fully fertile by her fifth rainy season. In the thirteen years she had
been alive she had been pregnant nine or ten times, and had never known it
until she was forced to note that she could no longer run quite as fast,
that the bulge in her belly made it more difficult to rake the guts out of
a prey-animal and that her dugs began to swell again with milk. Of the
fifty members of her community at least four were her children. More than
a dozen of the males were, or might have been, the children's fathers.
Squint was aware of the former relationship, but not of the latter. At
least one of the young males she knew to be a child of hers might well
have been the father of another-a notion which would not have disturbed
Squint, even if she had been capable of entertaining it. The thing she did
with the males when the flesh beneath her skinny buttocks swelled and
reddened was not in her mind related to childbirth. It was not related to
pleasure, either. It was an itch that she suffered to be scratched
whenever it happened. Squint had no way of defining "pleasure," except
perhaps as the absence of pain. Even in those terms, she knew little of it
throughout her life.
When the Heechee lander bellowed and flamed above the clouds, Squint
and all her community ran to hide. None of them saw it come to earth.
If a trawl scoops a starfish from the bottom of a sea, a spade lifts it
from the bucket of ooze and dumps it in a tank, a biologist pins it down
and dissects out its nervous system-does the starfish know what is
happening to it?
Squint had more self-awareness than a starfish. But she had little more
background of experience to inform her. Nothing that happened to her from
the moment she saw a bright light shining in her eyes made sense. She did
not feel the point of the anesthetic lance that put her to sleep. She did
not know she was carried into the lander and dumped into a pen of twelve
of her fellows. She did not feel the crushing acceleration when she took
off, or the weightlessness for the long time they floated in transit. She
did not know anything at all until she was allowed to waken again, and did
not understand what she then experienced.
Nothing was familiar!
Water. The water Squint drank did not any longer come from the muddy
brink of the river. It came in a shiny, hard trough. When she bent to lap
it up nothing lurked beneath its surface to lunge at her.
Sun and sky. There was no sun! There were no clouds, and there was no
rain. There were hard, blue-gleaming walls, and a blue-gleaming roof
overhead.
Food. There was no live thing to catch and dismember. There were flat,
tough, tasteless clods of chewy matter. They filled her stomach, and they
were always available. no matter how much she and her fellows ate, there
was always more.
Sights and sounds and smells-these were terrifying! There was a stink
she had never smelled before, sharp in her nose and scary. It was the
smell of something alive, but she never saw the creature that owned it.
There was an absence of normal smells almost as bad. no smell of deer. no
smell of antelope. no smell of cat (that one a blessing). no smell even of
their own dung, or not very much, because they had no rushes to tramp into
a home, and the places where they huddled together to sleep were sluiced
clean every time they left them. Her baby was born there, while the rest
of the tribe complained at her grunts because they wanted to sleep. When
she woke to lift it to her, to relieve the hot pressure in her teats, it
was gone. She never saw it again.
Squint's newborn was the first to disappear immediately after birth. It
was not the last. For fifteen years the little australopithecine family
continued to eat and copulate and bear and grow old, its numbers dwindling
because the infants were taken away as soon as born. One of the females
would squat and strain and whimper and give birth. Then they would all go
to sleep, and awaken with the little one gone. From time to time an adult
would die, or come close enough to it to lie curled and moaning so that
they knew it would not rise again. Then too they would all go to sleep;
and that adult, or that adult's body, would be gone when they woke. There
were thirty of them, then twenty, then ten-then only one. Squint was the
last, a very, very old female at twenty-nine. She knew she was old. She
did not know she was dying, only that there was a terrible crushing pain
in her belly that made her gasp and sob. She did not know when she was
dead. She only knew that that particular pain stopped, and then she was
conscious of another sort of pain. Not really pain. Strangeness. Numbness.
She saw, but she saw queerly flatly, queerly flickeringly, in a queerly
distorted range of colors. She was not used to her new vision, and did not
recognize what she saw. She tried to move her eyes and they did not move.
She tried to move head, or arms, or legs, and could not because she did
not have any. She remained in that condition for some considerable time.
Squint was not a preparation, in the sense that the live but exposed
nervous system of a biologist's brittle star is a preparation. She was an
experiment.
She was not a very great success. The attempt to preserve her identity
in machine storage did not fail for the reasons that had terminated the
earlier trials, with the other members of her tribe: poor match of
chemistry to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding.
One by one the Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and
solved them. Her experiment failed, or succeeded only in part, for a
different reason. There was not enough of an identity in the being that
could be recognized as "Squint" to preserve. She was not a biography, not
even a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain
and illustrated with fear.
But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.
In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth's sun from
half a light-year out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They
were leading lives quite different from Squint's-lives marked by automatic
care, heuristic tests and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized
that, although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent,
they contained the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the
process along.
Not much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal
of the colony from its prehistoric African home and Squint's death. The
Heechee were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much.
They had much longer-range plans than that.
As their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else
long before any true intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of
Squint's descendants, they built accordingly. They so constructed and
programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for
it to be supplied with CHONfood from a convenient processor of cometary
material, which they had already set operating to serve other of their
installations, and which was potentially equally long-lived. They
constructed machines to sample the skills of the descendants of the
newborns from time to time, and to repeat, as often as necessary, the
attempt to file their identities in machine storage for later review if
any of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would
have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.
Still, their plans encompassed very many alternatives, all going
simultaneously; because the object of their plans was of great concern to
them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.
Since Squint could not communicate, or act, in any useful way, the
Heechee experimenters thriftily wiped the effective sections of her
storage and kept her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for
consultation by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was
this that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived
all those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data
for use by whatever generations might be able to understand them. They
tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed
the rest of that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to
run.
For eight hundred thousand years.
"Danine," Hooay was moaning, "Danine, are you dead?"
She looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked
like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet's tail wagging below.
"Help me up, Hooay," she sobbed. "Take me back." Of them all, this had
been the worst. She felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world
would never be the same again. Janine did not know the word
"australopithecine," but she knew that the life she had just shared had
been an animal's. Worse than an animal's, because somewhere in Squint had
been the spark of the invention of thinking, and thus the unwanted
capacity to fear.
Janine was exhausted and she felt older than the Oldest One. At
just-turned fifteen, she was not a child any more. That account had been
overdrawn. There was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled
chamber that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively,
"Danine? What's wrong?"
"There is a joke to tell you," she said.
"You do not look like joking," he said.
"It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with
my sister to breed them. But my sister cannot breed. She has had an
operation so that she can never again bear a child."
"That is not a good joke," he protested. "No one would do a thing like
that!"
"She did it, Hooay." She added quickly, "Do not be frightened. You will
not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me."
Her soft eyes were brimming with tears. "How can I not be frightened?
Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him..." Then the tears
spilled over; he was terrified.
She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he
spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her
ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was
lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door.
When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.
"Wan," she said, "I want you to put your aims around me."
He looked at her grumpily. no one had told him what this was about, and
Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible.
He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested,
had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had
met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the
corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes.
"Are you afraid you will fall down?" he shrilled.
"I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly.
Don't squeak."
He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she
had tried to teach him. "Then why?"
"Oh, Wan." She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his
personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do.
His arms went around her automatically both at the same height, as though
she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades.
She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away.
"Do you remember what this is, Wan?"
"Of course! It is 'kissing'."
"But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this."
She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it
back and forth across his closed ones. "I think," she said, moving her
head away, "that that is a better way, don't you? It makes me feel-it
makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up."
Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. "Not
really throw up, just real funny."
He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was
troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, "Tiny
Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes
to see if the other person is in heat."
"In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say 'in love'."
"I think that 'in love' is different," he said stubbornly, "but anyway
to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says..."
She put her hands on his shoulders. "Tiny Jim isn't here."
"No, but Paul doesn't want us to..."
"Paul isn't here," she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of
her fingers to see what that felt like. "Lurvy isn't here either. Anyway,
none of what they think matters." The way it felt, she decided, was quite
strange. It wasn't really as though she were going to throw up, but as
though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a
sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all
unpleasant. "Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off
mine."
