When the shipboard computer’s mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and completely. It was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke at once. There were not many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth, urinated into the sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets with him to the terminal. “Display the mail now,” he ordered, munching on something that tasted like sour rye bread but was meant to be a sweet roll.
When he saw what the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and Dorema, and for himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and signed by eight hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging him to return and become their Burgermeister. “Dumb head!” he scolded the computer. “Why do you wake me for this trash?” Vera did not answer, because he did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.
Long before then, he was complaining, “Also this food is not fit for pigs! Attend to it at once!”
Poor Vera erased the attempt to interpret his first question and patiently attended to the second. “The recycling system is below optimal mass levels,” she said,”. . . Mr. Herter. In addition, my processing routines have been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have been deferred.”
“Do not defer the food question any more,” he snarled, “or you will kill me, and there’s an end to it.” He gloomily commanded display of the mission orders while he forced himself to chew the remainder of his breakfast. The orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas they had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him, perhaps they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed the end of it to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old face and brushed his sparse hair. And why was the recycling system depleted, so that it could not function properly? Because his daughters and their consorts had removed themselves and thus their useful by-products, as well as all the water Wan had stolen from the system. Stolen! Yes, there was no other word for it. Also they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary to monitor his health, and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic heart, if he should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the cameras, so that he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also they had taken- They had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the first time in his life, was wholly alone.
He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back, they would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was a reserve unit, a pillbox soldier, a standby program. He was given excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.
In his long life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had never taught himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait! To wait fifty days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable proposals and questions. To wait almost as long for his family and that hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he? Suppose he had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood flowing and his bowels moving and his brain thinking broke down in any place. What then?
And some day they surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not even his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather’s youth were really about his own. Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical could deal with anything, repair or replace, as long as it was not the brain itself that was damaged-and Payter’s brain was in the best of shape, because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?
But “here” there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great deal.
He was no longer a boy! But once he had been, and even then he had known that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now: the key to heart’s desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing! Skinny young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth but their leader all the same, had promised himself he would have much more. He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this, some grand futuristic pattern would emerge, and he alone would be able to find the handle to wield it, like a weapon, like an axe, like a scythe, to punish or reap or remake the world. Well, here it was! And what was he doing with it? He was waiting. It had not been like that, in the boyhood stories by Juve and Gail and Dominik and the Frenchman, Verne. The people in them did not waste themselves so spinelessly.
But what, after all, was one to do?
So while he waited for that question to answer itself, he kept up his daily rounds. He ate four light meals a day, every other one of CHON-food, methodically dictating to Vera his impressions of taste and consistency. He ordered Vera to design a new mobile bio-assay out of what odds and ends of sensor instrumentation could be spared, and worked at building it as she found time to complete parts of the design. He worked out ten minutes each morning with the weights, half an hour every afternoon with bending and stretching. He methodically walked every pathway in the Food Factory, with his hand-held camera pointed into every cranny. He composed long letters of complaint to his masters on Earth, cagily arguing the merits of aborting the mission and returning to Earth as soon as he could summon the family back, and actually transmitted one or two of them. He wrote fierce and peremptory directives to his lawyer in Stuttgart, in code, arguing his position, demanding a revision to the contract. And most of all, he schemed. And about the Traumeplatz most of all.
It was seldom out of his thoughts, this dreaming place with its startling potential. When he was depressed and fretful, he thought how rightly it would serve Earth if he were to repair it and call Wan back to give them their fevers once again. When he was charged with force and determination he went to look at it, lid hanging from an ornamental projection on one wall, the joints and fasteners always with him in his coverall pouch. How easy it would be to bring in a cutting torch and lop it free, cram the ship full of that, and the communications system for the Dead Men, and whatever other goods and treasures he could find; and then cast loose in the rocket for Earth, start the long, slow downward spiral that would bring him-what would it bring him? God in heaven, what would it not! Fame! Power! Prosperity! All the things that were his due-yes, and his rightful property, too, if he only got back in time to enjoy them.
It made him ill to think about it. All the time the clock was ticking, ticking. Every minute he was one minute closer to the end of his life. Every second spent waiting was a second stolen from the happy time of greatness and luxury that he had earned. He forced himself to eat, sitting on the edge of his private and looking longingly at the ship’s controls. “The food has not improved, Vera!” he called accusingly.
