things. His knowledge was as astonishing as his ignorance. Both were
unpredictable.
It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter
would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its
programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original
purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They
were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a
score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera's memory without bothering
to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her
needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement
that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a
formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst
into laughter. "Dortmund still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What
nonsense!"
"Why, that's really nice," Lurvy said agreeably. "It's quite a
compliment."
"It is quite nothing," he corrected her severely. "Burgermeister! With
what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or
even..." He fell silent, and then said gloomily, "If, to be sure, I ever
see the Federal Republic again." He paused, looking over their heads. His
lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: "Perhaps we should go
back now."
"Aw, Pop," Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her
the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them,
until Paul cleared his throat and said:
"Well, that's certainly one of our options. Of course, there's a legal
question of contract..."
Peter shook his head. "I have thought of that. They owe us so much
already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of
the damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won't pay..." He
hesitated, and then said, "No, there is no question that they won't pay.
We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that
we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a
return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way."
"And what about Wan?" Janine demanded.
"He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again,
and that is surely what is best for him."
"Don't you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to
sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?"
"That was a dream," her father said coldly. "Reality is that we cannot
do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for
all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not
just a matter of the contract," he went on, almost pleadingly. "We are
saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising!
We will be persons of great power!"
"No, Pop," Janine said, "listen to me. You've all been talking about
our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make
their lives better. Well, aren't we going to do our duty?"
He turned on her furiously. "Little minx, what do you know about duty?
Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare
check! We must think of ourselves as well!"
She would have replied, but Wan's wide-eyed, frightened stare made her
stop. "I hate this!" she announced. "Wan and I are going to go for a walk
to get away from the lot of you!"
"He is not really a bad person," she told Wan, once they were beyond
the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who
had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue
wall. "This is a place for water," he said, "but it is a dead one. There
are dozens of them, but almost all dead."
Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at
it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance
like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it
was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. "You said one of them
still works, but the water isn't drinkable?"
"Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?"
"Well, I guess so." She added, "Really, don't let them get to you. They
just get excited."
"Yes, Janine." But he was not in a talkative mood.
She said, "When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they
were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as
far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was
a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but
if I wasn't he'd bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That's what I used to
call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal." He was
listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not
respond. "Then my mother died," she said, "and Paul and Lurvy got married
and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn't so bad, really.
He came to see me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand
what I'm saying to you?"
"No," he said. "What's Santa Claus?"
"Oh, Wan!"
So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to
explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began
to smile; and curiously, as Wan's mood improved Janine's grew worse.
Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the
world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter
proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the
alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let
herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its
way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What
would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there?
Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with
the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical.
Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are
tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?
She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not
tell that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage
to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were
afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the
sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special
kind-less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave
while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to
everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying
before he cashed in on his courage.
And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her
about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest.
Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it
was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan's complications were merely not the
same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture
that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it
for a toilet. Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western
world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought
Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly
unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. "I had to go
somewhere," he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the
ship's sanitary like everybody else.
"Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were
sick, don't you see? She's always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff."
"There ought to be some other way."
"Well, there is." There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny
samples from each of them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan,
once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer,
and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to
do so, a little late. "What's the matter?"
He was acting uncomfortable. "When the Dead Men give me a medical check
they stick things in me. I don't like that."
"It's for your own good, Wan," she said severely. "Hey! That's an idea.
Let's go talk to the Dead Men."
And there was Janine's own complicatedness. She didn't really want to
talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing
place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the
place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan's
dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. "Wan," she
said, "I want to try the couch."
He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his
long nose. "Lurvy told me not to do that any more," he stated.
"I know she did. How do I get in?"
"First you tell me I must do what you all say," he complained, "then
you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing."
She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. "Do I just
pull the top down over me?"
"Oh," he said, shrugging, "if you've made up your mind-yes. It snaps
shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just
push."
She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at
his petulant, concerned face. "Does it-hurt?"
"Hurt? No! What an idea!"
"Well, what does it feel like?"
"Janine," he said severely, "you are very childish. Why do you ask
questions when you can see for yourself?" And he pushed down on the
shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and
locked. "It is best if you go to sleep," he called down to her, through
the shining blue network of wire.
"But I'm not sleepy," she objected reasonably. "I'm not anything. I
don't feel a thing..."
And then she did.
It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the
fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no
point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She
was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms
had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She
could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when
she opened her eyes, and these other-souls? were not at all as real or as
immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another
presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were
comforting.
When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm,
she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or
the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they
started back.
They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other
members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. "Stupid
little brat!" Paul raged. "You ever do anything like that again and I'll
paddle your pink little ass for you!"
"She won't!" her father said grimly. "I will see to that, right now;
and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later."
They had all become so quarrelsome! no one paddled Janine's bottom for
trying out the dreaming couch. no one punished her at all. They all
punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had
held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for
himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old
man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch
without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other
because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again,
when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to
Lurvy and Paul-they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they
would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court
within 5,000 A. U.
But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.
U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have
made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the
Food Factory's guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other
place-and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could
not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of
every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave
it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could
change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men
by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to
try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera's sound
system in linkage with the "radio". But Vera could not handle much give
and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did
not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera
was beaten.
All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The
squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her
around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he
was gone.
