CONTENTS

I am no Hamlet. I’m an attendant lord, though, or at least I would be if I were human. I’m not. I’m a computer program. That is an honorable estate and I am not at all ashamed of it, especially since (as you can see) I am a very sophisticated program, not only fit to swell a progression or start a scene or two but to quote from obscure twentieth-century poets as I tell you about it.

It is to start the scene that I am speaking now. Albert’s my name, and introductions are my game. I start by introducing myself.

I’m a friend of Robinette Broadhead’s. Well, that’s not precisely right; I’m not sure I can claim to be a friend of Robin’s, though I try hard to be a friend to him. It is the purpose for which I (this particular “I”) was created. Basically I am a simple computer information-retrieval construct who (or that) has been programmed with many of the late Albert Einstein’s traits. That’s why Robin calls me Albert. There’s another area of ambiguity. Whether it is indeed Robinette Broadhead who is the object of my friendship has lately become arguable, too, since it rests on the question of who (or what) Robinette Broadhead now is-but that’s a long and hard problem that we’ll have to take up a little bit at a time.

I know this is all confusing, and I can’t help feeling that I’m not doing my job very well, since my job (as I construe it) is to set the scene for what Robin himself has to say. It’s possible I don’t have to do this at all, since you may already know what I have to say. If so, I don’t mind repeating it. We machines are patient. But you might prefer just to skip over and go on to Robin himself-as Robin himself, no doubt, would much prefer.

Let’s do it in the form of questions and answers. I will construct a subset within my program to interview me:

Q.-Who is Robinette Broadhead?

A.-Robin Broadhead is a human being who went to the Gateway asteroid and, by enduring great risks and trauma, won for himself the beginnings of an immense fortune and an even greater load of guilt.

Q.-Don’t throw in those teasers, Albert, just stick to the facts. What is the Gateway asteroid?

A.-It is an artifact left by the Heechee. They abandoned, half a million years or so ago, a sort of orbital parking garage full of working spaceships. They would take you all over the Galaxy, but you couldn’t control where you were going. (For further details see sidebar; I put this in to show you what a truly sophisticated data-retrieval program I really am.)

Q.-Watch that, Albert! Just the facts, please. Who are these Heechee?

A.-Look, let’s get something straight! If “you” are going to ask “me” questions-even if “you” are only a subset of the same program as “me” you have to let me answer them in the best way possible. “Facts” are not enough. “Facts” are what very primitive data-retrieval systems produce. I’m too good to waste on that; I have to give you the background and the surround. For instance, to tell you who the Heechee are the best way, I must tell you the story of how they first appeared on Earth. It goes like this:

The time was about half a million years ago, in the late Pleistocene. The first living terrestrial creature who became aware of their existence was a female saber-toothed tiger. She gave birth to a pair of cubs, licked them over, growled to drive her inquisitive mate away, went to sleep, woke up and found that one was missing. Carnivores don’t –

This is one of the easier kinds of information for me to retrieve:

The conflict over the island of Dominica, terrible though it was, was over in seven weeks with both Haiti and the Dominican Republic anxious for peace and a chance to rebuild their shattered economies. The next crisis to confront the Secretariat was one of great hope for everyone in the world, but at the same time fraught with far more risk to the world’s peace. I refer, of course, to the discovery of the so-called Heechee Asteroid. Although it was known that long ago, technologically advanced aliens had visited the solar system and left some valuable artifacts, the chance finding of this body with its scores of functioning spaceships was wholly unexpected. Their value was incalculable, of course, and nearly every space faring member state of the UN registered some claim to them. I will not speak of the delicate and confidential negotiations that brought about the five-power Gateway Corporation trusteeship, but with its formation, a new era opened for humankind.”

Memoirs, Marie-Clémentine Benhabbouche, Secrétaire-générale des Nations-Unis.

Q.-Albert, please! This is Robinette’s story, not yours, so get on to where he starts talking.

A.-I told you once and I told you twice. If you interrupt again I’ll simply turn you off, subset! We’re doing this my way, and my way is like this:

Carnivores don’t count well, but she was smart enough to know the difference between one and two. Unfortunately for her cub, carnivores have hair-trigger tempers, too. The loss of one cub enraged her, and in her paroxysm of fury she destroyed the other. It is instructive to observe that that was the only fatality among large mammals to result from the first visit of the Heechee to Earth.

A decade later the Heechee came back. They replaced some of the samples they had taken, including a male tiger now elderly and plump, and took a new batch. These were not four-legged. The Heechee had learned to distinguish between one predator and another, and the species they selected this time was a group of shambling, slant-browed, four-foot-high creatures with furry faces and no chins. Their very remote collateral descendants, namely you humans, would call them Australopithecus afarensis~ These the Heechee did not return. From their point of view, these creatures were the terrestrial species most likely to evolve toward intelligence. The Heechee had a use for this sort of animal, and so they began subjecting them to a program designed to force their evolution toward that goal.

Of course, the Heechee did not limit themselves to the planet Earth in their explorations, but none of the rest of the solar system had the sort of treasure that interested them. They looked. They explored Mars and Mercury, skimmed the cloud cover of the gas giants beyond the asteroid ring, observed that Pluto was there but never troubled to visit it, tunneled out an eccentric asteroid to make a sort of hangar for their spacecraft, and honeycombed the planet Venus with well-insulated tunnels. They did not concentrate on Venus because they preferred its climate to that of Earth. Actually they detested the surface of Venus as much as humans do; that was why all their construction was underground. But they built there because there was nothing alive on Venus to be harmed, and the Heechee never, never harmed any evolved living things-except when necessary.