The confounded thing did not answer. “Vera! You must do something about the food!” It still did not answer, not for several seconds.
And then only, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Herter.” It was enough to make one sick. In fact, he did feel somewhat sick, he realized. He gazed with hostility at the dish he had been doggedly forcing down, supposed to be a sort of schnitzel, or as close to it as Vera’s limited recombinant capacities would allow, but tasting of whisky or sauerkraut, or both at once. He set it on the floor.
“I do not feel well,” he announced.
Pause. Then, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Hester.” Poor stupid Vera had just so much capacity. She was processing a burst of messages from Earth, endeavoring to carry on a conversation with the Dead Men by means of the faster-than-light radio, encoding and transmitting all of her own telemetry-all at once. She simply did not have time for his queasiness. But his accelerating unease would not be denied: a sudden rush of saliva under the tongue, a quick shuddering of the diaphragm. He barely made it to the sanitary, giving back, there, all he had taken. For the last time, he swore. He did not want to live so long as to see those God-bedamned organic compounds reworked for one more passage through his gut. When he was sure he had stopped vomiting he marched over to the console and pushed the override buttons. “All functions in standby except this,” he ordered. “Monitor my bio-assay at once.”
“Very well,” she said at once,”. . . Mr. Hester.” Silence for a moment, while the unit in the sanitary made what it could of what Peter had just deposited. “You are suffering from food poisoning,” she reported,”. . . Mr. Hester.”
“So! This I already know. What is to be done about it?”
Pause, while her tiny brain revolved the problem. “If you could add water to the system, the fermentation and recycling would be under better control,” she said, “. . . Mr. Hester. At least one hundred liters. There has been considerable loss due to evaporation in the much larger volume of space now available, as well as the stocks withdrawn for the remainder of your party. My recommendation is that you replenish the system with available water as soon as possible.”
“But that is not fit to drink for pigs even!”
“The solutes present problems,” she acknowledged. “Therefore I recommend that at least half of any added water be distilled first. The system should be able to cope with the remainder of the solutes. . . Mr. Hester.”
“God in Heaven! Am I to build a still out of nothing, and become a water-carrier too? And what of the bio-assay mobile unit, so that this will not happen again?”
Vera sorted through the questions for a moment. “Yes, I think that would be appropriate,” she agreed. “If you wish, I will provide construction plans. Also. . . Mr. Hester, you may wish to consider relying more heavily on CHON-food for your diet, since you do not appear to have severe adverse reactions to it.”
“Apart of course from the fact that it tastes like dog-biscuit,” he sneered. “Very well. Complete the construction plans at once. Hard copy, making use of available materials, do you understand?”
“Yes. . . Mr. Hester.” The computer was silent for a time, inventorying redundant parts and materials, devising linkages that would do the job. It was a formidable task for Vera’s limited intelligence. Peter drew a cup of water and rinsed out his mouth, then grimly unwrapped one of the least unattractive CHON tablets and nibbled off a tentative corner. While he waited to see if he would throw up again he faced the possibility that he might in fact die here, and alone. He did not even have the option he had thought was his, of casting everything adrift and returning to Earth by himself-not, at least, unless he first added water as ordered, and did his best to insure that nothing else would go wrong.
And yet it was every day so increasingly tempting. .
To be sure, that would mean casting his daughters and his son-in-law adrift.
But would they ever return? Suppose they did not. Suppose that rude boy turned the wrong switch, or ran out of fuel. Or anything. Suppose, in short, they died. Must he then wither on the vine until he also was dead? And what benefit would that be to humanity, if he perished here, and the whole thing to do over again with a new crew. . . and himself, Schwarze Peter, done out of reward, done out of fame and power, done out of life itself?
Or-an idea struck him-was there another option? This bedamned Food Factory itself, so set on continuing its course. What if he could find the controls that directed it so? What if he could learn to change those directions, so that it could bring him back to Earth not in three years and more, but at once, in days? To be sure, that would doom his family, would it not? But perhaps not! Perhaps they would return, if they returned at all, to the Food Factory itself, wherever it might be. Even in close orbit around Earth! And how marvelously that would solve everyone’s problems at once- He threw the remainder of the packet into the sanitary, to add to the store of organics. “Du bist verruckt, Peter!” he snarled to himself. The flaw in that dream could not be ignored: he had sought with all his might, and the controls to the Food Factory were not to be found.