Fortunately for Janine's pride, everyone else was gone, too-Paul and
Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so
that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she
thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends,
while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long
letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister
returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an
hour she was unprepared for their reaction. "Pa!" Lurvy cried, rattling at
the curtain of her father's private. "Wake up! Wan's gone!"
As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, "Now,
what's the matter with all of you?"
"You don't understand, do you?" Paul asked coldly. "What if he's taken
the ship?"
It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like
a blow in the face. "He wouldn't!"
"Would he not?" snarled her father. "And how do you know that, little
minx? And if he does, what of us?" He finished zipping his coverall and
stood up, glowering at them. "I have told you all," he said-but looking at
Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their
"all"-"I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to
go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk
that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without
warning. That is assuredly certain."
"And how do we do that?" Lurvy demanded. "You're preposterous, Pa. We
can't guard the ship day and night."
"And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes," the old man nodded. "So we
must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy."
Janine flew at him. "You monsters!" she choked. "You've been planning
this all out when we weren't around!" Her sister caught and held her.
"Calm down, Janine," she ordered. "Yes, it's true we've talked about
it-we had to! But nothing's settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan."
"Then settle it!" Janine flared. "I vote we go with Wan!"
"If he hasn't gone already, by himself," Paul put in.
"He hasn't!"
Lurvy said practically, "If he has, it's too late for us to do anything
about it. Outside of that, I'm with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?"
He hesitated. "I-guess so," he conceded. "Peter?"
The old man said with dignity, "If you are all agreed, then what does
it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go
and who is to stay. I propose..."
Lurvy stopped him. "Pa," she said, "I know what you are going to say,
but it won't work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in
contact with Earth. Janine's too young. It can't be me, because I'm the
best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a
Heechee ship. I don't want to go without Paul, and that leaves you."
They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her
around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the
dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission
still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of
what they were doing was that further communications of interest would
come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter
was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in
the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the
automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and
he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could
stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they
depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and
loaded them, too. Wan's ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed
out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during
maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the
rest of the voyage-suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who
dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in
the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume
and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It
was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by
sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along
the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done.
Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill
about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed
as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not
dead, and she said, "Pop? Don't take it so hard. We'll all be back as soon
as we can."
He nodded. "Which comes to," he said, "let me see, forty-nine days each
way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place." But then he pushed
himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully,
he said, "Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?"
Lurvy looked around, considering. "I think not-unless you think we
should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?"
"The Dead Men?" he shrilled, grinning. "They will not know. They are
not alive, you know, they have no sense of time."
"Then why do you like them so much?" Janine demanded.
Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. "They are my
friends," he said. "They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they
often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them."
Lurvy caught her breath. "Oh, Wan," she said, touching him. "I know we
haven't been as nice as we might. We've all been under a great strain.
We're really better people than we must seem to you."
Old Peter had had enough. "Go you now," he snarled. "Prove this to him,
do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!"
Less than two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had
it ever been as intense. The most susceptible one percent of the
population had simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone
had been severely affected.
I was one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck
in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I
wasn't trapped in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a
runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and
nurses writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one
minutes and forty-four seconds of delirious misery, and that diluted
because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
Of course, everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in
touch with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed
for fair. Harriet formed herself in the tank to tell me that at least
twenty-five calls were coming in for me-my science program, my legal
program, three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a
few real, live people. None of them, she told me apologetically when I
asked, was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment,
and I couldn't place a call from my end either. None of the machines had
been affected by the madness. They never were. The only time something
went wrong with them was when some live person had injected himself into
the circuit, for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was
happening a million times a minute, somewhere in the world, with some
machine or another, it was not surprising that some things took a little
while to get going again.
First order of business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I
gave Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports.
Quick bulletin from the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate:
some minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone
had left a barrier open in the fish factories and six hundred million
fingerlings swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a
minority stockholder in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of
the fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot
of others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of
a day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal
had produced in fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts
had simply stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions
of people had been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and
southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in
California, a train wreck in Wales, and a few as yet uncatalogued
disasters-the computers did not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the
news reports were calling it the worst ever.
By the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were
running again. I wasn't a captive any more. Looking out the window, I
could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on
the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been
on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had
been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of
wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she
could, but the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next
day. I couldn't even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed.
That was only an annoyance, not a problem. If I really wanted to get
through, there were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks.
But the rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to
surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
And meanwhile I had time to spare.
And all this time my science program had been bursting with things to
tell me. That was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it
off until I had a chance for a good, long natter; and that time had
arrived, "Harriet," I said, "put him on." And Albert Einstein took form in
the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. "What is it, Al,"
I asked, "something good?"
"Sure thing, Robin! We've found out where the fever comes from-it's the
Food Factory!"
It was my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind
at once, I wouldn't have been just about the last person on Earth to find
out that I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first
thing that hit me, and I was thinking about possible liability and
sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me.
First and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food
Factory itself. But we should have known all along. "If I had only timed
the Onsets carefully," Albert berated himself, "we could have located the
source years ago. And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with
their photonic nature."
"Their what nature?"
"They are electromagnetic, Robin," he explained. He tamped tobacco into
his pipe and reached for a match. "You realize, of course, that this is
established by transmission time-we received whatever signal caused the
madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening."
"Wait a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn't
this the same?"