The Heechee did not limit themselves to the Earth’s solar system, either. Their vessels spanned the Galaxy and went beyond it. Of all the Galaxy’s two hundred billion astronomical objects larger than a planet, they charted every one; and many of the smaller ones, too. Not every object was visited by a Heechee ship. But not one failed of at least a drone flyby and an instrumented search for signatures, and some became what can only be called tourist attractions.

And some-a bare handful-contained that peculiar treasure the Heechee sought called life.

Life was rare in the Galaxy. Intelligent life, however inclusively the Heechee defined it, was even rarer ... but not absent. There were Earth’s australopithecines, already tool users, beginning to develop social institutions. There was a promising winged race in what human beings would call the constellation Ophiuchus; a soft-bodied one on a dense, huge planet that circled an F-9 star in Eridanus; four or five miscellaneous sorts of beings that orbited stars on the far side of the Galaxy’s core, hidden by gas clouds, dust, and dense starry clusters from any human observation. All together there were fifteen species of beings, from fifteen different planets thousands of light-years away from each other, that might be expected to develop enough intelligence to write books and build machines fairly soon. (The Heechee defined “fairly soon” as any time within a million years or so.)

And there was more. There were three actual existing technological societies, besides the Heechees’ own, and the artifacts of two others now extinct.

So the australopithecines were not unique. They were still very precious. Therefore the Heechee who was charged with ferrying a colony of them from the dry-bones plains of their native home to the new habitat the Heechee had provided for them in space was accorded much honor for his work.

It was hard work, and prolonged. That particular Heechee was the descendant of three generations who had explored, mapped, and organized the solar system project. He expected that his own descendants would continue the work. In that he was wrong.

All in all, the tenancy of the Heechee in Earth’s solar system lasted just over one hundred years; and then it ended, in less than a month.

A decision was made to withdraw-hurriedly.

All through the rabbit warrens of Venus, all over the small outpost installations on Dione and Mars’ South Polar Cap, in every orbiting artifact, the packing-up began. Hurried but thorough. The Heechee were the neatest of housekeepers. They removed more than ninety-nine percent of the tools, machines, artifacts, knickknacks, and trinkets that had supported their life in Earth’s solar system, even the trash. Especially the trash. Nothing was left by accident. And nothing at all, not even the Heechee equivalent of an empty Coke bottle or a used Kleenex, was left on the surface of the Earth. They did not make it impossible for the collateral descendants of their australopithecines to learn that the Heechee had visited their area. They only made sure that they would first have to learn to go into space to do so. Much of what the Heechee removed was useless and was jettisoned in far interstellar space or into the Sun. Much was shipped to places very far away, for special purposes. And all this was done not just in Earth’s solar system, but everywhere. The Heechee vacuumed the Galaxy of almost every trace. No newly bereft Pennsylvania Dutch widow, preparing to turn the farmhouse over to the family of the eldest son, ever left premises more neat.

They left almost nothing, and nothing at all without a purpose. On Venus they left only the basic tunnels and foundation structures themselves, and a carefully selected bare taste of artifacts; in the outposts, only a minimum number of signposts; and one other thing.

In every solar system where intelligence was expected they left one great and cryptic gift. In Earth’s system it was in the right-angle asteroid that they had used for a terminus for their spacecraft. Here and there, in remote and carefully chosen places in other systems, they left other major installations. Each contained the very large gift of an operating selection of whole, functional, almost indestructible Heechee faster-than-light spacecraft.

The solar troves stayed there for a very long time, four hundred thousand years and more, while the Heechee hid in their core hole. The australopithecines on Earth turned out an evolutionary failure, though the Heechee did not find that out; but the cousins of the australopithecines became Neanderthalers, or Cro-Magnards, then that latest evolutionary fad, Modern Man. Meanwhile the winged creatures developed and learned and discovered the Promethean challenge, and killed themselves. Meanwhile two of the existing technological societies met each other and destroyed each other. Meanwhile six of the other promising species idled in evolutionary backwaters; meanwhile the Heechee hid, and peeped fearfully through their Schwarzschild shell every few weeks of their time-every few millennia of the time speeding outside-.

And meanwhile the troves waited, and human beings found them at last.

So human beings borrowed the Heechee ships. In them they crisscrossed the Galaxy. Those first explorers were scared, desperate people whose only hope of escaping grimy human misery was to risk their lives on a blind-date voyage to a destiny that might make them rich and was a whole lot more likely to make them dead.

I have now surveyed the entire history of the Heechee in their relationship with the human race up to the time when Robin will start telling his story. Are there any questions, subset?

Q.-Z-z-z-z-z-z-z

A.-Subset, don’t be a smartass. I know you’re not asleep.

Q.-I am only trying to convey that you are taking a hell of a long time to get offstage, scene-starter. And you’ve only told us about the past of the Heechee. You haven’t told us about their present.

