. It went like lightning. I woke up
when the acceleration warnings went off, and watched the brassy Moon rise
up toward us, and then there we were.
Considering how far I had been, it was surprising that I had never been
on the Moon before. I didn't know what to expect. It all took me by
surprise: the dancy, prancy feeling of weighing no more than an inflated
rubber doll, the sound of the reedy tenor that came out of my mouth in the
twenty-percent helium atmosphere. They weren't breathing Heechee mixture
any more, not on the Moon. Heechee digging machines went like a bomb in
the lunar rock, and with all the sunlight anybody could want to drive them
it cost nothing to keep them going. The only problem was filling them with
air, which was why they supplemented with helium-cheaper and easier to get
than N2.
The Heechee lunar spindle is near the shuttle base-or, to put it the
right way around, the shuttle base was located where it is, near Fra
Mauro, because that was where the Heechee had dug most a million years
before. It was all underground, even the docking ports concealed under the
lee of a ridge. A couple of American astronauts named Shepard and Mitchell
had spent a weekend roaming around within two hundred kilometers of it
once, and never noticed it was there. Now a community of more than a
thousand people lived in the spindle, and the digs and the new tunnels
were branching off in all directions, and the lunar surface was a rash of
microwave dishes and solar collectors and plumbing. "Hi, you," I said to
the first able-bodied man who seemed to have nothing to do. "What's your
name?"
He loped leisurely toward me, chewing on an unlighted cigar. "What's it
to you?" he asked.
"There's cargo coming off the shuttle. I want it loaded onto the Five
that's in the dock now. You'll need half a dozen helpers and probably
cargo-handling equipment, and it's a rush job."
"Urn," he said. "You got authority for this?"
"I'll show it to you when I pay you off," I said. "And the pay's a
thousand dollars a man, with a ten thousand dollar bonus to you personally
if you do it within three hours."
"Urn. Let's see the cargo." It was just coming off the rocket. He
looked it over carefully, scratched for a while, thought for a while. He
wasn't entirely without conversation. A couple of words at a time it
developed that his name was A. T. Walthers, Jr., and that he had been born
in the tunnels on Venus. By his bangle I could tell that he had tried his
luck on Gateway, and by the fact that he was doing odd jobs on the Moon I
could tell that his luck hadn't been good. Well, mine hadn't been either,
the first couple of times; and then it changed. In which direction is hard
to say. "Can do it, Broadhead," he said at last, "but we don't have three
hours. That joker Herter is due to perform again in about ninety minutes.
We'll have to wrap this up before that."
"All the better," I said. "Now, which way is the Gateway Corp office?"
"North end of the spindle," he said. "They close in about half an hour."
All the better, I thought again, but didn't say it. Dragging Bover
after me I prancy-danced back along the tunnel to the big spindle-shaped
cavern that was headquarters for the area and argued our way into the
Launch Director's room. "You'll want an open circuit to Earth for ID," I
told her. "I'm Robin Broadhead, and here's my thumbprint. This is Hanson
Bover-if you'll oblige, Bover..." He pressed his thumb on the plate next
to mine. "Now say your bit," I invited him.
"I, Allen Bover," he said by rote, "hereby withdraw my injunction
against Robin Broadhead, the Gateway Corp et al."
"Thank you," I said. "Now, Director, while you're verifying that,
here's a signed copy of what Bover has just said for your records, plus a
mission plan. Under my contract with Gateway Corp. which your machines can
retrieve for you, I have the right to make use of Gateway facilities in
connection with the Herter-Hall expedition. I am going to do so, for which
purpose I need the Five at present parked in your landing docks. You will
see by the mission plan that I intend to go to Heechee Heaven, and from
there to the Food Factory, where I will prevent Peter Herter from
inflicting any more damage to the Earth, also rescuing the Herter-Hall
party and returning valuable Gateway information for processing and use.
And I'd like to leave within the next hour," I finished strongly.
Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The
Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up
the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at
me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of
whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling
from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors
just above us. I didn't hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and
said, "Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?"
And from the air behind her desk came Praggler's growl. "You bet your
ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won't work. He can't have the ship."
It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the
passport identities of all passengers were radioed ahead, and the
officials had known I was coming before the shuttle left French Guiana. It
was just chance that it was Praggler who was there to meet me; even if he
hadn't been, they had plenty of time to get orders from the headquarters
in Brasilia. I thought for a while that because it was Praggler I could
talk him out of it. I couldn't. I yelled at him for thirty minutes and
begged for thirty more. no good. "There's nothing wrong with your mission
plan," he admitted. "What's wrong is you. You're not entitled to use
Gateway facilities, because Gateway Corp preempted you yesterday, while
you were in orbit. Even if it hadn't, Robin, I wouldn't let you go. You're
too personally involved. Not to mention too old for this kind of thing."
"I'm an experienced Gateway pilot! "
"You're an experienced pain in the ass, Robin. And maybe a little bit
crazy, too. What do you think one man could do on Heechee Heaven? No.
We'll use your plan. We'll even pay you royalties on it-if it works. But
we'll do it the right way, from Gateway itself, with at least three ships
going, two of them full of young, healthy, well armed daredevils."
"Senator," I pleaded, "let me go! If you ship this computer to Gateway
it'll take months-years!"
"Not if we send it right up there in the Five," he said. "Six days.
Then it can take right off again, in convoy. But not with you. However,"
he said reasonably, "we'll certainly pay you for the computer and for the
program. Leave it at that, Robin. Let somebody else take the risks. I'm
speaking as your friend."
Well, he was my friend and we both knew it, but maybe not as much of a
friend as he had been, after I told him what he could do with his
friendship. Finally Bover pulled me away. The last I saw of the Senator he
was sitting on the edge of the desk staring after me, face still purple
with rage, eyes looking as though they were getting ready to weep.
"That's tough luck, Mr. Broadhead," said Bover sympathetically.
I took a breath to straighten him out, too, and stopped myself just in
time. There was no point in it. "I'll get you a ticket back to Kourou," I
said.
He smiled, showing perfectly chiseled Chiclets-he had been spending
some of that money on himself. "You have made me a rich man, Mr.
Broadhead. I can pay for my own ticket. Also, I've never been here before
and will not likely come again, so I think I'll stay a while."
"Suit yourself."
"And you, Mr. Broadhead? What are your plans?"
"I don't have any." Nor could I think of any. I had run out of
programming. I cannot tell you how empty that feels. I had nerved myself
up for another Heechee mystery-ship ride-well, not as much a mystery as
when I was prospecting out of Gateway. But still a pretty scary prospect.
I had taken a step with Essie that I had feared taking for a long time.
And all for nothing.
I stared wistfully down the long, empty tunnel toward the docks. "I
might shoot my way through," I said.
