course. But not badly. Essie's own real flesh-and-blood doctor was in the
picture, and Harriet gave me a taped message from her. It translated to
don't worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don't worry quite as much as you
think you ought to.
Harriet had a batch of action messages for me to deal with. I
authorized another half-million dollars for fire-fighting in the food
mines, instructed Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for
our man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more
liquidity as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most
interesting programs report in, finishing with Albert's latest synoptic
from the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity
and efficiency. I had accepted the fact that Essie's chances of survival
were measurably improving all the time, so I didn't need to spare any
energy for grief. And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand
how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love's lovely
body, and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not
want to explore.
There was a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery,
in the course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I
didn't much like having there. That's okay. Once you take them out and
look at them-well, they're pretty bad, but at least they're outside, now,
not still inside and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program,
Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.
He was right, far as he went-one of the things I found unlikeable about
Sigfrid was that he was infuriatingly reliably right, all too much of the
time. What he didn't say was that you never got finished moving your
bowels. I kept coming up with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how
much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.
I turned Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent,
and watched some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink
out of the suite's adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn't
watching the PV, and I wasn't enjoying the drink. What I was doing was
encountering another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My
dearest beloved wife was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care,
and I was thinking about somebody else.
I turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped
onto the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. "What
can I do for you, Robin?" he beamed.
"I want you to talk to me about black holes," I said.
"Sure thing, Robin. But we've been over this a goad many times, you
know..."
"Fuck off, Albert! Just do it. And I don't mean in mathematics, I just
want you to explain them as simply as you can." One of these days I would
have to get Essie to rewrite Albert's program a little less
idiosyncratically.
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He
wrinkled his furry eyebrows. "Ah-ha," he said. "Uh-huh. Well, let's see."
"Is that a hard question for you?" I asked, more surprised than
sarcastic.
"Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start.
Well, let's start with light. You know that light is made up of particles
called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure..."
"Not that far back, Albert, please."
"All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of
light pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive
as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a
billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiation
pressure-call it the 'light pressure' from the nuclear reaction of
hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen.
Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in
only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers
in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that
part, Robin?"
"I think so. Get on with it."
"Well," he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can't
help wondering if he enjoys it! -"that's one of the ways black holes get
started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now
go on to the next part: escape velocity."
"I know what escape velocity is."
"Sure thing, Robin," he nodded, "an old Gateway prospector like you.
Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from
the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has
some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty
kilometers an hour-it wouldn't come back. It would reach escape velocity
and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you'd have to throw it a lot
faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster
than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.
"Now," he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light
it again, "if you..." tap, tap, "if you were on the surface of some object
that has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse.
Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high,
say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You
couldn't throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn't quite go that fast! So
even light..." puff, puff, "can't escape, because its velocity is ten
thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can't
escape, then nothing can escape; that's Einstein. If I may be excused the
vanity." He actually winked at me over his pipe. "So that's a black hole.
It's black because it can't radiate at all."
I said, "What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light."
Albert grinned ruefully. "Got me there, Robin, but we don't know how
they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole,
who knows? But we don't have any evidence of one of them ever doing it."
I thought that over for a moment. "Yet," I said.
"Well, yes, Robin," he agreed. "The problem, of going faster than
light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the
same problem." He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, "I guess
that's about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now."
I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently
puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really
nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated
light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. "Albert," I said,
"tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why
is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?"
"Well, Bob, sometimes it is," he said after a moment, "like that time.
But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to 'chat.' If
you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing
it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms
you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation,
involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches
through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and
metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as
are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance
to the tone of the particular chat. "'Tain't easy, Robin."
"You're smarter than you look, Albert," I said.
He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop.
"Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?"
I let him go, saying, "You're a good old machine, Albert." I stretched
out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least
he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging
question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to
some other program, and I couldn't remember when.
Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our
doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M. D., who came
to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in
a while. "Robin," she said, "I think Essie's out of danger."
"That's-marvelous!" I said, wishing I had saved words like "marvelous"
for when I really meant them, because they didn't do justice to the way I
felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of
course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I
had talked to-and, of course, had pumped all of Essie's medical history
back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we
wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that
she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie
instead.
"But don't go to see her tonight, Robin," she said. "Talk to her on the
phone if you want to-I prescribe it-but don't tire her out. By
tomorrow-well, I think she'll be stronger."
So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy,
but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep,
and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me
"Bob".
There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a
long time ago, that sometimes called me "Robin" and sometimes "Bob" and
even "Bobby". I hadn't talked to that particular program in quite a while,
because I hadn't felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.
Full Medical is-well, it's full medical. It's everything. If there's a
way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you've got it.
And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it-something under one
tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot.
Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.
Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of
Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over
the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business
as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people
paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung
machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses
moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up
in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of
which was the heart of me, namely my wife.
Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of
pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and
moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four
hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor
all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she
couldn't. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the
master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma's classmate supervising
a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going
on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby,
watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior
walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the
hospital in the hail. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was
wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. "Don't tire her out," he
said.
"I'm getting tired of hearing that."
He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me.
He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball
center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate.
There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters
who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the
most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn't have let that happen if he
hadn't been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.
I did not then appreciate how much "making it" she was going to have to
do.
She was still under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me
from seeing quite how used up she looked. The dayduty nurse retreated to
the sitting room, after telling me not to get Essie too tired, and we
talked for a while. We didn't say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your
talkative type person. She asked me what the news was from the Food
Factory, and when I had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she
asked what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four
or five thousand-word answers to her one-sentence questions it began to
dawn on me that talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn't
tire her out.
But she was talking, and even talking coherently, and did not seem
worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.
There was the usual raft of reports to get through and decisions to
make. When that was done I listened to Albert's latest reports from the
Food Factory for a while and then realized it was time for me to go to
sleep.
I lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn't restless. I wasn't exhausted.
I was just letting the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I
could hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie's
room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that
were keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not
taking it all in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours
before, Essie had been dead. Kaput. Xed. no longer alive. If it hadn't
been for Full Medical, and a lot of luck, I would along about now have
been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.
And inside my head there was a small minority of cells of the brain
that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just
might have been tidier all around if she hadn't been brought back to life.
This had nothing to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a
lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock when I heard she was
hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the
question came up a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever
polled, however asked.
I have never been entirely sure what the word "love" means. Especially
when applied to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment
of dialing Albert up and asking him to explain it. But I didn't. Albert
was the wrong program to ask, and I didn't want to start up with the right
one.
The synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the
Food Factory, and I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago
the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or
two from the action fronts. no cable, no satellites. Their orders went out
on sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could
share their skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the
Herter-Halls seemed like forever. Here was I at Ghent, and there were
they, Andy Jackson pounding the pee out of the British at New Orleans
weeks after the war was over. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on
how they were to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of
the boy, Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory
from its course. And five thousand astronomical units away, they were
doing what occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all
the questions would be moot.
As Essie mended, so did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her
lungs kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and
I could touch her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in
what went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she'd missed
her conference she grinned up at me. "AU on tape, dear Robin; have been
playing it back when you were busy."
"But you couldn't give your own paper..."
"You think? Why not? I wrote 'Robinette Broadhead' program for you, did
you not know I also wrote one for me? Conference moved in full
holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text.
To considerable approval. Even handled questions," she boasted, "by
borrowing your Albert program in drag."
Well, she's an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble
is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he
brought me down. He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General,
and I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me
through the blue contacts. "Yes, probably," he said. "But I'm not sure you
understand how serious her injuries are, Mr. Broadhead. All that's
happening now is that she's building up some reserves of strength. She's
going to need them."