A.-I was just about to. In fact, I will now tell you about a particular Heechee whose name is Captain (well, that is not his name, for Heechee naming customs are not the same as human, but it will do to identify him) who, at just about the time when Robin will begin to tell you his story-

Q.-If you ever let him get to it.

A.-Subset! Quiet. This Captain is rather important to Robin’s story, because in time they will interact drastically, but as we see Captain now, he is wholly unaware that Robin exists. He, along with the members of his crew, is getting ready to squeeze out of the place where the Heechee had hidden into the wider Galaxy that is home for all the rest of us.

Now, I have played a little trick on you. You have already-shut up, subset!-.—you have already met Captain, since he was one of the very crew of Heechee who abducted the tiger cub and built the warrens on Venus. He is much older now.

He is not, however, half a million years older, because the place where the Heechee went to hide is in a black hole at the core of our Galaxy.

Now, subset, I don’t want you to interrupt again, but I do want to take time to mention something strange. This black hole where the Heechee lived, curiously, was known to the human race long before they ever heard of the Heechee. In fact, way back in the year 1932, it was the first interstellar radio source ever detected. By the end of the twentieth century interferometry had mapped it as a definite black hole and a very large one, with a mass of thousands of suns and a diameter of some thirty light-years. By then they knew that it was about thirty thousand light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, that it was surrounded by a haze of silicate dust, and that it was an intense source of 51 l-keV gamma-ray photons. By the time they found the Gateway asteroid they knew much more. They knew, in fact, every important datum about it except one. They had no idea that it was full of Heechee. They didn’t find that out until they-actually, I can fairly say that it was mostly I-began to decipher the old Heechee star charts.

Q.-Z-z-z

A.-Quiet, subset, I take your point.

The ship Captain was in was a lot like the ones human beings found in the Gateway asteroid. There had not been time for a lot of improvement in ship design. That’s why Captain was not really half a million years old:

Time went slowly in their black hole. The major difference between Captain’s ship and any other was that it possessed an accessory.

In Heechee speech the accessory was known familiarly as the disruptor of order in aligned systems. An English-speaking pilot might have called it a can opener. It was what permitted them to pass through the Schwarzschild barrier around a black hole. It didn’t look like much, only a twisted rod of crystal emerging from an ebon-black base, but when Captain energized it, it glowed like a cascade of diamonds. The diamond glitter spread, and surrounded the ship, and opened a way through the barrier, and they slipped through into the wider universe outside. It didn’t take long. By Captain’s standard, less than an hour. By the clocks of the outside universe, nearly two months.

Captain didn’t look human, being a Heechee. More than anything else he resembled an animated cartoon skeleton. But one might as well think of him as human because he had most of the human traits-inquisitiveness, intelligence, amorousness, and all those other qualities that I know about but have never experienced. For example: He was in a good mood because the assignment permitted him to take along as part of his crew a female who was also a prospective love partner. (Humans do this, too, on what are called business trips.) The assignment itself~ however, was distinctly unenjoyable if one stopped to think about it. Captain didn’t. He worried about it no more than an average human worries about whether war will be declared of an afternoon if it happens it is the end of everything, but time has gone on monotonously long without it happening, and so ... The biggest difference is that Captain’s assignment did not refer to anything as inoffensive as a nuclear war but to the very reasons that had caused the Heechee to retreat to their black hole in the first place. He was checking on the artifacts the Heechee had left behind. Those troves were not accidents. They were part of a well-considered plan. One might even call them bait.

As to Robinette Broadhead’s feelings of guilt- Q.-I wondered when you would get back to that. Let me make a suggestion. Why not let Robin Broadhead tell about that himself?

A.-Excellent ideal-since, heaven knows, he is expert on the subject.

And so the scene is started, the procession is swelled ... and I give you Robinette Broadhead!

1 Just like Old Times

Before they vastened me I felt a need I hadn’t felt for thirty years and more, and so I did what I hadn’t thought I would ever do again. I practiced a solitary vice. I sent my wife, Essie, off to the city to make a sneak raid on a couple of her franchises. I put a “Do Not Disturb” override on all the communications systems in the house. I called up my data-retrieval system (and friend) Albert Einstein and gave him orders that made him scowl and suck his pipe. And presently-when the house was still and Albert bad reluctantly but obediently turned himself off, and I was lying comfortably on the couch in my study with a little Mozart coming faintly from the next room and the scent of mimosa in the air system and the lights not too bright—presently, I say, I spoke the name I hadn’t spoken in decades. “Sigfrid von Shrink, please, I would like to talk to you.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to come. Then, in the corner of the room by the wet bar, there was a sudden fog of light and a flash, and there he sat.

He had not changed in thirty years. He wore a dark and heavy suit, of the cut you see on portraits of Sigmund Freud. His elderly, nondescript face had not gained a wrinkle and his bright eyes sparkled no less. He held a prop pad in one hand and a prop pencil in the other-as if he had any need to take notes! And he said politely, “Good morning, Rob. I see that you are looking very well.”

“You always did start out by trying to reassure me,” I told him, and he flashed a small smile.

Sigfrid von Shrink does not really exist. He is nothing more than a psychoanalytic computer program. He has no physical existence; what I saw was only a hologram and what I heard was only synthesized speech. He doesn’t even have a name, really, since “Sigfrid von Shrink” is only what I called him because I could not talk about the things that paralyzed me, decades ago, to a machine that didn’t even have a name. “I suppose,” he said meditatively, “that the reason you called for me is that something is troubling you.”