"Mr. Broadhead! That's-that's..."
"Oh, don't worry. I'm not going to, mostly because all the guns I know
anything about are already loaded onto that Five. And I doubt they'll let
me in to get one."
He peered into my face. "Well," he said doubtfully, "perhaps you, too,
might enjoy just spending a few days..."
And then his expression changed.
I hardly saw it; I was feeling what he felt, and that was enough to
demand all my attention. Old Peter was in the couch again. Worse than
ever. It was not just his dreams and fantasies that I was
experiencing-that everyone alive was feeling. It was pain. Despair.
Madness. There was a terrible sense of pressure around the temples, a
flaming ache from arms and chest. My throat was dry, then raw with sour
clots as I vomited.
Nothing like that had ever come from the Food Factory before.
But then no one had ever died in the couch before. It did not stop in a
minute, or in ten. My lungs heaved in great starving gasps. So did
Bover's. So did everyone else's, wherever they were in range of his
transmission. The pain kept on, and every time it seemed to reach a
plateau there was an explosion of new pain; and all the time there was the
terror, the rage, the awful misery of a man who knew he was dying, and
hated it.
But I knew what it was.
I knew what it was, and I knew what I could do-what at least my body
could do, if I could only hold my mind together enough to make it. I
forced myself to take a step, and then another. I made myself trot down
that wide, weary corridor, when Bover was writhing on the ground behind me
and the guards were staggering, completely helpless, ahead. I blundered
past them and doubt they even saw me, into the narrow hatch of the lander,
tumbling all bruised and shaken, forcing myself to dog it closed over my
head.
And there I was, in the disastrously familiar tiny cubbyhole,
surrounded by shapes of molded tan plastic. Walthers had done his part of
the job, at least. I had no way of paying him for it, but if he had put
his hand in the port as I was closing it I would have given him a million.
At some point old Peter Herter died. His death did not end the misery.
It only began to slow it down. I could not have guessed what it would be
like to be in the mind of a man who has died, while he feels his heart
stop and his bowels loosen and the certainty of death stab into his brain.
It goes on much longer than I would have believed possible. It was going
on all the time I cut the lander loose and sent it up on its little
hydrogen jets to where the Heechee drive could work. I jammed and heaved
the course-guidance wheels about until they showed that well-learned
pattern Albert had taught me.
And then I squeezed the launch teat, and I was on my way. The ship
began its lurchy, queasy acceleration. The star patterns I could see,
barely see, by craning past a memory-storage unit, began to drift
together. no one could stop me now. I could not even stop myself.
By all the data Albert had been able to collect the trip would be
twenty-two days exactly. Not very long-not unless you are squeezed into a
ship that is already filled to capacity. There was room for me-more or
less. I could stretch out. I could stand up. I could even lie down, if the
vagrant motion of the ship let me know where "down" was, and if I did not
mind being folded over between pieces of metal. What I could not do, for
those twenty-two days, was move more than half a meter in any
direction-not to eat, not to sleep, not to bathe or excrete; not for
anything.
There was plenty of time on my hands for the purpose of remembering how
terrifying Heechee flight was, and to feel all of it.
There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to
record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those
tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or
sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not
much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo
flat-plate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen
the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.
At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I
could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter's death, so
terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my
head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!),
encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I
cherish, the contemplation of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I
had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost
surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that
expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen
black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That
amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was
not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took
care of the first day.
Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid,
half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on
Mach's Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical
speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn't really listen, but I let
the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.
Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored
about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all
again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.
Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the
provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with
Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and
that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.
I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back
and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the
eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh. On the eleventh I cut off the
computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.
It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for
the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could
produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the
crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn't know exactly
when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it
didn't). Probably not, either, in the second or third... and it didn't.
Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that.
It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.
Or on the twelfth.
Or on the thirteenth.
Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check
out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me
what I did not want to know.
It was too late.
Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next
minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through
to the end.
There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips
instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew
how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.
When I played the figures into the computer they came back cold and
clear.
The halfway point had come too late. Nineteen days from now the ship
might well arrive at Heechee Heaven, but not with a living pilot aboard.
By then I would have been dead for at least six.
As she began to be able to speak to the Old Ones they began to seem
more like individuals to her. They were not really old, either. Or at
least the three that most often guarded her and fed her and led her to her
sessions in the long night of the dreams were not. They learned to call
her Janine, or at least something close enough. Their own names were
complicated, but each name had a short form-Tar, or Tor, or Hooay-and they
responded to them, at need or just for play. They were as playful as
puppies, and as solicitous. When she came out of the bright blue cocoon,
racked and sweating from another life and another death-from another
lesson, in this course that the Oldest One had prescribed for her-one of
them was always there to coo and murmur and stroke.
But it was not enough! There was no consolation enough to make up for
what happened in the dreams, over and over.
Every day was the same. A few hours of uneasy and unrestful sleep. A
chance to eat. Maybe a game of tag or touch-tickle with Hooay or Tor.
Perhaps a chance to wander about the Heaven, always guarded. Then Tar or
Hooay or one of the others would tug her gently back to the cocoon and put
her inside and then, for hours, sometimes for what seemed like the entire
span of a life, Janine would be someone else. And such strange someones!
Male. Female. Young. Old. Mad. Crippled-they were all different. None of
them were quite human. Most were not human at all, especially the
earliest, oldest someones.
The lives she "dreamed" that were the closest in time were the nearest
to her own. At least, they were the lives of creatures not unlike Tor or
Tar or Hooay. They were not usually frightening, though all of them ended
in death. In them she lived random and chaotic snatches of their stored
memories of the short and chancy, or dull and driven, lives they had
known. As she came to understand the language of her captors she found out
that the lives she lived were those which had been specially selected (by
what criteria?) to be stored. So each had some special lesson. All of the
dreams were learning experiences for her, of course, and of course she
learned. She learned how to speak to the living ones; to understand their
overshadowed existences; to comprehend their obsessed need to obey. They
were slaves! Or pets? When they did what the Oldest One told them they
were obedient, and therefore good. When, rarely, they did not, they were
punished.
Between times she saw Wan sometimes, and sometimes her sister. They
were kept apart from her as a matter of policy. At first she did not
understand why; then she did, and laughed inside herself at the joke too
secret to share with even jokey Tor. Lurvy and Wan were learning too, and
taking it no better than she.
By the end of the first six "dreams" she could speak to the Old Ones.
Her lips and throat would not quite form their chirping, murmuring vowels,
but she could make herself understood. More urgently, she could follow
their orders. That saved trouble. When she was meant to return to her
private cell they did not need to push her, and when she was supposed to
bathe they did not have to strip her of her clothes. By the tenth lesson
they were almost friendly. By the fifteenth she (and Lurvy and Wan as
well) knew all they ever would about Heechee Heaven, including the fact
that the Old Ones were not, and never had been, Heechee.