"Ah, Robin! If we only knew that!" he twinkled, lighting his pipe. "I
can only conjecture..." puff, puff, "that this particular effect is not
compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that
I cannot even speculate on at this time. And, of course," he went on,
"there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have
any answers."
"Of course," I said, but I didn't ask him what they were. I was on the
track of something else. "Albert? Display the ships and stations you drew
information from in space."
"Sure thing, Robin." The flyaway hair and the seamed, cheerful face
melted away, and at once the holographic tank filled with a representation
of circumsolar space. Nine planets. A girdle of dust that was the asteroid
belt, and a powdery shell far out that was the Oort cloud. And about forty
points of colored light. The representation was in logarithmic scale, to
get it all in, and the size of the planets and artifacts immensely
enlarged. Albert's voice explained, "The four green ships are ours, Robin.
The eleven blue objects are Heechee installations; the round ones are only
detected, the star-shaped ones have been visited and are mostly manned.
All the others are ships that belong to other commercial interests, or to
governments."
I studied the plot. Not very many of the sparks were anywhere near the
green ship and blue star that marked the Food Factory. "Albert? If
somebody had to get another ship out to the Food Factory, which one could
get there fastest?"
He appeared in the lower corner of the projection, frowning and sucking
his pipe stem. A golden point near Saturn's rings began to flash on and
off. "There's a Brazilian cruiser just departing Tethys that could make it
in eighteen months," he said. "I have displayed only the ships that were
involved in my radiolocation. There are several others..." new lights
winked on in a scatter around the tank, "that could do better, provided
they have adequate fuel and supplies. But none in less than a year."
I sighed. "Turn it off, Albert," I said. "The thing is, we're into
something I didn't expect."
"What's that, Robin?" he asked, filling the tank again and folding his
hands over his belly in a comfortable way.
"That cocoon. I don't know how to handle it. I don't even see the point
of it. What's it for, Albert? Have you got any conjectures?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding cheerfully. "My best conjectures
are a pretty low order of probability, but that's just because there are
so many unknowns. Let's put it this way. Suppose you were a
Heechee-something like an anthropologist, say-interested in keeping an eye
on a developing civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so you don't
want to just sit there and watch. What you'd like to do is get a quick
estimate, maybe every thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well,
given something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the
Food Factory every once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more;
climb in the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would
take only minutes." He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on.
"Then-but this is a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn't even
assign a probability rating to it at all-then, if you found anything
interesting, you could explore further. You could even do something else.
This is really far out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon
transmits as well as receives, that's what the fevers came from. Perhaps
it can also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of the
great inventions sprang up all over the world, apparently independently,
maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?"
He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about
that.
All the thinking in the world didn't make it good, clean fun.
Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in
fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on
Venus, and the more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid,
playing with something he didn't understand, had plunged the whole human
race into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing
with things we didn't understand, what were the Heechee going to give us
for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert's suggestion that these
creatures had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe
even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about
what was going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through
the physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the
tank, looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept
right on with his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the
transmissions even as he was reporting on them, and be showed me selected
scenes of the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact.
The damn thing was still determined to go its own way. Best course
estimates suggested that it was moving toward a new cluster of comets,
several million miles away-at present rates, it would get there in a few
months. "Then what?" I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. "Presumably it will then stay there
until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin."
"Then can we move it?"
"No evidence, Robin. But it's possible. Speaking of which, I have a
theory about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches
an operating artifact-the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls
unlock and it can then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be
what happened to Ms. Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious
implications," he twinkled.
I don't like to let a computer program think it's smarter than I am.
"You mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over
the Galaxy, because their controls unlocked and they didn't know how to
get back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said approvingly. "That may account for what
Wan calls the 'Dead Men'. We've received some conversations with them, by
the way. Their responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course
we're handicapped by not being able to interact. But it does appear that
they are, or were, human beings."
"Are you telling me they were alive?"
"Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso's voice
on a tape was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they
are 'alive' now is a matter of definition. You might ask the same
question..." puff, pull, "about me."
"Huh." I thought for a minute. "Why are they so crazy?"
"Imperfect transcription, I would say. But that is not the important
thing." I waited until he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the
important thing. "It seems rather sure, Robin, that the transcription
occurred by some sort of chemical readout of the actual brains of the
prospectors."
"You mean the Heechee killed them and poured their brains into a
bottle?"
"Certainly not, Robin! First, I would hazard the opinion that the
prospectors died naturally rather than being killed. That would degrade
the chemistry of brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the
information. And certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical
analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?"
I groaned. "Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all
this quicker from straight visual synoptics."
"Sure thing you could, Robin, but not," he twinkled, "perhaps, as
entertainingly. At any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen
to have equipment to read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It
seems very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same
as the chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general
considerations, e. g., what they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their
chemistry was not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules.
It seems most unlikely that a compound which represents, e. g., the
ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the
same in their chemistry as in ours." He started to relight his pipe, then
caught my eye and added hurriedly, "So I conclude, Robin, that these
machines were designed not for Heechee brains."
He startled me. "For humans, then? But why? How? How did they know?
When..."
"Please, Robin. At your instructions, your wife has programmed me to
make large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that
I say. But," he added, nodding sagely, "I have this opinion, yes."
