I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-fifth day of my trip, the twenty seventh since turnover. The colors had been shocking pink for the whole fifty-five days. Now whorls of pure white formed, grew, flowed together.
I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I was arriving.
My little old ship—the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had banging around in for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself, tired of myself—was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the viewscreen, now related “down” to me because I had been decelerating, and saw nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There lots of stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eye. One red one that stood out more for intensity of hue than luminosity was an angry-looking red coal, not much brighter than Mars from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red.
I made myself take an interest.
That was not really easy. After two months of rejecting close to everything around me because it was boring or threatening, it was tough for me to switch over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and peered out as the ship began to rotate its scanning pattern, slicing orange-peel strips of sky to capture for the cameras and analyzers.
And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal. Fifty-five days of boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the viewscreen, holding onto it with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee metal. It was irregularly slab-sided, with rounded pimples studding it on the flat sides.
And the adrenalin began to flow, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head. I watched it out of sight, and then hauled myself over to the scan analyzer, waiting to see what would come out. There was no question that it was good, the only question was how good. Maybe extraordinarily good! Maybe a whole Peggy’s World all my own! -- with a royalty in the millions of dollars every year for the rest of my life! Maybe only a vacant shell. Maybe. The squared-off shape suggested it was—maybe that wildest of dreams, a whole big Heechee ship that I could enter into and fly around; where I chose, big enough to carry a thousand people and a lion tons of cargo! All those dreams were possible; and even if they all failed, if it was just an abandoned shell, if all that it held was one thing inside it, one little doodad, one gadget, one whosis that nobody had ever found before that could be taken apart, reproduced and made to work on Earth.
I stumbled and raked my knuckles against the spiral gaget now glowing soft gold. I sucked the blood off them and realized the ship was moving.
It shouldn’t have been moving! It wasn’t programmed to do that. It was meant to hang in whatever orbit it was programmed to find, and just stay there until I looked around and made my decisions.
I stared around, confused and baffled. The glowing slab was firmly in the middle of the viewscreen now, and it stayed there; ship had stopped its automatic spherical scan. Belatedly I heard the distant high yell of the lander motors. They were what was moving me; my ship was targeted for that slab.
And a green light was glowing over the pilot’s seat.
That was wrong! The green light was installed on Gateway by human beings. It had nothing to do with the Heechee; it was the plain old people’s radio circuit, announcing that someone was calling me. Who? Who could be anywhere near my brand-new discovery?
I thumbed on the TBS circuit and shouted, “Hello?”
There was an answer. I didn’t understand it; it seemed to be in some foreign language, perhaps Chinese. But it was human, all right. “Talk English!” I yelled. “Who the hell are you?”
Pause. Then another voice. “Who are you?”
“My name is Rob Broadhead,” I snarled.
“Broadhead?” Confused mumbling of a couple of voices. Then the English-speaking voice again: “We don’t have any record of a prospector named Broadhead. Are you from Aphrodite?”
“What’s Aphrodite?”
“Oh, Christ! Who are you? Listen, this is Gateway Two control and we don’t have time to screw around. Identify yourself!”
Gateway Two!
I snapped off the radio and lay back, watching the slab grow larger, ignoring the demand of the green light. Gateway Two? How ridiculous! If I had wanted to go to Gateway Two I would have signed up in the regular course and accepted the penalty of paying royalties on anything I might find. I would have flown out secure as any tourist, on a course that had been tested a hundred times. I hadn’t done that. I had picked a setting no one else had ever used and taken my risks. And I had felt every one of them, scared out of my brain for fifty-five bad days.
It wasn’t fair!
I lost my head. I lunged toward the Heechee course director and shoved the wheels around at random.
It was a failure I couldn’t accept. I was braced to find nothing. I was not braced to find I had done something easy, for no reward at all.
But what I produced was a bigger failure still. There was a bright yellow flash from the course board, and then all the colors went black.
The thin scream from the lander motors stopped.
The feeling of motion was gone. The ship was dead. Nothing was moving. Nothing worked in the Heechee complex; nothing, not even the cooling system.
By the time Gateway Two sent a ship out to haul me in I delirious with heatstroke, in an ambient temperature of 75.0 C.
Gateway was hot and dank. Gateway Two was cold enough that I had to borrow jacket, gloves, and heavy underwear. Gateway stank of sweat and sewers. Gateway Two tasted of rusty steel. Gateway was bright and loud and full of people. On Gateway Two there was almost no sound, and only seven human beings, counting myself, to make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, there were only a few dozen of them. No one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air there was came from chemical processors. The partial pressure of O2 was under 150 millibars; and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, much more than half earth-normal pressure altogether, that made the voices highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours.
The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it.
“I guess I’m in trouble,” I said.
“I would say so, yes,” he agreed. “The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before.”
“I didn’t know a Heechee ship could go dead like that.”
He shrugged. “You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?” I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. “I’m pretty busy right now. I’m going to have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours—if you can? -- fine. Then we’ll have a party for you.”
“Party!” It was the farthest thing from my mind. “For who?”
“We don’t meet someone like you every day, Broadhead,’ said Ituno admiringly, and left me to my thoughts.
I didn’t like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up,
put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. It didn’t take long; there wasn’t much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn’t have a tourist trade, and so there wasn’t any nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find. . . not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn’t work, either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing.
It was not one of my better days.
When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting.
“I don’t know how to flush it,” I apologized.
She looked me up and down. “You’re Broadhead,” she stated, and then: “Why don’t you go to Aphrodite?”
“What’s Aphrodite—no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what’s Aphrodite?”
She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all.
“Wait for me,” she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said, “Aphrodite’s where the money is, Broadhead. You’re going to need it.”
I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big find. “You’d have to pay royalty, of course,” she said. “And so far haven’t found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris. But there’s thousands of square miles to explore, and it’ll be months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?”
“Hot-planet experience?”
“I mean,” she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me, “have you ever explored a planet that’s hot?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn’t even land.”
“Pity,” she said. “Still, there’s not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite’s just a little bit worse. The primary’s a flare star, and you don’t want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you’re in.”
“What are the chances of finding one?” I asked.
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, “not all that good, maybe. After all, you’re out in open when you’re prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble,” she conceded. “But they don’t lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent.”
“What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?”
“More than that. Yes, I grant you, it’s higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it’s not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes—when the weather’s mild.”
“It sounds charming,” I said. “Why aren’t you out there now?”
“Me? I’m an out-pilot. I’m going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back.”
“I want a ride back right now.”
“Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They’ll throw the book at you.”
I thought it over carefully. Then I said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my chances.”
“Don’t you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this.”
“Sweetie,” I said, “I couldn’t take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don’t know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn’t want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn’t care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime’s worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo into Hester’s Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the Suits, and I wasn’t trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee. . . and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn’t leak.
None of them leaked.
On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn’t know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet’s who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn’t get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived.
I was almost sorry to leave. . . not counting being scared.
Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. “Sorry to see you go, Broadhead,” he said. “Sure you won’t change your mind? We’ve got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. If you change your mind after you get back—”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said.
“Banzai,” he said, and drank. “Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?”
“Shicky? Sure. My neighbor.”
“Give him my regards,” he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. “He’s a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself.”
“He’s a great person, all right,” I said absently, finishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. “Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?”
“Can’t make up his mind, Broadhead. He’s got a stake that’s enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can’t make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he’d be broke if he didn’t score. So he just stays on, a cripple.”
I put the glass down. I didn’t want any more to drink. “So long, Ituno,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn’t know if I would ever mail. There wasn’t much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there’s a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn’t room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping . . . and worrying.
Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did.
Sigfrid says, “You sound tired, Rob.”
Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders’ meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted.
Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn’t care if you’re physically exhausted. He doest care if you’ve got a broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother.