After they had practiced kissing again she said, "I think we should not
be standing up now." And some time later, when they were lying down, she
opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. "If I do that,"
he said, "perhaps you will get pregnant."
"If you don't do that," she said, "I think I will die."
When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed,
sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall.
Janine's heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later.
The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and
pain.
"I love you, Wan," she said.
He stirred and shrilled, "Oh, yes..." Then he caught himself and
dropped his voice to a grumble, "Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do
not know what they will do."
"Probably they won't hurt you, Wan."
Scornfully, "Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have
lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I
am worried about you." He added gloomily, "They are very noisy out there,
too. Something is happening."
"I don't think they will hurt us-any more, I mean," Janine corrected
herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries
were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor's voice
hailed Hooay outside the door.
There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood.
But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at
them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. "Perhaps I will not have to breed
you, Danine, after all," he said, kind but frightened. "But Danine! Oowan!
There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has
run away!"
Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of
the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay
sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped-Tar and two others of
Lurvy's guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought
back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay
motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around
his perimeter.
To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his
thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood
nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred
quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his
circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his
children had failed to carry out their orders.
The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example.
The hundred-odd others would also have to be punished-somewhat more
lightly, so that the race would not become extinct-for failing to keep the
three to their duty. As for the intruders-there was no punishment grave
enough for them! Perhaps they should be abolished, like any other
challenging organism that threatened to damage its host. Perhaps worse
than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.
But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw
the ripple of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One
rose to his extended height and spoke. "The female is to be recaptured and
preserved," he said. "This is to be done at once."
He stood there, wobbling uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were
performing erratically. He allowed himself to kneel once more while he
pondered his options. The exertion of going to the control room to set
course-the turmoil in his mind that had led him to do it-half a million
years of existence, all had taken their toll. He needed time to
"rest"-time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what
damage they could, and perhaps time no longer would be enough. "Do not
wake me again till this is done," he said, and the lights resumed their
random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.
Janine, circled in Wan's arm-his body half toward the Oldest One, half
sheltering her, trembling with fear-knew without being told that
"preserved" meant killed. She was frightened, too.
But she was also puzzled.
The Old Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not
fallen asleep by chance. Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun.
Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.
For that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later
and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.
She was not surprised to see her sister run in, waving a gun and
calling to them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped
over the sleeping form of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very
much surprised, to see that with them was another armed man she almost
recognized. She was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child.
But he looked like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts
from Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and
holidays: Robin Broadhead.
Not at his worst-not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One
himself and as dead as dead Payter-had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful
creature waving a gun at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the
skungy, month-old beard the man's face looked like a mummy's. He stank.
"You'd better take a bath!" Paul snapped. "And put that silly gun away."
The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. "You're Paul Hall," it
said, squinting at him. "For God's sake, do you have anything to eat?"
Paul stared past him. "Isn't there plenty still left in there?" He
pushed into the ship and found that, of course, there were stacks of
CHON-food packets exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into
the water bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the
ship was puddled and muddied. Paul offered a ration. "Keep your voice
down," he ordered. "And by the way, who are you?"
"I'm Robin Broadhead. What do you do with this?"
"Bite into it," snapped Paul, exasperated-less because of the man
himself, or even because of the way he smelled, than because he was still
shaking. He had been terrified that it would be an Old One he had come
across so unexpectedly. But-Robin Broadhead! What was he doing here?
But he could not put the question just then. Broadhead was almost
literally starving. He turned the flat pillow of food over in his hands,
frowning and shaking, and then bit into a corner of it. As soon as he
found it could be chewed he wolfed it down, crumbs spilling from his
mouth. He stared up at Paul while he jammed his mouth full faster than his
teeth could deal with it. "Take it easy," Paul said, alarmed. But he was
too late. The unfamiliar food, after so long a deprivation, did what could
have been expected of it. Broadhead choked, gagged and vomited it up.
"Damn you!" Paul snarled. "They'll smell you all the way to the spindle!"
Broadhead leaned back, gasping. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I thought I was
going to die. I pretty near did. Can you give me some water?"
Paul did, a couple of sips at a time, and then allowed the man just a
corner of one of the brown and yellow packets, the blandest there was.
"Slowly!" he ordered. "I'll give you more later." But he was beginning to
realize how good it was to have another human being there after-what was
it? it must have been two months, at least, of his solitary skulking and
hiding and plotting. "I don't know what you're doing here," he said at
last, "but I'm glad to see you."
Broadhead licked the last crumbs off his lips and managed to grin.
"Why, that's simple," he said, eyes avidly on the rest of the food in
Paul's hands. "I came here to rescue you."
Broadhead had been dehydrated and almost asphyxiated, but not really
starved. He kept down the crumbs Paul let him have and demanded more; kept
that down too, and was even able to help Paul clean up the mess he had
made. Paul found him clean clothes from Wan's sparse store in the ship-the
garments were too long and too slim by far, but the waistband of the kilt
did not really need to close all the way-and led him to the largest of the
water troughs to get himself clean. It wasn't daintiness. It was fear. The
Old Ones did not hear any better than human beings, nor see even quite as
well. But their noses were astonishingly acute. After two weeks of the
narrowest of escapes, in his first terrified blundering around Heechee
Heaven after Wan and Lurvy had been captured, Paul had learned to bathe
three times a day.
And much more.
He took post at a juncture of three corridors, mounting guard while
Broadhead got the worst of his thirty days in a Heechee ship off his skin.
Rescue them! In the first place, it wasn't true. Broadhead's intentions
were more subtle and complicated than that. In the second place,
Broadhead's plans were not the same as those Paul had been maturing for
two months. He had some notion of tricking information out of the Dead Men
and only the haziest notion of what to do with the information when he got
it. And he expected Paul to help him carry two or three metric tons of
machinery around Heechee Heaven, never mind the risk, never mind that Paul
might have ideas of his own. The trouble with being rescued was that the
rescuers expected to be in charge of the operation. And expected Paul to
be grateful!
Well, he admitted to himself, turning slowly to keep each corridor in
view-though the Old Ones were less diligent in patrolling than they had
been at first-he would have been grateful enough if Broadhead had showed
up at first, in those days of panic when he ran and hid and did not dare
either stay or leave; or again, a couple of weeks later, when he had begun
to work out a plan, had dared to go to the Dead Men's room and make
contact with the Food Factory-and learned that Peter Herter was dead. The
shipboard computer was no use to him, too stupid and too overburdened even
to relay his messages to Earth. The Dead Men were maddeningly. Were
maddening. He was entirely on his own. And slowly his nerve came back and
he began to plan. Even to act. When he found that he could dare coming
quite near the Old Ones provided he bathed enough to leave no odor trace,
he began his plan. Spying. Scheming. Studying. Recording-that was one of
the hardest parts. It is very difficult to keep records of how your enemy
behaves, what paths are frequented and on what occasions none of them are
likely to be about, when you have nothing to write with. Or a watch. Or
even the change of day and night, unheard of in the steady blue glow from
the Heechee-metal walls. It had finally occurred to him to use the habits
of the Old Ones themselves as his chronometer of their behavior. When he
saw a party of them going back toward the spindle where the Oldest One lay
motionless, they were getting ready to sleep. When he saw a party moving
away, it meant the beginning of a new day. They all slept at once, or
almost all, out of some imperative he could not imagine; and so there were
times when he dared come nearer and nearer to the place where Wan, Janine
and Lurvy were kept. Had even seen them once or twice, daring to hide
behind a berryfruit bush as the Old Ones were beginning to stir, peering
between the branches and then racing breathlessly away. He knew. He had it
all worked out. There were no more than a hundred or so of the Old Ones,
and they traveled usually in parties of only two or three.
Remained the question of how to deal with, even, a party of two or
three.
Paul Hall, leaner and angrier than he had ever been in his life,
thought he knew how to do that. In his first panicked days of flight and
hiding, after the others had been captured, he had blundered far and far
into the green and red corridors of Heechee Heaven. In some of them even
the lights were fading and sparse. In some of them the air had a sour and
unhealthful tang, and when he slept there he awoke with his head pounding
and thick. In all of them there were objects, machines, gadgets things;
some of them still purring or ticking quietly to themselves, some
flickering with a ceaseless rainbow of lights.