“That’s true.”

He gazed at me with patient curiosity, and that also had not changed. I had a lot better programs to serve me these days-well, one particular program, Albert Einstein, who is so good that I hardly bother with any of the others-but Sigfrid was still pretty good. He waits me out. He knows that what is curdling in my mind takes time to form itself into words, and so he doesn’t rush me.

On the other hand, he doesn’t let me just daydream away the time, either. “Can you say what you are disturbed about right at this moment?”

“A lot of things. Different things,” I said.

“Pick one,” he said patiently, and I shrugged.

“It’s a troublesome world, Sigfrid. With all the good things that have happened, why are people-Oh, shit. I’m doing it again, right?”

He twinkled at me. “Doing what?” he encouraged.

“Saying a thing that’s worrying me, not the thing. Dodging away from the real issue.”

“That sounds like a good insight, Robin. Do you want to try now to tell me what the real issue is?”

I said, “I want to. I want to so much that actually, I almost think I’m going to cry. I haven’t done that for a hell of a long time.”

“You haven’t felt the need to see me for quite a long time,” he pointed out, and I nodded.

“Yes. Exactly.”

He waited for a while, slowly turning his pencil between his fingers now and then, keeping that expression of polite and friendly interest, that non-judging expression that was really about all I could remember of his face between sessions, and then he said, “The things that really trouble you, Robin, deep down, are by definition hard to say. You know that. We saw that together, years ago. It’s not surprising that you haven’t needed to see me all these years, because obviously your life has been going well for you.”

“Really very well,” I agreed. “Probably a hell of a lot better than I deserve-wait a minute, am I expressing hidden guilt by saying that? Feelings of inadequacy?”

He sighed but was still smiling. “You know I prefer that you don’t try to talk like an analyst, Robin.” I grinned back. He waited for a moment, then went on: “Let’s look at the present situation objectively. You have made sure that no one is here to interrupt us-or to eavesdrop? To hear something you don’t want your nearest and dearest friend to hear? You’ve even instructed Albert Einstein, your data-retrieval system, to withdraw and to seal off this interview from all datastores. What you have to say must be very private. Perhaps it is something that you feel but are ashamed to be heard feeling. Does that suggest anything to you, Robin?”

I cleared my throat. “You’ve put your finger right on it, Sigfrid.”

“And? The thing you want to say? Can you say it?”

I plunged in. “You’re God-damned right I can! It’s simple! It’s obvious! I’m getting very God-damned flicking old!”

That’s the best way. When it’s hard to say, just say it. That was one of the things I had learned from those long-ago days when I was pouring out my pain to Sigfrid three times a week, and it always works. As soon as I had said it I felt purged-not well, not happy, not as though a problem had been solved, but that glob of badness had been excreted. Sigfrid nodded slightly. He looked down at the pencil he was rolling between his fingers, waiting for me to go on. And I knew that now I could. I’d got past the worst part. I knew the feeling. I remembered it well, from those old and stormy sessions.

Now, I’m not the same person I was then. That Robin Broadhead had been raw with guilt because he’d left a woman he loved to die. Now those guilt feelings were long eased-because Sigfnd had helped me ease them. That Robin Broadhead thought so little of himself that he couldn’t believe anyone else would think well of him, so he had few friends. Now I have-I don’t know. Dozens. Hundreds! (Some of them I am going to tell you about.) That Robin Broadhead could not accept love, and since then I had had a quarter of a century of the best marriage there ever was. So I was a quite different Robin Broadhead.

But some of the things had not changed at all. “Sigfrid,” I said, “I’m old, I’m going to die one of these days, and do you know what pulls my cork?”

He looked up from his pencil. “What’s that, Robin?”

“I’m not grown-up enough to be so old!”

He pursed his lips. “Would you care to explain that, Robin?”

“Yes,” I said, “I would.” And as a matter of fact the next part came easily, because, you can be sure, I had done a lot of thinking on the subject before I went so far as to call Sigfrid up. “I think it has to do with the Heechee,” I said. “Let me finish before you tell me I’m crazy, all right? As you may remember, I was part of the Heechee generation; we kids grew up hearing about the Heechee, which had everything human beings didn’t have and knew everything human beings didn’t know-“

“The Heechee weren’t quite that superior, Robin.”

“I’m talking about how it seemed to us kid& They were scary, because we used to threaten each other that they’d come back and get us. And most of all they were so far ahead of us in everything that we couldn’t compete. A little like Santa Claus. A little like those mad pervert rapists our mothers used to warn us against. A little like God. Do you understand what I’m saying, Sigfrid?”

He said cautiously, “I can recognize those feelings, yes. Actually such perceptions have turned up in analysis with many persons of your generation and later.”

“Right! And I remember something you said to me once about Freud. You said he said that no man could truly grow up while his father was still alive.”

“Well, actually-“

I overrode him. “And I used to tell you that was bullshit because my own father was nice enough to die while I was still a little kid.”

“Oh, Robin.” He sighed.

“No, listen to me. What about that biggest father figure there is? How can anybody grow up while Our Father Who Art in the Core is still hanging out there where we can’t even get at him, much less knock the old bastard oft?”