I say that. I say, “I’m tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don’t you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma.”
“Did you have any, Robby?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Do you want to talk about them, Robby?”
“Not particularly.”
He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy’s room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys’ stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and—I can’t read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on.
“Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?” Sigfrid probes gently.
“You bet.” Then I reconsider. “Well, no. I’m not sure.” Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It’s a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I’d had before, and she, I already knew better.
So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And—every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies’ room, and the stewardess was looking the other way—racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs.
And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the make.
“Do you want to just say what you’re feeling at this second, Rob?”
“I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was.”
“Don’t you know, really? Can’t you remember what was in your head while you weren’t talking, just now?”
“Sure I can!” I hesitate, then I say, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn’t believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby.”
“What was the insight, Robby?”
“I’m trying to tell you. It was about—well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these . . . I had—”
“I think you’re trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?”
“Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly . . .”
“You told me that, Rob.”
“Right.” And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me.
“Let’s see if I can help you, Rob,” he says. “What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?”
I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don’t control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm.
But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: “See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother’s favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only—”
“Please, Robbie, that isn’t quite right, and besides you’re intellectualizing. You know you really don’t want to put in all these preambles. You’re stalling, aren’t you?”
Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. “All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn’t help it! I was her only son. My father was dead—don’t clear your throat, Sigfrid, I’m getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once.”
“You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, ‘I love you, son?’”
“No!” I scream. Then I get control again. “Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends—girlfriends, I mean—that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don’t remember what I’d done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so. . . . But not to me.”
“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.
“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal pain.”
“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”
“Oh, shit.”
I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look, Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know—knew! -- she loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”
I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it. I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”
I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.
“But you see, Sigfrid,” I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, “she didn’t touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections—you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she . . .”
After a moment Sigfrid says, “Go on, Robbie. Say it.”
I try, but I am still stuck, and he says:
“Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don’t worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words.”
“Well, she would take my temperature,” I explain. “You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she’d hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she’d take the thermometer out and read it.”
I am right on the verge of bawling. I’m willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don’t think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won’t run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn’t say anything, and after a moment I manage the words:
“You see how it is, Sigfrid? It’s funny. All my life now—what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass.”
There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn’t good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels.
One thing that hadn’t changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her voice: “I warned you you’d fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?”
“I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else.”
“Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead.”
I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. “Emma,” I said, “do whatever you want to do, but get off my back.”
She said sunnily, “I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it’s what I have to do. It’s my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings.”
“What rules? It was my ass that was on the line.”
“The rules that say you shouldn’t destroy a ship,” she explained. I didn’t answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation.
“Mr. Hsien says,” said Emma, “that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race.” He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: “We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet, Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next out-pilot. Then we will call you again.”
She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. “Thanks a lot,” I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to it before she said:
“One more thing. Mr. Ituno’s report mentions that you worked on loading and fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain, Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one percent of her bonus to you for services during the return flight; so your account has been credited accordingly.”
“I didn’t have a contract with her,” I said, surprised.
“No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure. Altogether—” she looked under a paper, “it comes to twenty-five hundred plus fifty-five hundred—eight thousand dollars your account has been credited with.”
Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a dropshaft, grabbed an up-cable and pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship. There wasn’t enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it.
On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I’d had.
I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was drinking it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they dwindled away.
They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they’d assess me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn’t have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn’t make any difference; once they take away all you have, there isn’t anything left anyway.
So when you came right down to it, my eight thousand dollars was fairy gold. It could vanish with the morning dew. As soon as the xenotech’s report came in from Gateway Two the Board would reconvene and that would be the end of that.
So there was no particular reason to stretch my money. I might as well spend it.
There was no reason, either, to think about getting back my old job as an ivy-planter—even assuming I could get it, with Shicky fired from his job as straw-boss. The minute they made a judgment against me my credit balance would disappear. So would my prepaid per-capita payment. I would be subject to immediate defenestration.
If there happened to be an Earth-bound ship in port at the time I could just get on board, and sooner or later I would be back in Wyoming looking for my old job at the food mines. If there wasn’t a ship, then I was in trouble. I might be able to talk the American cruiser, or maybe the Brazilian one if Francy Hereira was in a position to pull strings for me, into taking me aboard for a while until a ship showed up. Or I might not.
Considered carefully, the chances were not very hopeful.
The very best thing I could do would be to act before the Board did, and there there were two choices.
I could take the next ship in port back to Earth and the food mines, without waiting for the Board’s decision.
Or I could ship out again.
They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever. . . and the other one scared me out of my mind.
Gateway was like a gentlemen’s club in which you never knew what members were in town. Louise Forehand was gone; her husband, Sess, was patiently holding the fort, waiting for her or their remaining daughter to return before shipping out again himself. He helped me move back into my room, which had been temporarily occupied by three Hungarian women until they had shipped out together in a Three. Moving took no great effort; I didn’t own anything anymore, except what I had just bought in the commissary.
The only permanent feature was Shicky Bakin, unfailingly friendly and always there. I asked him if he had heard from Klara. He had not. “Go out again, Rob,” he urged. “it is the only thing to do.”
“Yeah.” I did not want to argue it; he was incontestably right. Maybe I would. . . . I said, “I wish I weren’t a coward, Shicky, but I am. I just don’t know how I can make myself get into a ship again. I don’t have the courage to face a hundred days of fearing death every minute.”
He chuckled, and hopped off the chest of drawers to pat my shoulder. “You don’t need so much courage,” he said, flapping back to the chest. “You only need courage for one day: just to get in the ship and go. Then you don’t have to have courage anymore, because you don’t anymore have a choice.”
“I think I could have done it,” I said, “if Metchnikov’s theories about the color codes had been right. But some of the ‘safe’ ones are dead.”
“It was only a statistical matter, Rob. It is true that there is a better safety record now, and a better success record, too. Only marginal, yes. But better.”
“The ones that died are just as dead,” I said. “Still—perhaps I’ll talk to Dane again.”
Shicky looked surprised. “He’s out.”
“When?”
“Around when you left. I thought you knew.”
I had forgotten. “Wonder if he found the soft touch he was looking for.”
Shicky scratched his chin with his shoulder, keeping himself balanced with lazy wing strokes. Then he hopped off the chest and fluttered over to the piezophone. “Let’s see,” he said, punched buttons. The locator board jumped into view on the screen. “Launch 88-173,” he read. “Bonus, $150,000. That’s not much, is it?”
“I thought he was going for something bigger.”
“Well,” said Shicky, reading, “he didn’t get it. Says he came back last night.”
Since Metchnikov had halfway promised to share his apt with me, it made sense for me to talk to him; but I wasn’t so sensible. I got as far as checking out that he had returned with a find and with nothing to show for his efforts but the bonus; didn’t go to see him.
I didn’t do much of anything, in fact. I hung around.
Gateway is not the most amenity-filled place to live in the universe, but I found things to do. It beat the food mines. Each passing hour brought me an hour closer to the time when the tech’s report would arrive, but I managed not to think about that most of the time. I nursed drinks in the Blue Hell, making friends with the tourists, the visiting cruiser crews, the returnees, the fish that kept coming up from the sweltering planets, looking I guess, for another Klara. None showed up.
I read over the letters I had written her on the trip back from Gateway Two, and then I tore them up. Instead I wrote a silly short note to apologize and tell her that I loved her and took it down to radio it off to her on Venus. But she wasn’t there. I’d forgotten how long the slow Hohmann orbits took. The flight office identified the ship she had left on easily enough; it was a right-angle orbiter, which spent its whole life changing delta to rendezvous with plane-of-the-ecliptic flights between the planets. According to the records, her ship had made a rendezvous with a Mars-bound freighter, and then a Venus-bound high-G liner; she had presumably transferred to one of them, but didn’t know which, and neither one of them would reach its destination for a month or more yet.