"Well, I know that, Doe. There'll have to be another operation..."
"No. Not one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the
next couple of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don't want you
assuming that the results are a foregone conclusion," he lectured.
"There's a risk to every procedure, and she's up against some hairy ones.
Cherish her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I
don't guarantee it'll happen every time."
So I went in to see Essie in somewhat chastened mood to get on with the
cherishing.
The nurse was standing by her bed, and both of them were watching
Essie's tapes of the computer conference on her flatplate viewer. Since
Essie's plate was slaved to the big fullholographic interactive one I had
had moved into my room, there was a little yellow attention light in the
come; meant for me. Harriet had something she wanted to tell me about. It
could wait; when the light began to pulse and brighten and turn to red was
when it got important, and at the moment Essie was at the top of my
priorities. "You can leave us for a while, Alma," Essie said. The nurse
looked at me and shrugged why-not, so I took the chair next to the bed and
reached for Essie's hand.
"It's nice to be able to touch you again," I said.
Essie has a coarse, deep chuckle. I was glad to hear it. "Touch more in
a couple weeks," she said. "Meanwhile, no rule against kissing."
So, of course, I kissed her-hard enough so that something must have
registered on her telltales, because the day nurse popped her head in the
door to see what was going on. She didn't stop us, though. We stopped
ourselves. Essie reached up with her right hand-the left was still in its
cast, covering God knew what-and pushed her streaky dark-blonde hair away
from her eyes. "Very nice," she judged. "Do you want to see what Harriet
has to say?"
"Not particularly."
"Untrue," she said. "You have been talking to Dr. Ben, I see, and he
has told you to be sweet to me. But you always are, Robin, only not
everybody would notice." She grinned at me and turned her head to the
plate. "Harriet!" she called. "Robin is here."
I had not until that moment known that my secretary program would
respond to my wife's commands as well as my own. But I hadn't known she
could borrow my science program, either. Especially without my knowing
about it. When Harriet's cheerful and concerned face filled the screen I
told her, "If it's business I'll take it later-unless it can't wait?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that," Harriet said. "But Albert's desperate to
talk to you. He's got some good stuff from the Food Factory."
"I'll take it in the other room," I started, but Essie put her free
hand on mine.
"No. Here, Robin. I'm interested, too."
So I told Harriet to go ahead, and Albert's voice came on. But not
Albert's face. "Take a look at this," Albert said, and the screen filled
with a sort of American Gothic family portrait A man and a woman-not
really-a male and a female, standing side by side. They had faces and arms
and legs, and the female had breasts. Both had skungy beards and long hair
pulled into braids, and they were wearing wrap-around garments like saris,
with dots of color brightening the drab cloth.
I caught my breath. The pictures had taken me by surprise.
Albert appeared in the lower corner of the plate. "These are not
'real,' Robin," he said. "They are simply compositions generated by the
shipboard computer from Wan's, description. The boy says they are pretty
accurate, though."
I swallowed and glanced at Essie. I had to control my breathing before
I could ask, "Are these-are these what the Heechee look like?"
He frowned and chewed on his pipe stem. The figures on the screen
rotated solemnly, as though they were doing a slow folkdance, so that we
could see all sides. "There are some anomalies, Robin. For example, there
is the famous question of the Heechee ass. We have some Heechee furniture,
e. g., the seats before the control panels in their ships. From these it
was deduced that the Heechee bottom was not as the human bottom, because
there seems to be room for a large pendulant structure, perhaps a divided
body like a wasp's, hanging below the pelvis and between the legs. There
is nothing of this sort in the computer-generated image. But-Occam's
Razor, Robin."
"If I just give you time, you'll explain that," I commented.
"Sure thing, Robin, but it's a law of logic that I think you know. In
the absence of evidence, it is best to take the simplest theory. We know
of only two intelligent races in the history of the universe. These people
do not seem to belong to ours-the shape of the skull, and particularly the
jaw, is different; there is a triangular arcade, more like an ape's than a
human being's, and the teeth are quite anomalous. Therefore it is probable
that they belong to the other."
"Is somewhat scary," Essie offered softly. And it was. Especially to
me, since you might say that it was my responsibility. I was the one who
had ordered the Herter-Hall bunch to go out and look around, and if they
found the Heechee in the process..
I was not ready to think of what that might mean.
"What about the Dead Men? Do you have anything on them?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding his dustmop head. "Look at this."
The pictures winked away, and text rolled up the screen:
| MISSION REPORT
|
| Vessel 5-2, Voyage 081D31. Crew A. Meacham, D.
| Filgren, H. Meacham.
| Mission was science experiment, crew limited
| to allow instrumentation and computational
| equipment. Maximum lifesupport time estimated 800
| days. Vessel still unreported day 1200, presumed
| lost.
"It was only a fifty thousand dollar bonus-not much, but it was one of
the earliest from Gateway," Albert said over the text. "The one called 'H.
Meacham' appears to be the 'Dead Man' Wan calls Henrietta. She was a sort
of A. B. D. astrophysicist-you know, Robin, 'All But Dissertation'. She
blew that. When she tried to defend it they said it was more psychology
than physics, so she went to Gateway. The pilot's first name was Doris,
which checks, and the other person was Henrietta's husband, Arnold."
"So you've identified one of them? They were really real?"
"Sure thing, Robin-point nine nine sure, anyway. These Dead Men are
sometimes nonrational," he complained, reappearing on the plate. "And of
course we have had no opportunity for direct interrogation. The shipboard
computer is not really up to this kind of task. But, apart from the
confirmation of names, the mission seems appropriate. It was an
astrophysical investigation, and Henrietta's conversation includes
repeated references to astrophysical subjects. Once you subtract the
sexual ones, I mean," he twinkled, scratching his cheek with his pipestem.
"For example. 'Sagittarius A West'-a radio source at the center of the
Galaxy. 'NGC nag'. A giant elliptical galaxy, part of a large cluster.
'Average radial velocity of globular clusters'-in our own galaxy, that
comes to about 50 kilometers per second. 'High-redshift OSOs'..."
"You don't have to list them all," I said hastily. "Do you know what
they all mean? I mean, if you were talking about all those things, what
would you be talking about?"
Pause-but a short one; he was not accessing all the literature on the
subject, he had already done that "Cosmology," he said. "Specifically, I
think I would be talking about the classic HoyleOpik-Gamow controversy;
that is, whether the universe is closed, or open ended, or cyclical.
Whether it is in a steady state, or began with a big bang."
He paused again, but this time it was to let me think. I did, but not
to much effect "There doesn't seem to be much nourishment in that," I
said.
"Perhaps not, Rabin. It does sort of tie in with your questions about
black holes, though."
Well, damn your calculating heart, I thought, but did not say. He
looked innocent as a lamb, puffing away on his old pipe, calm and serious.
"That'll be all for now," I ordered, and kept my eyes on the blank screen
long after he had disappeared, in case Essie was going to ask me about why
I had been inquiring about black holes.
Well, she didn't. She just lay back, looking at the mirrors on the
ceiling. After a while she said, "Dear Robin, know what I wish?"
I was ready for it. "What, Essie?"
"Wish I could scratch."
All I could manage to say was, "Oh." I felt deflated-no; plugged up. I
was all ready to defend myself-with all gentle care, of course, because of
Essie's condition. And I didn't have to. I picked up her hand. "I was
worried about you," I offered.
"Yes, so was I," she said practically. "Tell me, Robin. Is true that
the fevers are from some sort of Heechee mind-ray?"
"Something like that, I suppose. Albert says it's electromagnetic, but
that's all I know." I stroked the veins on the back of her hand, and she
moved restlessly. But only from the neck up.
"I am apprehensive about Heechee, Robin," she said.