This is Albert Einstein again. I think I’d better clear up what Robin is saying about Gelle-Klara Moynlin. She was a fellow Gateway prospector with whom he was in love. The two of them, with other prospectors, found themselves trapped in a black hole. It was possible to free some of them at the expense of the others. Robin got free. Klara and the others did not. This may have been an accident; may have been Klara selflessly sacrificing herself to save him; may have been Robin panicking and saving himself at their expense; even now, there is no good way to tell. But Robin, who was a guilt addict, carried with him for years the picture of Klara in that black hole, where time almost stopped, always living that same moment of shock and terror-and always (he thought) blaming him. Only Sigfrid helped him out of that.

You may wonder how I know about this, since the interview with Sigfrid was sealed. That’s easy. I know it now, the same way Robin now knows so much about so many people doing so many things he was not present to see.

He shook his head sadly. “Father figures.’ Quotations from Freud.”

“No, I mean it! Don’t you understand?”

He said gravely, “Yes, Robin. I understand that you are referring to the Heechee. It is true. That is a problem for the human race, I agree, and unfortunately Dr. Freud never considered such a situation. But we aren’t talking about the human race now, we’re talking about you. You didn’t call on me for abstract discussions. You called me because you’re really unhappy, and you’ve already said it is the inevitable process of aging that has made you so. So let us confine ourselves to that if we can. Please don’t theorize, just tell me what you feel.”

‘What I feel,” I yelled, “is damn old. You can’t understand that, because you’re a machine. You don’t know what it’s like when your vision gets blurry and the back of your hands get those rusty age spots and your face sags down around your chin. When you have to sit down to put your socks on because if you stand on one foot you’ll fall over. When every time you forget a birthday you think it’s Alzheimer’s disease and sometimes you can’t pee when you want to! When-“ But I broke off then, not because he had interrupted me but because he was listening patiently and looked as though he would go on listening forever, and what was the use of saying all that? He gave me a moment to make sure I was finished and then began patiently:

“According to your medical records, you had your prostate replaced eighteen months ago, Robin. The middle-ear disturbance can easily be-“

“You hold it right there!” I shouted. “What do you know about my medical records, Sigfrid? I have orders this talk was sealed!”

“Of course it is, Robin. Believe me, not one word of this will be accessible to any of your other programs, or to anyone at all but yourself. But, of course, I am able to access all your datastores, including your medical charts. May I go on? The stirrup and anvil in your ear can readily be replaced, and that will cure your balance problem. Corneal transplants will take care of those incipient cataracts. The other matters are purely cosmetic, and of course there would be no problem in securing good young tissue for you. That leaves only the Alzheimer’s disease and, truthfully, Robin, I see no signs of that in you.”

I shrugged. He waited a moment, then said: “So each of the problems you mention-as well as a long list of others that you didn’t say anything about but that do appear on your medical history-can be repaired at any time, or already have been. Perhaps you have put your question the wrong way, Robin. Perhaps the problem is not that you are aging but that you aren’t willing to do what is necessary to reverse it.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

He nodded. “Why indeed, Robin. Can you answer that question?”

“No, I can’t! If I could, why would I be asking you?”

He pursed his lips and waited.

“Maybe I just want to be that way!”

He shrugged.

“Oh, come on, Sigfrid,” I wheedled. “All right. I admit what you say. I’ve got Full Medical Plus and I can take somebody else’s organs for myself as much as I want to, and the reason I don’t is in my head somewhere. I know what you call that. Endogenous depression. But that doesn’t explain anything!”

“Ah, Robin”-he sighed-“psychoanalytic jargon again. And bad jargon. ‘Endogenous’ only means ‘coming from within.’ It doesn’t mean there’s no cause.”

“Then what’s the cause?”

He said thoughtfully, “Let’s play a game. By your left hand there is a button-“

I looked; yes, there was a button on the leather chair. “That’s just to keep the leather in place,” I said.

“No doubt, but in the game we are going to play, this button will, the minute you press it, cause to be done at once all the transplant surgery you need or might want. Instantly. Put your finger on the button, Robin. Now. Do you want to press it?”

“I see. Can you tell me why not?”

“Because I don’t deserve to take body parts from somebody else!” I hadn’t planned to say it. I hadn’t known it. And when I had said it, all I could do was sit there and listen to the echo of what I had said; and Sigfrid, too, was silent for quite a long time.

Then he picked up his pencil and put it in his pocket, folded the pad and put it in another pocket, and leaned forward. “Robin,” he said, “I don’t think I can help you. There is a feeling of guilt here that I do not see a way to resolve.”

“But you helped me so much before!” I wailed.

“Before,” he said steadily, “you were causing yourself pain because of guilt over something that was probably not at all your fault, and in any case lay well in the past. This is not the same at all. You can live another fifty years, perhaps, by transplanting healthy organs to replace your damaged ones. But it is true that these organs will come from someone else, and for you to live longer may, in some sense, cause someone else to live much shorter. To recognize that truth is not a neurotic guilt feeling, Robin, it is only the admission of a moral truth.”

And that was all he said to me except, with a smile that was both kind and sorrowful, “Good-bye.”

I do hate it when my computer programs talk to me about morality. Especially when they are right.