I sent duplicate copies to each ship, but there wasn’t any answer.
The closest I came to a new girlfriend was a Gunner Third from the Brazilian cruiser. Francy Hereira brought her around. “This is Susie, my cousin,” he said, introducing us; and then, privately, later,”You should know, Rob, that I do not have family feelings about cousins.” All the crews got shore leave on Gateway from time to time, and while, as I have said, Gateway wasn’t Waikiki or Cannes, it beat the bare bones of a combat vessel. Susie Hereira was very young. She said she was nineteen and was supposed to be at least seventeen to be in the Brazilian Navy at all, but she didn’t look it. She did not speak much English, but we did not need much language in common to drink at the Blue Hell; and whe went to bed we discovered that although we had very little conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with bodies.
But Susie was only there one day a week, and that left a deal of time which needed destroying.
I tried everything: a reinforcement group, group-hugging, working out loves and hostilities on each other. Old Hegrai lecture series on the Heechee. A program of talks on astrophysics with a slant toward earning science bonuses from the Corporation. By careful budgeting of my time I managed to use it all up, decision was postponed day by day.
I do not want to give the impression that destroying time was a conscious plan in my mind; I was living from day to day, and day was full. On a Thursday Susie and Francy Hereira would check in, and the three of us might have lunch at the Blue Hell. Then Francy would go off to roam by himself, or pick up a girl to take a swim in Lake Superior, while Susie and I would retire to my room and my dope sticks to swim on those warmer waters of a bed. After dinner, some sort of entertainment. Thursday was the night the astrophysics lectures took place, and we would hear all about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, or red giants and blue dwarfs or neutron stars, or black holes. The professor was a fat old grabber from some jerkwater college near Smolensk, but through the dirty jokes there was poetry and beauty in what he talked about. He dwelt on the old stars that gave birth to us, spitting silicates and magnesium carbonate into space to form planets, hydrocarbons to form ourselves. He talked about the neutron stars that bent the gravity well around them; we knew them, because two launches had killed themselves, sheared rubble, by entering normal space too close to one of those highly dense dwarfs. He told us about the black holes that were places where a dense star had been, now detectable only by the observable fact that they swallowed everything nearby, even light; they had not merely bent the gravity well, they had wrapped it around themselves like a blanket. He described stars as thin as air, immense clouds of glowing gas; told us about the prestars of the Orion Nebula, just now blossoming into loose knots of warm gas that might in a million years be suns. His lectures were very popular; even old hands like Shicky and Dane Metchnikov showed up. While I listened to the professor I could feel the wonder and beauty of space. It was too immense and glorious to be frightening, and it was not until later that I would relate those sinks of radiation and swamps of thin gas to me, to the frail, frightened, pain-sensitive creation that was the body I inhabited. And then I would think about going out among those remote titans and my soul curled up inside me.
After one of those meetings I said good-bye to Susie and Francy and sat in an alcove near the lecture room, half hidden by the ivy, and despondently smoked a joint. Shicky found me there, and halted just in front of me, supporting himself on his wings. “I was looking for you, Rob,” he said, and stopped.
The grass was just beginning to hit me. “Interesting lecture,” I said absently, reaching for the good feeling that I wanted from the joint and not really very interested in whether Shicky was there or not.
“You missed the most interesting part,” said Shicky.
It occurred to me that he was looking both fearful and hopeful; there was something on his mind. I took another hit, and offered him the joint; he shook his head. “Rob,” he said, “I think there is something worth having coming up.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really, Rob! Something quite good. And soon.”
I was not ready for this. I wanted to go on smoking my joint until the temporary thrill of the lecture had worn off, so that I could go back to destroying the days. The last thing I wanted was to hear about some new mission that my guilt would make me want to sign on for, and my fear would abort.
Shicky caught the shelf of ivy and held himself up by it, looking at me curiously. “Rob-friend,” he said, “if I can find something out for you will you help me?”
“Help you how?”
“Take me with you!” he cried. “I can do everything but go in the lander. And this mission, I think, is one where it does not so much matter. There is a bonus for everyone, even for someone who must remain in orbit.”
“What are you talking about?” The grass was hitting me now; I could feel the warmth behind my knees and the gentle blur all around me.
“Metchnikov was talking to the lecturer,” Shicky said. “I think from what he said that he knows of a new mission. Only—they spoke in Russian, and I did not understand very well. But it is the one he has been waiting for.”
I said reasonably, “The last one he went out on wasn’t much, was it?”
“This is different!”
“I don’t think he would really cut me in on anything good—”
“Certainly not, if you don’t ask.”
“Oh, hell,” I grumbled. “All right. I’ll talk to him.”
Shicky beamed. “And then, Rob, please—take me with you?”
I stubbed out the joint, less than half smoked; I felt as though I wanted what was left of my wits about me. “I’ll do what I can,” I said, and headed back for the lecture room just as Metchnikov was coming out.
We had not spoken since he had returned. He looked as solid and broad as ever, and his fringe of chin whiskers was neatly trimmed. “Hello, Broadhead,” he said suspiciously.
I didn’t waste words. “I hear you’ve got something good coming up. Can I go along?”
He didn’t waste words, either. “No.” He looked at me with frank dislike. Partly that was what I had expected from him all along, but I was pretty sure part of it was because he had heard about me and Klara.
“You are going out,” I persisted. “What is it, a One?” He stroked his whiskers. “No,” he said reluctantly, “it isn’t a One. It’s two Fives.”
“Two Fives?”
He stared at me suspiciously for a moment, and then almost grinned; I did not like him when he smiled, it was always a question in my mind what he was smiling about.
“All right,” he said. “You want in, you can have it, for all of me. It’s not up to me, of course. You’ll have to ask Emma; she’s doing a briefing tomorrow morning. But she might let you go a science mission, with a minimum million-dollar bonus. You’re involved.”
“I’m involved?” That was something out of an unexpected rection! “Involved how?”
“Ask Emma,” he said, and brushed past me.
There were about a dozen prospectors in the briefing room, most of whom I knew: Sess Forehand, Shicky, Metchnikov, a few others I’d drunk with or gone to bed with, one time or another. Emma wasn’t there yet, and I managed to intercept her as she was coming in.
“I want to go out on this mission,” I said.
She looked startled. “You do? I thought—” But she stopped there, without saying what it was she thought.
I followed up: “I have as much right to go as Metchnikov does!”
“You sure as hell don’t have as good a record as he does, Broadhead.” She looked me over carefully, and then she said, “Well, I’ll tell you, if you want to know how it is, Broadhead. It’s a special mission, and partly you’re responsible for it. That boner of yours turns out to be interesting. I don’t mean wrecking the ship; that was stupid, and if there any justice in the universe you’d pay for it. But dumb luck is almost as good as brains.”
“You got the report from Gateway Two,” I guessed.
She shook her head. “Not yet. But it doesn’t matter. We finely programmed your mission into the computer, and it gave some interesting correlations. The course pattern that took you to Gateway Two—Oh, hell,” she said, “come on inside. You can sit through the briefing, at least. It’ll explain everything, and then we’ll see.”
She took my elbow and pushed me ahead of her into the room which was the same one we had used for a classroom—how long before? It seemed like a million years. I sat down between Sess and Shicky, and waited to hear what it was she had to say.
“Most of you,” she started off, “are here by invitation—with one or two exceptions. One of the exceptions is our distinguished friend Mr. Broadhead. He managed to wreck a ship near Gateway Two, as most of you know. By rights we ought to throw the book at him, but before he did that he accidentally turned up some interesting facts. His course colors were not the regular ones for Gateway Two, and when the computer compared them it came up with a whole new concept of course setting. Apparently only about five settings are critical for destination—the five that were the same for the usual Gateway Two setting, and for Broadhead’s new one. What the other settings mean we don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”
She leaned back and folded her hands. “This is a multiple-purpose mission,” she said. “We’re going to do something new. For openers, we’re going to send two ships to the same destination.”