Not even the Oldest One.
And who was the Oldest One? Her lessons had not taught her that. Tar
and Hooay explained, as best they could, that the Oldest One was God. That
was not a satisfying answer. He was a god too much like his worshipers to
have built Heechee Heaven or any part of it, including his own body. No.
The Heaven was Heechee-built, for what purpose only the Heechee knew, and
the Oldest One was not a Heechee.
Through all this the great machine was immobile again, motionless,
almost dead, conserving its dwindling remnant of life. When Janine crossed
the central spindle she saw it there, still as a statue. Occasionally
there was a sluggish flicker of pale color around its external sensors, as
though it were on the verge of awakening, perhaps following them through
half-closed eyes. When that happened, Hooay and Tar would quicken their
step. There was no touch-tickle or joking then. Mostly it was absolutely
still. She passed Wan in its very shadow one day, she going to the cocoon,
he coming away, and Hooay dared to let them talk for a moment. "It looks
scary," Janine said.
"I could destroy it for you, if you like," Wan boasted, glancing
nervously over his shoulder at the machine. But he had said it in English,
and had the wisdom not to translate it for their guards. But even the tone
of his voice made Hooay uneasy, and he hustled Janine away.
Janine was becoming almost fond of her captors, as one might be of a
great, gentle Malemute that could talk. It took her a long time to think
of a young female like Tar as either young or female. They all had the
same scraggly facial hair and the heavy supraorbital lobes characteristic
of the mature male primate. But they began to become individuals, rather
than specimens of the class "jailer". The heavier and darker of the two
males was called "Tor," but that was only one syllable out of a long and
subtle name from which Janine could only understand the word "dark". It
did not refer to his coloring. If anything, he was fairer than his
fellows. It had something to do with an adventure of his childhood, in a
part of the Heaven so strange and so seldom visited that there was little
light from even the eternal Heechee-metal walls. Tor trimmed his beard so
that it jutted down from his jaw in two inverted horns. Tor made the most
jokes, and tried to share them with his prisoner. Tor was the one who
jested with Janine, saying that if her male, Wan, was as infertile as he
seemed to be while penned with Lurvy, he would ask the Oldest One for
permission to impregnate her himself. Janine, cherishing her secret joke
about their infertility, was not frightened. She was not repelled, either,
because Tor was a kindly sort of satyr, and she believed she could
recognize the jest. All the same, she began to think of herself as no
longer a snotty kid. Each long dream aged her. In them she experienced the
sexual intercourse she had never known in life-sometimes as a woman,
sometimes not-and often pain, and always, at the end, death. The records
could not be made from a living person, Hooay explained in a nonplayful
moment; and his manner was not playful at all as he described the way in
which the brain was opened and fed into the machine that made the records.
She grew a little older while he was telling her.
As the dreams went on, they became stranger and more remote. "You are
going to very old times," Tor told her. "This one now..." he was leading
her toward the cocoon "-is the very oldest, and therefore the last.
Perhaps."
She paused beside the gleaming couch. "Is this another joke, Tor, or a
riddle?"
"No." He tugged soberly at the forks of his beard with both hands. "You
will not like this one, Danine."
"Thanks."
He grinned, to crinkle the corners of his sad, soft eyes. "But it is
the last I can give you. Perhaps-perhaps the Oldest One will then give you
a dream out of his own. It is said that he has sometimes done that, but I
do not know when. Not in any person's memory."
Janine swallowed. "It sounds scary," she said.
He said kindly, "It frightened me very much when I had it, Danine, but
remember that it is only a dream, for you." And he closed the cocoon over
her, and Janine fought for a moment against the sleep, and failed as
always... and was someone else.
Once there was a creature. It was female; but it was not an "it", if
Descartes is to be believed, because it was aware of its own existence,
and therefore it was a "she".
She had no name. But she was marked among her fellows by a great scar
from ear to nose, where the hoof of a dying prey-beast had nearly killed
her. Her eye on that side had healed with the lid pulled out of shape, and
so she might be called "Squint".
Squint had a home. It was not elaborate. It was no more than a
trampled-out nest in a clump of something like papyrus, partly sheltered
by a hummock of earth. But Squint and her relatives returned to those
nests every day and in this they were unlike any of the other living
things that resembled them. In one other respect they were quite unlike
anything else they grew up with, and that was that they used objects that
were not parts of their bodies to do work for them. Squint was not
beautiful. She stood not much over a meter tall. She had no eyebrows-the
hair on her scalp merged with them, and only her nose and cheekbones were
bare-and she had no chin to speak of. Her hands had fingers, but they were
usually clenched so that the backs of them were scarred and callused, and
the fingers did not separate well-not much better than the fingers of her
feet, which were almost as good at grasping things, and better at gouging
out the vulnerable parts of a creature unfortunate enough to find her arms
wrapped around its neck as it tried to run away. Squint was pregnant,
although she did not know that this was so. Squint was full grown and
He shrugged. "You might. But I think you would not. You are a symbol to
him, Mr. Broadhead, and I believe he would trust you. You see, I think I
know what it is he wants from all this. It is to live the way you do, for
all that remains of his life."
He stood up. "I do not expect you to agree to this at once," he said.
"I have perhaps twenty-four hours before I must reply to Mr. Herter.
Please think about this, and I will speak to you in one day."
I shook his hand, and had Harriet order him a taxicart, and stood with
him in the driveway until it rolled up and bore him briskly away into the
early night.
When I came back into my own room Essie was standing by the window,
looking out at the lights on the Tappan Sea. It was suddenly clear to me
who her visitors had been this day. At least one had been her hairdresser;
that tawny Niagara of hair hung true and even to her waist once more, and
when she turned to smile at me it was the same Essie who had left for
Arizona, all those long weeks before.
"You were so very long with that little man," she remarked. "You must
be hungry." She watched me standing there for a moment, and laughed. I
suppose that the questions in my mind were written on my face, because she
answered them. "One, dinner is ready now. Something light, which we can
eat at any time. Two, it is laid out in our room whenever you care to join
me there. And, three, yes, Robin, I have Wilma's assurance that all of
this is quite all right. Am much more well than you think, Robin dear."
"You surely look about as well as a person can get," I said, and must
have been smiling because her pale, perfect eyebrows came down in a frown.
"Are you amused at spectacle of horny wife?" she demanded. "Oh, no! No,
it is not that at all," I said, putting my arms around her. "I was just
wondering a moment ago why it was that anybody would want to live the way
I do. Now I know."
Well. We made love tentatively and slowly, and then when I found out
she wasn't going to break we did it again, rougher and rowdier. Then we
ate most of the food that was waiting for us on the sideboard, and lounged
around and hugged each other until we made love again. After that we just
sort of drowsed for a while, spooned together, until Essie commented to
the back of my neck, "Pretty impressive performance for old goat, Robin.