The frying-bacon sound of the hard-copy printer rescued him from his thoughts. He pulled the sheets out of the machine and frowned over them for a moment. So much work! Twenty hours, at least! And not merely time, but so much of it was hard physical labor! He would have to go out into space to reclaim piping from the struts that were meant to hold the auxiliary transmitters in place, cut them loose, bring them inside; and only then begin to weld them together and form them into a spiral. Simply for the condensation section of the still! He saw that he was beginning to shake- He barely made it to the sanitary in time. “Vera!” he croaked.
“I must have medication for this!”
“At once. . . Mr. Hester. Yes. In the medical kit you will find tablets marked-“
“Dumbhead! The medical kit is gone to Cuckooland!”
“Oh, yes . .. Mr. Hester. One moment. Yes. I have programmed appropriate pharmaceuticals for you. It will take about twenty minutes for them to be prepared.”
“In twenty minutes I could be dead,” be snarled. But there was no help for it, and so he sat and stewed for twenty minutes, the pressures mounting. Illness, hunger, loneliness, overwork, resentment, fear. Anger! That was what, in the end, they all fused into. Anger. Many vectors. One vector sum. By the time Vera’s dispensary popped out his pills, it had submerged all the others. He swallowed them greedily and retired to his private to see what would happen.
Actually they did appear to work. He lay back while the fires in his belly damped themselves, and fell imperceptibly asleep.
When he woke he felt at least physically better. He washed himself, brushed his teeth, brushed his thinning yellow hair, and only then noticed the Christmas tree of attention-demanding lights around Vera’s console. On the screen in bright red letters were the words:
GENTLY REQUEST PERMISSION TO RESUME NORMAL MODES.
He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten to cancel the override. When he ordered the computer to get back to business there was an instant explosion of bells and signal lights, a cascade of hard copy out of the printer and a voice. His elder daughter’s voice, out of Vera’s taped storage: “Hello, Pop. Sorry we couldn’t reach you to tell you we arrived safely. We’re going to explore now. Talk to you later.”
Because Peter Hester loved his family, the joy of their safe arrival flooded his heart and sustained him-for hours. For almost two days. But joy does not flourish in an existence of irritations and worries. He spoke to Lurvy-twice; for no more than thirty seconds each time. Vera simply could not handle more. Vera was harder pressed than Peter himself, stripped and rearranged as she was, handling two-way traffic between Heechee Heaven and the Earth, deferring top priority action commands when even higher priorities demanded attention. The one voice link with the Heechee place could not handle the volume it was given to carry, and mere chitchat between father and daughter could not be allowed.
That was not unjust, Peter conceded. Such marvels they were finding! What was unjust was that he himself was out of it. What was unjust was that among the urgent and meaningful traffic, Vera found time to pass on to him a hodgepodge of commands meant for himself. None reasonable. Some impossible to carry out. Redeploy the thrusters. Inventory CHON-food. Submit by return message complete analysis a cm by 3 cm by 12.5 cm packets in red and lavender wrappers. Do not submit unnecessary analyses! Submit metallurgical analysis “dreaming couch”. Do not attempt physical study “dreaming couch”. Query Dead Men re Heechee Drive. Query Dead Men re control panels. Query Dead Men. How easy that was to command! How hard to carry out, when they maundered and scolded and rambled and complained when he could hear them at all, and when most often he was forbidden to take time on the FTL voice circuit anyway. Some of the orders from Earth contradicted others, and most of them came out of order, with obsolete priority designations. And some did not come at all. Poor Vera’s storage circuits were soon approaching overload, and she tried to rid herself of unnecessary data by hard-printing it for him to, somehow, attend to; but that made problems of its own,, because the recycling system that fed the printer rolls was the same one that fed him, and the organics were already depleted. So Peter had to open and dump CHON-food into the sanitary and then get busy on the still.