He could not stay in those places, because there was no food or water,
and he could not find what he most sought. There were no real weapons.
Perhaps the Heechee had not needed them. But there was one machine that
had a gate of metal strips at one side and, when he wrenched them away, it
did not blow up or electrocute him, as he had half thought it would. And
he had a spear. And half a dozen times he encountered what looked like
smaller, more complicated versions of the Heechee tunnelers.
And some of them still worked. When the Heechee built they built
forever.
It took Paul three frightened, thirsty, baffling days of experiment to
make any of them function, stopping to creep back to the gold corridors or
the ship for food and water, always sure that the thundering noise of the
machine would draw the Old Ones down on him before he was ready. But it
did not. He learned to squeeze the nipple that hung down from the steering
yoke to make the ready lights spring into life, to shove the ponderous
knurled wheel forward or back to make it advance or retreat, to tread on
the oval floorplate that caused the blue-violet glow to lance out before
the machine, softening even the Heechee metal it touched. That was the
noisy part. Paul feared greatly that he would destroy something that would
wreck Heechee Heaven itself, if he did not bring down a search party. When
he came to move the machine to the place he had picked out it was almost
quiet, oozing forward on its rollogons. And he stopped to consider.
He knew where the Old Ones went, and when.
He had a spear that could kill a single Old One, maybe could let him
defeat even two or three if he came on them by surprise.
He possessed a machine that could annihilate any number of Old Ones, if
he could only get them to mass in front of it.
It all added up to a strategy that might even work. It was chancy-oh,
God, it was chancy! It depended on at least half a dozen trials by combat.
Even though the Old Ones did not seem to seek him armed, who was to say
that they might not learn? And what arms might they have? It meant killing
some of them, one by one, so expertly and carefully that he did not
attract the attention of the whole tribe until he was ready for it-and
then attracting them all at once, or so large a majority of them that he
could handle the rest with his spear. (Was that really a good gambling
bet?) And, above all, it meant that the Oldest One, the great machine Paul
had only glimpsed once or twice at long range and about whose powers he
knew nothing, must not intervene, and how likely was that?
He had no sure answers. He did have hopes. The Oldest One was too large
to move easily through any of the corridors but the gold-skeined ones. Nor
did it seem to move frequently at all. And perhaps he could somehow trick
it, too, before the devouring haze of the tunneling machine-which could
not, in this place, really be a tunneling machine, but seemed to work in
about the same way. At every step the odds were against him, true.
But at every step there was at least a slim chance for success. And it
was not the risk that stopped him at the last.
The Paul Hall who stole about and schemed in the tunnels of Heechee
Heaven, half crazed with anger and fear and worry for his wife and the
others, was not entirely crazy. He was the same
Paul Hall whose gentleness and patience had made Dorema Herter marry
him, who had accepted her saucy, sometimes bratty little sister and
abrasive father as part of the bargain. He wanted very much to save them
and bring them to freedom. Even at risk. There was always a way out of the
risk for him, if only to crawl aboard Wan's ship and return to the Food
Factory and thus-slowly, alone and mournful, but safe-ultimately to Earth
and wealth.
But, apart from risk, what was the cost?
The cost was wiping out perhaps an entire population of living and
intelligent creatures. They had taken his wife from him, but they had not
really harmed her. And, try as he would, Paul could not convince himself
he had the right to exterminate them.
And now here was this "rescuer," this nearly dead castaway named Robin
Broadhead, who listened sketchily to Paul's plan and smiled loftily and
said, politely enough, "You're still working for me, Hall. We'll do it my
way."
"The hell we will!"
Broadhead stayed polite enough, and even reasonable-it was amazing what
a bath and a little food had done for him. "The key," he said, "is to find
out what we're up against. Help me lug this information-processing stuff
to where the Dead Men are, and we'll take care of that. That's the first
thing."
"The first thing is rescuing my wife!"
"But why, Hall? She's all right where she is-you said so yourself. I'm
not talking about forever. One day, maybe. We find out what we can from
the Dead Men. We tape it all, pump them dry if we can. Then we take the
tapes and stick them in my ship, and then..."
"No."
"Yes!"
"No, and keep your God-damned voice down!" They squared off like kids
in a schoolyard, both flushed and furious, their eyes locked. Until Robin
Broadhead grimaced and shook his head and said, "Oh, hell. Paul? Are you
thinking what I'm thinking?"
Paul Hall let himself relax. After a second he said, "Actually, I'm
thinking the two of us would do better to figure out what is the best
thing to do, instead of arguing about who makes the decision."
Broadhead grinned. "That was what I was thinking, all right. You know
what my trouble is? I'm so surprised to be still alive that I don't know
how to adjust to it."
It only took them six hours to haul and set up the PMAL-2 processor
where they wanted it, but it was six hours of hard work. They were both
near the frayed end of exhaustion and it would have made sense to sleep,
but they were itching with impatience, both of them. Once they had the
main power source connected to the program banks Albert's prerecorded
voice instructed them, step by step, on how to do the rest-the processor
itself sprawled across the corridor, the voice terminals inside the Dead
Men's chamber, next to the radio link. Robin looked at Paul, Paul shrugged
to Robin, Robin started the program. From just outside the door they could
hear the flat, wheedling voice from the terminal: "Henrietta? Henrietta,
dear, can you answer me?"
Pause. no answer. The program Albert had written with Sigfrid von
Shrink's help tried again: "Henrietta, it's Tom. Please speak to me." It
would have been faster to punch out Henrietta's code to attract her
attention, but harder to square with the pretense that her long-lost
husband had reached her from some faroff outpost by radio.
The voice tried again, and once more. Paul scowled and whispered, "It
isn't working."
"Give it a chance," Robin said, but not confidently. They stood there
nervously, while the dead computer voice pleaded. And then at last, a
hesitant voice whispered, "Tom? Tomasino, is that you?"
Paul Hall was a normal human being, squashed a little out of shape,
perhaps, from four years of imprisonment and a hundred days of flight and
fright. Normal enough, though, to share the normal prurience; but what he
heard was more than he wanted to hear. He grinned in embarrassment at
Robin Broadhead, who shrugged uneasily back. The hurt tenderness and
spiteful jealousy of other people is humiliating to hear and can only be
eased by laughter; the divorce detective passes around his bootleg tape of
a wired bed for comic relief on a slow day at the office. But this was not
comic! Henrietta, any Henrietta, even the machine revenant called
Henrietta was not funny in her moment of heart's-desire, when she was
being gulled and betrayed. The program that wooed her was skillfully done.
It apologized and begged, and it even sobbed, in rustly tape-hissing sobs,
when Henrietta's own flat tape voice broke with sobs of spent sadness and
hopeless joy. And then, as it had been programmed to do, it settled in for
the kill. Would you. Dear Henrietta, could you... Is it possible for you
to tell me how to operate a Heechee ship?
Pause. Hesitation. Then the voice of the dead woman said:
"Why-yes, Tomasino." Another pause. It lengthened itself, until the
programmed deceiver moved in to fill the gap:
"Because if you could, dear, I think I might be able to join you. I'm
in a sort of a ship. It has a control room. If I knew how to work it..."
It was incredible to Paul that even a poorly stored machine
intelligence could succumb to such transparent blandishments. Succumb
Henrietta did. It was repellent to him to take part in the fraud, but take
part he did, and once started Henrietta could not be stopped. The secret
of controlling the Heechee ships? Of course, dear Tomasino! And the dead
woman warned her fake lover to stand by for burst transmission and hurled
out a whistling crackle of machine talk of which Paul could not understand
a sound and in which he could not find a word; but Robin Broadhead,
listening to the private status-report voice of the computer on his
headset, grinned and nodded and held up thumb and forefinger in a circle
of success. Paul signed silence and pulled him down the corridor. "If
you've got it," he whispered, "let's get out of here!"
"Oh, I've got it!" chortled Robin. "She's got it all! She was in open
circuit with whatever kind of machine runs this thing, it picked her
brains and she picked its, and she's telling the whole thing."