Sess Forehand raised his hand. “What’s the point of that?”
“Well, partly to make sure it is the same destination. We’re going to vary the noncritical settings slightly . . . the ones we think are noncritical. And we’re going to start the two ships thirty seconds apart. Now, if we know what we’re doing, that means you’ll come out about as far apart as Gateway travels in thirty seconds.”
Forehand wrinkled his brow. “Relative to what?”
“Good question,” she nodded. “Relative, we think, to the Sun. The stellar motion relative to the Galaxy—we think—can be neglected. At least, assuming that your destination turns out to be inside the Galaxy, and not so far away that the galactic motion has a markedly different vector. I mean, if you came out on the opposite side, it would be seventy kilometers a second, relative to the galactic center. We don’t think that’s involved. We only expect a relatively minor difference in velocity and direction, and—well, anyway, you should come out within somewhere between two and two hundred kilometers of each other.
“Of course,” she said, smiling cheerfully, “that’s only theoretical. Maybe the relative motions won’t mean anything at all. In that case, the problem is to keep you from colliding with each other. But we’re sure—pretty sure—that there will be at least some displacement. All you really need is about fifteen meters—the long diameter of a Five.”
“How sure is pretty sure?” one of the girls asked.
“Well,” Emma admitted, “reasonably sure. How do we know until we try?”
“It sounds dangerous,” Sess commented. He did not seem deterred by it. He was only stating an opinion. In this he was unlike me; I was very busy ignoring my inner sensations, trying to concentrate on the technicalities of the briefing.
Emma looked surprised. “That part? Look, I haven’t come to the dangerous part yet. This is a nonaccepted destination for all Ones, most Threes, and some Fives.”
“Why?” someone asked.
“That’s what you’re going there to find out,” she said patiently. “It happens to be the setting the computer picked out as best for testing the correlations between course settings. You’ve got armored Fives, and both accept this particular destination. That means you have what the Heechee designers figured was a good chance to handle it, right?”
“That was a long time ago,” I objected.
“Oh, sure. I never said otherwise. It is dangerous—at least to some extent. That’s what the million is for.”
She stopped there, gravely considering us, until someone obliged by asking, “What million?”
“The million-dollar bonus each one of you gets when you come back,” she said. “They’ve appropriated ten million dollars out of Corporation funds for this. Equal shares. Of course, there’s a good chance that it will be more than a million each. If you find anything worthwhile, the regular pay scales apply. And the computer thinks this is a good prospect.”
“Why is it worth ten million?” I asked.
“I don’t make these decisions,” she said patiently. And then she looked at me as a person, not part of the group, and added, “And by the way, Broadhead. We’re writing off your damage to the ship. So whatever you get is yours to keep. A million dollars? That’s a nice little nest egg. You can go back home, buy yourself a little business, live the rest of your life on that.”
We looked at each other, and Emma just sat there, smiling gently and waiting. I don’t know what the others were thinking about. What I was remembering was Gateway Two and the first trip, wearing our eyes out at the instruments, looking for something that wasn’t there. I suppose each of the others had washouts of their own to remember.
“Launch,” she said at last, “is day after tomorrow. The ones who want to sign, come see me in my office.”
They accepted me. They turned Shicky down.
But it wasn’t as easy as that, nothing ever is; the one who made sure Shicky was not going to go along was me. They filled up the first ship quickly: Sess Forehand, two girls from Sierra Leone, a French couple—all English-speaking, all briefed, all with previous missions. For the second ship Metchnikov signed as crew right away; a gay couple, Danny A. and Danny R., were his picks. Then, grudgingly, he agreed to me. And that left one opening.
“We can take your friend Bakin,” Emma said. “Or would you prefer your other friend?”
“What other friend?” I demanded.
“We have an application,” she said, “from Gunner Third Susanna Hereira, off the Brazilian cruiser. She has their permission to take leave for this purpose.”
“Susie! I didn’t know she’d volunteered!”
Emma studied her punch card reflectively. “She’s very qualified,” she commented. “Also, she has all her parts. I am referring,” she said sweetly, “to her legs, of course, although as I understand it you have some interest in her other parts as well. Or would you care to go gay for this mission?”
I felt an unreasoning rush of anger. I am not one of your sexually uptight people; the thought of physical contact with a male was not frightening in itself. But—with Dane Metchnikov? Or one of his lovers?
“Gunner Hereira can be here tomorrow,” Emma comme “The Brazilian cruiser is going to dock right after the orbiter.”
“Why the hell are you asking me?” I snarled. “Metchnikov is crew chief.”
“He prefers to leave it to you, Broadhead. Which one?”
“I don’t give a damn!” I yelled, and left. But there is no such thing as avoiding a decision. Not making a decision was in effect decision enough to keep Shicky off the crew. If I had fought for him, they would have taken him; without that, Susie was the obvious choice.
I spent the next day staying out of Shicky’s way. I picked new a fish at the Blue Hell, fresh out of the classroom, and spent the night in her room. I didn’t even go back to my own room for clothes; I dumped everything and bought a new outfit. I pretty well knew the places where Shicky might look for me—the Hell, Central Park, the museum—and so I stayed away from those places; I went for a long, rambling wander through the deserted tunnels, seeing no one at all, until late that night.
Then I took a chance and went to our farewell party. Shicky would probably be there, but there would be other people around.
He was. And so was Louise Forehand. In fact, she seemed to be the center of attention; I hadn’t even known she was back.
She saw me and waved to me. “I struck it rich, Rob! Drink up, I’m buying!”
I let someone put a glass in one hand and a joint in the other and before I took my hit I managed to ask her what she’d found.
“Weapons, Rob! Marvelous Heechee weapons, hundred them. Sess says it’s going to be at least a five-million-dollar assessment. Plus royalties. . . if anyone finds a way to duplicate the weapons anyway.”
I let the smoke blow out and washed out the taste with a swallow of white lightning. “What kind of weapons?”
“They’re like the tunnel diggers, only portable. They’ll cut a hole through anything. We lost Sara BellaFanta in the landing; one of them put a hole in her suit. But Tim and I are whacking up her share, so it’s two and a half mil apiece.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “I would have thought the last thing the human race needed was some new ways to kill each other—congratulations.” I was reaching for an air of moral superiority and I needed it; because as I turned away, there was Shicky, hanging in air, watching me.
“Want a hit?” I asked, offering him the joint.
He shook his head.
I said, “Shicky, it wasn’t up to me. I told them—I didn’t tell them not to take you.”
“Did you tell them they should?”
“It wasn’t up to me,” I said. “Hey, listen!” I went on, suddenly seeing an out. “Now that Louise has hit, Sess probably won’t want to go. Why don’t you take his place?”
He backed away, watching me; only his expression changed. “You don’t know?” he asked. “It is true that Sess canceled out, but he has already been replaced.”
“By whom?”
“By the person right behind you,” said Shicky, and I turned around, and there she was, looking at me, a glass in her hand and an expression I could not read on her face.
“Hello. Rob.” said Klara.
I had prepared myself for the party by a number of quick ones in the commissary; I was ninety-percent drunk and ten-percent stoned, but it all whooshed out of me as I looked at her. I put down the drink, handed the joint to someone at random, took her arm, and pulled her out into the tunnel.
“Klara,” I said. “Did you get my letters?”
She looked puzzled. “Letters?” She shook her head. “I guess you sent them to Venus? I never got there. I got as far as the rendezvous with the plane-of-the-ecliptic flight, and then I changed my mind. I came right back on the orbiter.”
“Oh, Klara.”