Not too bad for seventeen-year-old, even."
I stretched and yawned where I lay, rubbing my back against her belly
and breasts. "You sure got well in a hurry," I commented.
She didn't answer, just nuzzled my neck with her nose. There is a sort
of radar that cannot be seen or heard that tells me true. I lay there for
a moment, then disengaged myself and sat up. "Dearest Essie," I said,
"what aren't you telling me?"
She lay within my arm, face against my ribs. "About what?" she asked
innocently.
"Come on, Essie." When she didn't answer, I said, "Do I have to get
Wilma out of bed to tell me?"
She yawned and sat up. It was a false yawn; when she looked at me her
eyes were wide awake. "Wilma is most conservative," she said, shrugging.
"There are some medicines to promote healing, corticosteroids and such,
which she did not wish to give me. With them there is some slight risk of
consequences many years from now-but by then, no doubt, Full Medical will
be able to cope, I am sure. So I insisted. It made her angry."
"Consequence! You mean leukemia!"
"Yes, perhaps. But most likely not. Certainly not soon."
I got out of the bed and sat naked on the edge so that I could see her
better. "Essie, why?"
She slipped her thumbs under her long hair and pushed it back away horn
her face to return my stare. "Because I was in a hurry," she said.
"Because you are, after all, entitled to a well wife. Because it is
uncomfortable to pee through a catheter, not to say unesthetic. Because
was my decision to make and I made it." She threw the covers off her and
lay back. "Study me, Robin," she invited. "Not even scars! And inside,
under skin, am fully functional. Can eat, digest, excrete, make love,
conceive your child if we should wish. Not next spring or maybe next year.
Now."
And it was all true. I could see it for myself. Her long pale body was
unmarked-no, not entirely; down her left side was an irregular paler patch
of new skin. But you had to look to see it, and there was nothing else at
all to show that a few weeks earlier she had been gouged, and mutilated,
and in fact dead.
I was getting cold. I stood up to find Essie's robe for her and put my
own on. There was still some coffee on the sideboard, and still hot "For
me too," Essie said as I poured.
"Shouldn't you be resting?"
"When I am tired," she said practically, "you will know, because I will
roll over and go to sleep. Has been very long time since you and I were
like this, Robin. Am enjoying it."
She accepted a cup from me and looked at me over the rim as she sipped
it. "But you are not," she observed.
"Yes I am!" And I was; but honesty made me add, "I puzzle myself
sometimes, Essie. Why is it that when you show me love it comes out in my
head feeling like guilt?"
She put down her cup and lay back. "Do you wish to tell me about it,
dear Robin?"
"I just have." Then I added, "I suppose, if anybody, I should call up
old Sigfrid von Shrink and tell him."
"He is always available," she said.
"Hum. If I start with him God knows when I'd ever finish. Anyway, he's
not the program I want to talk to. There's so much going on, Essie! And
it's all happening without me. I feel left out."
"Yes," she said, "am aware this is how you feel. Is something you wish
to do, so will not feel left out any more?"
"Well-maybe," I said. "About Peter Herter, for instance. I've been
fooling around with a kind of an idea that I'd like to talk over with
Albert Einstein."
She nodded. "Very well, why not?" She sat up on the edge of the bed..
"Hand me my slippers, please. Let us do this now."
"Now? But it's late. You shouldn't be..."
"Robin," she said kindly, "I too have talked with Sigfrid von Shrink.
Is good program, even if not written by me. Says you are good man, Robin,
well adjusted, generous, and to all of this I also can testify, not to add
excellent lover and much fun to be with. Come into study." She took my
hand as we walked into the big room looking over the Tappan Sea and sat
before my console in the comfortable loveseat. "However," she went on,
"Sigfrid says you have great talent for inventing reasons not to do
things. So I will help you get off dime. Daite gorod Polymat." She was not
talking to me, but to the console, which sprang at once into light
"Display both Albert and Sigfrid programs," she ordered. "Access both
files in interactive mode. Now, Robin! Let us pursue questions you have
raised. After all, I am quite interested too."
This wife of so many years, this S. Ya. Lavorovna I married, she
surprises me most when I least expect it. She sat quite comfortably beside
me, holding my hand, while I talked quite openly about doing the things
that I had most wanted not to want. It was not just a matter of going to
Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory and stopping old Peter Herter from
messing up the world. It was where I might go after that
But at first It did not look as though I were going anywhere. "Albert,"
I said, "you told me that you had worked out a course setting for Heechee
Heaven from Gateway records. Can you do that for the Food Factory too?"
The two of them were sitting side by side in the PV tank, Albert
puffing on his pipe, Sigfrid, hands clasped and silent, attentively
listening. He would not speak until I spoke to him, and I was not doing
that. "'Fraid not," Albert said apologetically. "We have only one known
setting for the Food Factory, Trish Bover's, and that's not enough to be
sure. Maybe point-six probable that it would get a ship there. But then
what, Robin? It couldn't come back. Or at least Trish Bover's didn't." He
settled himself comfortably, and went on, "There are, of course, certain
alternatives." He glanced at Sigfrid von Shrink beside him. "One might so
manipulate Herter's mind by suggestion that he would change his plans."
"Would that work?" I was still talking to Albert Einstein. He shrugged,
and Sigfrid stirred but did not speak.
"Oh, do not be such a baby," Essie scolded. "Answer, Sigfrid."
"Gospozha Lavorovna," he said, glancing at me, "I think not. I believe
my colleague has raised this possibility only so that I might dismiss it.
I have studied the records of Peter Herter's transmissions. The symbolism
is quite obvious. The angelic women with the raptor beaks-what is a
'hooked nose', gospozha? Think of Payter's childhood, and what he heard of
the 'cleansing' of the world of the evil Jews. There is also the violence,
the punitive emotions. He is quite ill, has in fact already suffered one
coronary attack, and is no longer rational; he has, in fact, regressed to
quite a childish state. Neither suggestion nor appeals to reason will
work, gospozha. The only possibility would be perhaps long-term analysis.
He would not likely agree, the shipboard computer could not well handle it
and, in any case, there is not time. I cannot help you, gospozha, not with
any real chance of success."
Long and long ago I spent a couple of hundred mostly very unpleasant
hours listening to Sigfrid's reasonable, maddening voice, and I had not
wanted ever to hear it again. But, you know, it wasn't all that bad.
Beside me, Essie stirred, "Polymath," she called, "have fresh coffee
prepared." To me she said, "I think will be here for some time."
"I don't know for what," I objected. "I seem to be stymied."
"And if you are," she said comfortably, "we need not drink the coffee
but can go back to bed. Meanwhile am quite enjoying this, Robin."