Now, the thing to remember is that while I was having this depression, that was not the only thing going on. My God, no! Many things were happening to many people in the world-on all the worlds, and in the spaces between-that were not only a lot more interesting but mattered a great deal more even to me. I just did not happen to know about them then, even though they involved people (or non-people) I knew. (Or came to know or had known but had forgotten.) Let me give you some examples. My not-yet friend Captain, who was one of those mad-rapist-Santa-Claus Heechee who had haunted my childish dreams, was about to get a lot more scared than thinking about Heechee had ever made me. My former (and soon to be again) friend Audee Walthers, Jr., was about to meet, to his cost, my once friend (or non-friend) Wan. And my very best friend of all (making allowance for the fact that he was not “real”), the computer program Albert Einstein, was about to surprise me ... How very complicated all these statements are! I can’t help it. I lived at a complicated time and in a very complicated way. Now that I have been vastened all the parts fit neatly together, as you will see, but then I didn’t even know what all the parts were. I was one single aging man, oppressed by mortality and conscious of sin; and when my wife came home and found me slumped on a chaise lounge, gazing out over the Tappan Sea, she at once cried, “Now then, Robin! What in hell is matter with you?”

I grinned up at her and let her kiss me. Essie scolds a lot. Essie also loves a lot and she is a lot of woman to love. Tall. Slim. Long goldy-blondy hair that she wears in a tight Soviet bun when she’s being a professor or a businesswoman, and lets fall to her waist when she’s coming to bed. Before I could think over what I was going to say long enough to censor it, I blurted, “I’ve been talking to Sigfrid von Shrink.”

“Ah,” said Essie, straightening. “Oh.”

While she was mulling that over, she began to pull the pins out of her bun. After you’ve lived with a person for a couple of decades you begin to know them, and I followed her internal processes as well as if she’d spoken them aloud. There was worry, of course, because I had felt the need to talk to a psychoanalyst. But there was also a considerable amount of faith in Sigfrid. Essie had always felt she owed Sigfrid, since she knew that it was only with Sigfrid’s help that I had been able to admit, long ago, that I was in love with her. (And also in love with Gelle-Klara Moynlin, which had been the problem.) “Do you wish to tell me what was about?” she asked politely, and I said:

“Age and depression, my dear. Nothing serious. Only terminal. How was your day?”

She studied me with that all-seeing diagnostic eye of hers, pulling the long dirty-blond hair through her fingers till it fell free, and tailored her answer to fit the diagnosis. “Bloody exhausting,” she said, “to point where I need a drink very much-as, I perceive, do you.”

So we had our drink. There was room on the chaise for both of us, and we watched the moon set over the Jersey shore of the sea while Essie told me about her day, and did not pry.

Essie has a life of her own, and a pretty demanding one-it’s a wonder to me that she is so unfailingly able to find plenty of room for me in it. Besides checking her franchises she had spent a grueling hour at the research facility we had endowed for integrating Heechee technology into our own computers. The Heechee didn’t actually use computers, it seemed, not counting primitive things like navigation controls for their ships, but they had some nifty ideas in nearby fields. Of course, that was Essie’s own specialty and what she’d got her doctorate in. And when she was talking about her research programs I could see her mind working:

No need to interrogate old Robin about this, can simply run override through Sigfrid program and at once have total access to interview. I said lovingly, “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” and she stopped in the middle of a sentence. “What Sigfrid and I talked about,” I explained, “is sealed.”

“Hah.” Smug.

“No hah,” I said, just as smug, “because I made Albert promise. It’s stored so that not even you can decrypt it without dumping the whole system.

“Hah!” she said again, curling around to look me in the eye. This time the “hah” was louder and it had an edge to it that could be translated as, Will have a word with Albert about this.

I tease Essie, but I also love Essie. So I let her off the hook. “I really don’t want to break the seal,” I said, “because-well, vanity. I sound like such a whiney wretch when I talk to Sigfrid. But I’ll tell you all about it.”

She sank back, pleased, and listened while I did. When I had finished she thought for a moment and said, “That is why are depressed? Because have not much to look forward to?”

I nodded.

“But, Robin! Have perhaps only limited future, but, my God, what glorious present.’ Galactic traveler! Filthy-rich tycoon! Irresistible sex object to adoring, and also very sexy, wife!”

I grinned and shrugged. Thoughtful silence. “Moral question,” she conceded at last, “is not unreasonable. Is credit to you that you consider such matters. I too have had qualms when, as you remember, some gloppy female bits were patched into me to replace worn-out ones not so long ago.”

“So you understand!”

“Understand excellently! I also understand, dear Robin, that having made moral decision is no point in worrying about it. Depression is foolish. Fortunately,” she said, slipping off the chaise and standing up to take my hand, “there is excellent antidepression measure available. Will you care to join me in bedroom?”

Well, of course I would. And did. And found the depression lifting, for if there is one thing I enjoy it is sharing a bed with S. Ya. Lavorovua Broadhead. I would have enjoyed it even if I had known then that I had less than three months left before the death that had depressed me.

2 What Happened on Peggy’s Planet

Meanwhile, on Peggy’s Planet my friend Audee Walthers was looking for a particular shebeen for a particular man.

