But when I charged Albert with being caught flat-footed by it, he had
smiled that gentle, humble smile and poked his pipestem at his ear and
said, "Sure thing, Robin, if you mean the sort of surprise that one feels
when an unlikely contingency turns out to be real. But it was always a
contingency. Remember. The Heechee ships were able to navigate without
error to moving targets. That suggests the possibility of communication at
nearly instantaneous speeds over astronomical distances-ergo, a
faster-than-light radio."
"Then why didn't you tell me about it?" I demanded.
He scratched one sneakered foot against the other sockless ankle. "It
was only a possibility, Robin, estimated no more than point oh five. A
sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. We simply didn't have
enough evidence, until now."
I could have been chatting with Albert on the way down to Brasilia. But
I was traveling commercial-the company aircraft aren't fast enough for
those distances-and I like having Albert where I can see him when we talk,
so I spent my time voice-only with company business and Morton. And of
course with Harriet, who was under orders to check in once an hour, except
when I was asleep, with a quick status report on Essie.
Even hypersonic, a ten-thousand-kilometer flight takes a while, and I
had time for a lot of business. Morton wanted as much of it as he could
get, mostly to try to talk me out of meeting with Bover. "You have to take
him seriously, Robin," be whined through the plug in my ear. "Bover's
represented by Anjelos, Carpenter and Gutmann, and they're high-powered
people, with really good legal programs."
"Better than you?"
Hesitation. "Well-I hope not, Robin."
"Tell me something, Morton. If Bover didn't have much of a case to
begin with, why are these high-powered people bothering with him?"
Although I couldn't see him, I knew that Morton would be assuming his
defensive look, partly apologetic, partly you-laymen-wouldn't-understand.
"It's not all that weak, Robin. And it hasn't gone well for us so far. And
it's takking on some larger dimension than we originally estimated. And I
assume that they thought their connections would patch up the weak spots-I
also assume that they're in for a son-of-a-bitching big contingency fee.
You'd be better advised to patch up some of our own weak spots than take a
chance with Bover, Robin. Your pal Senator Praggler is on this month's
oversight committee. Go see him first."
"I'll go see him, but not first," I told Morton, and cut him off as we
circled in for a landing. I could see the big Gateway Authority tower
overshadowing the silly flat saucer over the House of Representatives, and
off up the lake the bright reflections of tin roofs in the Free Town. I
had cut it pretty close. My date with Trish Bover's widower (or husband,
depending on how you looked at it) was in less than an hour, and I didn't
really want to keep him waiting.
I didn't have to. I was already sitting at a table in the courtyard
dining room of the Brasilia Palace hotel when he came in. Skinny. Tall.
Balding. He sat down nervously, as if he were in a desperate hurry, or
desperately eager to be somewhere else. But when I offered him lunch he
took ten minutes to study the menu and wound up ordering all of it. Fresh
hearts of palm salad, little fresh-water shrimp from the lake, all the way
down to that wonderful raw pineapple flown up from Rio. "This is my
favorite hotel in Brasilia," I informed him genially, hostfully, as he
poured dressing on the hearts of palm. "Old. But good. I suppose you've
seen all the sights?"
"I've lived here for eight years, Mr. Broadhead."
"Oh, I see." I hadn't known where the hell the son of a bitch lived, he
was just a name and a nuisance. So much for travelog. I tried common
interests. "I got a flash synoptic from the Food Factory on the way down
here. The Herter-Hall party is doing well, finding out some marvelous
things. Did you know that we've identified four of the Dead Men as actual
Gateway prospectors?"
"I saw something about that on the PV, yes, Mr. Broadhead. It's quite
exciting."
"More than that, Bover. It can change this whole world around-and make
us all filthy rich, too." He nodded, his mouth full of salad. He kept on
keeping his mouth full, too; I wasn't doing much good trying to draw him
out. "All right," I said, "why don't we get down to business? I want you
to drop that injunction."
He chewed and swallowed. With the next forkful of shrimp poised at his
mouth he said, "I know you do, Mr. Broadhead," and refilled the mouth.
I took a long, slow sip of my wine and seltzer and said, with complete
control of my voice and manner, "Mr. Bover, I don't think you understand
what the issues are. I don't mean to put you down. I just can't believe
you have all the facts. We're both going to lose if you keep that
injunction in force." I went over the whole case with him, with care,
exactly as Morton had spelled it out to me: Gateway Corp's intervention,
eminent domain, the problem of complying with a court order when your
compliance doesn't get to the people it affects until a month and a half
after they've gone and done whatever they were going to do, the
opportunity for a negotiated settlement. "What I'm trying to say," I said,
"is that this is really big. Too big for us to be divided. They won't fuck
around with us, Bover. They'll just go ahead and expropriate us."
He didn't stop chewing, just listened, and then when he had nothing
more to chew he took a sip from his demitasse and said, "We really don't
have anything to discuss, Mr. Broadhead."
"Of course we do!"
"Not unless we both think so," he pointed out, "and I don't. You're a
little mistaken in some of the things you say. I don't have an injunction
any more. I have a judgment."
"Which I can get reversed in a hot..."
"Yes, maybe you can. But not in a hot anything. The law will take its
course, and it will take time. I won't make any deal Trish paid for
whatever comes out of this. Since she isn't around to protect her rights I
guess I have to."
"But it's going to cost both of us!"
"That's as may be. As my lawyer says. He advised me against this
meeting."
"Then why did you come?"
He looked at the remains of his lunch, then out at the fountains in the
courtyard. Three returned Gateway prospectors were sitting on the edge of
a reflecting pool with a slightly drunk Varig stewardess, singing and
tossing crumbs of French pastry to the goldfish. They had struck it rich.
"It makes a nice change for me, Mr. Broadhead," he said.
Out of the window of my suite, high up in the new Palace Tower, I could
see the crown-of-thorns of the cathedral glinting in the sun. It was
better than looking at my legal program on the full-service monitor,
because he was eating me out. "You may have prejudiced our whole case,
Robin. I don't think you understand how big this is getting."
"That's what I told Bover."
"No, really, Robin. Not just Robin Broadhead, Inc., not even just the
Gateway Corporation. Government's getting into it. And not just the
signatories to the Gateway Convention either. This may wind up a U. N.
matter."
"Oh, come on, Morton! Can they do that?"
"Of course they can, Robin. Eminent domain. Your friend Bover isn't
helping things any, either. He's petitioning for a conservator to take
over your personal and corporate holdings in this matter, in order to
administer the exploration properly."
The son of a bitch. He must have known that was happening while we were
eating the lunch I bought him. "What's this word 'proper'? What have I
done that was improper?"
"Short list, Robin?" He ticked off his fingers. "One, you exceeded your
authority by giving the Hester-Hall party more freedom of action than was
contemplated, which, two, led to their expedition to Heechee Heaven with
all of its potential consequences and thus, three, brought about a
situation of grave national peril. Strike that. Grave human peril."
"That's crap, Morton!"
"That's the way he put it in the petition," he nodded, "and, yes, we
may persuade somebody it's crap. Sooner or later. But right now it's up to
the Gateway Corp to act or not."
"Which means I better see the Senator." I got rid of Morton and called
Harriet to ask about my appointment.
"I can give you the Senator's secretarial program now," she smiled, and
faded to show a rather sketchy animation of a handsome young black girl.
It was quite poor simulation, nothing like the programs Essie writes for
me. But then Praggler was only a United States senator.
"Good afternoon," she greeted me. "The Senator asks me to say that he's
in Rio de Janeiro on committee business this evening, but will be happy to
see you whenever convenient tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o'clock?"
"Let's say nine," I told her, somewhat relieved. I had been a little
worried about Praggler's failure to get back to me right away. But now I
perceived he had a good reason: the fleshpots of Ipanema. "Harriet?" When
she came back I asked, "How's Mrs. Broadhead?"
"No change, Robin," she smiled. "She's awake and available now, if
you'd like to speak to her."
"Bet your sweet little electronic tooshy I do," I told her. She nodded
and drifted away. Harriet is a really good program; she doesn't always
understand the words, but she can make a yes-no decision from the tone of
my voice, and so when Essie appeared I said, "S. Ya. Lavorovna, you do
nice work."
"To be sure, dear Robin," she agreed, preening herself. She stood up
and turned slowly around. "As do our doctors, you will observe."
It took a moment for it to hit me. There were no life-support tubes!