"Great. Now let's find Lurvy!"
Broadhead looked at him, not angry but pleading. "Just a few more
minutes. Who knows what else she got?"
"No!"
"Yes!"-and then they looked at each other, and shook their heads.
"Compromise," said Robin Broadhead. "Fifteen minutes, all right? And then
we go rescue your wife."
They edged back along the corridor with smiles of rueful satisfaction
on their faces; but the satisfaction drained. The voices were not
embarrassingly intimate now. They were worse. They were almost quarreling.
There was somehow a snap and a snarl in the flat metallic voice that said,
"You're being a pig, Tom."
The program was cloyingly reasonable: "But, Henrietta, dear, I'm only
trying to find out..."
"What you try to find out," grated the voice, "depends on what your
capacities to learn are. I'm trying to tell you something more important!
I tried to tell you before. I tried to tell you all the while we were
coming out here, but, no, you didn't want to hear, all you wanted was to
get off in the lander with that fat bitch..."
The program knew when to be placatory. "I'm sorry, Henrietta, dear. If
you want me to learn some astrophysics I will."
"Damn right you will!" Pause. "It's terribly important, Tom!" Pause.
And then: "We go back to the Big Bang. Are you listening, Tom?"
"Of course I am, dear," said the program in its humblest and most
endearing way.
"All right! It goes back to how the universe got started, and we know
that pretty well-with one little hazy transition point that's a little
obscure. Call it Point X."
"Are you going to tell me what 'Point X' is, dear?"
"Shut up, Tom! Listen! Before Point X, essentially the whole universe
was packed into a tiny glob, no more than a matter of kilometers through,
super-dense, super hot, so squeezed it had no structure. Then it exploded.
It began to expand-up to Point X, and that part is pretty clear. Do you
follow me so far, Tom?"
"Yes, dear. That's basically simple cosmology, isn't it?"
Pause. "Just pay attention," Henrietta's voice said at last. "Then,
after Point X, it continued to expand. As it expanded, little bits of
'matter' began to condense out of it. First came nuclear particles,
hadrons and pious, electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks. Then 'real'
matter. Real hydrogen atoms, then even helium atoms. The exploding volume
of gas began to slow. Turbulence broke it into immense clouds. Gravity
pulled the clouds into clumps. As they shrank the heat of contraction set
nuclear reactions going. They glowed. The first stars were born. The
rest," she finished, "is what we can see going on now."
The program picked up its cue. "I see that, Henrietta, yes. How long
are we talking about, now?"
"Ah, good question," she said, in a voice not at all complimentary.
"From the beginning of the Big Bang to Point X, three seconds. From Point
X to right now, about eighteen billion years. And there we have it."
The program was not written to deal with sarcasm, but even in the flat
metal voice sarcasm hung. It did its best. "Thank you, dear," it said,
"and now will you tell me what is special about Point X?"
"I would tell you in a thick minute, my darling Tomasino," she said
sunnily, "except that you are not my darling Tomasino. That ass-head would
not have understood one word of what I just said, and I don't like being
lied to."
And no matter what the program tried, not even when Robin Broadhead
dropped the pretense and spoke to her direct, Henrietta would say no more.
"Hell with it," said Broadhead at last. "We've got enough to worry about
in the next couple of hours. We don't have to go back eighteen billion
years for it."
He hit a pressure release on the side of the processor and caught what
came out: the thick, soft rag-flop tape that had caught everything
Henrietta had said. He waved it aloft. "That's what I came for," he said,
grinning. "And now, Paul, let's take care of your little problem-and then
go home and spend our millions!"
In the deep, restless sleep of the Oldest One there were no dreams, but
there were irritations.
The irritations came faster and faster, more and more urgent. From the
time the first Gateway prospectors had terrifyingly come until he had
written (he thought) the last of them off, only the wink of an eye-not
more than a few years, really. And until the strangers and the boy were
caught, hardly a heartbeat; and until he was awakened again to be told the
female had escaped no time at all-none! Hardly even time for him to
decouple sensors and effectors and settle down; and now there was still no
peace. The children were panicked and quarrelsome. It was not their noise
alone that disturbed him. Noise could not awaken the Oldest One; only
physical attack, or being addressed directly. What was most irritating
about this racket was that it was not quite addressed to him, but not
quite not, either. It was a debate-an argument; a few frightened voices
demanding he be told something at once, a few even more frightened ones
pleading against it.
And that was incorrect. For half a million years the Oldest One had
trained his children in manners. If he was needed, he was to be addressed.
He was not to be awakened for trivial causes, and certainly not by
accident. Especially now. Especially when each effort of waking was more
of a drain on his ancient fabric and the time was in sight when he might
not wake at all.
The fretful rumpus did not stop.
The Oldest One called on his external sensors and gazed upon his
children. Why were so few of them there? Why were nearly half of them
sprawled on the floor, evidently asleep?
Painfully he activated his communications system and spoke: "What is
happening?"
When, quailing, they tried to answer and the Oldest One understood what
they were saying, the bands of color on his shell raced and blurred. The
female not recaptured. The younger female and the boy gone too. Twenty
more of the children found hopelessly asleep, and scores of others, gone
to search the artifact, not reporting back.
Something was terribly wrong.
Even at the very end of its useful life the Oldest One was a superb
machine. There were resources seldom used, powers not tapped for hundreds
of thousands of years. He rose on his rollogons to tower over the quaking
children and reached down into his deepest and least-used memories for
guidance and knowledge. On his foreplate, between the external vision
receptors, two polished blue knobs began a faint drone, and atop his
carapace a shallow dish glowed with faint violet light. It had been
thousands of years since the Oldest One had used any of his more punitive
effectors, but as information from the great stores of memories gathered
he began to believe that it was time to use them again. He reached into
the stored personalities, even, and Henrietta was open to him; he knew
what she had said, and what the new interlopers had asked. He understood
(what Henrietta had not) the meaning of the hand weapons Robin Broadhead
had been waving around; in the deepest of all memories, the ones that went
back even before his own flesh-and-blood life, there was the lance that
made his own ancestors go to sleep, and this was clearly much the same.
Here was trouble on a scale he had never known before, of a kind he
could not readily cope with. If he could get at them... But he could not.
His great bulk could not travel through the artifact's passages, except
the gold-skeined ones; the weapons that were ready to destroy would have
no targets. The children? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps they could hunt out and
overcome the others; certainly it was worth the effort to order them to do
so, the few survivors, and he did. But in the rational, mechanical mind of
the Oldest One the capacity for computation was unimpaired. He could read
the odds well. They were not good.
The question was, was his great plan endangered?
The answer was yes. But there, at least, there was something he could
do. The heart of the plan was the place where the artifact was controlled.
It was the nerve center of the entire construct; it was where he had dared
to set in motion the final stages of his plan.
Before he had finished framing the decision he was acting it out. The
great metal bulk shifted and turned, and then rolled out across the
spindle, into the wide-mouthed tunnel that led to the controls. Once
there, he was secure. Let them come if they chose! The weaponry was ready.
Its great drain on his dwindling powers was making him slow and unsteady
to move, but there was power enough. He could blockade himself and let the
flesh-and-blood things settle things however they might, and then... He
stopped. Ahead of him one of the wall-aligning machines was out of place.
It sat squarely in the center of the corridor, and behind it... If he had
been just a trifle less drained, the fraction of a second faster.... But
he was not. The glow from the wall aligner washed over him. He was blind.
He was deaf. He felt the external protuberances burn off his shell, felt
the great soft cylinders he rolled on melt and stick.
The Oldest One did not know how to feel pain. He did know how to feel
anguish of the soul. He had failed.
The flesh-and-blood things had control of his artifacts, and his plans
were at an end forever.