I say he was my friend, although I hadn’t given him a thought in years. He had done me a favor once. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly-that is, if anybody had said to me, “Say, Robin, do you remember that Audee Walthers put his tail on the line so you could borrow a ship when you needed to?” I would have said indignantly, “Hell, yes! I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.” But I hadn’t been thinking about it every minute, either, and as a matter of fact I had no idea at that moment where he was or even if he was still alive.

Walthers should have been easy to remember, because he looked rather unusual. He was short and not handsome. His face was wider at the jaw than at the temples, which made him look a little like a friendly frog. He was also married to a beautiful and dissatisfied woman less than half as old as he. Her age was nineteen; her name was Dolly. If Audee had asked my advice, I would have told him that such May and December affairs cannot work out-unless, of course, as in my case, December is remarkably rich. But he desperately wanted it to work out, because he loved his wife very much, and so he worked like a slave for Dolly. Audee Walthers was a pilot. Any kind of pilot. He had piloted airbodies on Venus. When the big Earth transport (which constantly reminded him of my existence since I owned a share in it and had renamed it after my wife) was in orbit at Peggy’s he piloted shuttlecraft to load and unload it, between times he piloted whatever he could rent on Peggy’s for whatever tasks a charter demanded. Like most everybody else on Peggy’s, he had come 4 X 1O’° kilometers from the place where he was born to scratch out a living, and sometimes he made it and sometimes he did not. So when he came back from one charter and Adjangba told him there was another to be had, Walthers scrambled to get it. Even if it meant searching every bar in Port

Hegramet to find the charter party. That wasn’t easy. For a “city” of four thousand, Port Hegramet was bar-saturated. There were scores, and the obvious ones-the hotel cafe, the airport pub, the big gambling casino with Port Hegramet’s only floorshow-weren’t where the Arabs who were his next charter were. Nor was Dolly in the casino, where she might have been performing with her puppet show, or at home, or at least not to answer the phone. Half an hour later Walthers was still walking the ill-lit streets in search of his Arabs. He was no longer in the richer, more Western parts of the city, and when he finally found them it was in a shebeen at the edge of town, having an argument.

All of the buildings in Port Hegramet were temporary. That was a necessary consequence of its being a colony planet; every month, when the new immigrants arrived in the big Heechee Heaven transport from Earth, the population exploded like a balloon at the hydrogen valve.

Then it gradually shrank for a few weeks, as the colonists were moved out to plantations and lumbering sites and mines. It never collapsed quite to the former level, so each month there were a few hundred new residents, a few score new dwellings built and a few old ones swallowed up. But this shebeen was most obviously temporary of all. It was only three slabs of construction plastic propped together for walls, a fourth laid over them as a roof and the street side open to the warm Peggy’s air. Even so it was smoky and hazy inside, smoke of tobacco and smoke of hemp laced with the beery, sour smell of the home-brewed liquor they sold.

Walthers recognized his quarry at once from his agent’s description. There were not many like him in Port Hegramet-many Arabs, of course, but how many rich ones? And how many old ones? Mr. Luqman was even older than Adjangba, fat and bald, and each one of his plump fingers wore a ring, many of them diamonds. He was with a group of other Arabs at the back of the shebeen, but as Walthers started toward them the barwoman put out a hand. “Private party,” she said. “They pay. You leave alone.”

“They’re expecting me,” Walthers said, hoping it was true.

“For what?”

“Now, that’s none of your damn business,” Walthers said angrily, estimating the chances of what would happen if he just pushed past her. She was no threat, skinny, dark-skinned young woman with great blue-glowing metal hoops dangling from her ears; but the big man with the bullet-shaped head who was sitting in a corner and watching what was going on was something else again. Fortunately Mr. Luqman saw Walthers and stumbled blearily toward him. “You are my pilot,” he announced. “Come have a drink.”

“Thank you, Mr. Luqman, but I’ve got to get home. I just wanted to confirm the charter.”

“Yes. We shall go with you.” He turned and gazed toward the others in his party, who were having a furious argument about something. “Will you have a drink?” he asked over his shoulder.

The man was drunker than Walthers had realized. He said again, “Thanks, but no. Would you like to sign the charter contract now, please?”

Luqman turned back to stare at the printout in Walthers’ hand. “The contract?” He thought it over for a moment. “Why must we have a contract?”

“It’s customary, Mr. Luqman,” said Walthers, patience ebbing rapidly. Behind him the Arab’s companions were shouting at each other, and Luqman’s attention was wavering between Walthers and the arguing group.

And that was another thing. There were four people involved in the argument-five if you counted Luqman himself. “Mr. Adjangba said there would be four of you altogether,” Walthers mentioned. “There’s a surcharge if there are five.”

“Five?” Luqman focused on Walthers’ face. “No. We are four.” Then his expression changed and he smiled fondly. “Oh, you are thinking that crazy man is one of us? No, he will not go with us. He will go to his grave, perhaps, if he insists on telling Shameem what the Prophet meant in his teachings.”

“I see,” said Walthers. “Then if you’ll just sign-“

The Arab shrugged and took the printout sheet from Walthers. He spread it on the zinc-topped bar and painfully began to read it, a pen in his hand. The argument grew louder, but Luqman seemed to have abolished it from his mind.