Well, why not? I was strangely no more sleepy than Essie appeared to
be. In fact, I was both alert and relaxed, and my mind had never been
clearer. "Albert," I said, "is there any progress on reading the Heechee
books?"
"Not much, Robin," he apologized. "There are other mathematical volumes
such as the one you saw, but as yet no language. Yes, Robin?"
I snapped my fingers. The vagrant thought that had been in the back of
my mind had come to the fore. "Gosh numbers," I said. "Those numbers the
book showed us. They're the same as the ones the Dead Men call 'gosh
numbers.'"
"Sure thing, Robin," he nodded. "They are basic dimensionless constants
of the universe, or at least of this universe. However, there is the
question of Mach's Principle, which suggests..."
"Not now, Albert! Where do you suppose the Dead Men got them?"
He paused, frowning. Tapping out his pipe, he glanced at Sigfrid before
he said, "I would conjecture that the Dead Men interfaced with the Heechee
machine intelligence. no doubt there was some transmission both ways."
"My very thought! What else do you conjecture the Dead Men might know?"
"That is very difficult to say. They are very incompletely stored, you
know. Communication was extremely difficult at best and has now been
interrupted entirely."
I sat up straight. "And what if we got back in communication? What if
somebody went to Heechee Heaven to talk to them?"
He coughed. Trying not to be patronizing, he said, "Robin, several
members of the Herter-Hall party, plus the boy, Wan, have failed to get
clear answers from them on these questions. Even our machine intelligence
has succeeded only poorly though," he said politely enough, "that is
primarily because of the necessity to interface with the shipboard
computer, Vera. They are poorly stored, Robin. They are obsessive,
irrational and often incoherent."
Behind me Essie was standing with the tray of coffee and cups-I had
hardly heard the bell from the kitchen to say it was ready. "Ask him,
Robin," she commanded.
I did not pretend to misunderstand. "Hell," I said, "all right,
Sigfrid. That's your line of work. How do we trick them into talking to
us?"
Sigfrid smiled and unlaced his hands. "It is good to speak to you
again, Robin," he said. "I would like to compliment you on your very
considerable progress since we spoke last..."
"Get on with it!"
"Of course, Robin. There is one possibility. The storage of the female
prospector, Henrietta, seems rather complete, except for her one
obsession, that is, with the unfaithfulness of her husband. I think that
if a machine program were written from what we know of her husband's
personality and interfaced with her..."
"Make a fake husband for her?"
"Essentially, yes, Robin," he nodded. "It wouldn't have to be exact.
Because the Dead Men in general are so poorly stored, any responses that
were inappropriate might be overlooked. Of course, the program would be
quite..."
"Stow it, Sigfrid. Can you write a program like that?"
"Yes. With help from your wife, yes."
"And then how do we get it in contact with Henrietta?"
He looked sidewise at Albert. "I believe my colleague can help there."
"Sure thing, Sigfrid," Albert said cheerily, scratching one foot with
the toe of the other. "One. Write the program, with ancillaries. Two. Read
it into a PMAL-2 flip processor, with a gigabit fast-access memory and
necessary slave units. Three. Put it in a Five and fire it off to Heechee
Heaven. Then interface it with Henrietta and start the interrogation. I'd
give that, oh, maybe a point-nine probability of working."
I frowned. "Why ship all that machinery around?"
Patiently he said, "It's c, Robin. The speed of light. Lacking an FTL
radio, we have to ship the machine to where the job is."
"The Herter-Hall computer has an FTL radio."
"Too dumb, Robin. Too slow. And I haven't told you the worst part. All
that hardware is pretty big, you know. It would just about fill a Five.
Which means it arrives naked and undefended at Heechee Heaven. And we
don't know who is going to meet it at the dock."
Essie was sitting beside me again, looking beautiful and concerned,
holding a cup of coffee. I took it automatically and swallowed a gulp.
"You said 'just about'," I pointed out "Does that mean a pilot could go
along?"
"'Fraid not, Robin. There's only room for about another hundred and
fifty kilos."
"I only weigh half that!" I felt Essie tense beside me. We were getting
right down to it, now. I felt more clear-headed and sure of myself than in
weeks. The paralysis of inaction was loosening every minute. I was aware
of what I was saying, and very conscious of what it meant to Essie-and
unwilling to stop.
"That's true, Robin," Albert conceded, "but do you want to get there
dead? There's food, water, air. Your round-trip standard allowance, with
all provision for regeneration, comes to more than three hundred kilos,
and there simply is not..."
"Cut it out, Albert," I said. "You know as well as I do that we're not
talking about a round trip. We're talking about, what was it? Twenty-two
days. That was flight time for Henrietta. That's all I need. Enough for
twenty-two days. Then I'll be on Heechee Heaven and it won't matter."
Sigfrid was looking very interested, but silent. Albert was looking
concerned. He admitted, "Well, that's true, Robin. But it's quite a risk.
There's no margin for error at all."
I shook my head. I was way ahead of him-way ahead, at any rate, of
where he was willing to go by himself. "You said there's a Five on the
Moon that will accept that destination. Is there a what-do-you-call-it
PMAL there too?"
"No, Robin," he said, but added sadly, "However, there is one at
Kourou, ready for shipment to Venus."
"Thank you, Albert," I said, half a snarl because it was like pulling
teeth to get it out of him. And then I sat back and contemplated what had
just been said.
I was not the only one who had been listening intently. Beside me Essie
set down her coffee cup. "Polymath," she commanded, "access and display
Morton program, in interactive mode. Go ahead, Robin. Do what you must
do."
There was the sound of a door opening from the tank, and Morton walked
in, shaking hands with Sigfrid and Albert as he glanced over his shoulder
at me. He was accessing information as he stepped, and I could tell by his
expression that he didn't like what he was finding out. I didn't care. I
said, "Morton! There's a PMAL-2 information processor at the launch base
in Guiana. Buy it for me."
He turned and confronted me. "Robin," he said stubbornly, "I don't
think you realize how rapidly you're eating into capital! This program is
costing you over a thousand dollars a minute alone. I'll have to sell
stock..."
"Sell it!"
"Not only that. If you're planning to ship yourself and that computer
to Heechee Heaven. Don't! Don't even think of it! First place, Bover's
injunction still prevents it. Second place, if you should manage to get
around that, you'd be liable to a contempt citation and damages that..."
"I didn't ask you about that, Morton. Suppose I got Bover to lift his
injunction. Could they stop me then?"
"Yes! But," he added, softening, "although they could, there is some
chance they would not. At least not in time. Nevertheless, as your legal
advisor, I have to say..."