“Oh, Rob,” she mimicked, grinning; that wasn’t much fun, because when she smiled I could see where the tooth was missing that I had knocked out. “So what else have we got to say to each other?”
I put my arms around her. “I can say that I love you, and I’m sorry, and I want to make it up to you, and I want to get married and live together and have kids and—”
“Jesus, Rob,” she said, pushing me away, gently enough, “when you say something you say a lot, don’t you? So hold it for a while. It’ll keep.”
“But it’s been months!”
She laughed. “No fooling, Rob. This is a bad day for Sagittarians to make decisions, especially about love. We’ll talk about it another time.”
“That crap! Listen, I don’t believe in any of that!”
“I do, Rob.”
I had an inspiration. “Hey! I bet I can trade with somebody in the first ship! Or, wait a minute, maybe Susie would trade with you—”
She shook her head, still smiling. “I really don’t think Susie would like that,” she said. “Anyway, they bitched enough about letting me switch with Sess. They’ll never stand still for another last minute change.”
“I don’t care, Klara!”
“Rob,” she said, “don’t rush me. I did a lot of thinking about you and me. I think we’ve got something that’s worth working for. But I can’t say it’s all straight in my head yet, and I don’t want to push it.”
“But, Klara—”
“Leave it at that Rob. I’ll be in the first Five, you’ll be in the second.
When we get where we’re going we’ll be able to talk. Maybe even switch around to come back together. But meanwhile we’ll both have a chance to think about what we really want.”
The only words I seemed to know I seemed to be saying over and over again: “But, Klara—”
She kissed me, and pushed me away. “Rob,” she said, “don’t be in such a hurry. We’ve got all the time there is.”
“Tell me something, Sigfrid,” I say, “how nervous am I?”
He is wearing his Sigmund Freud hologram this time, true Viennese stare, not a bit gemillich. But his voice is the gently sad baritone: “if you are asking what my sensors say, Rob, you are quite agitated, yes.”
“I thought so,” I say, bouncing around the mat.
“Can you tell me why?”
“No!” The whole week has been like that, marvelous sex with Doreen and S. Ya., and floods of tears in the shower; fantastic gambling and play at the bridge tournament, and total despair on the way home. I feel like a yo-yo. “I feel like a yo-yo,” I yell. “You opened up something I can’t handle.”
“I think you underestimate your capacity for handling pain,” he says reassuringly.
“Fuck you, Sigfrid! What do you know about human capacities?”
He almost sighs. “Are we back to that again, Rob?”
“We bloody well are!” And funnily, I feel less nervous; I goad him into an argument again, and the peril is reduced.
“It is true, Rob, that I am a machine. But I am a machine designed to understand what humans are like and, believe me, well designed for my function.”
“Designed! Sigfrid,” I say reasonably, “you aren’t human. You may know, but you don’t feel. You have no idea what it feels like to have to make human decisions and carry the load of human emotion. You don’t know what it feels like to have to tie a friend up to keep him from committing murder. To have someone you love die. To know it’s your fault. To be scared out of your mind.”
“I do know those things, Rob,” he says gently. “I really do. I want to explore why you are feeling so turbulent, so won’t you please help me?”
“No!”
“But your agitation, Rob, means that we are approaching the central pain—”
“Get your bloody drill out of my nerve!” But the analogy doesn’t throw him for a second; his circuits are finely tuned today.
“I’m not your dentist, Rob, I’m your analyst, and I tell you—”
“Stop!” I know what I have to do to get him away from where it hurts. I haven’t used S. Ya.’s secret little formula since that first day, but now I want to use it again. I say the words, and convert him from a tiger to a pussycat; he rolls over and lets me stroke his tummy, as I command him to display the gaudier bits from some of his interviews with attractive and highly quirky female patients; and the rest of the hour is spent as a peepshow; and I have got out of his room one more time intact.
Or nearly.
Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid, healing the Heechee-hacked scars. . . . Jesus, it was like a Boy Scout camp; we sang and frolicked all the nineteen days after turnaround. I don’t think I ever felt that good in my life. Partly it was release from fear; when we hit turnaround we all breathed easier, as always do. Partly it was that the first half of the trip had been pretty gritty, with Metchnikov and his two boyfriends in a complicated triple spat most of the time and Susie Hereira a lot less interested in me on shipboard than she had been as a once-a-night out on Gateway. But mostly, I think, for me anyway, it knowing that I was getting closer and closer to Klara. Danny A. helped me work out the figures; he’d taught some of the courses on Gateway, and he may have been wrong but there wasn’t any around righter so I took his word for it: he calculated from time of turnaround that we were going something like three hundred light-years in all—a guess, sure, but close enough. The ship, the one Klara was in, was getting farther and farther ahead of us all the way to turnaround, at which point we were doing something over ten light-years a day (or so Danny said).
The first Five had been launched thirty seconds ahead of us, so then it was just arithmetic: about one light-day. 3 x lO8 centimeters per second times 60 seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours. At turnaround Klara was a good seventeen and a half billion kilometers ahead of us. It seemed very far, and was. But after turnaround we were getting closer every day, following her in the same weird hole through space that the Heechee had drilled for us. Where our ship was going, hers had gone. I could feel that we were catching up; sometimes I fantasized that I could smell her perfume.
When I said something like that to Danny A. he looked at me queerly. “Do you know how far seventeen and a half billion kilometers is? You could fit the whole solar system in between them and us. Just about exactly; the semimajor axis of Pluto’s orbit is thirty-nine A.U. and change.”
I laughed, a little embarrassed. “It was just a notion.”
“So go to sleep,” he said, “and have a nice dream about it.” He knew how I felt about Klara; the whole ship did, even Metchnikov, even Susie, and maybe that was a fantasy, too, but I thought they all wished us well. We were all wishing all of us well, constructing elaborate plans about what we were going to do with our bonuses. For Klara and me, at a million dollars apiece, it came to a right nice piece of change. Maybe not enough for Full Medical—no, not if we wanted anything left over to have fun on. But Major Medical, at least, which meant really good health, barring something terribly damaging, for another thirty or forty years. We could live happily ever after on what was left over: travel; children and nice home in a decent part of—wait a minute, I cautioned myself. Home where? Not back anywhere near the food mines. Maybe not on Earth at all. Would Klara want to go back to Venus? I couldn’t see myself taking to the life of a tunnel rat. But I couldn’t see Klara in Dallas or New York, either. Of course, I thought, my wish racing far ahead of reality, if we really found anything a lousy million apiece might be only the beginning. Then we could have all the homes we wanted, anywhere we liked; and Full Medical, too, with transplants to keep us young and healthy and beautiful and sexually strong and—”You really ought to go to sleep,” said Danny A. from the seat next to mine; “the way you thrash around is a caution.”
But I didn’t feel like going to sleep. I was hungry, and there wasn’t any reason not to eat. For nineteen days we had been practicing food discipline, which is what you do on the way out for the first half of the trip. Once you’ve reached turnaround you know how much you can consume for the rest of the trip, which is why some prospectors come back fat. I climbed down out of the lander, where Susie and both the Dannys were sacked in, and then I found out what it was that was making me hungry. Dane Metchnikov was cooking himself a stew.
“Is there enough for two?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “I guess so.” He opened the squeeze-fit lid, peered inside, milked another hundred cc of water into it out of the vapor trap, and said, “Give it another ten minutes. I was going to have a drink first.”
I accepted the invitation, and we passed a wine flask back and forth. While he shook the stew and added a dollop of salt, I took the star readings for him. We were still close to maximum velocity and there was nothing on the viewscreen that looked like a familiar constellation, or even much like a star; but it was all beginning to look friendly and good to me. To all of us. I’d never seen Dane so cheerful and relaxed. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “A million’s enough. After this one I’m going back to Syracuse, get my doctorate, get a job. There’s going to be some school somewhere that’ll want a poet in residence or an English teacher who’s been on seven missions. They’ll pay me something, and the money from this will keep me in extras all the rest of my life.”