She wore flesh-form casts on her left side, but she was free of the
machines! "My God, woman, what happened?"
"Perhaps healing has happened," she said serenely. "Although it is only
an experiment. The doctors have just left, and I am to try this for six
hours. Then they will examine me again."
"You look bloody marvelous." We chatted fill-in talk for a few minutes;
she told me about the doctors, I told her about Brasilia, while I studied
her as carefully as I could in a PV tank. She kept getting up and
stretching, delighting in her freedom, until she worried me. "Are you sure
you're supposed to do all that?"
"I have been told that I must not think of water skiing or dancing for
a while. But perhaps not everything that is fun is prohibited."
"Essie, you lewd lady, is that a lustful look I see in your eye? Are
you feeling well enough for that?"
"Quite well, yes. Well. Not well," she amplified, "but perhaps as
though you and I had enjoyed a hard night's drinking a day or two ago. A
little fragile. But I do not think I would be harmed by a gentle lover."
"I'll be back tomorrow morning."
"You will not be back tomorrow morning," she said firmly. "You will be
back when you are entirely through with your business in Brasilia and not
one moment before or else, my boy, you will not find any willing partner
for your debauched intentions here."
I said good-bye in a rosy glow.
Which lasted all of twenty-five minutes, until I got around to
double-checking with the doctor.
It took a little while, because she was just getting back to Columbia
Medical when I called. "I'm sorry to be rushed, Mr. Broadhead," she
apologized, shrugging out of her gray tweed suit-coat. "I've got to show
students how to suture nerve tissue in about ten minutes."
"You usually call me Robin, Dr. Liederman," I said, cooling off quickly.
"Yes, I do-Robin. Don't get worried. I don't have bad news." While she
was talking she was continuing to strip down, as far as brassiere level,
before putting on a turtleneck and an operating-room gown. Wilma Liederman
is a good-looking woman of a certain age, but I was not there to ogle her
charms.
"But you don't have good news, either?"
"Not yet. You've talked to Essie, so you know we're trying her out
without the machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and
we won't know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won't."
"Essie said six."
"Six hours to readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows
bad signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away." She
was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand.
Holding her dripping hands in the air she came back closer to the comm
set. "I don't want you worrying, Robin," she said. "All this is routine.
She's got about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if
they've taken hold. I wouldn't let her go this far if I didn't think the
chances were at least reasonable, Robin."
"'Reasonable' doesn't sound real good to me, Wilma!"
"Better than reasonable, but don't push me. And don't worry, either.
You're getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you
want more-me too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything's
going to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it's something we
can fix. Now I've got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young
lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards."
"I think I ought to get back there," I said.
"For what? There's nothing you can do but get in the way. Robin, I
promise I won't let her die before you get back." In the background the P.
A. system was chiming gently. "They're playing my song, Robin, talk to you
later."
There are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know
that I can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for
me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.
There are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of
burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.
And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing
that the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I
am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding
speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert
was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him
purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a
question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about
architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead
Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I
was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with
everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another
time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the
weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food
Factory, connected to someone I loved.
Wouldn't that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as
Wan had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were
feeling, let them feel the inside of you? What a wonderful thing for
lovers!
And to that thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and
telling him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of
the couch.
It was not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The
difficulty was that I was not quite sure which someone I wished I were
connected to. My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a
lot farther away and much harder to reach?
So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the
pool, and a lounge in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite
with a bottle of wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I
really wanted to know. "Albert? Where, exactly, is Kiara now?"
He paused, tamping tobacco into his pipe and frowning. "Gelle-Kiara
Moynlin," he said at last, "is in a black hole."
"Yes. And what does that mean?"
He said apologetically, "That's hard to say. I mean it's hard to put in
simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don't know. Not enough
data."
"Do your best,"
"Sure thing, Robin. I would say that she is in the section of the
exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of
the singularity you encountered-which," he waved carelessly and a
blackboard appeared behind him, "is of course just at the Schwarzschild
radius."
He stood up, jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy
cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:
2GM
C2
"At that boundary, light can't go any farther. It is what you might
think of as a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can
go. You can't see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from
behind it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass-and I don't
have to tell an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I?
From the instrumentation you brought back, it would appear that this
particular hole was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give
it a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want
to know?"
"A little bit, Albert," I said, shifting uncomfortably on the
Watercouch. I wasn't really sure just what I was asking for.
"Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Bobby," he said.
"Oh, no. I don't think so. There's a lot of radiation around, and God
knows what shear forces. But she hasn't had much time to be dead yet.
Depends on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you're gone.
Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of..."
"I understand about time dilation," I interrupted. And I did, because I
was feeling almost as though I were living through some of it. "Is there
any way we can find that out."
"'A black hole has no hair,' Bobby," he quoted solemnly. "That's what
we call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that
the only information you get out of a black hole is mass, charge and
angular momentum. Nothing else."
"Unless you get inside it, the way she did."
"Well, yes, Robby," he admitted, sitting down and attending to his
pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, "Robin?"
"Yes, Albert?"
He looked abashed, or as abashed as a holographic construct can. "I
haven't been entirely fair with you," he said. "There is some information
that comes out of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics.
And it doesn't do you any good, either. Not for your purposes."
I didn't really like having a computer program tell me what my
"purposes" were. Especially since I wasn't all that sure myself. "Tell me
about it!" I ordered.
"Well-we don't really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking's first
principles. He pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to
have a 'temperature'-which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of
particles do escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest
you, Robby."
"What kind do they escape from?"
"Well, mostly from the tiny ones, the ones with the mass of, say, Mount
Everest. Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get
real hot, a hundred billion Kelvin and up. The smaller they get, the
faster the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get-so they keep on
getting smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes
the other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish
their mass, and the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like
Kiara's has a temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a
Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time."
"So you don't get out of one of those."
"Not any way I know about, no, Robin. Does that answer your questions?"
"For now," I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it
that when he was talking to me about Kiara he called me "Robby"?
Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning
to overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names
from time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to
speak to Essie about straightening out her programming, because I
certainly did not feel I had any need for the services of Sigfrid von
Shrink now.
Senator Praggler's temporary office wasn't in the Gateway tower, but on
the 96th floor of the legislators' office building. A courtesy from the
Brazilian Congress to a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was
only two stories below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with
the dawn, I got there a couple minutes late. I had spent the time
wandering around the early morning city, ducking under the overhead
roadways, coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort
of temporary stasis of time.
But Praggler shook me out of it, all charged-up and beaming. "It's
wonderful news, Robin!" he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering
coffee. "Jesus! How stupid we've all been!"
For a moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That
only showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a
late flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had
turned out to be the prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. "I
thought you'd have known all about it," he apologized, when he had
finished filling me in.
"I've been out walking," I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to
be telling me about something as big as that on my own project. But I
recover fast. "Seems to me, Senator," I said, "that's a big plus for
vacating that injunction."
He grinned. "You know, I could have guessed it would strike you that
way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?"
"Well, it looks clear to me. What's the biggest purpose of the
expedition? Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there's
a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up."
He frowned. "We don't know how to decode the damn things."
"We will. Now that we know what they are, we'll figure out a way to
make them work. We've got the revelation. All we need is the engineering.
We ought to..." I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going
to say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the
market, but that was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched
to, "We ought to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall
expedition isn't our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about
national interests loses a lot of weight."
He accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that
didn't look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. "It's an argument.
I'll tell it to the committee."
"I was hoping you'd do more than that, Senator."
"If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don't have that
authority. I'm only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go
home and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that's the limit
of it."
"And what's the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover's claim?"
He hesitated. "I think it's worse than that. I think the sentiment's to
expropriate you all. Then it's a Gateway Corporation matter, which means
it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course,
in the long run, you'll all get reimbursed..."
I slammed the cup back into its saucer. "Fuck the reimbursement! Do you
think I'm in this for the money?"
Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think
he trusts me, but there wasn't any friendly look on his face when he said,
"Sometimes I wonder just why you are in it, Robin." He looked at me for a
moment without expression. I knew he knew about me and Kiara, and I also
knew he'd been a guest at Essie's table at Tappan. "I'm sorry about your
wife's illness," he said at last. "I hope she's all better real soon."
I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to
tell her to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get
their hands on. She had about a million messages, but I would only take
one-and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be
seeing the doctors in about an hour. I didn't have time for the rest,
because I had somewhere to go.