"That's very sensible. Even temperate. Me, I'm scared shitless." And,
as a matter of fact I was; in fact, I was trembling. The little yellow
light winked on at the corner of the screen.
"Somebody wants to talk to you, Robin."
"They can wait. I'm talking to the woman I love right now."
"Thank you. Robin? If you are scared of Heechee as I am, how is it that
you go right ahead?"
"Well, honey, what choice do I have? There's fifty days of dead time.
What we just heard is ancient history, twenty-five days old. If I told
them to break off and go home right now, it would be twenty-five days
before they heard it."
"Surely, yes. But if you could stop, would you?" I didn't answer. I was
feeling very strange-a little frightened, a lot unlike myself. "What if
Heechee don't like us, Robin?" she asked.
And what a good question that was! I had been asking it of myself ever
since the first day I considered getting into a Gateway prospecting ship
and setting out to explore for myself. What if we meet the Heechee and
they don't like us? What if they squash us like flies, torture us, enslave
us, experiment on us-what if they simply ignore us? With my eyes on the
yellow dot, which was beginning to pulse slowly, I said, mothering her,
"Well, there's not much chance that they will actually do us any harm..."
"I do not need soothing, Robin!" She was distinctly edgy, and so was I.
Something must have been showing up on her monitors, because the day nurse
looked in again, hovered indecisively in the doorway, and went away.
I said, "Essie, the stakes are too big. Remember last year in
Calcutta?" We had gone to one of her seminars, and had cut it short
because we couldn't bear the sight of the abject city of two hundred
million paupers.
Her eyes were on me, and she was frowning. "Yes, I know, starvation.
There has always been starvation, Robin."
"Not like this! Not like what it will be before very long, if something
doesn't happen to prevent it! The world is bursting at the seams. Albert
says..." I hesitated. I didn't actually want to tell her what Albert said.
Siberia was already out of food production, its fragile land looking like
the Gobi because of overpressure. The topsoil in the American Midwest was
down to scant inches, and even the food mines were straining to keep up
with demand. What Albert said was that we had maybe ten years.
The signal light had gone to red and was winking rapidly, but I didn't
want to interrupt myself. "Essie," I said, "if we can make the Food
Factory work, we can bring CHON-food to all the starving people, and that
means no more starvation ever. That's only the beginning. If we can figure
out how to build Heechee ships for ourselves, and make them go where we
like-then we can colonize new planets. Lots of them. More than that. With
Heechee technology we can take all the asteroids in the solar system and
turn them into Gateways. Build space habitats. Terraform planets. We can
make a paradise for a million times the population of the Earth, for the
next million years!"
I stopped, because I realized I was babbling. I felt sad and delirious,
worried and-lustful; and from the expression on Essie's face she was
feeling something strange too. "Those are very good reasons, Robin," she
began, and that was as far as she got The signal light was bright ruby red
and vibrating like a pulsar; and then it winked away and Albert Einstein's
worried face appeared on the screen. I had never known him to appear
without being invited before.
"Robin," he cried, "there is another emanation of the fever!"
I stood up shaking. "But it isn't time," I objected stupidly.
"It has happened, Robin, and it is rather strange. It peaked, let me
see, just under one hundred seconds ago. I believe-Yes," he nodded,
seeming to listen to an inaudible voice, "it is dying away."
And, as a matter of fact, I was already feeling less strange. no attack
had ever been so short, and no other had quite felt like that Apparently
somebody else was experimenting with the couch.
"Albert," I said, "send a priority message to the Food Factory. Desist
immediately, repeat immediately, from any further use of the couch for any
purpose. Dismantle it if possible without irreversible damage. You will
forfeit all pay and bonuses if there is any further breach of this
directive. Got it?"
"It's already on its way, Robin," he said, and disappeared.
Essie and I looked at each other for a moment. "But you did not tell
them to abandon the expedition and come back," she said at last.
I shrugged. "It doesn't change anything," I said.
"No," she agreed. "And you have given me some really very good reasons,
Robin. But are they your reasons?"
I didn't answer.
I knew what Essie thought were my reasons for pushing on into the
exploration of Heechee space, regardless of fevers or costs or risks. She
thought my reasons had a name, and the name was Gelle-Kiara Moynlin. And I
sometimes was not sure she was wrong.
Wherever Lurvy moved in the ship, she was always conscious of the
mottled gray pattern in the viewplate. It showed nothing she could
recognize, but it was a nothing she had seen before, for months on end.
While they were traveling faster than light on the way to Heechee
Heaven they were alone. The universe was empty around them, except for
that pebbly, shifting gray. They were the universe. Even on the long climb
to the Food Factory it had not been this solitary. At least there were
stars. Even planets. In tau space, or whatever crazy kind of space Heechee
ships drove through or tunneled under or sidestepped around, there was
nothing. Last times Lurvy had been in that much emptiness had been in her
Gateway missions, and they were not sweet memories at all.
This ship was far the biggest she had ever seen. Gateway's largest held
five people. This could have housed twenty or more. It contained eight
separate compartments. Three were cargo, filled automatically (Wan
explained) with the output of the Food Factory while the ship was docked
there. Two seemed to be staterooms, but not for human beings. If the
"bunks" that rolled out from the walls were bunks indeed, they were too
tiny for human adults. One of the rooms Wan identified as his own, which
he invited Janine to share. When Lurvy vetoed the notion he gave in
sulkily, and so they roomed in segregated style, boys in one chamber,
girls in the other. The largest room, located in the mathematical center
of the ship, was shaped like a cylinder with tapered ends. It had neither
floor nor ceiling, except that three seats were fixed to the surface
facing the controls. As the surface was curved, the seats leaned toward
each other. They were simple enough, of the design Lurvy had lived with
for months at a time: Two flat metal slabs, joined together in a Vee. "On
Gateway ships we stretched webbing across them," Lurvy offered.
"What is 'webbing'?" asked Wan; and, when it was explained, said, "What
a good idea. I will do that next trip. I can steal some material from the
Old Ones."
As in all Heechee ships, the controls themselves were nearly automatic.
There were a dozen knurled wheels in a row, with colored lights for each
wheel. As the wheels were turned (not that anyone would ever turn them
while in flight; that was well established suicide), the lights changed
color and intensity, and developed bands of light and dark like spectrum
lines. They represented course settings. Not even Wan could read them,
much less Lurvy or the others. But since Lurvy's time on Gateway, at great
expense in prospectors' lives, the big brains had accumulated a
considerable store of data. Some colors meant a good chance of something
worthwhile. Some referred to the length of the trip the course director
was set for. Some-many were filed away as no-nos, because every ship that
had entered faster-than-light space with those settings had stayed there.
Or somewhere. Had, at least, never returned to Gateway. Out of habit and
orders, Lurvy photographed every fluctuation of control lights and
viewscreen, even when the screen showed nothing she could recognize as
worth photographing. An hour after the group left the Food Factory, the
star patterns began to shrink together to a winking point of brightness.
They had reached the speed of light. And then even the point was gone. The
screen took on the appearance of gray mud that raindrops had spattered,
and stayed that way.
To Wan, of course, the ship was only his familiar schoolbus, used for
commuting back and forth since he was old enough to squeeze the launch
teat. Paul had never been in a real Heechee ship before, and was subdued
for days. Neither had Janine, but one more marvel was nothing unusual in
her fourteen-year-old life. For Lurvy, something else. It was a bigger
version of the ships in which she had earned her Out bangles-and precious
little else-and therefore frightening.