All I had really heard was the one word, and that I had heard loud and surprising: “Poet?”
He grinned. “Didn’t you know? That’s how I got to Gateway; the Guggenheim Foundation paid my way.” He took the pot out of the cooker, divided the stew into two dishes, and we ate.
This was the fellow who had been shrieking viciously at the two Dannys for a solid hour, two days before, while Susie and I lay angry and isolated in the lander, listening. It was all turnaround. We were home free; the mission wasn’t going to strand us out of fuel, and we didn’t have to worry about finding anything, because our reward was guaranteed. I asked him about his poetry. He wouldn’t recite any, but promised to show me copies of what he’d sent back to the Guggenheims when we reached Gateway again.
And when we’d finished eating, and wiped out the pot and dishes and put them away, Dane looked at his watch. “Too early to wake the others up,” he said, “and not a damn thing to do.”
He looked at me, smiling. It was a real smile, not a grin; and I pushed myself over to him, and sat in the warm and welcome circle of his arm.
And nineteen days went like an hour, and then the clock told us it was almost time to arrive. We were all awake, crowded into the capsule, eager as kids at Christmas, waiting to open our toys. It had been the happiest trip I had ever made, and probably one of the happiest ever. “You know,” said Danny R. thoughtfully, “I’m almost sorry to arrive.” And Susie, just beginning to understand our English, said:
“Sim, ja sei,” and then, “I too!” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back; but what I was really thinking about was Klara. We had tried the radio a couple of times, but it didn’t work in the Heechee wormholes through space. But when we came out I would be able to talk to her! I didn’t mind that others would be listening, I knew what it was that I wanted to say. I even knew what she would answer. There was no question about it; there was surely as much euphoria in her ship as in ours, for the same reasons, and with all that love and joy the answer was not in doubt.
“We’re stopping!” Danny R. yelled. “Can you feel it?”
“Yes!” crowed Metchnikov, bouncing with the tiny surges of the pseudo-gravity that marked our return to normal space. And there was another sign, too: the golden helix in the center of the cabin was beginning to glow, brighter every second.
“I think we’ve made it,” said Danny R., bursting with pleasure, and I was as pleased as he.
“I’ll start the spherical scan,” I said, confident that I knew what to do. Susie took her cue from me and opened the door up to the lander; she and Danny A. were going to go out for the star sights.
But Danny A. didn’t join her. He was staring at the viewscreen. As I started the ship turning, I could see stars, which was normal enough; they did not seem special in any way, although they were rather blurry for some reason.
I staggered and almost fell. The ship’s rotation did not seem as smooth as it should be.
“The radio,” Danny said, and Metchnikov, frowning, looked up and saw the light.
“Turn it on,” I cried. The voice I heard might be Klara’s.
Metchnikov, still frowning, reached for the switch, and then I noticed that the helix was a brighter gold than I had ever seen it: straw-colored, as though it were incandescently hot. No heat from it, but the golden color was shot through with streaks of white.
“That’s funny,” I said, pointing.
I don’t know if anyone heard me; the radio was pouring static, and inside the capsule the sound was very loud. Metchnikov grabbed for the tuning and the gain. Over the static I heard a voice I didn’t recognize at first. It was Danny A.’s. “Do you feel that?” he yelled. “It’s gravity! We’re in trouble. Stop the scan!”
I stopped it reflexively.
But by then the ship’s screen had turned and something came into view that was not a star and not a galaxy. It was a dim mass of pale-blue light, mottled, immense, and terrifying at the first glimpse. I knew it was not a sun. No sun can be so big and so dim. It hurt the eyes to look at it, not because of brightness. It hurt inside the eyes, up far into the optic nerve. The pain was in the brain itself.
Metchnikov switched off the radio, and in the silence that followed I heard Danny A. say prayerfully, “Dearest God, we’ve had it. That thing is a black hole.”
“With your permission, Rob,” says Sigfrid, “I’d like to explore something with you before you command me into my passive play mode.”
I tighten up; the son of a bitch has read my mind. “I observe,” he says instantly, “that you are feeling some apprehension. That is what I would like to explore.”
Incredible, I feel myself trying to save his feelings. Sometimes I forget he’s a machine. “I didn’t know you were aware that I’d been doing that,” I apologize.
“Of course I’m aware, Rob. When you have given me the proper command I obey it, but you have not ever given me the command to refrain from recording and integrating data. I assume you do not possess that command.”
“You assume good, Sigfrid.”
“There is no reason that you should not have access to whatever information I possess. I have not attempted to interfere before now—”
“Could you?”
“I do have the capacity to signal the use of the command construction to higher authority, yes. I have not done that.”
“Why not?” The old bag of bolts keeps on surprising me; all this is new to me.
“As I have said, there is no reason to. But clearly you are attempting to postpone some sort of confrontation, and I would like to tell you what I think that confrontation involves. Then you can make your own decision.”
“Oh, cripes.” I throw off the straps and sit up. “Do you mind if I smoke?” I know what the answer is going to be, but he surprises me again.
“Under the circumstances, no. If you feel the need of a tension reducer I agree. I had even considered offering you a mild tranquilizer if you wish it.”
“Jesus,” I say admiringly, lighting up—and I actually have to stop myself from offering him one! “All right, let’s have it.”
Sigfrid gets up, stretches his legs, and crosses to a more comfortable chair! I hadn’t known he could do that, either. “I am trying to put you at your ease, Rob,” he says, “as I am sure you observe. First let me tell you something about my capacities—and yours—which I do not think you know. I can provide information about any of my clients. That is, you are not limited to those who have had access to this particular terminal.”
“I don’t think I understand that,” I say, after he has paused for a moment.
“I think you do. Or will. When you want to. However, the more important question is what memory you are attempting to keep suppressed. I feel it is necessary for you to unblock it. I had considered offering you light hypnosis, or a tranquilizer, or even a fully human analyst to come in for one session, and any or all of those are at your disposal if you wish them. But I have observed that you are relatively comfortable in discussions about what you perceive as objective reality, as distinguished from your internalization of reality. So I would like to explore a particular incident with you in those terms.”
I carefully tap some ash off the end of my cigarette. He’s right about that; as long as we keep the conversation abstract and impersonal, I can talk about anybloodything. “What incident is that, Sigfrid?”
“Your final prospecting voyage from Gateway, Rob. Let me refresh your memory—”
“Jesus, Sigfrid!”
“I know you think you recall it perfectly,” he says, interpreting me exactly, “and in that sense I don’t suppose your memory needs refreshing. But what is interesting about that particular episode is that all the main areas of your internal concern seem to concentrate there. Your terror. Your homosexual tendencies—”
“Hey!”
“—which are not, to be sure, a major part of your sexuality, Rob, but which give you more concern than is warranted. Your feelings about your mother. The immense burden of guilt you put on yourself. And, above all, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin. All these things recur over and over in your dreams, Rob, and you often do not make the identification. And they are all present in this one episode.”
I stub out a cigarette, and realize that I have had two going at once. “I don’t see the part about my mother,” I say at last.
“You don’t?” The hologram that I call Sigirid von Shrink moves toward a corner of the room. “Let me show you a picture.” He raises his hand—that’s pure theater, I know it is—and in the corner there appears a woman’s figure. It is not very clear, but it is quite slim, and is in the act of covering a cough.
“It’s not a very good resemblance to my mother,” I object.
“Isn’t it?”
“Well,” I say generously, “I suppose it’s the best you can do. I mean, not having anything to go on except, I guess, my description of her.”
“The picture,” says Sigfrid gently enough, “was assembled from your description of the girl Susie Hereira.”