"You don't have to say anything. Buy the computer. Albert and Sigfrid,
program it the way we discussed. You three get out of the tank; I want
Harriet. Harriet? Get me a flight, Kourou to the Moon, same ship as the
computer Morton's buying for me, soon as you can. And while you're doing
that see if you can locate Hanson Bover for me. I want to talk to him."
When she nodded and winked away I turned to look at Essie. Her eyes were
damp, but she was smiling.
"You know something?" I said. "Sigfrid never called me 'Rob' or 'Bobby'
once."
She put her arms around me and hugged me close. "Maybe he thinks you
are not to be treated like an infant now," she said. "And neither am I,
Robin. Do you think I wanted to get well only so we could make love
quickly? No. It was also so you would not be held prisoner here by a wife
you thought it wicked to leave. And so that I would be well able to deal
with it," she added, "when you left anyway."
We landed at Cayenne in pitch dark and pouring rain. Bover was waiting
for me as I cleared Customs, half asleep in a foam armchair by the baggage
terminal. I thanked him several times for meeting me, but he shrugged it
off. "We have only two hours," he said. "Let us get on with it."
Harriet had chartered a chopper for us. We took off over the palms just
as the sun was coming up from the Atlantic. By the time we reached Kourou
it was full daylight, and the lunar module was erect beside its support
tower. It was tiny compared to the giants that climb up from Kennedy or
California, but the Centre Spatial Guyanais gets one-sixth better
performance out of its rockets, being almost on the equator, so they don't
have to be as big. The computer was already loaded and stowed, and Bover
and I got aboard at once. Slam. Shove. Retching taste of the breakfast I
shouldn't have eaten on the airplane rising in my throat, and then we were
under way.
It takes three days for the lunar flight. I spent as much of it as I
could sleeping, the rest talking to Bover. It was the longest time I had
spent out of reach of my comm facilities in at least a dozen years, and I
thought it would hang heavy on my hands. It went like lightning. I woke up
when the acceleration warnings went off, and watched the brassy Moon rise
up toward us, and then there we were.
Considering how far I had been, it was surprising that I had never been
on the Moon before. I didn't know what to expect. It all took me by
surprise: the dancy, prancy feeling of weighing no more than an inflated
rubber doll, the sound of the reedy tenor that came out of my mouth in the
twenty-percent helium atmosphere. They weren't breathing Heechee mixture
any more, not on the Moon. Heechee digging machines went like a bomb in
the lunar rock, and with all the sunlight anybody could want to drive them
it cost nothing to keep them going. The only problem was filling them with
air, which was why they supplemented with helium-cheaper and easier to get
than N2.
The Heechee lunar spindle is near the shuttle base-or, to put it the
right way around, the shuttle base was located where it is, near Fra
Mauro, because that was where the Heechee had dug most a million years
before. It was all underground, even the docking ports concealed under the
lee of a ridge. A couple of American astronauts named Shepard and Mitchell
had spent a weekend roaming around within two hundred kilometers of it
once, and never noticed it was there. Now a community of more than a
thousand people lived in the spindle, and the digs and the new tunnels
were branching off in all directions, and the lunar surface was a rash of
microwave dishes and solar collectors and plumbing. "Hi, you," I said to
the first able-bodied man who seemed to have nothing to do. "What's your
name?"
He loped leisurely toward me, chewing on an unlighted cigar. "What's it
to you?" he asked.
"There's cargo coming off the shuttle. I want it loaded onto the Five
that's in the dock now. You'll need half a dozen helpers and probably
cargo-handling equipment, and it's a rush job."
"Urn," he said. "You got authority for this?"
"I'll show it to you when I pay you off," I said. "And the pay's a
thousand dollars a man, with a ten thousand dollar bonus to you personally
if you do it within three hours."
"Urn. Let's see the cargo." It was just coming off the rocket. He
looked it over carefully, scratched for a while, thought for a while. He
wasn't entirely without conversation. A couple of words at a time it
developed that his name was A. T. Walthers, Jr., and that he had been born
in the tunnels on Venus. By his bangle I could tell that he had tried his
luck on Gateway, and by the fact that he was doing odd jobs on the Moon I
could tell that his luck hadn't been good. Well, mine hadn't been either,
the first couple of times; and then it changed. In which direction is hard
to say. "Can do it, Broadhead," he said at last, "but we don't have three
hours. That joker Herter is due to perform again in about ninety minutes.
We'll have to wrap this up before that."
"All the better," I said. "Now, which way is the Gateway Corp office?"
"North end of the spindle," he said. "They close in about half an hour."
All the better, I thought again, but didn't say it. Dragging Bover
after me I prancy-danced back along the tunnel to the big spindle-shaped
cavern that was headquarters for the area and argued our way into the
Launch Director's room. "You'll want an open circuit to Earth for ID," I
told her. "I'm Robin Broadhead, and here's my thumbprint. This is Hanson
Bover-if you'll oblige, Bover..." He pressed his thumb on the plate next
to mine. "Now say your bit," I invited him.
"I, Allen Bover," he said by rote, "hereby withdraw my injunction
against Robin Broadhead, the Gateway Corp et al."
"Thank you," I said. "Now, Director, while you're verifying that,
here's a signed copy of what Bover has just said for your records, plus a
mission plan. Under my contract with Gateway Corp. which your machines can
retrieve for you, I have the right to make use of Gateway facilities in
connection with the Herter-Hall expedition. I am going to do so, for which
purpose I need the Five at present parked in your landing docks. You will
see by the mission plan that I intend to go to Heechee Heaven, and from
there to the Food Factory, where I will prevent Peter Herter from
inflicting any more damage to the Earth, also rescuing the Herter-Hall
party and returning valuable Gateway information for processing and use.
And I'd like to leave within the next hour," I finished strongly.
Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The
Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up
the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at
me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of
whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling
from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors
just above us. I didn't hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and
said, "Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?"
And from the air behind her desk came Praggler's growl. "You bet your
ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won't work. He can't have the ship."
It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the
passport identities of all passengers were radioed ahead, and the
officials had known I was coming before the shuttle left French Guiana. It
was just chance that it was Praggler who was there to meet me; even if he
hadn't been, they had plenty of time to get orders from the headquarters
in Brasilia. I thought for a while that because it was Praggler I could
talk him out of it. I couldn't. I yelled at him for thirty minutes and
begged for thirty more. no good. "There's nothing wrong with your mission
plan," he admitted. "What's wrong is you. You're not entitled to use
Gateway facilities, because Gateway Corp preempted you yesterday, while
you were in orbit. Even if it hadn't, Robin, I wouldn't let you go. You're
too personally involved. Not to mention too old for this kind of thing."
"I'm an experienced Gateway pilot! "
"You're an experienced pain in the ass, Robin. And maybe a little bit
crazy, too. What do you think one man could do on Heechee Heaven? No.