She could not help it. She could not convince herself that this trip,
at least, was a regular shuttle run. She had learned too much fear
blundering into the unknown as a Gateway pilot. She pushed herself around
its vast-comparatively vast-space (nearly a hundred and fifty cubic
meters!), and worried. It was not only the muddy viewscreen that kept her
attention. There was the shiny golden lozenge, bigger than a man, that was
thought to contain the FTL drive machinery and was known to explode
totally if opened. There was the crystal, glassy spiral that got hot (no
one had ever known why) from time to time, and lit up with tiny hot flecks
of radiance at the beginning and end of each trip, and at one other very
important time.
It was that time that Lurvy was watching for. And when, exactly
twenty-four days, five hours and fifty-six minutes after they left the
Food Factory, the golden coil flickered and began to light, she could not
help a great sigh of relief.
"What's the matter?" Wan shrilled suspiciously.
"Just that we're halfway now," she said, noting the time in her log.
"That's the turnaround point. That's what you look for in a Gateway ship.
If you reach the halfway point with only a quarter of your life-support
gone you know you won't run out and starve on the way home."
Wan pouted. "Don't you trust me, Lurvy? We will not starve."
"It feels good to know for sure," she grinned, and then lost the grin,
because she was thinking about what was at the end of the trip.
So they rubbed along together, the best way they could, getting on each
other's nerves a thousand times apiece a day. Paul taught Wan to play
chess, to keep his mind off Janine. Wan patiently-more often
impatiently-rehearsed again and again everything he could tell them about
Heechee Heaven and its occupants.
They slept as much as they could. In the restraining net next to Paul,
Wan's teen-aged juices bubbled and flowed. He tossed and turned in the
random, tiny accelerations of the ship, wishing he were alone so that he
could do those things that appeared to be prohibited when one was not
alone-or wishing he were not alone, but with Janine, so that he could do
those even better things Tiny Jim and Henrietta had described to him. He
had asked Henrietta any number of times what the female role was in this
conjugation. To this she always responded, even when she would not talk
about anything else; but almost never in a way that was helpful to Wan.
However her sentences began, they almost always ended by returning
tearfully to the subject of her terrible betrayals by her husband and that
floozy, Doris.
He did not know, even, in just what physical ways the female departed
from the male. Pictures and words did not do it. Toward the end of the
trip curiosity overpowered acculturation, and he begged Janine or Lurvy,
either one, to let him see for himself. Even without touching. "Why, you
filthy beast," said Janine diagnostically. She was not angry. She was
smiling. "Bide your time, boy, you'll get your chances."
But Lurvy was not amused, and when Wan had gone disconsolately away she
and her sister had, for them, a long talk. As long as Janine would
tolerate. "Lurvy, dear," she said at last, "I know. I know I'm only
fifteen-well, almost-and Wan's not much older. I know that I don't want to
get pregnant four years away from a doctor, and with all kinds of things
coming up that we don't know how we'll deal with-I know all that. You
think I'm just your snotty kid sister. Well, I am. But I'm your smart
snotty kid sister. When you say something worth listening to I listen. So
piss off, dear Lurvy." Smiling comfortably, she pushed herself away after
Wan, and then stopped and returned to kiss Lurvy. "You and Pop," she said.
"You both drive me straight up the wall. But I love you both a lot-and
Paul, too."
It was not altogether Wan's fault, Lurvy knew. They were all smelling
extremely high. Among all their sweats and secretions were pheromones
enough to make a monk horny, much less an impressionable virgin kid. And
that was not at all Wan's fault, in fact exactly the reverse. If he had
not insisted, they would not have lugged so much water aboard; if they had
not, they would be even filthier and sweatier than their rationed sponge
baths left them. They had, when you came right down to it, left the Food
Factory far too impulsively. Payter had been right.
Astonishingly, Lurvy realized that she actually missed the old man. In
the ship they were wholly cut off from communication of any kind. What was
he doing? Was he still well? They had had to take the mobile bio-assay
unit-they had only one, and four people needed it more than one. But that
was not really true, either, because away from the shipboard computer it
was balled into a shiny, motionless mass, and would stay that way until
they established radio contact with Vera from Heechee Heaven-and
meanwhile, what was happening to her father?
The curious thing was that Lurvy loved the old man, and thought that he
loved her back. He had given every sign of it but verbal ones. It was his
money and ambition that had put them all on the flight to the Food Factory
in the first place, buying them participants' shares by scraping the
bottom of the money, if not of the ambition. It had been his money that
had paid for her going to Gateway in the first place, and when the gamble
went sour he had not reproached her. Or not directly, and not much.
After six weeks in Wan's ship, Lurvy began to feel adjusted to it. She
even felt fairly comfortable, not counting the smells and irritations and
worries; at least, as long as she didn't think too much about the trips
that had earned her her five Out bangles from Gateway. There was very
little good to remember in any of them.
Lurvy's first trip had been a washout. Fourteen months of round-trip
travel to come out circling a planet that had been flamed clean in a nova
eruption. Maybe something had been there once. Nothing was there when
Lurvy arrived, stark solitary and already talking to herself in her
one-person ship. That had cured her of single flights, and the next was in
a Three. no better. None of them any better. She became famous in Gateway,
an object of curiosity-strong contender for the record of most flights
taken and fewest profits returned. It was not an honor she liked, but it
was never as bad until the last flight of all.
That was disaster.
Before they even reached their destination she had awakened out of an
edgy, restless sleep to horror. The woman she had made her special friend
was floating bloodily next to her, the other woman also dead not far away,
and the two men who made up the rest of the Five's crew engaged in
screaming, mutilating hand-to-hand battle.
The rules of the Gateway Corporation provided that any payments
resulting from a voyage were to be divided equally among the survivors.
Her shipmate Stratos Kristianides had made up his mind to be the only
survivor.
In actuality, he didn't survive. He lost the battle to her other
shipmate, and lover, Hector Possanbee. The winner, with Lurvy, went on to
find-again-nothing. Smoldering red gas giant. Pitiful little binary
Class-M companion star. And no way of reaching the only detectable planet,
a huge methane-covered Jupiter of a thing, without dying in the attempt.
Lurvy had come back to Earth after that with her tail between her legs,
and no second chance in sight. Payter had given her that opportunity, and
she did not think there would be another. The hundred and some thousand
dollars it had cost him to pay her way to Gateway had put a very big dent
in the money he had accumulated over his sixty or seventy years-she didn't
really know how many years-of life. She had failed him. Not just him. And
she accepted, out of his kindness and forbearance to hate her, the fact
that he really did love his daughter-and kind, pointless Paul and silly
young Janine, too. In some way, Payter loved them all.
And was getting very little out of it, Lurvy judged.
She rubbed her Out bangles moodily. They had been very expensive to
obtain.
She was not easy in her mind about her father, or about what lay ahead.
Making love to Paul helped pass the time-when they could convince
themselves that they didn't have to supervise the younger ones for a
quarter of an hour or so. It was not the same for Lurvy as making love to
Hector, the man who had survived the last Gateway flight with her, the man
who had asked her to marry him. The man who asked her to ship out with him
again and to build a life together. Short, broad, always active, always
alert, a dynamo in bed, kind and patient when she was sick or irritable or
scared-there were a hundred reasons why she should have married Hector.
And only one, really, why she did not. When she was wrenched out of that
terrible sleep she had found Hector and Stratos battling. While she
watched, Stratos died.
Hector had explained to her that Stratos had gone out of control to try
to slay them all; but she had been asleep when the slaughter started. One
of the men had obviously tried to murder his shipmates.
But she had never known for sure which one.
He proposed to her when things were bleakest and grimiest, a day before
they reached Gateway on the sorry return trip. "We are really most
delightfully good together, Dorema," he said, arms about her, consolingly.
"Just us and no one else. I think I could not have borne this with the
others around. Next time we will be more fortunate! So let's get married,
please?"