I light another cigarette, with some difficulty, because my hand is shaking. “Wow,” I say, with real admiration. “I take my hat off to you, Sigfrid. That’s very interesting. Of course,” I go on, suddenly feeling irritable, “Susie was, my God, only a child! And from that I realize—I realize now, I mean—that there are some resemblances. But the age is all wrong.”
“Rob,” says Sigfrid, “how old was your mother when you were little?”
“She was very young.” I add after a moment, “As a matter of fact, she looked a lot younger than she was even.”
Sigfrid lets me hang there for a moment, and then he waves his hand again and the figure disappears, and instead we are suddenly looking at a picture of two Fives butted lander-to-lander in midspace, and beyond them is—is—”Oh, my God, Sigfrid,” I say. He waits me out for a while. As far as I am concerned, he can wait forever; I simply do not know what to say. I am not hurting, but I am paralyzed. I cannot say anything, and I cannot move.
“This,” he begins, speaking very softly and gently, “is a reconstruction of the two ships in your expedition in the vicinity of the object SAG YY. It is a black hole or, more accurately, a singularity in a state of extremely rapid rotation.”
“I know what it is, Sigfrid.”
“Yes. You do. Because of its rotation, the translation velocity of what is called its event threshold or Schwarzschlld discontinuity exceeds the speed of light, and so it is not properly black; in fact it can be seen by virtue of what is called Cerenkov radiation. It was because of the instrument readings on this and other aspects of the singularity that your expedition was awarded a ten-million-dollar bonus, in addition to the agreed-upon sum which, along with certain other lesser amounts, is the foundation of your present fortune.”
“I know that, too, Sigfrid.” Pause.
“Would you care to tell me what else you know about it, Rob?”
Pause.
“I’m not sure I can, Sigfrid.”
Pause again.
He isn’t even urging me to try. He knows that he doesn’t have to. I want to try, and I take my cue from his own manner. There is something in there that I can’t talk about, that scares me even to think about; but wrapped around that central terror there is something I can talk about, and that is the objective reality.
“I don’t know how much you know about singularities, Sigfrid.”
“Perhaps you can just say what you think it is that I ought to know, Rob.”
I put out the current cigarette and light another one. “Well,” I say, “you know and I know that if you really wanted to know about singularities it’s all in the data-banks somewhere, and a lot more exactly and informatively than I can say it, but anyway. . The thing about black holes is they’re traps. They bend light. They bend time. Once you’re in you can’t get out. Only. . . Only. . .”
After a moment Sigfrid says, “It’s all right for you to cry if you want to, Rob,” which is the way that I suddenly realize that that’s what I’m doing.
“Jesus,” I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps handy right next to the mat. He waits.
“Only I did get out,” I say.
And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits himself a joke. “That,” he says, “is pretty obvious, from the fact that you’re here.”
“This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid,” I say.
“I am sure it is for you, Rob.”
“I wish I had a drink.”
Click. “The cabinet behind you,” says Sigfrid, “that has just opened contains some rather good sherry. It isn’t made from grapes, I’m sorry to say; the health service doesn’t go in for luxuries. But I don’t think you’ll be aware of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is laced with just a dollop of THC to soothe the nerves.”
“Holy Christ,” I say, having run out of ways of expressing surprise. The sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside me.
“Okay,” I say, setting the glass down. “Well. When I got back to Gateway they’d written the expedition off. We were almost a year overdue. Because we’d been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation? . . . Oh, never mind,” I say, before he can answer, “that was a rhetorical question. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock time—clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic universe, I mean. And—”
I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough.
“And if we’d gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower. Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us.
“But I got out.”
And I think of something and look at my watch. “Speaking of time, my hour’s been up for the last five minutes!”
“I have no other appointments this afternoon, Rob.”
I stare. “What?”
Gently:
“I cleared my calendar before your appointment, Rob.”
I don’t say “Holy Christ” again, but I surely think it. “This makes me feel right up against the wall, Sigfrid!” I say angrily.
“I am not forcing you to stay past your hour, Rob. I am pointing out that you have that option if you choose.”
I mull that for a while.
“You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid,” I say. “All right. Well, you see, there was no way we could get out considered as a unit. Our ships were caught, well inside the of point of no return, and there just ain’t no way home from there. But Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all about the holes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck.
“But we weren’t a unit! We were two ships! And each of those came apart into two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part of our system to the other and you know, kick part of us deeper into the well and at the same kick the other part up and out—then part of the unit could get free!”
Long pause.
“Why don’t you have another drink, Rob?” says Sigfrid courteously. “After you finish crying, I mean.”
Fear! There was so much terror jumping around inside my skin that I couldn’t feel it anymore; my senses were saturated with it; I don’t know if I screamed or babbled, I only did what Danny A. told me to do. We’d backed the two ships together and linked up, lander-to-lander, and we were trying to manhandle gear, instruments, clothes, everything that moved out of the first ship into whatever corners we could find of the second, to make room for ten people where five were a tight fit. Hand to hand, back and forth, we bucket-brigaded the stuff. Dane Metchnikov’s kidneys must have been kicked black-and-blue; he was the one who was in the landers, changing the fuel-metering switches to blow every drop of hydrox at once. Would we survive that? We had no way of knowing. Both our Fives were armored, and we didn’t expect to damage the Heechee-metal shells. But the contents of the shells would be us, all of us in the one of them that went free—or we hoped would go free—and there wasn’t really any way to tell whether we could come free in the first place, or whether what would come free would be nothing but jelly, anyway. And all we had was minutes, and not very many of them. I guess I passed Klara twenty times in ten minutes, and I remember that once, the first time, we kissed. Or aimed at each other’s lips, and came close enough. I remember the smell of her, and once lifting my head because the musk oil was so strong and not seeing her, and then forgetting it again. And all the time, out of one viewscreen or another, that immense broad, baleful blue ball hung flickering outside; the racing shadows across its surface that were phase effects made fearful pictures; the gripping grab of its gravity waves tugged at our guts. Danny A. was in the capsule of the first ship, watching the time and kicking bags and bundles down to the lander hatch to pass on, through the hatch, through the landers, up to the capsule of the second ship where I was pushing them out of the way, any which way, just to make room for more. “Five minutes,” he’d yell, and “Four minutes!” and “Three minutes, get the goddamn lead out!” and then, “That’s it! All of you! Drop what you’re doing and come on up here.” And we did. All of us. All but me. I could hear the others yelling, and then calling to me; but I’d fallen behind, our own lander was blocked, I couldn’t get through the hatch! And I tugged somebody’s duffelbag out of the way, just as Klara was screaming over the TBS radio, “Rob! Rob, for God’s sake, get up here!” And I knew it was too late; and I slammed the hatch and dogged it down, just as I heard Danny A.’s voice shouting, “No! No! Wait. . . .”
Wait. . .
Wait for a very, very long time.
After a while, I don’t know how long, I raise my head and say, “Sorry, Sigfrid.”
“For what, Rob?”
“For crying like this.” I am physically exhausted. It is as if I had run ten miles through a gauntlet of mad Choctaws pounding me with clubs.
“Are you feeling better now, Rob?”
“Better?” I puzzle over that stupid question for a moment, and then I take inventory, and, curiously enough, I am. “Why, yeah. I guess so. Not what you’d call good. But better.”
“Take it easy for a minute, Rob.”
That strikes me as a dumb remark, and I tell him so. I have about the energy level of a small, arthritic jellyfish that’s been dead for a week. I have no choice but to take it easy.
But I do feel better. “I feel,” I say, “as if I let myself feel my guilt at last.”
“And you survived it.”
I think that over. “I guess I did,” I say.
“Let’s explore that question of guilt, Rob. Guilt why?”
“Because I jettisoned nine people to save myself, asshole!”