"Jesus," I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I
tucked it away and went on to the next worry. "What about the Old Ones?
Are they human, do you think?"
He tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. "I would say
not," he said at last.
I didn't ask him what the alternative was. I didn't want to hear it.
When Albert had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put
my legal program on. I couldn't talk to him right away, though, because
right then my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted
to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he
had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank,
sliced into my chicken steak and said, "Go ahead, Morton, what's the bad
news?"
He said apologetically, "You know that Bover suit?"
"What Bover suit?"
"Trish Bover's husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We
filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the
fever and... Well. He is wrong in the law, Robin, but he denied our
request for time to set a hearing date and entered summary judgment
against."
I stopped chewing. "Can he do that?" I roared through my mouthful of
prime rare chicken.
"Well, yes, or at least he did it. But we'll get him on appeal, only
that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue,
and he pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there's some
question whether she actually completed the mission, do you see?
Meanwhile..."
Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to
draw out a discussion so. "Meanwhile what, Morton?"
"Well, since the recent, ah, episode, there seems to be another
complication. Gateway Corp wants to go slow until they figure out just
where they are with this fever business, so they've accepted service of an
injunction. Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with
exploitation of the factory."
I blew up. "Shit, Mort! You mean we can't use it after we bring it all
the way in from orbit?"
"I'm afraid I mean more than that," he apologized. "You're enjoined to
stop moving it. You're enjoined to refrain from interfering with its
normal activities in any way, pending a declarative judgment. That's
Bover's action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food
by moving to a new comet cluster you're endangering his interest. Now, we
can get that vacated, I'm sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some
sort of action to stop doing everything until they get a handle on the
fever."
"Oh, God." I put down my fork. I wasn't hungry any more. "The only good
thing," I said, "is that's an order they can't enforce."
"Because it will take so long to get a message to the Herter-Hall
party, yes, Robin," he nodded. "On the..."
He disappeared, zit. He slid diagonally away out of the tank, and
Harriet appeared. She looked terrible. I have good programs for my
computer help. But they don't always bring good news. "Robin!" she cried.
"There's a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona-it's your wife!"
"Essie? Essie? Is she sick?"
"Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in
a car crash. They've got her on life support, but... There's no prognosis,
Robin. She isn't responding."
I didn't use my priorities. I didn't want to take the time. I went
straight to the Washington office of the Gateway Corp. who went to the
Secretary of Defense, who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane
leaving Boiling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
The flight was three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the
way. There were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn't
even want them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left
me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love
of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of
my life after she was safely gone, also left me-without quite dying,
because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of
reach forever-that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I
wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot
law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between
source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable
for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All
you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the
"roof," but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms,
labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting
city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I
heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off
at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be
used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window
when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor's
office-he wouldn't be using it for some time-kicked out the insurance
adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two
senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from
our medical program.
Essie's pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were
good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the
machines for a while.
Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all
its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the
neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was
simply swamped.
I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was no Visitors, and no
visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door,
forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling
mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor's desk set until I found a
closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it
on. I couldn't see how well Essie was doing. I couldn't even tell for sure
which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time
to time to pass on little news items. She didn't bother with messages of
sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me
a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and
Harriet gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without
bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that
kind of programming. Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a
past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers,
and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men's
room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of
Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and
said, "Senor Broad'ead? Por favor." The cop was still at the door of
Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but
with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent
patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her
nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes
were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not
conscious.
Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn't enough time for
anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects
under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all
for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to
have one.
In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short,
pot-bellied old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked
at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. "Oh, yes, Mr.
Blackhead," he said. "Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is
responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a
short time toward evening."
I didn't bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top
questions on the list: "Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is
there anything she needs? -I mean anything."
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too
long. "Pain we can take care of, and she's already on Full Medical. I
understand you are an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing
for you to do. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe there'll be something
she'll need. Today, no. Her whole left side was crushed when the bus
folded in on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six
or seven hours, until somebody got to her."
I didn't know I had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A
little sympathy came through the contact lenses as he peered up at me.
"That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life.
Being squeezed was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have
bled to death." He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. "Um.
She's going to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two
ribs. Eight, ten, fourteen-maybe twenty square inches of new skin, and
there's considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we'll want a
transplant."
"If there's anything at all..."
"Nothing at all, Mr. Blackeu," he said, folding up the paper. "Nothing
now. Go away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be
able to talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you're
taking up."
Harriet had already arranged for the hotel to move Essie's things out
of her room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had
delivered toilet stuff and a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up
there. I didn't want to go out. I didn't enjoy seeing the cheerful
tipplers in the lobby bar, or the streets full of people who had got
safely through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing
it had been for them.
I made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much,
but not in staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and
played some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But
when they went from Stravinsky to Carl Orff that lusty, horny Catullus
poetry made me think about the last time I had played it with my lusty,
horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.
"Turn it off," I snapped and ever-vigilant Harriet stopped it in
midshriek.
"Do you want to receive messages, Robin?" she inquired froth the same
audio speaker.
I dried myself carefully, and then said: "In a minute. I might as
well." Dried, brushed, in clean clothes, I sat down in front of the
hotel's comm system. They weren't quite nice enough to give their guests
full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a
flat-plate display. She reassured me about Essie. She was continuously
monitoring, and everything was going well enough-not far enough, of
unpredictable.