She burrowed her chin into his hard, warm, cocoa-colored shoulder.
picture, and Harriet gave me a taped message from her. It translated to
don't worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don't worry quite as much as you
think you ought to.
Harriet had a batch of action messages for me to deal with. I
authorized another half-million dollars for fire-fighting in the food
mines, instructed Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for
our man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more
liquidity as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most
interesting programs report in, finishing with Albert's latest synoptic
from the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity
and efficiency. I had accepted the fact that Essie's chances of survival
were measurably improving all the time, so I didn't need to spare any
energy for grief. And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand
how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love's lovely
body, and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not
want to explore.
There was a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery,
in the course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I
didn't much like having there. That's okay. Once you take them out and
look at them-well, they're pretty bad, but at least they're outside, now,
not still inside and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program,
Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.
He was right, far as he went-one of the things I found unlikeable about
Sigfrid was that he was infuriatingly reliably right, all too much of the
time. What he didn't say was that you never got finished moving your
bowels. I kept coming up with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how
much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.
I turned Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent,
and watched some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink
out of the suite's adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn't
watching the PV, and I wasn't enjoying the drink. What I was doing was
encountering another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My
dearest beloved wife was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care,
and I was thinking about somebody else.
I turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped
onto the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. "What
can I do for you, Robin?" he beamed.
"I want you to talk to me about black holes," I said.
"Sure thing, Robin. But we've been over this a goad many times, you
know..."
"Fuck off, Albert! Just do it. And I don't mean in mathematics, I just
want you to explain them as simply as you can." One of these days I would
have to get Essie to rewrite Albert's program a little less
idiosyncratically.
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He
wrinkled his furry eyebrows. "Ah-ha," he said. "Uh-huh. Well, let's see."
"Is that a hard question for you?" I asked, more surprised than
sarcastic.
"Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start.
Well, let's start with light. You know that light is made up of particles
called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure..."
"Not that far back, Albert, please."
"All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of
light pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive
as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a
billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiation
pressure-call it the 'light pressure' from the nuclear reaction of
hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen.
Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in
only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers
in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that
part, Robin?"
"I think so. Get on with it."
"Well," he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can't
help wondering if he enjoys it! -"that's one of the ways black holes get
started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now
go on to the next part: escape velocity."
"I know what escape velocity is."
"Sure thing, Robin," he nodded, "an old Gateway prospector like you.
Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from
the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has
some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty
kilometers an hour-it wouldn't come back. It would reach escape velocity
and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you'd have to throw it a lot
faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster
than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.
"Now," he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light
it again, "if you..." tap, tap, "if you were on the surface of some object
that has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse.
Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high,
say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You
couldn't throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn't quite go that fast! So
even light..." puff, puff, "can't escape, because its velocity is ten
thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can't
escape, then nothing can escape; that's Einstein. If I may be excused the
vanity." He actually winked at me over his pipe. "So that's a black hole.
It's black because it can't radiate at all."
I said, "What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light."
Albert grinned ruefully. "Got me there, Robin, but we don't know how
they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole,
who knows? But we don't have any evidence of one of them ever doing it."
I thought that over for a moment. "Yet," I said.
"Well, yes, Robin," he agreed. "The problem, of going faster than
light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the
same problem." He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, "I guess
that's about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now."
I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently
puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really
nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated
light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. "Albert," I said,
"tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why
is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?"
"Well, Bob, sometimes it is," he said after a moment, "like that time.
But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to 'chat.' If
you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing
it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms
you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation,
involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches
through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and
metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as
are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance
to the tone of the particular chat. "'Tain't easy, Robin."
"You're smarter than you look, Albert," I said.
He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop.
"Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?"
I let him go, saying, "You're a good old machine, Albert." I stretched
out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least
he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging
question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to
some other program, and I couldn't remember when.
Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our
doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M. D., who came
to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in
a while. "Robin," she said, "I think Essie's out of danger."
"That's-marvelous!" I said, wishing I had saved words like "marvelous"
for when I really meant them, because they didn't do justice to the way I
felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of
course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I
had talked to-and, of course, had pumped all of Essie's medical history
back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we
wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that
she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie
instead.
"But don't go to see her tonight, Robin," she said. "Talk to her on the
phone if you want to-I prescribe it-but don't tire her out. By
tomorrow-well, I think she'll be stronger."
So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy,
but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep,
and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me
"Bob".
There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a
long time ago, that sometimes called me "Robin" and sometimes "Bob" and
even "Bobby". I hadn't talked to that particular program in quite a while,
because I hadn't felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.
Full Medical is-well, it's full medical. It's everything. If there's a
way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you've got it.
And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it-something under one
tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot.
Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.
Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of
Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over
the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business
as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people
paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung
machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses
moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up
in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of
which was the heart of me, namely my wife.
Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of
pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and
moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four
hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor
all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she
couldn't. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the
master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma's classmate supervising
a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going
on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby,
watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior
walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the
hospital in the hail. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was
wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. "Don't tire her out," he
said.
"I'm getting tired of hearing that."
He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me.
He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball
center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate.
There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters
who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the
most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn't have let that happen if he
hadn't been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.
I did not then appreciate how much "making it" she was going to have to
do.
She was still under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me
from seeing quite how used up she looked. The dayduty nurse retreated to
the sitting room, after telling me not to get Essie too tired, and we
talked for a while. We didn't say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your
talkative type person. She asked me what the news was from the Food
Factory, and when I had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she
asked what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four
or five thousand-word answers to her one-sentence questions it began to
dawn on me that talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn't
tire her out.
But she was talking, and even talking coherently, and did not seem
worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.
There was the usual raft of reports to get through and decisions to
make. When that was done I listened to Albert's latest reports from the
Food Factory for a while and then realized it was time for me to go to
sleep.
I lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn't restless. I wasn't exhausted.
I was just letting the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I
could hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie's
room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that
were keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not
taking it all in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours
before, Essie had been dead. Kaput. Xed. no longer alive. If it hadn't
been for Full Medical, and a lot of luck, I would along about now have
been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.
And inside my head there was a small minority of cells of the brain
that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just
might have been tidier all around if she hadn't been brought back to life.
This had nothing to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a
lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock when I heard she was
hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the
question came up a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever
polled, however asked.
I have never been entirely sure what the word "love" means. Especially
when applied to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment
of dialing Albert up and asking him to explain it. But I didn't. Albert
was the wrong program to ask, and I didn't want to start up with the right
one.
The synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the
Food Factory, and I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago
the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or
two from the action fronts. no cable, no satellites. Their orders went out
on sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could
share their skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the
Herter-Halls seemed like forever. Here was I at Ghent, and there were
they, Andy Jackson pounding the pee out of the British at New Orleans
weeks after the war was over. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on
how they were to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of
the boy, Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory
from its course. And five thousand astronomical units away, they were
doing what occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all
the questions would be moot.
As Essie mended, so did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her
lungs kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and
I could touch her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in
what went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she'd missed
her conference she grinned up at me. "AU on tape, dear Robin; have been
playing it back when you were busy."
"But you couldn't give your own paper..."
"You think? Why not? I wrote 'Robinette Broadhead' program for you, did
you not know I also wrote one for me? Conference moved in full
holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text.
To considerable approval. Even handled questions," she boasted, "by
borrowing your Albert program in drag."
Well, she's an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble
is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he
brought me down. He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General,
and I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me
through the blue contacts. "Yes, probably," he said. "But I'm not sure you
understand how serious her injuries are, Mr. Broadhead. All that's
happening now is that she's building up some reserves of strength. She's
going to need them."
"Well, I know that, Doe. There'll have to be another operation..."