It is not easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the
doormen have their orders, and they know who rates priority. I had to
climb up on the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver
the address, he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written
down. It wasn't my bad Portuguese. He didn't really want to go to Free
Town.
So we drove out past the old cathedral, under the immense Gateway
tower, along the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two
kilometers of it. That was the green space, the cordon sanitaire the
Brazilians defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the
shantytown. As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in
the Wyoming food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this
was a different stink. Not just the stench of oil. This was open-air
toilets and rotting garbage-two million people without running water in
their homes. The shanties had sprung up in the first place to give
construction workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream
city. They were supposed to disappear when the city was finished.
Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.
The taxi-driver pushed his cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow
alleys, muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people
moved slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along
beside us. I made him take me to the exact place, and get out and ask
where Senhor Hanson Bover lived, but before he found out I saw Bover
himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home.
As soon as I paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster
than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.
Bover did not stand up as I came toward him. He was chewing on some
kind of sweet roll, and didn't stop doing that, either. He just watched
me.
By the standards of the barrio, he lived in a mansion. Those old
trailers had two or three rooms inside, and he even had a little patch of
something or other green growing alongside the step. The top of his head
was bare and sunburned, and he was wearing dirty denim cut-offs and a
tee-shirt printed with something in Portuguese that I didn't understand,
but looked dirty too. He swallowed and said, "I would offer you lunch,
Broadhead, but I'm just finishing eating it."
"I don't want lunch. I want to make a deal. I'll give you fifty per
cent of my interest in the expedition plus a million dollars cash if you
drop your suit."
He stroked the top of his head gingerly. It struck me strange that he
got burned so fast, because I hadn't noticed sunburn the day before-but
then I realized I hadn't noticed baldness, either. He had been wearing a
toupee. All dressed up for his mingling with class society. No difference.
I didn't like the man's manners, and I didn't like the growing cluster of
audience around us, either. "Can we talk this over inside?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He just pushed the last bite of the roll into his
mouth and chewed it while he looked at me.
That was enough of that. I squeezed past him and climbed the steps into
the house.
The first thing that hit me was the stink-worse than outside, oh, a
hundred times worse. Three walls of the room were taken up with stacks of
cages, and breeding rabbits in every cage. What I smelled was rabbit shit,
kilos of it. And not just from rabbits. There was a baby with a soiled
diaper being nursed in the arms of a skinny young woman. No. A girl; she
looked fifteen at the most. She stared up worriedly at me, but didn't stop
nursing.
So this was the dedicated worshipper at his wife's shrine! I couldn't
help it. I laughed out loud.
Coming inside had not been such a good idea. Bover followed me in,
pulling the door shut, and the stink intensified. He was not impassive
now, he was angry. "I see you don't approve of my living arrangements," he
said.
I shrugged. "I didn't come here to talk about your sex life."
"No. Nor do you have any right to. You wouldn't understand."
I tried to keep the conversation where I wanted it to be. "Bover," I
said, "I made you an offer which is better than you'll ever get in a
court, and a lot more than you had any reason to hope for. Please accept
it, so I can go ahead with what I'm doing."
He didn't answer me directly that time, either, just said something to
the girl in Portuguese. She got up silently, wrapped a cloth around the
baby's bottom, and went out on the steps, closing the door again behind
her. Bover said, as though he hadn't heard me, "Trish has been gone for
more than eight years, Mr. Broadhead. I still love her. But I've only got
one life to live and I know what the odds are against ever sharing any of
it with Trish again."
"If we can figure out how to run the Heechee ships properly we might be
able to go out and find Trish," I said. I didn't pursue that; all it was
doing was making him look at me with active hostility, as though he
thought I were trying to con him. I said,
"A million dollars, Bover. You can be out of this place tonight.
Forever. With your lady and your baby and your rabbits, too. Full Medical
for all of them. A future for the kid."
"I told you you wouldn't understand, Broadhead."
I checked myself and only said, "Then make me understand. Tell me what
I don't know."
He picked a soiled baby dress and a couple of pins off the chair the
girl had been sitting on. For a moment I thought he had relapsed into
hospitality, but he sat there himself and said, "Broadhead, I've lived for
eight years on welfare. Brazilian welfare. If we hadn't raised rabbits we
wouldn't have had meat. If we didn't sell the skins I wouldn't have bus
fare to meet you for lunch, or to go to my lawyer's office. A million
dollars won't pay me for that, or for Trish."
I was still trying to keep my temper, but the stink was getting to me,
and so was his attitude. I switched strategies. "Do you have any sympathy
for your neighbors, Bover? Do you want to see them helped? We can end this
kind of poverty forever, Bover, with Heechee technology. Plenty of food
for everybody! Decent places to live!"
He said patiently, "You know as well as I do that the first things that
come from Heechee technology-any technology don't go to people in the
barrio. They go to make rich people like you richer. Oh, maybe sooner or
later it might all happen, but when? In time to make any difference to my
neighbors?"
"Yes! If I can make it happen faster I will!"
He nodded judgmatically. "You say you will do that. I know I will, if I
get control. Why should I trust you?"
"Because I give you my word, you stupid shit! Why do you think I'm
cutting corners?"
He leaned back and looked up at me. "As to that," he said, "why, yes, I
think I know why you're in such a hurry. It doesn't have much to do with
my neighbors or me. My lawyers have researched you quite carefully,
Broadhead, and I know all about your girl on Gateway."
I couldn't help it. I exploded. "If you know that much," I yelled,
"then you know I want to get her out of where I put her! And I'll tell you
this, Bover, I'm not going to let you and your jailbait whore keep me from
trying!"
His face was suddenly as red as the top of his head. "And what does
your wife think about what you're doing?" he asked nastily.
"Why don't you ask her yourself? If she lives long enough for you to
hassle her. Fuck you, Bover, I'm going. How do I get a taxi?" He only
grinned at me. Meanly. I brushed past the woman on the stoop and left
without looking back.
By the time I got back to the hotel I knew what he was grinning about.
It had been explained to me by two hours of waiting for a bus, in a square
next to an open latrine. I won't even say what riding that bus was like.
I've traveled in worse ways, but not since I left Gateway. There were
knots of people in the hotel lobby, and they looked at me strangely as I
walked across the floor. Of course, they all knew who I was. Everybody
knew about the Herter-Halls, and my picture had been on the PV along with
theirs. I had no doubt that I looked peculiar, sweated, and still furious.
My console was a fireworks display of attention signals when I slammed
myself into my suite. The first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom,
but over my shoulder, through the open door, I called: "Harriet! Hold all
messages for a minute and give me Morton. One way. I don't want a
response, I just want to give an order." Morton's little face appeared in
the corner of the display, looking antsy but ready. "Morton, I just came
from Bover. I said everything I could think of to him and it did no good,
so I want you to get me private detectives. I want to search his record
like it's never been searched before. The son of a bitch must have done
something wrong. I want to blackmail him. If it's a ten-year-old parking
ticket, I want to extradite him for it. Get busy on that." He nodded
silently, but didn't go away, meaning that he was doing what I had said
but wanted to say something himself, if only I would let him. Over him was
the larger, waiting face of Harriet, counting out the minute's silence I
had imposed on her. I came back into the room and said, "All right,
Harriet, let's have it. Top priority first, one at a time."
"Yes, Robin, but..." She hesitated, making swift evaluations. "Their
are two immediate ones, Robin. First, Albert Einstein wishes to discuss
with you the capture of the Herter-Hall party, apparently by the Heechee."
"Captured! Why the hell didn't you..." I stopped; obviously she
couldn't have told me, because I was out of communication entirely for
most of the afternoon. She didn't wait for me to figure that out but went
on:
"However, I think you would prefer to receive Dr. Liederman's report
first, Robin. I've been putting through a call, and she's ready to talk to
you now, live."
That stopped me.
"Do it," I said, but I knew it couldn't be anything good, to make Wilma
Liederman report live and in person. "What's the matter?" I asked as soon
as she appeared.
She was wearing an evening dress, with an orchid on her shoulder, first
time I had seen her like that since she came to our wedding. "Don't panic,
Robin," she said, "but Essie's had a slight setback. She's on the
life-support machines again."
"What?"
"It's not as bad as it sounds. She's awake, and coherent, feeling no
pain, her condition is stable. We can keep her like that forever..."