Even if Vera had had time for him, he had not much time for Vera. Struggle into EVA equipment. Cycle himself out on the hull of the Food Factory. Cut away tubing and bind it together. Sweat it back to the ship, always fighting the infuriating, dogged thrust of the Food Factory itself as it plunged toward somewhere or other. He could spare time only for an occasional glance at the pictures coming back from Heechee Heaven. Vera displayed them as they came in, one frame at a time; but then each one was whisked away to make storage space for the next one, and if Peter was not there to see they would go unseen. Even so, good heavens! The Dead Men, so featureless to look at. The corridors of Heechee Heaven. The Old Ones-Peter’s heart almost stopped as he looked at the great broad face of an Old One on the screen. But he had time only for a look, and then the still was done and he must go on with the next task. Build himself a yoke for his shoulders. Seam together plastic sheeting (another drain on the recycler!) to make buckets. Squat impatiently by the one functioning-barely functioning-water source, holding the flexible disk around the spout and catching the foulsmelling dribble in the bags. Tote the water back, half into the still, the other half into the recycling tanks. Sleep when he could. Eat when he could force himself. Attend to his own personal priority messages when they trickled through, and when he was too exhausted for anything physical. Another message from Dortmund, three hundred municipal workers this time-stupid Vera, for letting such trash through! A coded communication from his lawyer, meaning half an hour to translate it. And then all it said was, “Am attempting secure more favorable terms. Can promise nothing. Meanwhile advise full compliance all directives.” What a pig! Peter, swearing, sat before the console, slammed down the override key and dictated his reply:
“Full compliance with all stupid directives will kill me, and then what?” And he sent it in the clear; let Broadhead and the Gateway Corp make what they would of it!
And perhaps the message was no lie. In all his stress and bustle, Peter had no time for aches and pains. He ate the CHON-food and, when new regular rations began to come out of the recycler, them, too. Even when they tasted foul-sometimes turpentine, sometimes mold-he was not sick. This was not ideal. Peter knew that he was operating on stress and adrenaline, and sometime there would be a price to pay. But he could see no way to avoid paying it when due.
And when at last he had the food processor working reasonably well once more, and had managed to catch up with what appeared the most peremptory of his own orders, he sat before Vera’s console half-dozing, and then saw the greatest marvel of all. He scowled uncomprehendingly. What was that idiot boy doing with a prayer fan? Why in the next frame was he poking it into those foolish things that looked like flowerholders? And then the next frame began to build on the screen, and Peter gave a great shout. Suddenly a picture had appeared, some sort of book-Japanese or Chinese, by the look of it.
He was out of the ship and halfway to the Traumeplatz before his conscious mind quite articulated what some part of him had understood at once. The prayer fans! They contained information! He did not stop to wonder why the information had been in a Terrestrial language, or at least what looked like one. He had grasped the essential fact. He was determined to see for himself. Panting, he thrust himself into the room and scrabbled feverishly among the “fans”. How was it done? Why in the name of God had he not waited to see more, to be sure of what he was doing? But there were the candleholders, or flowerpots, or whatever he had thought they were; he jammed the first prayer fan to hand into the nearest one. Nothing happened.
He tried six of them, narrow end first, wide end first, every way he could think of, before it occurred to him that perhaps not all of the reading machines were still working. And the second one he tried pulled the fan out of his hand and immediately sprang into light. He was looking at six dancers in black masks and bodystockings, and he was hearing a song he had not heard for many years.
It was a taped PV show! No. Not even that. It was older than that. Years older, not much more recent than the first years of the discovery of the Gateway asteroid; his second wife was still alive, and Janine not born yet, when that song was new. It had been simple old television, before the Heechee piezoelectric circuits had been incorporated into communications systems for human beings. It had perhaps been part of the library of some Gateway prospector, no doubt One of the Dead Men, and somehow it had been transcribed to a prayer fan.
What a cheat!
But then he realized that there were thousands of prayer fans, on Earth, in the tunnels of Venus, still on Gateway itself; wherever the Heechee had been they had left them. Whatever the source of this one, most of the others must have been left by the Heechee themselves! And that alone-dear God, that alone was worth more even than the Food Factory, for it was the key to all of the Heechee’s knowledge! What a bonus there would be!
Exulting, Peter tried another fan (old movie), and another (slim volume of poetry, this time in English, by someone named Eliot), and another. How disgusting! If this was what Wan had got his notions of love from, some lascivious Gateway prospector carrying pornography with him to pass the time, no wonder his behavior was so foul! But he could not remain angry long, for he had too much to be glad about. He snatched it out of the reader, and then, in the quiet, heard the distant tiny sound of Vera’s urgent-attention bell.
It had a frightening sound, even before he got back to the ship, even before he demanded the message and heard his son-in-law’s voice, rasped with fear:
“Urgent override priority! For Peter Hester and immediate relay to Earth! Lurvy, Janine and Wan have been captured by the Heechee, and I think they are coming after me!”