My name is Robin Broadhead, and I am the richest person there is in the
whole solar system. The only one who comes close is old Bover, and he
would come a lot closer if he hadn't thrown half of his money into slum
clearance and urban rehabilitation and a lot of what was left into an
inch-by-inch scan of trans-Plutonian space, looking for the ship with what
was left of his wife, Trish. (What he is going to do with her if he finds
been alive she had been pregnant nine or ten times, and had never known it
until she was forced to note that she could no longer run quite as fast,
that the bulge in her belly made it more difficult to rake the guts out of
a prey-animal and that her dugs began to swell again with milk. Of the
fifty members of her community at least four were her children. More than
a dozen of the males were, or might have been, the children's fathers.
Squint was aware of the former relationship, but not of the latter. At
least one of the young males she knew to be a child of hers might well
have been the father of another-a notion which would not have disturbed
Squint, even if she had been capable of entertaining it. The thing she did
with the males when the flesh beneath her skinny buttocks swelled and
reddened was not in her mind related to childbirth. It was not related to
pleasure, either. It was an itch that she suffered to be scratched
whenever it happened. Squint had no way of defining "pleasure," except
perhaps as the absence of pain. Even in those terms, she knew little of it
throughout her life.
When the Heechee lander bellowed and flamed above the clouds, Squint
and all her community ran to hide. None of them saw it come to earth.
If a trawl scoops a starfish from the bottom of a sea, a spade lifts it
from the bucket of ooze and dumps it in a tank, a biologist pins it down
and dissects out its nervous system-does the starfish know what is
happening to it?
Squint had more self-awareness than a starfish. But she had little more
background of experience to inform her. Nothing that happened to her from
the moment she saw a bright light shining in her eyes made sense. She did
not feel the point of the anesthetic lance that put her to sleep. She did
not know she was carried into the lander and dumped into a pen of twelve
of her fellows. She did not feel the crushing acceleration when she took
off, or the weightlessness for the long time they floated in transit. She
did not know anything at all until she was allowed to waken again, and did
not understand what she then experienced.
Nothing was familiar!
Water. The water Squint drank did not any longer come from the muddy
brink of the river. It came in a shiny, hard trough. When she bent to lap
it up nothing lurked beneath its surface to lunge at her.
Sun and sky. There was no sun! There were no clouds, and there was no
rain. There were hard, blue-gleaming walls, and a blue-gleaming roof
overhead.
Food. There was no live thing to catch and dismember. There were flat,
tough, tasteless clods of chewy matter. They filled her stomach, and they
were always available. no matter how much she and her fellows ate, there
was always more.
Sights and sounds and smells-these were terrifying! There was a stink
she had never smelled before, sharp in her nose and scary. It was the
smell of something alive, but she never saw the creature that owned it.
There was an absence of normal smells almost as bad. no smell of deer. no
smell of antelope. no smell of cat (that one a blessing). no smell even of
their own dung, or not very much, because they had no rushes to tramp into
a home, and the places where they huddled together to sleep were sluiced
clean every time they left them. Her baby was born there, while the rest
of the tribe complained at her grunts because they wanted to sleep. When
she woke to lift it to her, to relieve the hot pressure in her teats, it
was gone. She never saw it again.
Squint's newborn was the first to disappear immediately after birth. It
was not the last. For fifteen years the little australopithecine family
continued to eat and copulate and bear and grow old, its numbers dwindling
because the infants were taken away as soon as born. One of the females
would squat and strain and whimper and give birth. Then they would all go
to sleep, and awaken with the little one gone. From time to time an adult
would die, or come close enough to it to lie curled and moaning so that
they knew it would not rise again. Then too they would all go to sleep;
and that adult, or that adult's body, would be gone when they woke. There
were thirty of them, then twenty, then ten-then only one. Squint was the
last, a very, very old female at twenty-nine. She knew she was old. She
did not know she was dying, only that there was a terrible crushing pain
in her belly that made her gasp and sob. She did not know when she was
dead. She only knew that that particular pain stopped, and then she was
conscious of another sort of pain. Not really pain. Strangeness. Numbness.
She saw, but she saw queerly flatly, queerly flickeringly, in a queerly
distorted range of colors. She was not used to her new vision, and did not
recognize what she saw. She tried to move her eyes and they did not move.
She tried to move head, or arms, or legs, and could not because she did
not have any. She remained in that condition for some considerable time.
Squint was not a preparation, in the sense that the live but exposed
nervous system of a biologist's brittle star is a preparation. She was an
experiment.
She was not a very great success. The attempt to preserve her identity
in machine storage did not fail for the reasons that had terminated the
earlier trials, with the other members of her tribe: poor match of
chemistry to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding.
One by one the Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and
solved them. Her experiment failed, or succeeded only in part, for a
different reason. There was not enough of an identity in the being that
could be recognized as "Squint" to preserve. She was not a biography, not
even a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain
and illustrated with fear.
But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.
In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth's sun from
half a light-year out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They
were leading lives quite different from Squint's-lives marked by automatic
care, heuristic tests and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized
that, although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent,
they contained the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the
process along.
Not much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal
of the colony from its prehistoric African home and Squint's death. The
Heechee were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much.
They had much longer-range plans than that.
As their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else
long before any true intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of
Squint's descendants, they built accordingly. They so constructed and
programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for
it to be supplied with CHONfood from a convenient processor of cometary
material, which they had already set operating to serve other of their
installations, and which was potentially equally long-lived. They
constructed machines to sample the skills of the descendants of the
newborns from time to time, and to repeat, as often as necessary, the
attempt to file their identities in machine storage for later review if
any of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would
have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.
Still, their plans encompassed very many alternatives, all going
simultaneously; because the object of their plans was of great concern to
them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.
Since Squint could not communicate, or act, in any useful way, the
Heechee experimenters thriftily wiped the effective sections of her
storage and kept her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for
consultation by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was
this that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived
all those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data
for use by whatever generations might be able to understand them. They
tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed
the rest of that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to
run.
For eight hundred thousand years.
"Danine," Hooay was moaning, "Danine, are you dead?"
She looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked
like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet's tail wagging below.
"Help me up, Hooay," she sobbed. "Take me back." Of them all, this had
been the worst. She felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world
would never be the same again. Janine did not know the word
"australopithecine," but she knew that the life she had just shared had
been an animal's. Worse than an animal's, because somewhere in Squint had
been the spark of the invention of thinking, and thus the unwanted
capacity to fear.
Janine was exhausted and she felt older than the Oldest One. At
just-turned fifteen, she was not a child any more. That account had been
overdrawn. There was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled
chamber that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively,
"Danine? What's wrong?"
"There is a joke to tell you," she said.
"You do not look like joking," he said.
"It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with
my sister to breed them. But my sister cannot breed. She has had an
operation so that she can never again bear a child."
"That is not a good joke," he protested. "No one would do a thing like
that!"
"She did it, Hooay." She added quickly, "Do not be frightened. You will
not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me."
Her soft eyes were brimming with tears. "How can I not be frightened?
Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him..." Then the tears
spilled over; he was terrified.
She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he
spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her
ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was
lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door.
When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.
"Wan," she said, "I want you to put your aims around me."
He looked at her grumpily. no one had told him what this was about, and
Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible.
He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested,
had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had
met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the
corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes.
"Are you afraid you will fall down?" he shrilled.
"I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly.
Don't squeak."
He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she
had tried to teach him. "Then why?"
"Oh, Wan." She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his
personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do.
His arms went around her automatically both at the same height, as though
she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades.
She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away.
"Do you remember what this is, Wan?"
"Of course! It is 'kissing'."
"But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this."
She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it
back and forth across his closed ones. "I think," she said, moving her
head away, "that that is a better way, don't you? It makes me feel-it
makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up."
Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. "Not
really throw up, just real funny."
He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was
troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, "Tiny
Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes
to see if the other person is in heat."
"In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say 'in love'."
"I think that 'in love' is different," he said stubbornly, "but anyway
to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says..."
She put her hands on his shoulders. "Tiny Jim isn't here."
"No, but Paul doesn't want us to..."
"Paul isn't here," she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of
her fingers to see what that felt like. "Lurvy isn't here either. Anyway,
none of what they think matters." The way it felt, she decided, was quite
strange. It wasn't really as though she were going to throw up, but as
though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a
sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all
unpleasant. "Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off
mine."