"No. Not one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the
next couple of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don't want you
assuming that the results are a foregone conclusion," he lectured.
"There's a risk to every procedure, and she's up against some hairy ones.
Cherish her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I
don't guarantee it'll happen every time."
So I went in to see Essie in somewhat chastened mood to get on with the
cherishing.
The nurse was standing by her bed, and both of them were watching
Essie's tapes of the computer conference on her flatplate viewer. Since
Essie's plate was slaved to the big fullholographic interactive one I had
had moved into my room, there was a little yellow attention light in the
come; meant for me. Harriet had something she wanted to tell me about. It
could wait; when the light began to pulse and brighten and turn to red was
when it got important, and at the moment Essie was at the top of my
priorities. "You can leave us for a while, Alma," Essie said. The nurse
looked at me and shrugged why-not, so I took the chair next to the bed and
reached for Essie's hand.
"It's nice to be able to touch you again," I said.
Essie has a coarse, deep chuckle. I was glad to hear it. "Touch more in
a couple weeks," she said. "Meanwhile, no rule against kissing."
So, of course, I kissed her-hard enough so that something must have
registered on her telltales, because the day nurse popped her head in the
door to see what was going on. She didn't stop us, though. We stopped
ourselves. Essie reached up with her right hand-the left was still in its
cast, covering God knew what-and pushed her streaky dark-blonde hair away
from her eyes. "Very nice," she judged. "Do you want to see what Harriet
has to say?"
"Not particularly."
"Untrue," she said. "You have been talking to Dr. Ben, I see, and he
has told you to be sweet to me. But you always are, Robin, only not
everybody would notice." She grinned at me and turned her head to the
plate. "Harriet!" she called. "Robin is here."
I had not until that moment known that my secretary program would
respond to my wife's commands as well as my own. But I hadn't known she
could borrow my science program, either. Especially without my knowing
about it. When Harriet's cheerful and concerned face filled the screen I
told her, "If it's business I'll take it later-unless it can't wait?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that," Harriet said. "But Albert's desperate to
talk to you. He's got some good stuff from the Food Factory."
"I'll take it in the other room," I started, but Essie put her free
hand on mine.
"No. Here, Robin. I'm interested, too."
So I told Harriet to go ahead, and Albert's voice came on. But not
Albert's face. "Take a look at this," Albert said, and the screen filled
with a sort of American Gothic family portrait A man and a woman-not
really-a male and a female, standing side by side. They had faces and arms
and legs, and the female had breasts. Both had skungy beards and long hair
pulled into braids, and they were wearing wrap-around garments like saris,
with dots of color brightening the drab cloth.
I caught my breath. The pictures had taken me by surprise.
Albert appeared in the lower corner of the plate. "These are not
'real,' Robin," he said. "They are simply compositions generated by the
shipboard computer from Wan's, description. The boy says they are pretty
accurate, though."
I swallowed and glanced at Essie. I had to control my breathing before
I could ask, "Are these-are these what the Heechee look like?"
He frowned and chewed on his pipe stem. The figures on the screen
rotated solemnly, as though they were doing a slow folkdance, so that we
could see all sides. "There are some anomalies, Robin. For example, there
is the famous question of the Heechee ass. We have some Heechee furniture,
e. g., the seats before the control panels in their ships. From these it
was deduced that the Heechee bottom was not as the human bottom, because
there seems to be room for a large pendulant structure, perhaps a divided
body like a wasp's, hanging below the pelvis and between the legs. There
is nothing of this sort in the computer-generated image. But-Occam's
Razor, Robin."
"If I just give you time, you'll explain that," I commented.
"Sure thing, Robin, but it's a law of logic that I think you know. In
the absence of evidence, it is best to take the simplest theory. We know
of only two intelligent races in the history of the universe. These people
do not seem to belong to ours-the shape of the skull, and particularly the
jaw, is different; there is a triangular arcade, more like an ape's than a
human being's, and the teeth are quite anomalous. Therefore it is probable
that they belong to the other."
"Is somewhat scary," Essie offered softly. And it was. Especially to
me, since you might say that it was my responsibility. I was the one who
had ordered the Herter-Hall bunch to go out and look around, and if they
found the Heechee in the process..
I was not ready to think of what that might mean.
"What about the Dead Men? Do you have anything on them?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding his dustmop head. "Look at this."
The pictures winked away, and text rolled up the screen:
| MISSION REPORT
|
| Vessel 5-2, Voyage 081D31. Crew A. Meacham, D.
| Filgren, H. Meacham.
| Mission was science experiment, crew limited
| to allow instrumentation and computational
| equipment. Maximum lifesupport time estimated 800
| days. Vessel still unreported day 1200, presumed
| lost.
"It was only a fifty thousand dollar bonus-not much, but it was one of
the earliest from Gateway," Albert said over the text. "The one called 'H.
Meacham' appears to be the 'Dead Man' Wan calls Henrietta. She was a sort
of A. B. D. astrophysicist-you know, Robin, 'All But Dissertation'. She
blew that. When she tried to defend it they said it was more psychology
than physics, so she went to Gateway. The pilot's first name was Doris,
which checks, and the other person was Henrietta's husband, Arnold."
"So you've identified one of them? They were really real?"
"Sure thing, Robin-point nine nine sure, anyway. These Dead Men are
sometimes nonrational," he complained, reappearing on the plate. "And of
course we have had no opportunity for direct interrogation. The shipboard
computer is not really up to this kind of task. But, apart from the
confirmation of names, the mission seems appropriate. It was an
astrophysical investigation, and Henrietta's conversation includes
repeated references to astrophysical subjects. Once you subtract the
sexual ones, I mean," he twinkled, scratching his cheek with his pipestem.
"For example. 'Sagittarius A West'-a radio source at the center of the
Galaxy. 'NGC nag'. A giant elliptical galaxy, part of a large cluster.
'Average radial velocity of globular clusters'-in our own galaxy, that
comes to about 50 kilometers per second. 'High-redshift OSOs'..."
"You don't have to list them all," I said hastily. "Do you know what
they all mean? I mean, if you were talking about all those things, what
would you be talking about?"
Pause-but a short one; he was not accessing all the literature on the
subject, he had already done that "Cosmology," he said. "Specifically, I
think I would be talking about the classic HoyleOpik-Gamow controversy;
that is, whether the universe is closed, or open ended, or cyclical.
Whether it is in a steady state, or began with a big bang."
He paused again, but this time it was to let me think. I did, but not
to much effect "There doesn't seem to be much nourishment in that," I
said.
"Perhaps not, Rabin. It does sort of tie in with your questions about
black holes, though."
Well, damn your calculating heart, I thought, but did not say. He
looked innocent as a lamb, puffing away on his old pipe, calm and serious.
"That'll be all for now," I ordered, and kept my eyes on the blank screen
long after he had disappeared, in case Essie was going to ask me about why
I had been inquiring about black holes.
Well, she didn't. She just lay back, looking at the mirrors on the
ceiling. After a while she said, "Dear Robin, know what I wish?"
I was ready for it. "What, Essie?"
"Wish I could scratch."
All I could manage to say was, "Oh." I felt deflated-no; plugged up. I
was all ready to defend myself-with all gentle care, of course, because of
Essie's condition. And I didn't have to. I picked up her hand. "I was
worried about you," I offered.
"Yes, so was I," she said practically. "Tell me, Robin. Is true that
the fevers are from some sort of Heechee mind-ray?"
"Something like that, I suppose. Albert says it's electromagnetic, but
that's all I know." I stroked the veins on the back of her hand, and she
moved restlessly. But only from the neck up.
"I am apprehensive about Heechee, Robin," she said.