The advantage of his new situation, and the only one, was that now that there were no more messages coming from Heechee Heaven Vera was better able to cope with her overload. Patiently Peter teased out of her all the pictures that had been transmitted before Paul’s message had been taped, and saw the knot of Heechee at the end of the corridor, the blurred struggle, half a dozen quick glimpses of the ceiling of the corridor, something that might have been the back of Wan’s head-then nothing. Or nothing that meant anything. Peter could not know that the camera had been jammed into the blouse of one of the Old Ones, but he could see that there was nothing to be seen: obscure shadowy shapes, perhaps a hint of texture.
Peter’s mind was clear. But it was also empty. He did not allow himself to feel how empty his life had at once become. He carefully programmed Vera to go back over the voice messages and select the significant ones, and listened to what all of them had said. There was no hope in any of it. Not even when at last a new picture suddenly began to build on the screen, then another, then another. For half a dozen frames there was nothing that made sense, perhaps a fist over the lens, maybe a shot of a bare floor. Then, in one corner of the last frame, something that looked like-what? Like a Sturmkampfwagen from his earliest boyhood? But then it was gone, and the camera had once again been put where it showed nothing at all, and stayed that way through fifty frames.
What it noticeably did not show was any sign of either of his daughters, or of Wan. And as to Paul, the old man did not have a clue; after his last frantic message he was gone.
In some unwanted corner of his mind he found the realization that now he might be, probably was, the sole survivor of the mission, and so whatever bonus might come to all was now his alone.
He held the thought where he could look at it. But it meant nothing. He was now hopelessly alone, more alone than ever, as alone as Trish Bover frozen into her eternal ragged orbit that would go nowhere. Perhaps he could get back to Earth to claim his reward. Perhaps he could keep from dying. But how was he to keep from going insane?
It took Peter a long time to fall asleep. He was not afraid of sleeping. What he dreaded was waking up afterward, and when it came it was as bad as he had feared. In the first moment it was a day like any other day, and it was only after a peaceable moment of stretching and yawning that he remembered what had happened. “Peter Hester,” he said to himself out loud, “you are alone in this very damned place, and you will die here, still alone.” He noted that he was talking to himself. Already.
Through the habits of all those years he washed himself, cleaned his mouth, brushed his hair and then took time to snip off the loose ends around his ears and at the nape of his neck. It did not matter what he did, in any case. Having left his private, he opened two packets of CHON-food and ate them methodically before asking Vera if there were any messages from Heechee Heaven. “No,” she said, “. . . Mr. Hester, but there are a number of downlink action relays.”
“Later,” he said. They did not matter. They would tell him to do things he had already done, perhaps. Or they would tell him to do things he had no intention of doing, perhaps to force himself outside, to rerig the thrusters, to try again. But the Food Factory would of course counter every thrust with an equal and opposite thrust of its own and continue its slow acceleration toward God, He knew what, for God, He knew why. In any event, nothing that came from Earth for the next fifty days would be relevant to the new realities.
And in less than fifty days- In less than fifty days, what? “You talk as though you had a choice of options, Peter Hester!” he scolded himself.
Well, perhaps he had, he thought, if only he could perceive what they were. Meanwhile the best thing for him to do was to do what he had always done. To keep himself fastidiously neat. To do such tasks as were reasonable for him to do. To maintain his well established habits. He had learned through all those decades of life that the best time for him to move his bowels was some forty-five minutes after eating breakfast; it was now about that time; it was appropriate to do that. While he was squatting on the sanitary he felt a tiny, almost imperceptible lurch once more and scowled. It was an annoyance to have things happen when he did not know their cause, and it was an interruption in what he was doing, with his customary efficiency. Of course, one could not claim much personal credit for the functioning of sphincters that had been bought and transplanted from some hapless (or hungry) donor, or for a stomach inserted intact from another. Nevertheless, it pleased Peter that he functioned so well.
You are morbidly interested in your bowel movements, he told himself, but silently.
Also silently-it did not seem so bad to talk to oneself, as long as it was not aloud-he defended himself. It was not unjustified, he thought. It was only because the example of the bio-assay unit in the toilet was always before him. For three and a half years it had been monitoring every waste product of their bodies. Of course, so it must! How else to keep tabs on their health? And if it was proper for a machine to weigh and evaluate one’s excrement, why not for the excrement’s author?