After they had practiced kissing again she said, "I think we should not
be standing up now." And some time later, when they were lying down, she
opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. "If I do that,"
he said, "perhaps you will get pregnant."
"If you don't do that," she said, "I think I will die."
When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed,
sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall.
Janine's heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later.
The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and
pain.
"I love you, Wan," she said.
He stirred and shrilled, "Oh, yes..." Then he caught himself and
dropped his voice to a grumble, "Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do
not know what they will do."
"Probably they won't hurt you, Wan."
Scornfully, "Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have
lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I
am worried about you." He added gloomily, "They are very noisy out there,
too. Something is happening."
"I don't think they will hurt us-any more, I mean," Janine corrected
herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries
were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor's voice
hailed Hooay outside the door.
There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood.
But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at
them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. "Perhaps I will not have to breed
you, Danine, after all," he said, kind but frightened. "But Danine! Oowan!
There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has
run away!"
Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of
the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay
sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped-Tar and two others of
Lurvy's guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought
back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay
motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around
his perimeter.
To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his
thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood
nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred
quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his
circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his
children had failed to carry out their orders.
The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example.
The hundred-odd others would also have to be punished-somewhat more
lightly, so that the race would not become extinct-for failing to keep the
three to their duty. As for the intruders-there was no punishment grave
enough for them! Perhaps they should be abolished, like any other
challenging organism that threatened to damage its host. Perhaps worse
than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.
But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw
the ripple of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One
rose to his extended height and spoke. "The female is to be recaptured and
preserved," he said. "This is to be done at once."
He stood there, wobbling uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were
performing erratically. He allowed himself to kneel once more while he
pondered his options. The exertion of going to the control room to set
course-the turmoil in his mind that had led him to do it-half a million
years of existence, all had taken their toll. He needed time to
"rest"-time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what
damage they could, and perhaps time no longer would be enough. "Do not
wake me again till this is done," he said, and the lights resumed their
random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.
Janine, circled in Wan's arm-his body half toward the Oldest One, half
sheltering her, trembling with fear-knew without being told that
"preserved" meant killed. She was frightened, too.
But she was also puzzled.
The Old Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not
fallen asleep by chance. Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun.
Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.
For that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later
and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.
She was not surprised to see her sister run in, waving a gun and
calling to them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped
over the sleeping form of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very
much surprised, to see that with them was another armed man she almost
recognized. She was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child.
But he looked like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts
from Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and
holidays: Robin Broadhead.
Not at his worst-not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One
himself and as dead as dead Payter-had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful
creature waving a gun at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the
skungy, month-old beard the man's face looked like a mummy's. He stank.
"You'd better take a bath!" Paul snapped. "And put that silly gun away."
The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. "You're Paul Hall," it
said, squinting at him. "For God's sake, do you have anything to eat?"
Paul stared past him. "Isn't there plenty still left in there?" He
pushed into the ship and found that, of course, there were stacks of
CHON-food packets exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into
the water bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the
ship was puddled and muddied. Paul offered a ration. "Keep your voice
down," he ordered. "And by the way, who are you?"
"I'm Robin Broadhead. What do you do with this?"
"Bite into it," snapped Paul, exasperated-less because of the man
himself, or even because of the way he smelled, than because he was still
shaking. He had been terrified that it would be an Old One he had come
across so unexpectedly. But-Robin Broadhead! What was he doing here?
But he could not put the question just then. Broadhead was almost
literally starving. He turned the flat pillow of food over in his hands,
frowning and shaking, and then bit into a corner of it. As soon as he
found it could be chewed he wolfed it down, crumbs spilling from his
mouth. He stared up at Paul while he jammed his mouth full faster than his
teeth could deal with it. "Take it easy," Paul said, alarmed. But he was
too late. The unfamiliar food, after so long a deprivation, did what could
have been expected of it. Broadhead choked, gagged and vomited it up.
"Damn you!" Paul snarled. "They'll smell you all the way to the spindle!"
Broadhead leaned back, gasping. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I thought I was
going to die. I pretty near did. Can you give me some water?"
Paul did, a couple of sips at a time, and then allowed the man just a
corner of one of the brown and yellow packets, the blandest there was.
"Slowly!" he ordered. "I'll give you more later." But he was beginning to
realize how good it was to have another human being there after-what was
it? it must have been two months, at least, of his solitary skulking and
hiding and plotting. "I don't know what you're doing here," he said at
last, "but I'm glad to see you."
Broadhead licked the last crumbs off his lips and managed to grin.
"Why, that's simple," he said, eyes avidly on the rest of the food in
Paul's hands. "I came here to rescue you."
Broadhead had been dehydrated and almost asphyxiated, but not really
starved. He kept down the crumbs Paul let him have and demanded more; kept
that down too, and was even able to help Paul clean up the mess he had
made. Paul found him clean clothes from Wan's sparse store in the ship-the
garments were too long and too slim by far, but the waistband of the kilt
did not really need to close all the way-and led him to the largest of the
water troughs to get himself clean. It wasn't daintiness. It was fear. The
Old Ones did not hear any better than human beings, nor see even quite as
well. But their noses were astonishingly acute. After two weeks of the
narrowest of escapes, in his first terrified blundering around Heechee
Heaven after Wan and Lurvy had been captured, Paul had learned to bathe
three times a day.
And much more.
He took post at a juncture of three corridors, mounting guard while
Broadhead got the worst of his thirty days in a Heechee ship off his skin.
Rescue them! In the first place, it wasn't true. Broadhead's intentions
were more subtle and complicated than that. In the second place,
Broadhead's plans were not the same as those Paul had been maturing for
two months. He had some notion of tricking information out of the Dead Men
and only the haziest notion of what to do with the information when he got
it. And he expected Paul to help him carry two or three metric tons of
machinery around Heechee Heaven, never mind the risk, never mind that Paul
might have ideas of his own. The trouble with being rescued was that the
rescuers expected to be in charge of the operation. And expected Paul to
be grateful!
Well, he admitted to himself, turning slowly to keep each corridor in
view-though the Old Ones were less diligent in patrolling than they had
been at first-he would have been grateful enough if Broadhead had showed
up at first, in those days of panic when he ran and hid and did not dare
either stay or leave; or again, a couple of weeks later, when he had begun
to work out a plan, had dared to go to the Dead Men's room and make
contact with the Food Factory-and learned that Peter Herter was dead. The
shipboard computer was no use to him, too stupid and too overburdened even
to relay his messages to Earth. The Dead Men were maddeningly. Were
maddening. He was entirely on his own. And slowly his nerve came back and
he began to plan. Even to act. When he found that he could dare coming
quite near the Old Ones provided he bathed enough to leave no odor trace,
he began his plan. Spying. Scheming. Studying. Recording-that was one of
the hardest parts. It is very difficult to keep records of how your enemy
behaves, what paths are frequented and on what occasions none of them are
likely to be about, when you have nothing to write with. Or a watch. Or
even the change of day and night, unheard of in the steady blue glow from
the Heechee-metal walls. It had finally occurred to him to use the habits
of the Old Ones themselves as his chronometer of their behavior. When he
saw a party of them going back toward the spindle where the Oldest One lay
motionless, they were getting ready to sleep. When he saw a party moving
away, it meant the beginning of a new day. They all slept at once, or
almost all, out of some imperative he could not imagine; and so there were
times when he dared come nearer and nearer to the place where Wan, Janine
and Lurvy were kept. Had even seen them once or twice, daring to hide
behind a berryfruit bush as the Old Ones were beginning to stir, peering
between the branches and then racing breathlessly away. He knew. He had it
all worked out. There were no more than a hundred or so of the Old Ones,
and they traveled usually in parties of only two or three.
Remained the question of how to deal with, even, a party of two or
three.
Paul Hall, leaner and angrier than he had ever been in his life,
thought he knew how to do that. In his first panicked days of flight and
hiding, after the others had been captured, he had blundered far and far
into the green and red corridors of Heechee Heaven. In some of them even
the lights were fading and sparse. In some of them the air had a sour and
unhealthful tang, and when he slept there he awoke with his head pounding
and thick. In all of them there were objects, machines, gadgets things;
some of them still purring or ticking quietly to themselves, some
flickering with a ceaseless rainbow of lights.