It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter
would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its
programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original
purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They
were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a
score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera's memory without bothering
to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her
needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement
that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a
formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst
into laughter. "Dortmund still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What
nonsense!"
"Why, that's really nice," Lurvy said agreeably. "It's quite a
compliment."
"It is quite nothing," he corrected her severely. "Burgermeister! With
what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or
even..." He fell silent, and then said gloomily, "If, to be sure, I ever
see the Federal Republic again." He paused, looking over their heads. His
lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: "Perhaps we should go
back now."
"Aw, Pop," Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her
the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them,
until Paul cleared his throat and said:
"Well, that's certainly one of our options. Of course, there's a legal
question of contract..."
Peter shook his head. "I have thought of that. They owe us so much
already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of
the damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won't pay..." He
hesitated, and then said, "No, there is no question that they won't pay.
We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that
we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a
return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way."
"And what about Wan?" Janine demanded.
"He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again,
and that is surely what is best for him."
"Don't you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to
sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?"
"That was a dream," her father said coldly. "Reality is that we cannot
do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for
all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not
just a matter of the contract," he went on, almost pleadingly. "We are
saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising!
We will be persons of great power!"
"No, Pop," Janine said, "listen to me. You've all been talking about
our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make
their lives better. Well, aren't we going to do our duty?"
He turned on her furiously. "Little minx, what do you know about duty?
Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare
check! We must think of ourselves as well!"
She would have replied, but Wan's wide-eyed, frightened stare made her
stop. "I hate this!" she announced. "Wan and I are going to go for a walk
to get away from the lot of you!"
"He is not really a bad person," she told Wan, once they were beyond
the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who
had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue
wall. "This is a place for water," he said, "but it is a dead one. There
are dozens of them, but almost all dead."
Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at
it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance
like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it
was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. "You said one of them
still works, but the water isn't drinkable?"
"Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?"
"Well, I guess so." She added, "Really, don't let them get to you. They
just get excited."
"Yes, Janine." But he was not in a talkative mood.
She said, "When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they
were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as
far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was
a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but
if I wasn't he'd bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That's what I used to
call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal." He was
listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not
respond. "Then my mother died," she said, "and Paul and Lurvy got married
and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn't so bad, really.
He came to see me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand
what I'm saying to you?"
"No," he said. "What's Santa Claus?"
"Oh, Wan!"
So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to
explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began
to smile; and curiously, as Wan's mood improved Janine's grew worse.
Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the
world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter
proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the
alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let
herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its
way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What
would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there?
Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with
the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical.
Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are
tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?
She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not
tell that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage
to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were
afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the
sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special
kind-less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave
while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to
everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying
before he cashed in on his courage.
And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her
about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest.
Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it
was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan's complications were merely not the
same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture
that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it
for a toilet. Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western
world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought
Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly
unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. "I had to go
somewhere," he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the
ship's sanitary like everybody else.
"Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were
sick, don't you see? She's always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff."
"There ought to be some other way."
"Well, there is." There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny
samples from each of them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan,
once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer,
and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to
do so, a little late. "What's the matter?"
He was acting uncomfortable. "When the Dead Men give me a medical check
they stick things in me. I don't like that."
"It's for your own good, Wan," she said severely. "Hey! That's an idea.
Let's go talk to the Dead Men."
And there was Janine's own complicatedness. She didn't really want to
talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing
place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the
place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan's
dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. "Wan," she
said, "I want to try the couch."
He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his
long nose. "Lurvy told me not to do that any more," he stated.
"I know she did. How do I get in?"
"First you tell me I must do what you all say," he complained, "then
you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing."
She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. "Do I just
pull the top down over me?"
"Oh," he said, shrugging, "if you've made up your mind-yes. It snaps
shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just
push."
She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at
his petulant, concerned face. "Does it-hurt?"
"Hurt? No! What an idea!"
"Well, what does it feel like?"
"Janine," he said severely, "you are very childish. Why do you ask
questions when you can see for yourself?" And he pushed down on the
shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and
locked. "It is best if you go to sleep," he called down to her, through
the shining blue network of wire.
"But I'm not sleepy," she objected reasonably. "I'm not anything. I
don't feel a thing..."
And then she did.
It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the
fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no
point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She
was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms
had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She
could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when
she opened her eyes, and these other-souls? were not at all as real or as
immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another
presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were
comforting.
When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm,
she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or
the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they
started back.
They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other
members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. "Stupid
little brat!" Paul raged. "You ever do anything like that again and I'll
paddle your pink little ass for you!"
"She won't!" her father said grimly. "I will see to that, right now;
and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later."
They had all become so quarrelsome! no one paddled Janine's bottom for
trying out the dreaming couch. no one punished her at all. They all
punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had
held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for
himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old
man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch
without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other
because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again,
when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to
Lurvy and Paul-they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they
would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court
within 5,000 A. U.
But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.
U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have
made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the
Food Factory's guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other
place-and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could
not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of
every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave
it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could
change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men
by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to
try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera's sound
system in linkage with the "radio". But Vera could not handle much give
and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did
not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera
was beaten.
All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The
squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her
around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he
was gone.