"Get to the 'but'!"
"But she's rejecting the kidney, and the tissues around it aren't
regenerating. She needs a whole new batch of transplants. She had uremic
failure about two hours ago and now she's on fulltime dialysis. That's not
the worst part. She's had so many bits and pieces stuck in her from so
many sources that her auto-immune system is all screwed up. We're going to
have to scrounge to get a tissue match, and even so we're going to have to
dope her with anti-immunes for a long time."
"Shit! That's right out of the Dark Ages!"
She nodded. "Usually we can get a four-four match, but not for Essie.
Not this time. She's a rare-blood to begin with, you know. She's Russian,
and her types are uncommon in this part of the world, so..."
"Get some from Leningrad, for Christ's sake!"
"So, I was about to say, I've checked tissue banks all over the world.
We can come close. Real close. But in her present state there's still some
risk."
I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out her tone. "Of having to
do it over, you mean?" She shook her head gently. "You mean, of-of dying?
I don't believe you! What the hell is Full Medical for?"
"Robin-she already has died of this, you know. We had to reanimate her.
There's a limit to the shock she can survive."
"Then the hell with the operation! You said she's stable the way she
is!"
Wilma looked at the hands clasped in her lap for a moment, then up at
me. "She's the patient, Robin, not you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's her decision. She has already decided she doesn't want to be tied
down to a life-support system forever. We're going to go in again tomorrow
morning."
I sat there staring at the tank, long after Wilma Liedermari had
disappeared and my patient secretarial program had formed, silently
waiting for orders. "Uh, Harriet," I said at last, "I want a flight back
tonight."
"Yes, Robin," she said. "I've already booked you. There's no direct
flight tonight, but there's one that you can transfer at Caracas, gets you
in to New York about five AM. The surgery is not scheduled until eight."
"Thank you." She went back to silent waiting. Morton's silly face was
still there in the tank, too, tiny and reproachful down in the lower
right-hand corner. He did not speak, but every once in a while he cleared
his throat or swallowed to let me know he was waiting. "Morton," I said,
"didn't I tell you to get lost?"
"I can't do that, Robin. Not while I have an unresolved dilemma. You
gave orders about Mr. Bover..."
"Damn right I did. If I can't handle him that way maybe I'll just get
him killed."
"You don't have to bother," Morton said quickly. "There's a message
from his lawyers for you. He has decided to accept your offer."
I goggled at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. "I don't understand it
either, Robin, and neither do his lawyers," he said quickly. "They are
quite upset But there is a personal message for you, if it explains
anything."
"What's that?"
"Quote, 'Maybe he does understand after all.' Close quote."
In a somewhat confusing life, and one that is rapidly becoming a long
one, I've had a lot of confusing days, but that one was special. I ran a
hot tub and soaked in it for half an hour, trying to make my mind empty.
The effort didn't bring calm.
I had three hours before the Caracas plane left. I didn't know what to
do with it. It was not that there wasn't plenty for me to do. Harriet kept
trying to get my attention-Morton to firm up the contract with Bover,
Albert to discuss the bioanalysis of the Heechee droppings somebody had
collected, everybody to talk to me, about everything. I didn't want to do
any of them. I was stuck in my dilated time, watching the world flash
past. But it didn't flash, it crept. I didn't know what to do about it. It
was nice that Bover thought I understood so well. I wondered what he would
take to explain what I understood to me.
After a while I managed to work up enough energy to let Harriet put
through some of the decision-needed calls for me, and I made what
decisions seemed necessary; and a while after that, toying with a bowl of
crackers and milk, I listened to a news summary. It was full of talk about
the Herter-Hall capture, all of which I could get better from Albert than
from the PV newscasters.
And at that point I remembered that Albert had wanted to talk to me,
and for a moment I felt better. It gave me a point and purpose in living.
I had someone to yell at. "Halfwit," I snapped at him as he materialized,
"magnetic tapes are a century old. How come you can't read them?"
He looked at me calmly under his bushy white brows. "You're referring
to the so-called 'prayer fans', aren't you, Robin? Of course we did try
that, many times. We even suspected that there might be a synergy, and so
we tried several kinds of magnetic fields at once, steady and oscillating,
oscillating at different rates of speed. We even tried simultaneous
microwave radiation, though, as it turned out, the wrong kind..."
I was still bemused, but not so much so that I didn't pick up on the
implication. "You mean there's a right kind?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he grinned. "Once we got a good trace from the
Herter-Hall instrumentation we just duplicated it. The same microwave
radiation that's ambient in the Food Factory, a flux of a few microwatts
of elliptically polarized million-A microwave. And then we get the
signal."
"Bloody marvelous, Albert! And what is it you got?"
"Uh, well," he said, reaching for his pipe, "actually not a lot, yet.
It's hologram-stored and time-dependent, so what we get is a kind of
choppy cloud of symbols. And, of course, we can't read any of the symbols.
It's Heechee language, you know. But now it's just straight cryptography,
so to speak. All we need is a Rosetta stone."
"How long?"
He shrugged, and spread his hands, and twinkled.
I thought for a moment. "Well, stay with it. Another thing. I want you
to read into my lawyer program the whole thing, the microwave frequencies,
schematics, everything. There ought to be a patent in there somewhere, and
I want it."
"Sure thing, Robin. Uh. Would you like to hear about the Dead Men?"
"What about the Dead Men?"
"Well," he said, "not all of them are human. There are some pretty
strange little minds in those storage circuits, Robin. I think they might
be what you call the Old Ones."
The back of my neck prickled. "Heechee?"
"No, no, Robin! Almost human. But not. They don't use language well,
especially what seem to be the earliest of them, and I bet you can't even
guess the computer-time bill you're going to get for analysis and mapping
to make any sense of them at all."
"My God! Essie'll be thrilled when..."
I stopped. For a moment I had forgotten about Essie.
"Well," I said, "that's-interesting. What else is there to tell?" But,
really, I didn't care. I had used up my own last jolt of adrenaline, and
there wasn't any more.
I let him tell me the rest of his budget of conversation, but most of
it rolled right off me. Three members of the Herter-Hall party were known
to be captured. The Heechee had brought them to a spindle-shaped place
where some old machinery was lying about. The cameras were continuing to
return frames of nothing very exciting. The Dead Men had gone haywire,
were making no sense at all. Paul Hall's whereabouts were unknown; perhaps
he was still at liberty. Perhaps he was still alive. The haywire link
between the Dead Men's radio and the Food Factory was still functioning,
but it was not clear how long it would last-even if it had anything to
tell us. The organic chemistry of the Heechee was quite surprising, in
that it was less unlike human biochemistry than one might guess. I let him
talk until he ran down, not prompting him to continue, then turned back to
the commercial PV. It bad two rapid-fire comedians delivering bellylaugh
lines to each other. Unfortunately, it was in Portuguese. It didn't
matter. I still had an hour to kill, and I let it run. If nothing else, I
could admire the pretty Carioca, fruit salad in her hair, whose scanty
costume the comedians were tweaking off as they passed her back and forth,
giggling.
Harriet's attention signal lighted up, bright red.
Before I could make up my mind to respond, the picture slid off the
commercial PV channel and a man's voice said something stern in
Portuguese. I couldn't understand a word of it, but I understood the
picture that showed almost at once.
It was the Food Factory, taken out of stock, a shot from the
Herter-Halls as they were approaching it to dock. And in the short
sentence the announcer had spoken were two words that could have been
"Peter Herter".
Could have been.
Were.
The picture didn't change, but a voice began, and it was old Herter's
voice, angry and firm. "This message," it said, "is to be broadcast over
all networks at once. It is a two-hour warning. In two hours I am going to
cause a one-minute attack of the fever by entering the couch and
projecting the necessary, uh, projections. I tell you all to take
precautions. If you do not, it is your responsibility, not mine." It
paused for a moment, then resumed. "Remember, you have two hours from a
count which I will give you. no more. Shortly after that I will speak
again to tell you the reason for this, and what I demand as my proper
right if you do not wish this to happen many times. Two hours.
Beginning... now."
And the voice stopped.
The announcer came back on, babbling in Portuguese, looking scared. It
didn't matter that I couldn't understand what he was saying.