He could not stay in those places, because there was no food or water,
and he could not find what he most sought. There were no real weapons.
Perhaps the Heechee had not needed them. But there was one machine that
had a gate of metal strips at one side and, when he wrenched them away, it
did not blow up or electrocute him, as he had half thought it would. And
he had a spear. And half a dozen times he encountered what looked like
smaller, more complicated versions of the Heechee tunnelers.
And some of them still worked. When the Heechee built they built
forever.
It took Paul three frightened, thirsty, baffling days of experiment to
make any of them function, stopping to creep back to the gold corridors or
the ship for food and water, always sure that the thundering noise of the
machine would draw the Old Ones down on him before he was ready. But it
did not. He learned to squeeze the nipple that hung down from the steering
yoke to make the ready lights spring into life, to shove the ponderous
knurled wheel forward or back to make it advance or retreat, to tread on
the oval floorplate that caused the blue-violet glow to lance out before
the machine, softening even the Heechee metal it touched. That was the
noisy part. Paul feared greatly that he would destroy something that would
wreck Heechee Heaven itself, if he did not bring down a search party. When
he came to move the machine to the place he had picked out it was almost
quiet, oozing forward on its rollogons. And he stopped to consider.
He knew where the Old Ones went, and when.
He had a spear that could kill a single Old One, maybe could let him
defeat even two or three if he came on them by surprise.
He possessed a machine that could annihilate any number of Old Ones, if
he could only get them to mass in front of it.
It all added up to a strategy that might even work. It was chancy-oh,
God, it was chancy! It depended on at least half a dozen trials by combat.
Even though the Old Ones did not seem to seek him armed, who was to say
that they might not learn? And what arms might they have? It meant killing
some of them, one by one, so expertly and carefully that he did not
attract the attention of the whole tribe until he was ready for it-and
then attracting them all at once, or so large a majority of them that he
could handle the rest with his spear. (Was that really a good gambling
bet?) And, above all, it meant that the Oldest One, the great machine Paul
had only glimpsed once or twice at long range and about whose powers he
knew nothing, must not intervene, and how likely was that?
He had no sure answers. He did have hopes. The Oldest One was too large
to move easily through any of the corridors but the gold-skeined ones. Nor
did it seem to move frequently at all. And perhaps he could somehow trick
it, too, before the devouring haze of the tunneling machine-which could
not, in this place, really be a tunneling machine, but seemed to work in
about the same way. At every step the odds were against him, true.
But at every step there was at least a slim chance for success. And it
was not the risk that stopped him at the last.
The Paul Hall who stole about and schemed in the tunnels of Heechee
Heaven, half crazed with anger and fear and worry for his wife and the
others, was not entirely crazy. He was the same
Paul Hall whose gentleness and patience had made Dorema Herter marry
him, who had accepted her saucy, sometimes bratty little sister and
abrasive father as part of the bargain. He wanted very much to save them
and bring them to freedom. Even at risk. There was always a way out of the
risk for him, if only to crawl aboard Wan's ship and return to the Food
Factory and thus-slowly, alone and mournful, but safe-ultimately to Earth
and wealth.
But, apart from risk, what was the cost?
The cost was wiping out perhaps an entire population of living and
intelligent creatures. They had taken his wife from him, but they had not
really harmed her. And, try as he would, Paul could not convince himself
he had the right to exterminate them.
And now here was this "rescuer," this nearly dead castaway named Robin
Broadhead, who listened sketchily to Paul's plan and smiled loftily and
said, politely enough, "You're still working for me, Hall. We'll do it my
way."
"The hell we will!"
Broadhead stayed polite enough, and even reasonable-it was amazing what
a bath and a little food had done for him. "The key," he said, "is to find
out what we're up against. Help me lug this information-processing stuff
to where the Dead Men are, and we'll take care of that. That's the first
thing."
"The first thing is rescuing my wife!"
"But why, Hall? She's all right where she is-you said so yourself. I'm
not talking about forever. One day, maybe. We find out what we can from
the Dead Men. We tape it all, pump them dry if we can. Then we take the
tapes and stick them in my ship, and then..."
"No."
"Yes!"
"No, and keep your God-damned voice down!" They squared off like kids
in a schoolyard, both flushed and furious, their eyes locked. Until Robin
Broadhead grimaced and shook his head and said, "Oh, hell. Paul? Are you
thinking what I'm thinking?"
Paul Hall let himself relax. After a second he said, "Actually, I'm
thinking the two of us would do better to figure out what is the best
thing to do, instead of arguing about who makes the decision."
Broadhead grinned. "That was what I was thinking, all right. You know
what my trouble is? I'm so surprised to be still alive that I don't know
how to adjust to it."
It only took them six hours to haul and set up the PMAL-2 processor
where they wanted it, but it was six hours of hard work. They were both
near the frayed end of exhaustion and it would have made sense to sleep,
but they were itching with impatience, both of them. Once they had the
main power source connected to the program banks Albert's prerecorded
voice instructed them, step by step, on how to do the rest-the processor
itself sprawled across the corridor, the voice terminals inside the Dead
Men's chamber, next to the radio link. Robin looked at Paul, Paul shrugged
to Robin, Robin started the program. From just outside the door they could
hear the flat, wheedling voice from the terminal: "Henrietta? Henrietta,
dear, can you answer me?"
Pause. no answer. The program Albert had written with Sigfrid von
Shrink's help tried again: "Henrietta, it's Tom. Please speak to me." It
would have been faster to punch out Henrietta's code to attract her
attention, but harder to square with the pretense that her long-lost
husband had reached her from some faroff outpost by radio.
The voice tried again, and once more. Paul scowled and whispered, "It
isn't working."
"Give it a chance," Robin said, but not confidently. They stood there
nervously, while the dead computer voice pleaded. And then at last, a
hesitant voice whispered, "Tom? Tomasino, is that you?"
Paul Hall was a normal human being, squashed a little out of shape,
perhaps, from four years of imprisonment and a hundred days of flight and
fright. Normal enough, though, to share the normal prurience; but what he
heard was more than he wanted to hear. He grinned in embarrassment at
Robin Broadhead, who shrugged uneasily back. The hurt tenderness and
spiteful jealousy of other people is humiliating to hear and can only be
eased by laughter; the divorce detective passes around his bootleg tape of
a wired bed for comic relief on a slow day at the office. But this was not
comic! Henrietta, any Henrietta, even the machine revenant called
Henrietta was not funny in her moment of heart's-desire, when she was
being gulled and betrayed. The program that wooed her was skillfully done.
It apologized and begged, and it even sobbed, in rustly tape-hissing sobs,
when Henrietta's own flat tape voice broke with sobs of spent sadness and
hopeless joy. And then, as it had been programmed to do, it settled in for
the kill. Would you. Dear Henrietta, could you... Is it possible for you
to tell me how to operate a Heechee ship?
Pause. Hesitation. Then the voice of the dead woman said:
"Why-yes, Tomasino." Another pause. It lengthened itself, until the
programmed deceiver moved in to fill the gap:
"Because if you could, dear, I think I might be able to join you. I'm
in a sort of a ship. It has a control room. If I knew how to work it..."
It was incredible to Paul that even a poorly stored machine
intelligence could succumb to such transparent blandishments. Succumb
Henrietta did. It was repellent to him to take part in the fraud, but take
part he did, and once started Henrietta could not be stopped. The secret
of controlling the Heechee ships? Of course, dear Tomasino! And the dead
woman warned her fake lover to stand by for burst transmission and hurled
out a whistling crackle of machine talk of which Paul could not understand
a sound and in which he could not find a word; but Robin Broadhead,
listening to the private status-report voice of the computer on his
headset, grinned and nodded and held up thumb and forefinger in a circle
of success. Paul signed silence and pulled him down the corridor. "If
you've got it," he whispered, "let's get out of here!"
"Oh, I've got it!" chortled Robin. "She's got it all! She was in open
circuit with whatever kind of machine runs this thing, it picked her
brains and she picked its, and she's telling the whole thing."