"That's very sensible. Even temperate. Me, I'm scared shitless." And,
as a matter of fact I was; in fact, I was trembling. The little yellow
light winked on at the corner of the screen.
"Somebody wants to talk to you, Robin."
"They can wait. I'm talking to the woman I love right now."
"Thank you. Robin? If you are scared of Heechee as I am, how is it that
you go right ahead?"
"Well, honey, what choice do I have? There's fifty days of dead time.
What we just heard is ancient history, twenty-five days old. If I told
them to break off and go home right now, it would be twenty-five days
before they heard it."
"Surely, yes. But if you could stop, would you?" I didn't answer. I was
feeling very strange-a little frightened, a lot unlike myself. "What if
Heechee don't like us, Robin?" she asked.
And what a good question that was! I had been asking it of myself ever
since the first day I considered getting into a Gateway prospecting ship
and setting out to explore for myself. What if we meet the Heechee and
they don't like us? What if they squash us like flies, torture us, enslave
us, experiment on us-what if they simply ignore us? With my eyes on the
yellow dot, which was beginning to pulse slowly, I said, mothering her,
"Well, there's not much chance that they will actually do us any harm..."
"I do not need soothing, Robin!" She was distinctly edgy, and so was I.
Something must have been showing up on her monitors, because the day nurse
looked in again, hovered indecisively in the doorway, and went away.
I said, "Essie, the stakes are too big. Remember last year in
Calcutta?" We had gone to one of her seminars, and had cut it short
because we couldn't bear the sight of the abject city of two hundred
million paupers.
Her eyes were on me, and she was frowning. "Yes, I know, starvation.
There has always been starvation, Robin."
"Not like this! Not like what it will be before very long, if something
doesn't happen to prevent it! The world is bursting at the seams. Albert
says..." I hesitated. I didn't actually want to tell her what Albert said.
Siberia was already out of food production, its fragile land looking like
the Gobi because of overpressure. The topsoil in the American Midwest was
down to scant inches, and even the food mines were straining to keep up
with demand. What Albert said was that we had maybe ten years.
The signal light had gone to red and was winking rapidly, but I didn't
want to interrupt myself. "Essie," I said, "if we can make the Food
Factory work, we can bring CHON-food to all the starving people, and that
means no more starvation ever. That's only the beginning. If we can figure
out how to build Heechee ships for ourselves, and make them go where we
like-then we can colonize new planets. Lots of them. More than that. With
Heechee technology we can take all the asteroids in the solar system and
turn them into Gateways. Build space habitats. Terraform planets. We can
make a paradise for a million times the population of the Earth, for the
next million years!"
I stopped, because I realized I was babbling. I felt sad and delirious,
worried and-lustful; and from the expression on Essie's face she was
feeling something strange too. "Those are very good reasons, Robin," she
began, and that was as far as she got The signal light was bright ruby red
and vibrating like a pulsar; and then it winked away and Albert Einstein's
worried face appeared on the screen. I had never known him to appear
without being invited before.
"Robin," he cried, "there is another emanation of the fever!"
I stood up shaking. "But it isn't time," I objected stupidly.
"It has happened, Robin, and it is rather strange. It peaked, let me
see, just under one hundred seconds ago. I believe-Yes," he nodded,
seeming to listen to an inaudible voice, "it is dying away."
And, as a matter of fact, I was already feeling less strange. no attack
had ever been so short, and no other had quite felt like that Apparently
somebody else was experimenting with the couch.
"Albert," I said, "send a priority message to the Food Factory. Desist
immediately, repeat immediately, from any further use of the couch for any
purpose. Dismantle it if possible without irreversible damage. You will
forfeit all pay and bonuses if there is any further breach of this
directive. Got it?"
"It's already on its way, Robin," he said, and disappeared.
Essie and I looked at each other for a moment. "But you did not tell
them to abandon the expedition and come back," she said at last.
I shrugged. "It doesn't change anything," I said.
"No," she agreed. "And you have given me some really very good reasons,
Robin. But are they your reasons?"
I didn't answer.
I knew what Essie thought were my reasons for pushing on into the
exploration of Heechee space, regardless of fevers or costs or risks. She
thought my reasons had a name, and the name was Gelle-Kiara Moynlin. And I
sometimes was not sure she was wrong.
Wherever Lurvy moved in the ship, she was always conscious of the
mottled gray pattern in the viewplate. It showed nothing she could
recognize, but it was a nothing she had seen before, for months on end.
While they were traveling faster than light on the way to Heechee
Heaven they were alone. The universe was empty around them, except for
that pebbly, shifting gray. They were the universe. Even on the long climb
to the Food Factory it had not been this solitary. At least there were
stars. Even planets. In tau space, or whatever crazy kind of space Heechee
ships drove through or tunneled under or sidestepped around, there was
nothing. Last times Lurvy had been in that much emptiness had been in her
Gateway missions, and they were not sweet memories at all.
This ship was far the biggest she had ever seen. Gateway's largest held
five people. This could have housed twenty or more. It contained eight
separate compartments. Three were cargo, filled automatically (Wan
explained) with the output of the Food Factory while the ship was docked
there. Two seemed to be staterooms, but not for human beings. If the
"bunks" that rolled out from the walls were bunks indeed, they were too
tiny for human adults. One of the rooms Wan identified as his own, which
he invited Janine to share. When Lurvy vetoed the notion he gave in
sulkily, and so they roomed in segregated style, boys in one chamber,
girls in the other. The largest room, located in the mathematical center
of the ship, was shaped like a cylinder with tapered ends. It had neither
floor nor ceiling, except that three seats were fixed to the surface
facing the controls. As the surface was curved, the seats leaned toward
each other. They were simple enough, of the design Lurvy had lived with
for months at a time: Two flat metal slabs, joined together in a Vee. "On
Gateway ships we stretched webbing across them," Lurvy offered.
"What is 'webbing'?" asked Wan; and, when it was explained, said, "What
a good idea. I will do that next trip. I can steal some material from the
Old Ones."
As in all Heechee ships, the controls themselves were nearly automatic.
There were a dozen knurled wheels in a row, with colored lights for each
wheel. As the wheels were turned (not that anyone would ever turn them
while in flight; that was well established suicide), the lights changed
color and intensity, and developed bands of light and dark like spectrum
lines. They represented course settings. Not even Wan could read them,
much less Lurvy or the others. But since Lurvy's time on Gateway, at great
expense in prospectors' lives, the big brains had accumulated a
considerable store of data. Some colors meant a good chance of something
worthwhile. Some referred to the length of the trip the course director
was set for. Some-many were filed away as no-nos, because every ship that
had entered faster-than-light space with those settings had stayed there.
Or somewhere. Had, at least, never returned to Gateway. Out of habit and
orders, Lurvy photographed every fluctuation of control lights and
viewscreen, even when the screen showed nothing she could recognize as
worth photographing. An hour after the group left the Food Factory, the
star patterns began to shrink together to a winking point of brightness.
They had reached the speed of light. And then even the point was gone. The
screen took on the appearance of gray mud that raindrops had spattered,
and stayed that way.
To Wan, of course, the ship was only his familiar schoolbus, used for
commuting back and forth since he was old enough to squeeze the launch
teat. Paul had never been in a real Heechee ship before, and was subdued
for days. Neither had Janine, but one more marvel was nothing unusual in
her fourteen-year-old life. For Lurvy, something else. It was a bigger
version of the ships in which she had earned her Out bangles-and precious
little else-and therefore frightening.