I had understood what Peter Herter had said, very well. He had repaired
the dreaming couch and was going to use it. Not out of ignorance, like
Wan. Not as a quick experiment, like the girl, Janine. He was going to use
smiled that gentle, humble smile and poked his pipestem at his ear and
said, "Sure thing, Robin, if you mean the sort of surprise that one feels
when an unlikely contingency turns out to be real. But it was always a
contingency. Remember. The Heechee ships were able to navigate without
error to moving targets. That suggests the possibility of communication at
nearly instantaneous speeds over astronomical distances-ergo, a
faster-than-light radio."
"Then why didn't you tell me about it?" I demanded.
He scratched one sneakered foot against the other sockless ankle. "It
was only a possibility, Robin, estimated no more than point oh five. A
sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. We simply didn't have
enough evidence, until now."
I could have been chatting with Albert on the way down to Brasilia. But
I was traveling commercial-the company aircraft aren't fast enough for
those distances-and I like having Albert where I can see him when we talk,
so I spent my time voice-only with company business and Morton. And of
course with Harriet, who was under orders to check in once an hour, except
when I was asleep, with a quick status report on Essie.
Even hypersonic, a ten-thousand-kilometer flight takes a while, and I
had time for a lot of business. Morton wanted as much of it as he could
get, mostly to try to talk me out of meeting with Bover. "You have to take
him seriously, Robin," be whined through the plug in my ear. "Bover's
represented by Anjelos, Carpenter and Gutmann, and they're high-powered
people, with really good legal programs."
"Better than you?"
Hesitation. "Well-I hope not, Robin."
"Tell me something, Morton. If Bover didn't have much of a case to
begin with, why are these high-powered people bothering with him?"
Although I couldn't see him, I knew that Morton would be assuming his
defensive look, partly apologetic, partly you-laymen-wouldn't-understand.
"It's not all that weak, Robin. And it hasn't gone well for us so far. And
it's takking on some larger dimension than we originally estimated. And I
assume that they thought their connections would patch up the weak spots-I
also assume that they're in for a son-of-a-bitching big contingency fee.
You'd be better advised to patch up some of our own weak spots than take a
chance with Bover, Robin. Your pal Senator Praggler is on this month's
oversight committee. Go see him first."
"I'll go see him, but not first," I told Morton, and cut him off as we
circled in for a landing. I could see the big Gateway Authority tower
overshadowing the silly flat saucer over the House of Representatives, and
off up the lake the bright reflections of tin roofs in the Free Town. I
had cut it pretty close. My date with Trish Bover's widower (or husband,
depending on how you looked at it) was in less than an hour, and I didn't
really want to keep him waiting.
I didn't have to. I was already sitting at a table in the courtyard
dining room of the Brasilia Palace hotel when he came in. Skinny. Tall.
Balding. He sat down nervously, as if he were in a desperate hurry, or
desperately eager to be somewhere else. But when I offered him lunch he
took ten minutes to study the menu and wound up ordering all of it. Fresh
hearts of palm salad, little fresh-water shrimp from the lake, all the way
down to that wonderful raw pineapple flown up from Rio. "This is my
favorite hotel in Brasilia," I informed him genially, hostfully, as he
poured dressing on the hearts of palm. "Old. But good. I suppose you've
seen all the sights?"
"I've lived here for eight years, Mr. Broadhead."
"Oh, I see." I hadn't known where the hell the son of a bitch lived, he
was just a name and a nuisance. So much for travelog. I tried common
interests. "I got a flash synoptic from the Food Factory on the way down
here. The Herter-Hall party is doing well, finding out some marvelous
things. Did you know that we've identified four of the Dead Men as actual
Gateway prospectors?"
"I saw something about that on the PV, yes, Mr. Broadhead. It's quite
exciting."
"More than that, Bover. It can change this whole world around-and make
us all filthy rich, too." He nodded, his mouth full of salad. He kept on
keeping his mouth full, too; I wasn't doing much good trying to draw him
out. "All right," I said, "why don't we get down to business? I want you
to drop that injunction."
He chewed and swallowed. With the next forkful of shrimp poised at his
mouth he said, "I know you do, Mr. Broadhead," and refilled the mouth.
I took a long, slow sip of my wine and seltzer and said, with complete
control of my voice and manner, "Mr. Bover, I don't think you understand
what the issues are. I don't mean to put you down. I just can't believe
you have all the facts. We're both going to lose if you keep that
injunction in force." I went over the whole case with him, with care,
exactly as Morton had spelled it out to me: Gateway Corp's intervention,
eminent domain, the problem of complying with a court order when your
compliance doesn't get to the people it affects until a month and a half
after they've gone and done whatever they were going to do, the
opportunity for a negotiated settlement. "What I'm trying to say," I said,
"is that this is really big. Too big for us to be divided. They won't fuck
around with us, Bover. They'll just go ahead and expropriate us."
He didn't stop chewing, just listened, and then when he had nothing
more to chew he took a sip from his demitasse and said, "We really don't
have anything to discuss, Mr. Broadhead."
"Of course we do!"
"Not unless we both think so," he pointed out, "and I don't. You're a
little mistaken in some of the things you say. I don't have an injunction
any more. I have a judgment."
"Which I can get reversed in a hot..."
"Yes, maybe you can. But not in a hot anything. The law will take its
course, and it will take time. I won't make any deal Trish paid for
whatever comes out of this. Since she isn't around to protect her rights I
guess I have to."
"But it's going to cost both of us!"
"That's as may be. As my lawyer says. He advised me against this
meeting."
"Then why did you come?"
He looked at the remains of his lunch, then out at the fountains in the
courtyard. Three returned Gateway prospectors were sitting on the edge of
a reflecting pool with a slightly drunk Varig stewardess, singing and
tossing crumbs of French pastry to the goldfish. They had struck it rich.
"It makes a nice change for me, Mr. Broadhead," he said.
Out of the window of my suite, high up in the new Palace Tower, I could
see the crown-of-thorns of the cathedral glinting in the sun. It was
better than looking at my legal program on the full-service monitor,
because he was eating me out. "You may have prejudiced our whole case,
Robin. I don't think you understand how big this is getting."
"That's what I told Bover."
"No, really, Robin. Not just Robin Broadhead, Inc., not even just the
Gateway Corporation. Government's getting into it. And not just the
signatories to the Gateway Convention either. This may wind up a U. N.
matter."
"Oh, come on, Morton! Can they do that?"
"Of course they can, Robin. Eminent domain. Your friend Bover isn't
helping things any, either. He's petitioning for a conservator to take
over your personal and corporate holdings in this matter, in order to
administer the exploration properly."
The son of a bitch. He must have known that was happening while we were
eating the lunch I bought him. "What's this word 'proper'? What have I
done that was improper?"
"Short list, Robin?" He ticked off his fingers. "One, you exceeded your
authority by giving the Hester-Hall party more freedom of action than was
contemplated, which, two, led to their expedition to Heechee Heaven with
all of its potential consequences and thus, three, brought about a
situation of grave national peril. Strike that. Grave human peril."
"That's crap, Morton!"
"That's the way he put it in the petition," he nodded, "and, yes, we
may persuade somebody it's crap. Sooner or later. But right now it's up to
the Gateway Corp to act or not."
"Which means I better see the Senator." I got rid of Morton and called
Harriet to ask about my appointment.
"I can give you the Senator's secretarial program now," she smiled, and
faded to show a rather sketchy animation of a handsome young black girl.
It was quite poor simulation, nothing like the programs Essie writes for
me. But then Praggler was only a United States senator.
"Good afternoon," she greeted me. "The Senator asks me to say that he's
in Rio de Janeiro on committee business this evening, but will be happy to
see you whenever convenient tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o'clock?"
"Let's say nine," I told her, somewhat relieved. I had been a little
worried about Praggler's failure to get back to me right away. But now I
perceived he had a good reason: the fleshpots of Ipanema. "Harriet?" When
she came back I asked, "How's Mrs. Broadhead?"
"No change, Robin," she smiled. "She's awake and available now, if
you'd like to speak to her."
"Bet your sweet little electronic tooshy I do," I told her. She nodded
and drifted away. Harriet is a really good program; she doesn't always
understand the words, but she can make a yes-no decision from the tone of
my voice, and so when Essie appeared I said, "S. Ya. Lavorovna, you do
nice work."
"To be sure, dear Robin," she agreed, preening herself. She stood up
and turned slowly around. "As do our doctors, you will observe."
It took a moment for it to hit me. There were no life-support tubes!