He said aloud, grinning, “Du bist verruckt, Peter Hester!”
He nodded in agreement with himself as he cleaned himself and fastened his coverall, because he had summed it all up. Yes. He was crazy.
By the standards of ordinary men.
But what ordinary man had ever been in the present position of Peter Hester?
So when one had said that he was crazy, after all, one had said nothing that was relevant. What did the standards of ordinary men signify as to Schwarze Peter? It was only against extraordinary men that he could be judged-and what a motley crew they were! Drug addicts and drunkards. Adulterers and traitors. Tycho Brahe had a gutta-percha nose, and no one thought him the less. The Reichsfuhrer ate no meat. Great Frederick himself spent many hours that could have been devoted to the management of an empire in composing music for tinkle-tanide chamber groups. He strolled across to the computer and called, “Vera, what was that little thump a few minutes ago?”
The computer paused to match the description against her telemetry. “I cannot be sure. . . Mr. Hester. But the moment of inertia is consistent with either the launching or docking of one of the cargo ships that have been observed.”
He stood for a moment gripping the edge of the console seat. “Fool!” he shouted. “Why was I not told that that was possible?”
“I’m sorry . . . Mr. Hester,” she apologized. “The analysis suggesting this possibility has been read out for you as hard copy. Perhaps you overlooked it.”
“Fool,” he said again, but this time he was not sure who he was talking to. The ships, of course! It had been implicit all along that the production of the Food Factory had to go somewhere. And it had also been implicit that the ships had to return empty to be reloaded. For what? Where?
That did not matter. What mattered was the perception that perhaps they would not always come empty.
And, following on that, the perception that one ship at least, known to come to the Food Factory, was now in Heechee Heaven. If it should come back, who or what might be in it?
Peter rubbed his arm, which had begun to ache. Pains or none, he could perhaps do something about that! He had some weeks before that ship could possibly return. He could-what? Yes! He could barricade that corridor. He could somehow move machines, stores-anything that had mass-to block it, so that when it did return, if it did, whoever was in it would be stopped, or at least delayed. And the time to begin that was now.
He delayed no further, but set off to find materials for a barricade.
It was not hard to move even quite massive objects, in the low thrust of the Food Factory. But it was tiring. And his arms continued to ache. And in a little while, as he was shoving a blue metal object like a short, fat canoe down toward the dock, he became aware of a strange sensation that seemed to come from the roots of his teeth, almost like the beginning of a toothache; and saliva began to flow from under his tongue.
Peter stopped and breathed deeply, forcing himself to relax. It did no good. He had known it would do no good. In a few moments the pain in the chest began, first tentative, as though someone were pressing against him with a sled runner along his breastbone, then painful, a hard, bruising thrust, as though the runner were on top of him and a hundred-kilo man standing on it.
He was too far from Vera to get medicine. He would have to wait it out. If it was false angina, he would live. If it was cardiac arrest, he would not. He sat patient and still, waiting to see which it would be, while anger built up and built up inside him. How unfair it was!
How unfair it all was! Five thousand astronomical units away, serenely and untroubled, the people of the world went about their business, neither knowing nor caring that the person who could bring them so much-who already had!-might be dying, alone and in pain.
Could they be grateful? Could they show respect, appreciation, even common decency?
Perhaps he would give them a chance. If they responded with these things, yes, he would bring them such gifts as they had never known. But if they were wicked and disobedient- Then Schwarze Peter would bring them such terrible gifts that all the world would shudder and quake with fear! In either case, they would never forget him. . . if only he survived what was happening to him now.
The main thing was Essie. I sat by her bed every time she came out of surgery-fourteen times in six weeks-and every time her voice was a little weaker and she looked a little more gaunt. Everybody was after me all the time, the suit against me in Brasilia was going badly, reports poured in from the Food Factory, the fire in the food mines still would not go out. But Essie was up front. Harriet had her orders. Wherever I was, asleep or awake, if Essie asked for me she was put through at once. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Broadhead, Robin will be with you right away. No, you won’t be disturbing him. He just woke up from a nap.” Or he’s just between appointments, or he’s just coming up the lawn from the Tappan Sea, or anything that would not deter Essie from speaking to me right away. And then I would go into the darkened room, all sun-tanned and grinning and relaxed, and tell her how well she was looking. They had taken my billiard room and moved a whole operating theater into it, and cleared the books out of the library next door to make it a bedroom for her. She was pretty comfortable there. Or said she was.