We'll use your plan. We'll even pay you royalties on it-if it works. But
we'll do it the right way, from Gateway itself, with at least three ships
going, two of them full of young, healthy, well armed daredevils."
"Senator," I pleaded, "let me go! If you ship this computer to Gateway
it'll take months-years!"
"Not if we send it right up there in the Five," he said. "Six days.
Then it can take right off again, in convoy. But not with you. However,"
he said reasonably, "we'll certainly pay you for the computer and for the
program. Leave it at that, Robin. Let somebody else take the risks. I'm
speaking as your friend."
Well, he was my friend and we both knew it, but maybe not as much of a
friend as he had been, after I told him what he could do with his
friendship. Finally Bover pulled me away. The last I saw of the Senator he
was sitting on the edge of the desk staring after me, face still purple
with rage, eyes looking as though they were getting ready to weep.
"That's tough luck, Mr. Broadhead," said Bover sympathetically.
I took a breath to straighten him out, too, and stopped myself just in
time. There was no point in it. "I'll get you a ticket back to Kourou," I
said.
He smiled, showing perfectly chiseled Chiclets-he had been spending
some of that money on himself. "You have made me a rich man, Mr.
Broadhead. I can pay for my own ticket. Also, I've never been here before
and will not likely come again, so I think I'll stay a while."
"Suit yourself."
"And you, Mr. Broadhead? What are your plans?"
"I don't have any." Nor could I think of any. I had run out of
programming. I cannot tell you how empty that feels. I had nerved myself
up for another Heechee mystery-ship ride-well, not as much a mystery as
when I was prospecting out of Gateway. But still a pretty scary prospect.
I had taken a step with Essie that I had feared taking for a long time.
And all for nothing.
I stared wistfully down the long, empty tunnel toward the docks. "I
might shoot my way through," I said.
"Mr. Broadhead! That's-that's..."
"Oh, don't worry. I'm not going to, mostly because all the guns I know
anything about are already loaded onto that Five. And I doubt they'll let
me in to get one."
He peered into my face. "Well," he said doubtfully, "perhaps you, too,
might enjoy just spending a few days..."
And then his expression changed.
I hardly saw it; I was feeling what he felt, and that was enough to
demand all my attention. Old Peter was in the couch again. Worse than
ever. It was not just his dreams and fantasies that I was
experiencing-that everyone alive was feeling. It was pain. Despair.
Madness. There was a terrible sense of pressure around the temples, a
flaming ache from arms and chest. My throat was dry, then raw with sour
clots as I vomited.
Nothing like that had ever come from the Food Factory before.
But then no one had ever died in the couch before. It did not stop in a
minute, or in ten. My lungs heaved in great starving gasps. So did
Bover's. So did everyone else's, wherever they were in range of his
transmission. The pain kept on, and every time it seemed to reach a
plateau there was an explosion of new pain; and all the time there was the
terror, the rage, the awful misery of a man who knew he was dying, and
hated it.
But I knew what it was.
I knew what it was, and I knew what I could do-what at least my body
could do, if I could only hold my mind together enough to make it. I
forced myself to take a step, and then another. I made myself trot down
that wide, weary corridor, when Bover was writhing on the ground behind me
and the guards were staggering, completely helpless, ahead. I blundered
past them and doubt they even saw me, into the narrow hatch of the lander,
tumbling all bruised and shaken, forcing myself to dog it closed over my
head.
And there I was, in the disastrously familiar tiny cubbyhole,
surrounded by shapes of molded tan plastic. Walthers had done his part of
the job, at least. I had no way of paying him for it, but if he had put
his hand in the port as I was closing it I would have given him a million.
At some point old Peter Herter died. His death did not end the misery.
It only began to slow it down. I could not have guessed what it would be
like to be in the mind of a man who has died, while he feels his heart
stop and his bowels loosen and the certainty of death stab into his brain.
It goes on much longer than I would have believed possible. It was going
on all the time I cut the lander loose and sent it up on its little
hydrogen jets to where the Heechee drive could work. I jammed and heaved
the course-guidance wheels about until they showed that well-learned
pattern Albert had taught me.
And then I squeezed the launch teat, and I was on my way. The ship
began its lurchy, queasy acceleration. The star patterns I could see,
barely see, by craning past a memory-storage unit, began to drift
together. no one could stop me now. I could not even stop myself.
By all the data Albert had been able to collect the trip would be
twenty-two days exactly. Not very long-not unless you are squeezed into a
ship that is already filled to capacity. There was room for me-more or
less. I could stretch out. I could stand up. I could even lie down, if the
vagrant motion of the ship let me know where "down" was, and if I did not
mind being folded over between pieces of metal. What I could not do, for
those twenty-two days, was move more than half a meter in any
direction-not to eat, not to sleep, not to bathe or excrete; not for
anything.
There was plenty of time on my hands for the purpose of remembering how
terrifying Heechee flight was, and to feel all of it.
There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to
record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those
tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or
sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not
much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo
flat-plate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen
the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.
At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I
could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter's death, so
terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my
head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!),
encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I
cherish, the contemplation of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I
had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost
surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that
expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen
black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That
amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was
not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took
care of the first day.
Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid,
half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on
Mach's Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical
speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn't really listen, but I let
the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.
Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored
about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all
again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.
Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the
provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with
Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and
that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.
I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back
and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the
eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh. On the eleventh I cut off the
computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.
It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for
the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could
produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the
crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn't know exactly
when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it
didn't). Probably not, either, in the second or third... and it didn't.
Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that.
It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.
Or on the twelfth.
Or on the thirteenth.
Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check
out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me
what I did not want to know.
It was too late.
Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next
minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through
to the end.
There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips
instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew
how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.
When I played the figures into the computer they came back cold and
clear.
The halfway point had come too late. Nineteen days from now the ship
might well arrive at Heechee Heaven, but not with a living pilot aboard.
By then I would have been dead for at least six.
As she began to be able to speak to the Old Ones they began to seem
more like individuals to her. They were not really old, either. Or at
least the three that most often guarded her and fed her and led her to her
sessions in the long night of the dreams were not. They learned to call
her Janine, or at least something close enough. Their own names were
complicated, but each name had a short form-Tar, or Tor, or Hooay-and they
responded to them, at need or just for play. They were as playful as
puppies, and as solicitous. When she came out of the bright blue cocoon,
racked and sweating from another life and another death-from another
lesson, in this course that the Oldest One had prescribed for her-one of
them was always there to coo and murmur and stroke.
But it was not enough! There was no consolation enough to make up for
what happened in the dreams, over and over.
Every day was the same. A few hours of uneasy and unrestful sleep. A
chance to eat. Maybe a game of tag or touch-tickle with Hooay or Tor.