She wore flesh-form casts on her left side, but she was free of the
machines! "My God, woman, what happened?"
"Perhaps healing has happened," she said serenely. "Although it is only
an experiment. The doctors have just left, and I am to try this for six
hours. Then they will examine me again."
"You look bloody marvelous." We chatted fill-in talk for a few minutes;
she told me about the doctors, I told her about Brasilia, while I studied
her as carefully as I could in a PV tank. She kept getting up and
stretching, delighting in her freedom, until she worried me. "Are you sure
you're supposed to do all that?"
"I have been told that I must not think of water skiing or dancing for
a while. But perhaps not everything that is fun is prohibited."
"Essie, you lewd lady, is that a lustful look I see in your eye? Are
you feeling well enough for that?"
"Quite well, yes. Well. Not well," she amplified, "but perhaps as
though you and I had enjoyed a hard night's drinking a day or two ago. A
little fragile. But I do not think I would be harmed by a gentle lover."
"I'll be back tomorrow morning."
"You will not be back tomorrow morning," she said firmly. "You will be
back when you are entirely through with your business in Brasilia and not
one moment before or else, my boy, you will not find any willing partner
for your debauched intentions here."
I said good-bye in a rosy glow.
Which lasted all of twenty-five minutes, until I got around to
double-checking with the doctor.
It took a little while, because she was just getting back to Columbia
Medical when I called. "I'm sorry to be rushed, Mr. Broadhead," she
apologized, shrugging out of her gray tweed suit-coat. "I've got to show
students how to suture nerve tissue in about ten minutes."
"You usually call me Robin, Dr. Liederman," I said, cooling off quickly.
"Yes, I do-Robin. Don't get worried. I don't have bad news." While she
was talking she was continuing to strip down, as far as brassiere level,
before putting on a turtleneck and an operating-room gown. Wilma Liederman
is a good-looking woman of a certain age, but I was not there to ogle her
charms.
"But you don't have good news, either?"
"Not yet. You've talked to Essie, so you know we're trying her out
without the machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and
we won't know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won't."
"Essie said six."
"Six hours to readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows
bad signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away." She
was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand.
Holding her dripping hands in the air she came back closer to the comm
set. "I don't want you worrying, Robin," she said. "All this is routine.
She's got about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if
they've taken hold. I wouldn't let her go this far if I didn't think the
chances were at least reasonable, Robin."
"'Reasonable' doesn't sound real good to me, Wilma!"
"Better than reasonable, but don't push me. And don't worry, either.
You're getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you
want more-me too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything's
going to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it's something we
can fix. Now I've got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young
lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards."
"I think I ought to get back there," I said.
"For what? There's nothing you can do but get in the way. Robin, I
promise I won't let her die before you get back." In the background the P.
A. system was chiming gently. "They're playing my song, Robin, talk to you
later."
There are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know
that I can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for
me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.
There are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of
burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.
And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing
that the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I
am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding
speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert
was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him
purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a
question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about
architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead
Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I
was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with
everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another
time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the
weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food
Factory, connected to someone I loved.
Wouldn't that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as
Wan had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were
feeling, let them feel the inside of you? What a wonderful thing for
lovers!
And to that thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and
telling him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of
the couch.
It was not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The
difficulty was that I was not quite sure which someone I wished I were
connected to. My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a
lot farther away and much harder to reach?
So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the
pool, and a lounge in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite
with a bottle of wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I
really wanted to know. "Albert? Where, exactly, is Kiara now?"
He paused, tamping tobacco into his pipe and frowning. "Gelle-Kiara
Moynlin," he said at last, "is in a black hole."
"Yes. And what does that mean?"
He said apologetically, "That's hard to say. I mean it's hard to put in
simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don't know. Not enough
data."
"Do your best,"
"Sure thing, Robin. I would say that she is in the section of the
exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of
the singularity you encountered-which," he waved carelessly and a
blackboard appeared behind him, "is of course just at the Schwarzschild
radius."
He stood up, jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy
cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:
2GM
C2
"At that boundary, light can't go any farther. It is what you might
think of as a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can
go. You can't see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from
behind it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass-and I don't
have to tell an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I?
From the instrumentation you brought back, it would appear that this
particular hole was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give
it a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want
to know?"
"A little bit, Albert," I said, shifting uncomfortably on the
Watercouch. I wasn't really sure just what I was asking for.
"Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Bobby," he said.
"Oh, no. I don't think so. There's a lot of radiation around, and God
knows what shear forces. But she hasn't had much time to be dead yet.
Depends on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you're gone.
Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of..."
"I understand about time dilation," I interrupted. And I did, because I
was feeling almost as though I were living through some of it. "Is there
any way we can find that out."
"'A black hole has no hair,' Bobby," he quoted solemnly. "That's what
we call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that
the only information you get out of a black hole is mass, charge and
angular momentum. Nothing else."
"Unless you get inside it, the way she did."
"Well, yes, Robby," he admitted, sitting down and attending to his
pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, "Robin?"
"Yes, Albert?"
He looked abashed, or as abashed as a holographic construct can. "I
haven't been entirely fair with you," he said. "There is some information
that comes out of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics.
And it doesn't do you any good, either. Not for your purposes."
I didn't really like having a computer program tell me what my
"purposes" were. Especially since I wasn't all that sure myself. "Tell me
about it!" I ordered.
"Well-we don't really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking's first
principles. He pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to
have a 'temperature'-which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of
particles do escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest
you, Robby."
"What kind do they escape from?"
"Well, mostly from the tiny ones, the ones with the mass of, say, Mount
Everest. Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get
real hot, a hundred billion Kelvin and up. The smaller they get, the
faster the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get-so they keep on
getting smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes
the other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish
their mass, and the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like
Kiara's has a temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a
Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time."
"So you don't get out of one of those."
"Not any way I know about, no, Robin. Does that answer your questions?"
"For now," I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it
that when he was talking to me about Kiara he called me "Robby"?
Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning
to overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names
from time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to
speak to Essie about straightening out her programming, because I
certainly did not feel I had any need for the services of Sigfrid von
Shrink now.
Senator Praggler's temporary office wasn't in the Gateway tower, but on
the 96th floor of the legislators' office building. A courtesy from the
Brazilian Congress to a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was
only two stories below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with
the dawn, I got there a couple minutes late. I had spent the time
wandering around the early morning city, ducking under the overhead
roadways, coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort
of temporary stasis of time.
But Praggler shook me out of it, all charged-up and beaming. "It's
wonderful news, Robin!" he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering
coffee. "Jesus! How stupid we've all been!"
For a moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That
only showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a
late flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had
turned out to be the prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. "I
thought you'd have known all about it," he apologized, when he had
finished filling me in.
"I've been out walking," I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to
be telling me about something as big as that on my own project. But I
recover fast. "Seems to me, Senator," I said, "that's a big plus for
vacating that injunction."
He grinned. "You know, I could have guessed it would strike you that
way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?"
"Well, it looks clear to me. What's the biggest purpose of the
expedition? Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there's
a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up."
He frowned. "We don't know how to decode the damn things."
"We will. Now that we know what they are, we'll figure out a way to
make them work. We've got the revelation. All we need is the engineering.
We ought to..." I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going
to say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the
market, but that was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched
to, "We ought to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall
expedition isn't our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about
national interests loses a lot of weight."
He accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that
didn't look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. "It's an argument.
I'll tell it to the committee."
"I was hoping you'd do more than that, Senator."
"If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don't have that
authority. I'm only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go
home and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that's the limit
of it."
"And what's the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover's claim?"
He hesitated. "I think it's worse than that. I think the sentiment's to
expropriate you all. Then it's a Gateway Corporation matter, which means
it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course,
in the long run, you'll all get reimbursed..."
I slammed the cup back into its saucer. "Fuck the reimbursement! Do you
think I'm in this for the money?"
Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think
he trusts me, but there wasn't any friendly look on his face when he said,
"Sometimes I wonder just why you are in it, Robin." He looked at me for a
moment without expression. I knew he knew about me and Kiara, and I also
knew he'd been a guest at Essie's table at Tappan. "I'm sorry about your
wife's illness," he said at last. "I hope she's all better real soon."
I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to
tell her to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get
their hands on. She had about a million messages, but I would only take
one-and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be
seeing the doctors in about an hour. I didn't have time for the rest,
because I had somewhere to go.