And actually, she didn’t look bad at all. They had done the splints and the bone grafts, and plugged in two or three kilos of spare parts and tissues. They had even put the skin back, or I guess transplanted new skin from somebody else. Her face looked fine, except for a light bandage on one side, and she brushed her streaky blonde hair down over that. “So, stud,” she would greet me. “How you hanging?”
“Just fine, just fine. A little horny,” I would say, nuzzling her neck with my nose. “And you?”
“Just fine.” So we reassured each other; and we weren’t lying, you know. She was getting better every day, the doctors told me that. And I was getting-I don’t know what I was getting. But I was all atremble with eagerness for every morning. Operating on five hours sleep a night. Never tired. Never felt better in my life.
But still she kept getting skinnier every time. The doctors told me what I must do, and I told Harriet and Harriet reprogrammed the cook So we stopped having salads and bare broiled steaks. No coffee and juice breakfasts, but tvoroznyikyi, cream-cheese pancakes, and mugs of steaming cocoa. Caucasian lamb pilaff for lunch. Roast grouse in sour-cream sauce for dinner. “You’re spoiling me, dear Robin,” she accused, and I said:
“Only fattening you up. I can’t stand skinny women.”
“Yes, very well. But there is such a thing as being too ethnic. Is there nothing fattening that is not Russian?”
“Wait for dessert,” I grinned. “Strawberry shortcake.” And whipped with double Devonshire cream. As a matter of psychology, the nurse had persuaded me to start with small portions on large plates. Essie doggedly ate them all the way through, and as we gradually increased the size of the portions she gradually ate more each day. She didn’t stop losing weight. But she slowed it down a lot, and by the end of six weeks the doctors opined that her condition, cautiously, might be regarded as stable. Nearly.
When I told her the good news she was actually standing up- tethered to the plumbing under her bed, but able to walk about the room. “About time,” she said, reaching out to kiss me. “Now. You have been spending too much time at home.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said.
“It is a kindness,” she said soberly. “Is very dear to me that you have always been here, Robin. But now that I am almost well you must have affairs to attend to.”
“Not really. I get along fine with the comm facilities in the brain room. Of course, it would be nice for the two of us to go somewhere. I don’t think you’ve ever seen Brasilia. Maybe in a few weeks-“
“No. Not in few weeks. Not with me. If you have need to go, please do it, Robin.”
I hesitated. “Well, Morton thinks it might be useful.”
She nodded briskly and called, “Harriet? Mr. Broadhead will be leaving for Brasilia tomorrow morning. Make reservations et cetera.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Broadhead,” Harriet said from the console at the head of Essie’s bed. Her image sputtered into blackness as quickly as it had appeared, and Essie put her arms around me.
“I will see that you have complete communications in Brasilia,” she promised, “and Harriet will be instructed to keep you posted on my condition at all times. Square count, Robin. If I need you, you will know at once.”
I said into her ear, “Well-“
She said into my shoulder, “Is no ‘well’. Is settled, and, Robin? I love you very much.”
Albert tells me that every radio message I send is actually a long, skinny string of photons, like a spear thrown into space. A thirty-second burst communication is a column nine million kilometers long, each photon zipping along at the speed of light, in perfect step all the way. But even that long, fast, skinny spear takes forever to go 5,000 A.U. The fever that had wounded my wife had taken twenty-five days to get here. The orders to stop fooling with the couch had gone only a fraction of the way before they passed the second fever, the one the girl Janine had laid on us. Lightly, to be sure. Our message congratulating the Herter-Halls on arriving at the Food Factory, out somewhere past Pluto’s orbit, had passed the one to tell us that most of them had gone skylarking off to Heechee Heaven. By now they were there; and our message telling them what to do about it was long since at the Food Factory for relay-for once two events had occurred at times close enough to have some meaning for each other.
But by the time we knew what meaning they had had, the event would again be twenty-five days in the past. What an annoyance! I wanted many things on the Food Factory, but what I wanted most of all at that moment was that faster-than-light radio. Astonishing that such a thing should be! 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 it as a weapon. He had a gun pointed at the heads of the entire human race.
And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp was sure to take over now, and I couldn’t blame them.