“Has anyone ever accused you of that? Anyone but yourself, I mean?”
“Accused?” I blow my nose again, thinking. “Well, no. Why should they? When I got back I was kind of a hero.” I think about Shicky, so kind, so mothering; and Francy Hereira holding me in his arms, letting me bawl, even though I’d killed his cousin. “But they weren’t there. They didn’t see me blow the tanks to get free.”
“Did you blow the tanks?”
“Oh, hell, Sigfrid,” I say, “I don’t know. I was going to. I was reaching for the button.”
“Does it make sense that the button in the ship you were planning to abandon would actually fire the combined tanks in the landers?”
“Why not? I don’t know. Anyway,” I say, “you can’t give me any alibis I haven’t already thought of for myself. I know maybe Danny or Klara pushed the button before I did. But I was reaching for mine!”
“And which ship did you think would go free?”
“Theirs! Mine,” I correct myself. “No, I don’t know.”
Sigfrid says gravely, “Actually, that was a very resourceful thing you did. You knew you couldn’t all have survived. There wasn’t time. The only choice was whether some of you would die, or all of you would. You elected to see that somebody lived.”
“Crap! I’m a murderer!”
Pause, while Sigfrid’s circuits think that over. “Rob,” he says carefully, “I think you’re contradicting yourself. Didn’t you say she’s still alive in that discontinuity?”
“They all are! Time has stopped for them!”
“Then how could you have murdered anybody?”
“What?”
He says again, “How could you have murdered anybody?”
“. . . I don’t know,” I say, “but, honestly, Sigfrid, I really don’t want to think about it anymore today.”
“There’s no reason you should, Rob. I wonder if you have any idea how much you’ve accomplished in the past two and a half hours. I’m proud of you!”
And queerly, incongruously, I believe he is, chips, Heechee circuits, holograms and all, and it makes me feel good to believe it.
“You can go any time you want to,” he says, getting up and going back to his easy chair in the most lifelike way possible, even grinning at me! “But I think I would like to show you something first.” My defenses are eroded down to nothing. I only say, “What’s that, Sigfrid?”
“That other capability of ours that I mentioned, Rob,” he “the one that we’ve never used. I would like to display another patient, from some time back.”
“Another patient?”
He says gently, “Look over in the corner, Rob.”
I look—
and there she is.
“Klara!” And as soon as I see her I know where Sigfrid gets her from—the machine Klara was consulting back on Gateway. She is hanging there, one arm across a file rack, her feet lazily floating in the air, talking earnestly; her broad black eyebrows frown and sigh and her face grins, and grimaces, and then looks sweetly, invitingly relaxed.
“You can hear what she’s saying if you want to, Rob.”
“Do I want to?”
“Not necessarily. But there’s nothing in it to be afraid of. She loved you, Rob, the best way she knew how. The same as you loved her.”
I look for a long time, and then I say, “Turn her off, Sigfrid. Please.”
In the recovery room I almost fall asleep for a moment. I have never been so relaxed.
I wash my face, and smoke another cigarette, and then I go out into the bright diffuse daylight under the Bubble, and it all is so good and so friendly. I think of Klara with love and tenderness and in my heart I say good-bye to her. And then I think of S. Ya. with whom I have a date for that evening—if I’m not already late for it! But she’ll wait; she’s a good scout, almost as good as Klara.
Klara.
I stop in the middle of the mall, and people bump up against me. A little old lady in short-shorts toddles over to me and asks, “Is something wrong?”
I stare at her, and don’t answer; and then I turn around and head back for Sigfrid’s office.
There is no one there, not even a hologram. I yell, “Sigfrid! Where the hell are you?”
No one. No answer. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this room when it wasn’t set up. I can see what is real and what hologram now; and not much of it is real. Powder-metal studs for projectors. The mat (real); the cabinet with the light (real); a few other pieces of furniture that I might want to see or use. But no Sigirid. Not even the chair he usually sits in. “Sigfrid!”
I keep on yelling, with my heart bubbling up in my throat, my brain spinning. “Sigfrid!” I scream, and at last there is a of a haze and a flash and there he is in his Sigmund Freud guise looking at me politely.
“Yes, Rob?”
“Sigfrid, I did murder her! She’s gone!”
“I see that you’re upset, Rob,” he says. “Can you tell me what it is that’s bothering you?”
“Upset! I’m worse than upset, Sigfrid, I’m a person who killed nine other people to save his life! Maybe not ‘really’! Maybe not ‘on purpose’! But in their eyes I killed them, as much as in mine.”
“But Rob,” he says reasonably, “we’ve been all over this. They’re still alive; they all are. Time has stopped for them—”
“I know,” I howl. “Don’t you understand, Sigfrid? That’s the point. I not only killed her, I’m still killing her!”
Patiently: “Do you think what you just said is true, Rob?”
“She thinks it is! Now, and forever, as long as I live. It’s not years ago that it happened for her. It’s only a few minutes, and it goes on for all of my life. I’m down here, getting older, trying to forget, and there’s Klara up there in Sagittarius YY, floating around like a fly in amber!”
I drop to the bare plastic mat, sobbing. Little by little, Sigfrid has been restoring the whole office, patching in this decoration and that. There are pinatas hanging over my head, and a holopic Lake Garda at Sirmione on the wall, hoverfloats, sailboats, bathers having fun.
“Let the pain out, Rob,” Sigfrid says gently. “Let it all out.
“What do you think I’m doing?” I roll over on the foam staring at the ceiling. “I could get over the pain and the guilt, Sigfrid, if she could. But for her it isn’t over. She’s out there, stuck in time.”
“Go ahead, Rob,” he encourages.
“I am going ahead. Every second is still the newest second in her mind—the second when I threw her life away to save my own. I’ll live and get old and die before she lives past that second, Sigfrid.”
“Keep going, Rob. Say it all.”
“She’s thinking I betrayed her, and she’s thinking it now! I can’t live with that.”
There is a very, very long silence, and at last Sigfrid says:
“You are, you know.”
“What?” My mind has gone a thousand light-years away.
“You are living with it, Rob.”
“Do you call this living?” I sneer, sitting up and wiping my nose with another of his million tissues.
“You respond very quickly to anything I say, Rob,” says Sigfrid, “and therefore sometimes I think your response is a counterpunch. You parry what I say with words. Let me strike home for once, Rob. Let this sink in: you are living.”
Well, I suppose I am.” It is true enough; it is just not very rewarding.
Another long pause, and then Sigfrid says:
“Rob. You know that I am a machine. You also know that my function is to deal with human feelings. I cannot feel feelings. But I can represent them with models, I can analyze them, I can evaluate them. I can do this for you. I can even do it for myself. I can construct a paradigm within which I can assess the value of emotions. Guilt? It is a painful thing; but because it is painful it is a behavior modifier. It can influence you to avoid guilt-inducing actions, and this is a valuable thing for you and for society. But you cannot use it if you do not feel it.”
“I do feel it! Jesus Christ, Sigfrid, you know I’m feeling it!”
“I know,” he says, “that now you are letting yourself feel it. It is out in the open, where you can let it work for you, not buried where it can only harm you. That is what I am for, Rob. To bring your feelings out where you can use them.”
“Even the bad feelings? Guilt, fear, pain, envy?”
“Guilt. Fear. Pain. Envy. The motivators. The modifiers. The qualities that I, Rob, do not have, except in a hypothetical sense, when I make a paradigm and assign them to myself for study.”
There is another pause. I have a funny feeling about it. Sigfrid’s pauses are usually either to give me time to let something sink in, or to permit him to compute some complex chain of argument about me. This time I think it is me but not about me. And at last he says, “You asked me, Rob.”
“Asked you? What was that?”
“You asked me, ‘Do you call this living?’ And I answer: Yes. It is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”