It is not easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the
doormen have their orders, and they know who rates priority. I had to
climb up on the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver
the address, he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written
down. It wasn't my bad Portuguese. He didn't really want to go to Free
Town.
So we drove out past the old cathedral, under the immense Gateway
tower, along the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two
kilometers of it. That was the green space, the cordon sanitaire the
Brazilians defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the
shantytown. As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in
the Wyoming food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this
was a different stink. Not just the stench of oil. This was open-air
toilets and rotting garbage-two million people without running water in
their homes. The shanties had sprung up in the first place to give
construction workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream
city. They were supposed to disappear when the city was finished.
Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.
The taxi-driver pushed his cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow
alleys, muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people
moved slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along
beside us. I made him take me to the exact place, and get out and ask
where Senhor Hanson Bover lived, but before he found out I saw Bover
himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home.
As soon as I paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster
than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.
Bover did not stand up as I came toward him. He was chewing on some
kind of sweet roll, and didn't stop doing that, either. He just watched
me.
By the standards of the barrio, he lived in a mansion. Those old
trailers had two or three rooms inside, and he even had a little patch of
something or other green growing alongside the step. The top of his head
was bare and sunburned, and he was wearing dirty denim cut-offs and a
tee-shirt printed with something in Portuguese that I didn't understand,
but looked dirty too. He swallowed and said, "I would offer you lunch,
Broadhead, but I'm just finishing eating it."
"I don't want lunch. I want to make a deal. I'll give you fifty per
cent of my interest in the expedition plus a million dollars cash if you
drop your suit."
He stroked the top of his head gingerly. It struck me strange that he
got burned so fast, because I hadn't noticed sunburn the day before-but
then I realized I hadn't noticed baldness, either. He had been wearing a
toupee. All dressed up for his mingling with class society. No difference.
I didn't like the man's manners, and I didn't like the growing cluster of
audience around us, either. "Can we talk this over inside?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He just pushed the last bite of the roll into his
mouth and chewed it while he looked at me.
That was enough of that. I squeezed past him and climbed the steps into
the house.
The first thing that hit me was the stink-worse than outside, oh, a
hundred times worse. Three walls of the room were taken up with stacks of
cages, and breeding rabbits in every cage. What I smelled was rabbit shit,
kilos of it. And not just from rabbits. There was a baby with a soiled
diaper being nursed in the arms of a skinny young woman. No. A girl; she
looked fifteen at the most. She stared up worriedly at me, but didn't stop
nursing.
So this was the dedicated worshipper at his wife's shrine! I couldn't
help it. I laughed out loud.
Coming inside had not been such a good idea. Bover followed me in,
pulling the door shut, and the stink intensified. He was not impassive
now, he was angry. "I see you don't approve of my living arrangements," he
said.
I shrugged. "I didn't come here to talk about your sex life."
"No. Nor do you have any right to. You wouldn't understand."
I tried to keep the conversation where I wanted it to be. "Bover," I
said, "I made you an offer which is better than you'll ever get in a
court, and a lot more than you had any reason to hope for. Please accept
it, so I can go ahead with what I'm doing."
He didn't answer me directly that time, either, just said something to
the girl in Portuguese. She got up silently, wrapped a cloth around the
baby's bottom, and went out on the steps, closing the door again behind
her. Bover said, as though he hadn't heard me, "Trish has been gone for
more than eight years, Mr. Broadhead. I still love her. But I've only got
one life to live and I know what the odds are against ever sharing any of
it with Trish again."
"If we can figure out how to run the Heechee ships properly we might be
able to go out and find Trish," I said. I didn't pursue that; all it was
doing was making him look at me with active hostility, as though he
thought I were trying to con him. I said,
"A million dollars, Bover. You can be out of this place tonight.
Forever. With your lady and your baby and your rabbits, too. Full Medical
for all of them. A future for the kid."
"I told you you wouldn't understand, Broadhead."
I checked myself and only said, "Then make me understand. Tell me what
I don't know."
He picked a soiled baby dress and a couple of pins off the chair the
girl had been sitting on. For a moment I thought he had relapsed into
hospitality, but he sat there himself and said, "Broadhead, I've lived for
eight years on welfare. Brazilian welfare. If we hadn't raised rabbits we
wouldn't have had meat. If we didn't sell the skins I wouldn't have bus
fare to meet you for lunch, or to go to my lawyer's office. A million
dollars won't pay me for that, or for Trish."
I was still trying to keep my temper, but the stink was getting to me,
and so was his attitude. I switched strategies. "Do you have any sympathy
for your neighbors, Bover? Do you want to see them helped? We can end this
kind of poverty forever, Bover, with Heechee technology. Plenty of food
for everybody! Decent places to live!"
He said patiently, "You know as well as I do that the first things that
come from Heechee technology-any technology don't go to people in the
barrio. They go to make rich people like you richer. Oh, maybe sooner or
later it might all happen, but when? In time to make any difference to my
neighbors?"
"Yes! If I can make it happen faster I will!"
He nodded judgmatically. "You say you will do that. I know I will, if I
get control. Why should I trust you?"
"Because I give you my word, you stupid shit! Why do you think I'm
cutting corners?"
He leaned back and looked up at me. "As to that," he said, "why, yes, I
think I know why you're in such a hurry. It doesn't have much to do with
my neighbors or me. My lawyers have researched you quite carefully,
Broadhead, and I know all about your girl on Gateway."
I couldn't help it. I exploded. "If you know that much," I yelled,
"then you know I want to get her out of where I put her! And I'll tell you
this, Bover, I'm not going to let you and your jailbait whore keep me from
trying!"
His face was suddenly as red as the top of his head. "And what does
your wife think about what you're doing?" he asked nastily.
"Why don't you ask her yourself? If she lives long enough for you to
hassle her. Fuck you, Bover, I'm going. How do I get a taxi?" He only
grinned at me. Meanly. I brushed past the woman on the stoop and left
without looking back.
By the time I got back to the hotel I knew what he was grinning about.
It had been explained to me by two hours of waiting for a bus, in a square
next to an open latrine. I won't even say what riding that bus was like.
I've traveled in worse ways, but not since I left Gateway. There were
knots of people in the hotel lobby, and they looked at me strangely as I
walked across the floor. Of course, they all knew who I was. Everybody
knew about the Herter-Halls, and my picture had been on the PV along with
theirs. I had no doubt that I looked peculiar, sweated, and still furious.
My console was a fireworks display of attention signals when I slammed
myself into my suite. The first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom,
but over my shoulder, through the open door, I called: "Harriet! Hold all
messages for a minute and give me Morton. One way. I don't want a
response, I just want to give an order." Morton's little face appeared in
the corner of the display, looking antsy but ready. "Morton, I just came
from Bover. I said everything I could think of to him and it did no good,
so I want you to get me private detectives. I want to search his record
like it's never been searched before. The son of a bitch must have done
something wrong. I want to blackmail him. If it's a ten-year-old parking
ticket, I want to extradite him for it. Get busy on that." He nodded
silently, but didn't go away, meaning that he was doing what I had said
but wanted to say something himself, if only I would let him. Over him was
the larger, waiting face of Harriet, counting out the minute's silence I
had imposed on her. I came back into the room and said, "All right,
Harriet, let's have it. Top priority first, one at a time."
"Yes, Robin, but..." She hesitated, making swift evaluations. "Their
are two immediate ones, Robin. First, Albert Einstein wishes to discuss
with you the capture of the Herter-Hall party, apparently by the Heechee."
"Captured! Why the hell didn't you..." I stopped; obviously she
couldn't have told me, because I was out of communication entirely for
most of the afternoon. She didn't wait for me to figure that out but went
on:
"However, I think you would prefer to receive Dr. Liederman's report
first, Robin. I've been putting through a call, and she's ready to talk to
you now, live."
That stopped me.
"Do it," I said, but I knew it couldn't be anything good, to make Wilma
Liederman report live and in person. "What's the matter?" I asked as soon
as she appeared.
She was wearing an evening dress, with an orchid on her shoulder, first
time I had seen her like that since she came to our wedding. "Don't panic,
Robin," she said, "but Essie's had a slight setback. She's on the
life-support machines again."
"What?"
"It's not as bad as it sounds. She's awake, and coherent, feeling no
pain, her condition is stable. We can keep her like that forever..."