Perhaps a chance to wander about the Heaven, always guarded. Then Tar or
Hooay or one of the others would tug her gently back to the cocoon and put
her inside and then, for hours, sometimes for what seemed like the entire
span of a life, Janine would be someone else. And such strange someones!
Male. Female. Young. Old. Mad. Crippled-they were all different. None of
them were quite human. Most were not human at all, especially the
earliest, oldest someones.
The lives she "dreamed" that were the closest in time were the nearest
to her own. At least, they were the lives of creatures not unlike Tor or
Tar or Hooay. They were not usually frightening, though all of them ended
in death. In them she lived random and chaotic snatches of their stored
memories of the short and chancy, or dull and driven, lives they had
known. As she came to understand the language of her captors she found out
that the lives she lived were those which had been specially selected (by
what criteria?) to be stored. So each had some special lesson. All of the
dreams were learning experiences for her, of course, and of course she
learned. She learned how to speak to the living ones; to understand their
overshadowed existences; to comprehend their obsessed need to obey. They
were slaves! Or pets? When they did what the Oldest One told them they
were obedient, and therefore good. When, rarely, they did not, they were
punished.
Between times she saw Wan sometimes, and sometimes her sister. They
were kept apart from her as a matter of policy. At first she did not
understand why; then she did, and laughed inside herself at the joke too
secret to share with even jokey Tor. Lurvy and Wan were learning too, and
taking it no better than she.
By the end of the first six "dreams" she could speak to the Old Ones.
Her lips and throat would not quite form their chirping, murmuring vowels,
but she could make herself understood. More urgently, she could follow
their orders. That saved trouble. When she was meant to return to her
private cell they did not need to push her, and when she was supposed to
bathe they did not have to strip her of her clothes. By the tenth lesson
they were almost friendly. By the fifteenth she (and Lurvy and Wan as
well) knew all they ever would about Heechee Heaven, including the fact
that the Old Ones were not, and never had been, Heechee.
Not even the Oldest One.
And who was the Oldest One? Her lessons had not taught her that. Tar
and Hooay explained, as best they could, that the Oldest One was God. That
was not a satisfying answer. He was a god too much like his worshipers to
have built Heechee Heaven or any part of it, including his own body. No.
The Heaven was Heechee-built, for what purpose only the Heechee knew, and
the Oldest One was not a Heechee.
Through all this the great machine was immobile again, motionless,
almost dead, conserving its dwindling remnant of life. When Janine crossed
the central spindle she saw it there, still as a statue. Occasionally
there was a sluggish flicker of pale color around its external sensors, as
though it were on the verge of awakening, perhaps following them through
half-closed eyes. When that happened, Hooay and Tar would quicken their
step. There was no touch-tickle or joking then. Mostly it was absolutely
still. She passed Wan in its very shadow one day, she going to the cocoon,
he coming away, and Hooay dared to let them talk for a moment. "It looks
scary," Janine said.
"I could destroy it for you, if you like," Wan boasted, glancing
nervously over his shoulder at the machine. But he had said it in English,
and had the wisdom not to translate it for their guards. But even the tone
of his voice made Hooay uneasy, and he hustled Janine away.
Janine was becoming almost fond of her captors, as one might be of a
great, gentle Malemute that could talk. It took her a long time to think
of a young female like Tar as either young or female. They all had the
same scraggly facial hair and the heavy supraorbital lobes characteristic
of the mature male primate. But they began to become individuals, rather
than specimens of the class "jailer". The heavier and darker of the two
males was called "Tor," but that was only one syllable out of a long and
subtle name from which Janine could only understand the word "dark". It
did not refer to his coloring. If anything, he was fairer than his
fellows. It had something to do with an adventure of his childhood, in a
part of the Heaven so strange and so seldom visited that there was little
light from even the eternal Heechee-metal walls. Tor trimmed his beard so
that it jutted down from his jaw in two inverted horns. Tor made the most
jokes, and tried to share them with his prisoner. Tor was the one who
jested with Janine, saying that if her male, Wan, was as infertile as he
seemed to be while penned with Lurvy, he would ask the Oldest One for
permission to impregnate her himself. Janine, cherishing her secret joke
about their infertility, was not frightened. She was not repelled, either,
because Tor was a kindly sort of satyr, and she believed she could
recognize the jest. All the same, she began to think of herself as no
longer a snotty kid. Each long dream aged her. In them she experienced the
sexual intercourse she had never known in life-sometimes as a woman,
sometimes not-and often pain, and always, at the end, death. The records
could not be made from a living person, Hooay explained in a nonplayful
moment; and his manner was not playful at all as he described the way in
which the brain was opened and fed into the machine that made the records.
She grew a little older while he was telling her.
As the dreams went on, they became stranger and more remote. "You are
going to very old times," Tor told her. "This one now..." he was leading
her toward the cocoon "-is the very oldest, and therefore the last.
Perhaps."
She paused beside the gleaming couch. "Is this another joke, Tor, or a
riddle?"
"No." He tugged soberly at the forks of his beard with both hands. "You
will not like this one, Danine."
"Thanks."
He grinned, to crinkle the corners of his sad, soft eyes. "But it is
the last I can give you. Perhaps-perhaps the Oldest One will then give you
a dream out of his own. It is said that he has sometimes done that, but I
do not know when. Not in any person's memory."
Janine swallowed. "It sounds scary," she said.
He said kindly, "It frightened me very much when I had it, Danine, but
remember that it is only a dream, for you." And he closed the cocoon over
her, and Janine fought for a moment against the sleep, and failed as
always... and was someone else.
Once there was a creature. It was female; but it was not an "it", if
Descartes is to be believed, because it was aware of its own existence,
and therefore it was a "she".
She had no name. But she was marked among her fellows by a great scar
from ear to nose, where the hoof of a dying prey-beast had nearly killed
her. Her eye on that side had healed with the lid pulled out of shape, and
so she might be called "Squint".
Squint had a home. It was not elaborate. It was no more than a
trampled-out nest in a clump of something like papyrus, partly sheltered
by a hummock of earth. But Squint and her relatives returned to those
nests every day and in this they were unlike any of the other living
things that resembled them. In one other respect they were quite unlike
anything else they grew up with, and that was that they used objects that
were not parts of their bodies to do work for them. Squint was not
beautiful. She stood not much over a meter tall. She had no eyebrows-the
hair on her scalp merged with them, and only her nose and cheekbones were
bare-and she had no chin to speak of. Her hands had fingers, but they were
usually clenched so that the backs of them were scarred and callused, and
the fingers did not separate well-not much better than the fingers of her
feet, which were almost as good at grasping things, and better at gouging
out the vulnerable parts of a creature unfortunate enough to find her arms
wrapped around its neck as it tried to run away. Squint was pregnant,
although she did not know that this was so. Squint was full grown and