Fortunately for Janine's pride, everyone else was gone, too-Paul and
Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so
that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she
thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends,
while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long
letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister
returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an
hour she was unprepared for their reaction. "Pa!" Lurvy cried, rattling at
the curtain of her father's private. "Wake up! Wan's gone!"
As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, "Now,
what's the matter with all of you?"
"You don't understand, do you?" Paul asked coldly. "What if he's taken
the ship?"
It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like
a blow in the face. "He wouldn't!"
"Would he not?" snarled her father. "And how do you know that, little
minx? And if he does, what of us?" He finished zipping his coverall and
stood up, glowering at them. "I have told you all," he said-but looking at
Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their
"all"-"I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to
go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk
that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without
warning. That is assuredly certain."
"And how do we do that?" Lurvy demanded. "You're preposterous, Pa. We
can't guard the ship day and night."
"And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes," the old man nodded. "So we
must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy."
Janine flew at him. "You monsters!" she choked. "You've been planning
this all out when we weren't around!" Her sister caught and held her.
"Calm down, Janine," she ordered. "Yes, it's true we've talked about
it-we had to! But nothing's settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan."
"Then settle it!" Janine flared. "I vote we go with Wan!"
"If he hasn't gone already, by himself," Paul put in.
"He hasn't!"
Lurvy said practically, "If he has, it's too late for us to do anything
about it. Outside of that, I'm with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?"
He hesitated. "I-guess so," he conceded. "Peter?"
The old man said with dignity, "If you are all agreed, then what does
it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go
and who is to stay. I propose..."
Lurvy stopped him. "Pa," she said, "I know what you are going to say,
but it won't work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in
contact with Earth. Janine's too young. It can't be me, because I'm the
best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a
Heechee ship. I don't want to go without Paul, and that leaves you."
They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her
around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the
dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission
still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of
what they were doing was that further communications of interest would
come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter
was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in
the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the
automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and
he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could
stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they
depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and
loaded them, too. Wan's ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed
out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during
maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the
rest of the voyage-suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who
dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in
the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume
and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It
was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by
sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along
the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done.
Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill
about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed
as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not
dead, and she said, "Pop? Don't take it so hard. We'll all be back as soon
as we can."
He nodded. "Which comes to," he said, "let me see, forty-nine days each
way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place." But then he pushed
himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully,
he said, "Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?"
Lurvy looked around, considering. "I think not-unless you think we
should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?"
"The Dead Men?" he shrilled, grinning. "They will not know. They are
not alive, you know, they have no sense of time."
"Then why do you like them so much?" Janine demanded.
Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. "They are my
friends," he said. "They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they
often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them."
Lurvy caught her breath. "Oh, Wan," she said, touching him. "I know we
haven't been as nice as we might. We've all been under a great strain.
We're really better people than we must seem to you."
Old Peter had had enough. "Go you now," he snarled. "Prove this to him,
do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!"
Less than two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had
it ever been as intense. The most susceptible one percent of the
population had simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone
had been severely affected.
I was one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck
in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I
wasn't trapped in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a
runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and
nurses writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one
minutes and forty-four seconds of delirious misery, and that diluted
because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
Of course, everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in
touch with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed
for fair. Harriet formed herself in the tank to tell me that at least
twenty-five calls were coming in for me-my science program, my legal
program, three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a
few real, live people. None of them, she told me apologetically when I
asked, was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment,
and I couldn't place a call from my end either. None of the machines had
been affected by the madness. They never were. The only time something
went wrong with them was when some live person had injected himself into
the circuit, for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was
happening a million times a minute, somewhere in the world, with some
machine or another, it was not surprising that some things took a little
while to get going again.
First order of business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I
gave Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports.
Quick bulletin from the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate:
some minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone
had left a barrier open in the fish factories and six hundred million
fingerlings swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a
minority stockholder in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of
the fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot
of others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of
a day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal
had produced in fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts
had simply stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions
of people had been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and
southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in
California, a train wreck in Wales, and a few as yet uncatalogued
disasters-the computers did not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the
news reports were calling it the worst ever.
By the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were
running again. I wasn't a captive any more. Looking out the window, I
could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on
the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been
on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had
been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of
wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she
could, but the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next
day. I couldn't even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed.
That was only an annoyance, not a problem. If I really wanted to get
through, there were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks.
But the rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to
surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
And meanwhile I had time to spare.
And all this time my science program had been bursting with things to
tell me. That was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it
off until I had a chance for a good, long natter; and that time had
arrived, "Harriet," I said, "put him on." And Albert Einstein took form in
the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. "What is it, Al,"
I asked, "something good?"
"Sure thing, Robin! We've found out where the fever comes from-it's the
Food Factory!"
It was my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind
at once, I wouldn't have been just about the last person on Earth to find
out that I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first
thing that hit me, and I was thinking about possible liability and
sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me.
First and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food
Factory itself. But we should have known all along. "If I had only timed
the Onsets carefully," Albert berated himself, "we could have located the
source years ago. And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with
their photonic nature."
"Their what nature?"
"They are electromagnetic, Robin," he explained. He tamped tobacco into
his pipe and reached for a match. "You realize, of course, that this is
established by transmission time-we received whatever signal caused the
madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening."
"Wait a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn't
this the same?"