"Get to the 'but'!"
"But she's rejecting the kidney, and the tissues around it aren't
regenerating. She needs a whole new batch of transplants. She had uremic
failure about two hours ago and now she's on fulltime dialysis. That's not
the worst part. She's had so many bits and pieces stuck in her from so
many sources that her auto-immune system is all screwed up. We're going to
have to scrounge to get a tissue match, and even so we're going to have to
dope her with anti-immunes for a long time."
"Shit! That's right out of the Dark Ages!"
She nodded. "Usually we can get a four-four match, but not for Essie.
Not this time. She's a rare-blood to begin with, you know. She's Russian,
and her types are uncommon in this part of the world, so..."
"Get some from Leningrad, for Christ's sake!"
"So, I was about to say, I've checked tissue banks all over the world.
We can come close. Real close. But in her present state there's still some
risk."
I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out her tone. "Of having to
do it over, you mean?" She shook her head gently. "You mean, of-of dying?
I don't believe you! What the hell is Full Medical for?"
"Robin-she already has died of this, you know. We had to reanimate her.
There's a limit to the shock she can survive."
"Then the hell with the operation! You said she's stable the way she
is!"
Wilma looked at the hands clasped in her lap for a moment, then up at
me. "She's the patient, Robin, not you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's her decision. She has already decided she doesn't want to be tied
down to a life-support system forever. We're going to go in again tomorrow
morning."
I sat there staring at the tank, long after Wilma Liedermari had
disappeared and my patient secretarial program had formed, silently
waiting for orders. "Uh, Harriet," I said at last, "I want a flight back
tonight."
"Yes, Robin," she said. "I've already booked you. There's no direct
flight tonight, but there's one that you can transfer at Caracas, gets you
in to New York about five AM. The surgery is not scheduled until eight."
"Thank you." She went back to silent waiting. Morton's silly face was
still there in the tank, too, tiny and reproachful down in the lower
right-hand corner. He did not speak, but every once in a while he cleared
his throat or swallowed to let me know he was waiting. "Morton," I said,
"didn't I tell you to get lost?"
"I can't do that, Robin. Not while I have an unresolved dilemma. You
gave orders about Mr. Bover..."
"Damn right I did. If I can't handle him that way maybe I'll just get
him killed."
"You don't have to bother," Morton said quickly. "There's a message
from his lawyers for you. He has decided to accept your offer."
I goggled at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. "I don't understand it
either, Robin, and neither do his lawyers," he said quickly. "They are
quite upset But there is a personal message for you, if it explains
anything."
"What's that?"
"Quote, 'Maybe he does understand after all.' Close quote."
In a somewhat confusing life, and one that is rapidly becoming a long
one, I've had a lot of confusing days, but that one was special. I ran a
hot tub and soaked in it for half an hour, trying to make my mind empty.
The effort didn't bring calm.
I had three hours before the Caracas plane left. I didn't know what to
do with it. It was not that there wasn't plenty for me to do. Harriet kept
trying to get my attention-Morton to firm up the contract with Bover,
Albert to discuss the bioanalysis of the Heechee droppings somebody had
collected, everybody to talk to me, about everything. I didn't want to do
any of them. I was stuck in my dilated time, watching the world flash
past. But it didn't flash, it crept. I didn't know what to do about it. It
was nice that Bover thought I understood so well. I wondered what he would
take to explain what I understood to me.
After a while I managed to work up enough energy to let Harriet put
through some of the decision-needed calls for me, and I made what
decisions seemed necessary; and a while after that, toying with a bowl of
crackers and milk, I listened to a news summary. It was full of talk about
the Herter-Hall capture, all of which I could get better from Albert than
from the PV newscasters.
And at that point I remembered that Albert had wanted to talk to me,
and for a moment I felt better. It gave me a point and purpose in living.
I had someone to yell at. "Halfwit," I snapped at him as he materialized,
"magnetic tapes are a century old. How come you can't read them?"
He looked at me calmly under his bushy white brows. "You're referring
to the so-called 'prayer fans', aren't you, Robin? Of course we did try
that, many times. We even suspected that there might be a synergy, and so
we tried several kinds of magnetic fields at once, steady and oscillating,
oscillating at different rates of speed. We even tried simultaneous
microwave radiation, though, as it turned out, the wrong kind..."
I was still bemused, but not so much so that I didn't pick up on the
implication. "You mean there's a right kind?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he grinned. "Once we got a good trace from the
Herter-Hall instrumentation we just duplicated it. The same microwave
radiation that's ambient in the Food Factory, a flux of a few microwatts
of elliptically polarized million-A microwave. And then we get the
signal."
"Bloody marvelous, Albert! And what is it you got?"
"Uh, well," he said, reaching for his pipe, "actually not a lot, yet.
It's hologram-stored and time-dependent, so what we get is a kind of
choppy cloud of symbols. And, of course, we can't read any of the symbols.
It's Heechee language, you know. But now it's just straight cryptography,
so to speak. All we need is a Rosetta stone."
"How long?"
He shrugged, and spread his hands, and twinkled.
I thought for a moment. "Well, stay with it. Another thing. I want you
to read into my lawyer program the whole thing, the microwave frequencies,
schematics, everything. There ought to be a patent in there somewhere, and
I want it."
"Sure thing, Robin. Uh. Would you like to hear about the Dead Men?"
"What about the Dead Men?"
"Well," he said, "not all of them are human. There are some pretty
strange little minds in those storage circuits, Robin. I think they might
be what you call the Old Ones."
The back of my neck prickled. "Heechee?"
"No, no, Robin! Almost human. But not. They don't use language well,
especially what seem to be the earliest of them, and I bet you can't even
guess the computer-time bill you're going to get for analysis and mapping
to make any sense of them at all."
"My God! Essie'll be thrilled when..."
I stopped. For a moment I had forgotten about Essie.
"Well," I said, "that's-interesting. What else is there to tell?" But,
really, I didn't care. I had used up my own last jolt of adrenaline, and
there wasn't any more.
I let him tell me the rest of his budget of conversation, but most of
it rolled right off me. Three members of the Herter-Hall party were known
to be captured. The Heechee had brought them to a spindle-shaped place
where some old machinery was lying about. The cameras were continuing to
return frames of nothing very exciting. The Dead Men had gone haywire,
were making no sense at all. Paul Hall's whereabouts were unknown; perhaps
he was still at liberty. Perhaps he was still alive. The haywire link
between the Dead Men's radio and the Food Factory was still functioning,
but it was not clear how long it would last-even if it had anything to
tell us. The organic chemistry of the Heechee was quite surprising, in
that it was less unlike human biochemistry than one might guess. I let him
talk until he ran down, not prompting him to continue, then turned back to
the commercial PV. It bad two rapid-fire comedians delivering bellylaugh
lines to each other. Unfortunately, it was in Portuguese. It didn't
matter. I still had an hour to kill, and I let it run. If nothing else, I
could admire the pretty Carioca, fruit salad in her hair, whose scanty
costume the comedians were tweaking off as they passed her back and forth,
giggling.
Harriet's attention signal lighted up, bright red.
Before I could make up my mind to respond, the picture slid off the
commercial PV channel and a man's voice said something stern in
Portuguese. I couldn't understand a word of it, but I understood the
picture that showed almost at once.
It was the Food Factory, taken out of stock, a shot from the
Herter-Halls as they were approaching it to dock. And in the short
sentence the announcer had spoken were two words that could have been
"Peter Herter".
Could have been.
Were.
The picture didn't change, but a voice began, and it was old Herter's
voice, angry and firm. "This message," it said, "is to be broadcast over
all networks at once. It is a two-hour warning. In two hours I am going to
cause a one-minute attack of the fever by entering the couch and
projecting the necessary, uh, projections. I tell you all to take
precautions. If you do not, it is your responsibility, not mine." It
paused for a moment, then resumed. "Remember, you have two hours from a
count which I will give you. no more. Shortly after that I will speak
again to tell you the reason for this, and what I demand as my proper
right if you do not wish this to happen many times. Two hours.
Beginning... now."
And the voice stopped.
The announcer came back on, babbling in Portuguese, looking scared. It
didn't matter that I couldn't understand what he was saying.
I had understood what Peter Herter had said, very well. He had repaired
the dreaming couch and was going to use it. Not out of ignorance, like
Wan. Not as a quick experiment, like the girl, Janine. He was going to use