She could not help it. She could not convince herself that this trip,
at least, was a regular shuttle run. She had learned too much fear
blundering into the unknown as a Gateway pilot. She pushed herself around
its vast-comparatively vast-space (nearly a hundred and fifty cubic
meters!), and worried. It was not only the muddy viewscreen that kept her
attention. There was the shiny golden lozenge, bigger than a man, that was
thought to contain the FTL drive machinery and was known to explode
totally if opened. There was the crystal, glassy spiral that got hot (no
one had ever known why) from time to time, and lit up with tiny hot flecks
of radiance at the beginning and end of each trip, and at one other very
important time.
It was that time that Lurvy was watching for. And when, exactly
twenty-four days, five hours and fifty-six minutes after they left the
Food Factory, the golden coil flickered and began to light, she could not
help a great sigh of relief.
"What's the matter?" Wan shrilled suspiciously.
"Just that we're halfway now," she said, noting the time in her log.
"That's the turnaround point. That's what you look for in a Gateway ship.
If you reach the halfway point with only a quarter of your life-support
gone you know you won't run out and starve on the way home."
Wan pouted. "Don't you trust me, Lurvy? We will not starve."
"It feels good to know for sure," she grinned, and then lost the grin,
because she was thinking about what was at the end of the trip.
So they rubbed along together, the best way they could, getting on each
other's nerves a thousand times apiece a day. Paul taught Wan to play
chess, to keep his mind off Janine. Wan patiently-more often
impatiently-rehearsed again and again everything he could tell them about
Heechee Heaven and its occupants.
They slept as much as they could. In the restraining net next to Paul,
Wan's teen-aged juices bubbled and flowed. He tossed and turned in the
random, tiny accelerations of the ship, wishing he were alone so that he
could do those things that appeared to be prohibited when one was not
alone-or wishing he were not alone, but with Janine, so that he could do
those even better things Tiny Jim and Henrietta had described to him. He
had asked Henrietta any number of times what the female role was in this
conjugation. To this she always responded, even when she would not talk
about anything else; but almost never in a way that was helpful to Wan.
However her sentences began, they almost always ended by returning
tearfully to the subject of her terrible betrayals by her husband and that
floozy, Doris.
He did not know, even, in just what physical ways the female departed
from the male. Pictures and words did not do it. Toward the end of the
trip curiosity overpowered acculturation, and he begged Janine or Lurvy,
either one, to let him see for himself. Even without touching. "Why, you
filthy beast," said Janine diagnostically. She was not angry. She was
smiling. "Bide your time, boy, you'll get your chances."
But Lurvy was not amused, and when Wan had gone disconsolately away she
and her sister had, for them, a long talk. As long as Janine would
tolerate. "Lurvy, dear," she said at last, "I know. I know I'm only
fifteen-well, almost-and Wan's not much older. I know that I don't want to
get pregnant four years away from a doctor, and with all kinds of things
coming up that we don't know how we'll deal with-I know all that. You
think I'm just your snotty kid sister. Well, I am. But I'm your smart
snotty kid sister. When you say something worth listening to I listen. So
piss off, dear Lurvy." Smiling comfortably, she pushed herself away after
Wan, and then stopped and returned to kiss Lurvy. "You and Pop," she said.
"You both drive me straight up the wall. But I love you both a lot-and
Paul, too."
It was not altogether Wan's fault, Lurvy knew. They were all smelling
extremely high. Among all their sweats and secretions were pheromones
enough to make a monk horny, much less an impressionable virgin kid. And
that was not at all Wan's fault, in fact exactly the reverse. If he had
not insisted, they would not have lugged so much water aboard; if they had
not, they would be even filthier and sweatier than their rationed sponge
baths left them. They had, when you came right down to it, left the Food
Factory far too impulsively. Payter had been right.
Astonishingly, Lurvy realized that she actually missed the old man. In
the ship they were wholly cut off from communication of any kind. What was
he doing? Was he still well? They had had to take the mobile bio-assay
unit-they had only one, and four people needed it more than one. But that
was not really true, either, because away from the shipboard computer it
was balled into a shiny, motionless mass, and would stay that way until
they established radio contact with Vera from Heechee Heaven-and
meanwhile, what was happening to her father?
The curious thing was that Lurvy loved the old man, and thought that he
loved her back. He had given every sign of it but verbal ones. It was his
money and ambition that had put them all on the flight to the Food Factory
in the first place, buying them participants' shares by scraping the
bottom of the money, if not of the ambition. It had been his money that
had paid for her going to Gateway in the first place, and when the gamble
went sour he had not reproached her. Or not directly, and not much.
After six weeks in Wan's ship, Lurvy began to feel adjusted to it. She
even felt fairly comfortable, not counting the smells and irritations and
worries; at least, as long as she didn't think too much about the trips
that had earned her her five Out bangles from Gateway. There was very
little good to remember in any of them.
Lurvy's first trip had been a washout. Fourteen months of round-trip
travel to come out circling a planet that had been flamed clean in a nova
eruption. Maybe something had been there once. Nothing was there when
Lurvy arrived, stark solitary and already talking to herself in her
one-person ship. That had cured her of single flights, and the next was in
a Three. no better. None of them any better. She became famous in Gateway,
an object of curiosity-strong contender for the record of most flights
taken and fewest profits returned. It was not an honor she liked, but it
was never as bad until the last flight of all.
That was disaster.
Before they even reached their destination she had awakened out of an
edgy, restless sleep to horror. The woman she had made her special friend
was floating bloodily next to her, the other woman also dead not far away,
and the two men who made up the rest of the Five's crew engaged in
screaming, mutilating hand-to-hand battle.
The rules of the Gateway Corporation provided that any payments
resulting from a voyage were to be divided equally among the survivors.
Her shipmate Stratos Kristianides had made up his mind to be the only
survivor.
In actuality, he didn't survive. He lost the battle to her other
shipmate, and lover, Hector Possanbee. The winner, with Lurvy, went on to
find-again-nothing. Smoldering red gas giant. Pitiful little binary
Class-M companion star. And no way of reaching the only detectable planet,
a huge methane-covered Jupiter of a thing, without dying in the attempt.
Lurvy had come back to Earth after that with her tail between her legs,
and no second chance in sight. Payter had given her that opportunity, and
she did not think there would be another. The hundred and some thousand
dollars it had cost him to pay her way to Gateway had put a very big dent
in the money he had accumulated over his sixty or seventy years-she didn't
really know how many years-of life. She had failed him. Not just him. And
she accepted, out of his kindness and forbearance to hate her, the fact
that he really did love his daughter-and kind, pointless Paul and silly
young Janine, too. In some way, Payter loved them all.
And was getting very little out of it, Lurvy judged.
She rubbed her Out bangles moodily. They had been very expensive to
obtain.
She was not easy in her mind about her father, or about what lay ahead.
Making love to Paul helped pass the time-when they could convince
themselves that they didn't have to supervise the younger ones for a
quarter of an hour or so. It was not the same for Lurvy as making love to
Hector, the man who had survived the last Gateway flight with her, the man
who had asked her to marry him. The man who asked her to ship out with him
again and to build a life together. Short, broad, always active, always
alert, a dynamo in bed, kind and patient when she was sick or irritable or
scared-there were a hundred reasons why she should have married Hector.
And only one, really, why she did not. When she was wrenched out of that
terrible sleep she had found Hector and Stratos battling. While she
watched, Stratos died.
Hector had explained to her that Stratos had gone out of control to try
to slay them all; but she had been asleep when the slaughter started. One
of the men had obviously tried to murder his shipmates.
But she had never known for sure which one.
He proposed to her when things were bleakest and grimiest, a day before
they reached Gateway on the sorry return trip. "We are really most
delightfully good together, Dorema," he said, arms about her, consolingly.
"Just us and no one else. I think I could not have borne this with the
others around. Next time we will be more fortunate! So let's get married,
please?"
She burrowed her chin into his hard, warm, cocoa-colored shoulder.