"Great. Now let's find Lurvy!"
Broadhead looked at him, not angry but pleading. "Just a few more
minutes. Who knows what else she got?"
"No!"
"Yes!"-and then they looked at each other, and shook their heads.
"Compromise," said Robin Broadhead. "Fifteen minutes, all right? And then
we go rescue your wife."
They edged back along the corridor with smiles of rueful satisfaction
on their faces; but the satisfaction drained. The voices were not
embarrassingly intimate now. They were worse. They were almost quarreling.
There was somehow a snap and a snarl in the flat metallic voice that said,
"You're being a pig, Tom."
The program was cloyingly reasonable: "But, Henrietta, dear, I'm only
trying to find out..."
"What you try to find out," grated the voice, "depends on what your
capacities to learn are. I'm trying to tell you something more important!
I tried to tell you before. I tried to tell you all the while we were
coming out here, but, no, you didn't want to hear, all you wanted was to
get off in the lander with that fat bitch..."
The program knew when to be placatory. "I'm sorry, Henrietta, dear. If
you want me to learn some astrophysics I will."
"Damn right you will!" Pause. "It's terribly important, Tom!" Pause.
And then: "We go back to the Big Bang. Are you listening, Tom?"
"Of course I am, dear," said the program in its humblest and most
endearing way.
"All right! It goes back to how the universe got started, and we know
that pretty well-with one little hazy transition point that's a little
obscure. Call it Point X."
"Are you going to tell me what 'Point X' is, dear?"
"Shut up, Tom! Listen! Before Point X, essentially the whole universe
was packed into a tiny glob, no more than a matter of kilometers through,
super-dense, super hot, so squeezed it had no structure. Then it exploded.
It began to expand-up to Point X, and that part is pretty clear. Do you
follow me so far, Tom?"
"Yes, dear. That's basically simple cosmology, isn't it?"
Pause. "Just pay attention," Henrietta's voice said at last. "Then,
after Point X, it continued to expand. As it expanded, little bits of
'matter' began to condense out of it. First came nuclear particles,
hadrons and pious, electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks. Then 'real'
matter. Real hydrogen atoms, then even helium atoms. The exploding volume
of gas began to slow. Turbulence broke it into immense clouds. Gravity
pulled the clouds into clumps. As they shrank the heat of contraction set
nuclear reactions going. They glowed. The first stars were born. The
rest," she finished, "is what we can see going on now."
The program picked up its cue. "I see that, Henrietta, yes. How long
are we talking about, now?"
"Ah, good question," she said, in a voice not at all complimentary.
"From the beginning of the Big Bang to Point X, three seconds. From Point
X to right now, about eighteen billion years. And there we have it."
The program was not written to deal with sarcasm, but even in the flat
metal voice sarcasm hung. It did its best. "Thank you, dear," it said,
"and now will you tell me what is special about Point X?"
"I would tell you in a thick minute, my darling Tomasino," she said
sunnily, "except that you are not my darling Tomasino. That ass-head would
not have understood one word of what I just said, and I don't like being
lied to."
And no matter what the program tried, not even when Robin Broadhead
dropped the pretense and spoke to her direct, Henrietta would say no more.
"Hell with it," said Broadhead at last. "We've got enough to worry about
in the next couple of hours. We don't have to go back eighteen billion
years for it."
He hit a pressure release on the side of the processor and caught what
came out: the thick, soft rag-flop tape that had caught everything
Henrietta had said. He waved it aloft. "That's what I came for," he said,
grinning. "And now, Paul, let's take care of your little problem-and then
go home and spend our millions!"
In the deep, restless sleep of the Oldest One there were no dreams, but
there were irritations.
The irritations came faster and faster, more and more urgent. From the
time the first Gateway prospectors had terrifyingly come until he had
written (he thought) the last of them off, only the wink of an eye-not
more than a few years, really. And until the strangers and the boy were
caught, hardly a heartbeat; and until he was awakened again to be told the
female had escaped no time at all-none! Hardly even time for him to
decouple sensors and effectors and settle down; and now there was still no
peace. The children were panicked and quarrelsome. It was not their noise
alone that disturbed him. Noise could not awaken the Oldest One; only
physical attack, or being addressed directly. What was most irritating
about this racket was that it was not quite addressed to him, but not
quite not, either. It was a debate-an argument; a few frightened voices
demanding he be told something at once, a few even more frightened ones
pleading against it.
And that was incorrect. For half a million years the Oldest One had
trained his children in manners. If he was needed, he was to be addressed.
He was not to be awakened for trivial causes, and certainly not by
accident. Especially now. Especially when each effort of waking was more
of a drain on his ancient fabric and the time was in sight when he might
not wake at all.
The fretful rumpus did not stop.
The Oldest One called on his external sensors and gazed upon his
children. Why were so few of them there? Why were nearly half of them
sprawled on the floor, evidently asleep?
Painfully he activated his communications system and spoke: "What is
happening?"
When, quailing, they tried to answer and the Oldest One understood what
they were saying, the bands of color on his shell raced and blurred. The
female not recaptured. The younger female and the boy gone too. Twenty
more of the children found hopelessly asleep, and scores of others, gone
to search the artifact, not reporting back.
Something was terribly wrong.
Even at the very end of its useful life the Oldest One was a superb
machine. There were resources seldom used, powers not tapped for hundreds
of thousands of years. He rose on his rollogons to tower over the quaking
children and reached down into his deepest and least-used memories for
guidance and knowledge. On his foreplate, between the external vision
receptors, two polished blue knobs began a faint drone, and atop his
carapace a shallow dish glowed with faint violet light. It had been
thousands of years since the Oldest One had used any of his more punitive
effectors, but as information from the great stores of memories gathered
he began to believe that it was time to use them again. He reached into
the stored personalities, even, and Henrietta was open to him; he knew
what she had said, and what the new interlopers had asked. He understood
(what Henrietta had not) the meaning of the hand weapons Robin Broadhead
had been waving around; in the deepest of all memories, the ones that went
back even before his own flesh-and-blood life, there was the lance that
made his own ancestors go to sleep, and this was clearly much the same.
Here was trouble on a scale he had never known before, of a kind he
could not readily cope with. If he could get at them... But he could not.
His great bulk could not travel through the artifact's passages, except
the gold-skeined ones; the weapons that were ready to destroy would have
no targets. The children? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps they could hunt out and
overcome the others; certainly it was worth the effort to order them to do
so, the few survivors, and he did. But in the rational, mechanical mind of
the Oldest One the capacity for computation was unimpaired. He could read
the odds well. They were not good.
The question was, was his great plan endangered?
The answer was yes. But there, at least, there was something he could
do. The heart of the plan was the place where the artifact was controlled.
It was the nerve center of the entire construct; it was where he had dared
to set in motion the final stages of his plan.
Before he had finished framing the decision he was acting it out. The
great metal bulk shifted and turned, and then rolled out across the
spindle, into the wide-mouthed tunnel that led to the controls. Once
there, he was secure. Let them come if they chose! The weaponry was ready.
Its great drain on his dwindling powers was making him slow and unsteady
to move, but there was power enough. He could blockade himself and let the
flesh-and-blood things settle things however they might, and then... He
stopped. Ahead of him one of the wall-aligning machines was out of place.
It sat squarely in the center of the corridor, and behind it... If he had
been just a trifle less drained, the fraction of a second faster.... But
he was not. The glow from the wall aligner washed over him. He was blind.
He was deaf. He felt the external protuberances burn off his shell, felt
the great soft cylinders he rolled on melt and stick.
The Oldest One did not know how to feel pain. He did know how to feel
anguish of the soul. He had failed.
The flesh-and-blood things had control of his artifacts, and his plans
were at an end forever.
My name is Robin Broadhead, and I am the richest person there is in the
whole solar system. The only one who comes close is old Bover, and he
would come a lot closer if he hadn't thrown half of his money into slum
clearance and urban rehabilitation and a lot of what was left into an
inch-by-inch scan of trans-Plutonian space, looking for the ship with what
was left of his wife, Trish. (What he is going to do with her if he finds