"Ah, Robin! If we only knew that!" he twinkled, lighting his pipe. "I
can only conjecture..." puff, puff, "that this particular effect is not
compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that
I cannot even speculate on at this time. And, of course," he went on,
"there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have
any answers."
"Of course," I said, but I didn't ask him what they were. I was on the
track of something else. "Albert? Display the ships and stations you drew
information from in space."
"Sure thing, Robin." The flyaway hair and the seamed, cheerful face
melted away, and at once the holographic tank filled with a representation
of circumsolar space. Nine planets. A girdle of dust that was the asteroid
belt, and a powdery shell far out that was the Oort cloud. And about forty
points of colored light. The representation was in logarithmic scale, to
get it all in, and the size of the planets and artifacts immensely
enlarged. Albert's voice explained, "The four green ships are ours, Robin.
The eleven blue objects are Heechee installations; the round ones are only
detected, the star-shaped ones have been visited and are mostly manned.
All the others are ships that belong to other commercial interests, or to
governments."
I studied the plot. Not very many of the sparks were anywhere near the
green ship and blue star that marked the Food Factory. "Albert? If
somebody had to get another ship out to the Food Factory, which one could
get there fastest?"
He appeared in the lower corner of the projection, frowning and sucking
his pipe stem. A golden point near Saturn's rings began to flash on and
off. "There's a Brazilian cruiser just departing Tethys that could make it
in eighteen months," he said. "I have displayed only the ships that were
involved in my radiolocation. There are several others..." new lights
winked on in a scatter around the tank, "that could do better, provided
they have adequate fuel and supplies. But none in less than a year."
I sighed. "Turn it off, Albert," I said. "The thing is, we're into
something I didn't expect."
"What's that, Robin?" he asked, filling the tank again and folding his
hands over his belly in a comfortable way.
"That cocoon. I don't know how to handle it. I don't even see the point
of it. What's it for, Albert? Have you got any conjectures?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding cheerfully. "My best conjectures
are a pretty low order of probability, but that's just because there are
so many unknowns. Let's put it this way. Suppose you were a
Heechee-something like an anthropologist, say-interested in keeping an eye
on a developing civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so you don't
want to just sit there and watch. What you'd like to do is get a quick
estimate, maybe every thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well,
given something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the
Food Factory every once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more;
climb in the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would
take only minutes." He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on.
"Then-but this is a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn't even
assign a probability rating to it at all-then, if you found anything
interesting, you could explore further. You could even do something else.
This is really far out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon
transmits as well as receives, that's what the fevers came from. Perhaps
it can also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of the
great inventions sprang up all over the world, apparently independently,
maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?"
He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about
that.
All the thinking in the world didn't make it good, clean fun.
Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in
fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on
Venus, and the more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid,
playing with something he didn't understand, had plunged the whole human
race into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing
with things we didn't understand, what were the Heechee going to give us
for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert's suggestion that these
creatures had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe
even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about
what was going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through
the physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the
tank, looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept
right on with his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the
transmissions even as he was reporting on them, and be showed me selected
scenes of the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact.
The damn thing was still determined to go its own way. Best course
estimates suggested that it was moving toward a new cluster of comets,
several million miles away-at present rates, it would get there in a few
months. "Then what?" I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. "Presumably it will then stay there
until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin."
"Then can we move it?"
"No evidence, Robin. But it's possible. Speaking of which, I have a
theory about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches
an operating artifact-the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls
unlock and it can then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be
what happened to Ms. Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious
implications," he twinkled.
I don't like to let a computer program think it's smarter than I am.
"You mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over
the Galaxy, because their controls unlocked and they didn't know how to
get back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said approvingly. "That may account for what
Wan calls the 'Dead Men'. We've received some conversations with them, by
the way. Their responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course
we're handicapped by not being able to interact. But it does appear that
they are, or were, human beings."
"Are you telling me they were alive?"
"Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso's voice
on a tape was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they
are 'alive' now is a matter of definition. You might ask the same
question..." puff, pull, "about me."
"Huh." I thought for a minute. "Why are they so crazy?"
"Imperfect transcription, I would say. But that is not the important
thing." I waited until he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the
important thing. "It seems rather sure, Robin, that the transcription
occurred by some sort of chemical readout of the actual brains of the
prospectors."
"You mean the Heechee killed them and poured their brains into a
bottle?"
"Certainly not, Robin! First, I would hazard the opinion that the
prospectors died naturally rather than being killed. That would degrade
the chemistry of brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the
information. And certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical
analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?"
I groaned. "Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all
this quicker from straight visual synoptics."
"Sure thing you could, Robin, but not," he twinkled, "perhaps, as
entertainingly. At any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen
to have equipment to read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It
seems very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same
as the chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general
considerations, e. g., what they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their
chemistry was not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules.
It seems most unlikely that a compound which represents, e. g., the
ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the
same in their chemistry as in ours." He started to relight his pipe, then
caught my eye and added hurriedly, "So I conclude, Robin, that these
machines were designed not for Heechee brains."
He startled me. "For humans, then? But why? How? How did they know?
When..."
"Please, Robin. At your instructions, your wife has programmed me to
make large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that
I say. But," he added, nodding sagely, "I have this opinion, yes."
"Jesus," I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I
tucked it away and went on to the next worry. "What about the Old Ones?
Are they human, do you think?"
He tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. "I would say
not," he said at last.
I didn't ask him what the alternative was. I didn't want to hear it.
When Albert had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put
my legal program on. I couldn't talk to him right away, though, because
right then my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted
to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he
had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank,
sliced into my chicken steak and said, "Go ahead, Morton, what's the bad
news?"
He said apologetically, "You know that Bover suit?"
"What Bover suit?"
"Trish Bover's husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We
filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the
fever and... Well. He is wrong in the law, Robin, but he denied our
request for time to set a hearing date and entered summary judgment
against."
I stopped chewing. "Can he do that?" I roared through my mouthful of
prime rare chicken.
"Well, yes, or at least he did it. But we'll get him on appeal, only
that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue,
and he pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there's some
question whether she actually completed the mission, do you see?
Meanwhile..."
Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to
draw out a discussion so. "Meanwhile what, Morton?"
"Well, since the recent, ah, episode, there seems to be another
complication. Gateway Corp wants to go slow until they figure out just
where they are with this fever business, so they've accepted service of an
injunction. Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with
exploitation of the factory."
I blew up. "Shit, Mort! You mean we can't use it after we bring it all
the way in from orbit?"
"I'm afraid I mean more than that," he apologized. "You're enjoined to
stop moving it. You're enjoined to refrain from interfering with its
normal activities in any way, pending a declarative judgment. That's
Bover's action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food
by moving to a new comet cluster you're endangering his interest. Now, we
can get that vacated, I'm sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some
sort of action to stop doing everything until they get a handle on the
fever."
"Oh, God." I put down my fork. I wasn't hungry any more. "The only good
thing," I said, "is that's an order they can't enforce."
"Because it will take so long to get a message to the Herter-Hall
party, yes, Robin," he nodded. "On the..."
He disappeared, zit. He slid diagonally away out of the tank, and
Harriet appeared. She looked terrible. I have good programs for my
computer help. But they don't always bring good news. "Robin!" she cried.
"There's a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona-it's your wife!"
"Essie? Essie? Is she sick?"
"Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in
a car crash. They've got her on life support, but... There's no prognosis,
Robin. She isn't responding."
I didn't use my priorities. I didn't want to take the time. I went
straight to the Washington office of the Gateway Corp. who went to the
Secretary of Defense, who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane
leaving Boiling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
The flight was three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the
way. There were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn't
even want them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left
me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love
of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of
my life after she was safely gone, also left me-without quite dying,
because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of
reach forever-that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I
wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot
law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between
source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable
for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All
you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the
"roof," but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms,
labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting
city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I
heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off
at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be
used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window
when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor's
office-he wouldn't be using it for some time-kicked out the insurance
adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two
senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from
our medical program.
Essie's pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were
good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the
machines for a while.
Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all
its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the
neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was
simply swamped.
I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was no Visitors, and no
visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door,
forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling
mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor's desk set until I found a
closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it
on. I couldn't see how well Essie was doing. I couldn't even tell for sure
which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time
to time to pass on little news items. She didn't bother with messages of
sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me
a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and
Harriet gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without
bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that
kind of programming. Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a
past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers,
and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men's
room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of
Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and
said, "Senor Broad'ead? Por favor." The cop was still at the door of
Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but
with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent
patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her
nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes
were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not
conscious.
Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn't enough time for
anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects
under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all
for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to
have one.
In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short,
pot-bellied old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked
at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. "Oh, yes, Mr.
Blackhead," he said. "Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is
responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a
short time toward evening."
I didn't bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top
questions on the list: "Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is
there anything she needs? -I mean anything."
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too
long. "Pain we can take care of, and she's already on Full Medical. I
understand you are an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing
for you to do. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe there'll be something
she'll need. Today, no. Her whole left side was crushed when the bus
folded in on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six
or seven hours, until somebody got to her."
I didn't know I had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A
little sympathy came through the contact lenses as he peered up at me.
"That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life.
Being squeezed was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have
bled to death." He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. "Um.
She's going to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two
ribs. Eight, ten, fourteen-maybe twenty square inches of new skin, and
there's considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we'll want a
transplant."
"If there's anything at all..."
"Nothing at all, Mr. Blackeu," he said, folding up the paper. "Nothing
now. Go away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be
able to talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you're
taking up."
Harriet had already arranged for the hotel to move Essie's things out
of her room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had
delivered toilet stuff and a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up
there. I didn't want to go out. I didn't enjoy seeing the cheerful
tipplers in the lobby bar, or the streets full of people who had got
safely through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing
it had been for them.
I made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much,
but not in staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and
played some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But
when they went from Stravinsky to Carl Orff that lusty, horny Catullus
poetry made me think about the last time I had played it with my lusty,
horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.
"Turn it off," I snapped and ever-vigilant Harriet stopped it in
midshriek.
"Do you want to receive messages, Robin?" she inquired froth the same
audio speaker.
I dried myself carefully, and then said: "In a minute. I might as
well." Dried, brushed, in clean clothes, I sat down in front of the
hotel's comm system. They weren't quite nice enough to give their guests
full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a
flat-plate display. She reassured me about Essie. She was continuously
monitoring, and everything was going well enough-not far enough, of