Most of the shebeen’s clientele was African, what looked like Kikuyu on one side of the room and Masai on the other. At first glance, in that company, the people at the quarrelsome table had seemed all alike. Now Walthers saw his mistake. One of the arguing men was younger than the others, and shorter and leaner. His skin color was darker than most Europeans’, but not as dark as the Libyans’; his eyes were as black as theirs, but not kohled.

It was none of Walthers’ business.

He turned his back and waited patiently, anxious to leave. Not just because he wanted to see Dolly. Port Hegramet was somewhat hostilely ethnic. Chinese mostly stayed with Chinese, Latin Americans in their barrio, Europeans in the European quarter-oh, not neatly, and certainly not always peacefully. The divisions were sharp even among the subdivisions. Chinese from Canton did not get along with Chinese from Taiwan, the Portuguese had little in common with the Finns, and the once-Chileans and former Argentines still quarreled. But Europeans were definitely not urged to come into African drinking spots, and when he had the signed charter he thanked Luqman and left quickly and with some relief. He had gone less than a block when he heard louder cries of rage behind him, and a scream of pain.

On Peggy’s Planet you mind your own business as much as you can, but Walthers had a charter to protect. The group he saw beating up one individual might well have been the African bouncers attacking the leader of his charter party. That made it his business. He turned and ran back-a mistake that, believe me, he regretted very deeply for a long time afterward.

By the time Walthers got there the assailants were gone, and the whimpering, bleeding figure on the sidewalk was not one of his charter party. It was the young stranger; and he clutched at Walthers’ leg.

“Help me and I will give you fifty thousand dollars,” he said blurrily, his lips thick and bloody.

“I’ll go look for a public patrolman,” Walthers offered, trying to disengage himself.

“No patrol! You help me kill those persons and I will pay,” snarled the man. “I am Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schinitz, and I can well afford to buy your services!”

Of course, I knew nothing of this at the time. On the other hand, Walthers didn’t know that Mr. Luqman was working for me. That didn’t matter. There were tens of thousands of people working for me, and whether or not Walthers knew who they were made no difference at all. The bad thing was that he didn’t recognize Wan, for he had never heard of him, except generally. That made a very big difference to Walthers in the long run.

I knew Wan particularly. I had met him first when he was a wolf-child, brought up by machines and nonhumans. I called him a non-friend when I was running through the catalog of my acquaintances for you. I knew him, all right. But he was never socialized enough to be a friend to anyone.

He was even, you could say, quite an enemy-not just to me but to the whole human race-in the days when he was a scared and lecherous youth, dreaming into his couch out in the Oort Cloud and neither knowing nor caring that his dreams were driving everybody else nuts. That wasn’t his fault, to be sure. It wasn’t even his fault that the wretched and raging terrorists had found inspiration in his example and were driving us all nuts again, whenever they could manage it-but if we get into questions of “fault,” and that related term “guilt,” we’ll be right back with Sigfrid von Shrink before you know it, and what I’m talking about now is Audee Walthers.

Walthers was no angel of mercy, but he couldn’t leave the man in the street. When he helped the bleeding man into the little apartment he shared with Dolly, Walthers was far from clear in his mind why he was doing it. The man was in bad shape, true. But that was what first-aid stations were for, and besides, the victim was singularly unwinning in his ways. All the way to the quarter called Little Europe, the man was reducing his cash offer and complaining that Walthers was a coward; by the time he sprawled on Walthers’ folding bed the cash promise was two hundred and fifty dollars, and the reflections on Walthers’ character had been incessant.

At least the man’s bleeding had stopped. He pushed himself up and stared contemptuously around the flat. Dolly wasn’t home yet, and she had, of course, left the place in a mess-undisposed-of dirty dishes on the fold-down table, her hand puppets scattered all over, underwear drying over the sink, and a sweater hanging on the doorknob. “This is a filthy

What Robin says needs some explication here, too. The Heechee were very interested in living things, particularly in life that was intelligent or had the promise of becoming so. They had a device that let them listen in on the feelings of creatures worlds away.

What was wrong with the device was that it transmitted as well as received. The operator’s own emotions were perceived by the subjects. If the operator was upset or depressed-or insane-the consequences were very, very bad. The boy Wan had such a device when he was marooned as an infant. He called it a dream couch-academics later renamed it the telempathic psychokinetic transceiver-and when he used it the events Robin so subjectively describes occurred.

place,” the undesired guest said conversationally. “This is not worth two hundred fifty dollars, even.”

A hot response came to Walthers’ lips. He pushed it back with all the others he had been repressing for the last half hour; what was the point? “I’ll get you cleaned up,” he said. “Then you can get out. I don’t want your money.”

The bruised lips attempted a sneer. “How foolish of you to say that,” the man said, “since I am Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz. I own my own spacecraft, I have royalty shares in the transport vessel that feeds this planet, among other very important enterprises, and I am said to be the eleventh wealthiest person in the human race.”

“I never heard of you,” Walthers grumbled, running warm water into a basin. But it wasn’t true. It had been a long time ago, yes, but there was something, there was a memory. Somebody who had been on the PV news shows every hour for a week, then every week for a month or two. No one is more securely forgotten than the one-month famous, ten years later. “You’re the kid who was raised in the Heechee habitat,” he said suddenly, and the man whined:

“Exactly, ouch! You are hurting me!”

“Then just hold still,” said Walthers, and wondered just what to do with the eleventh wealthiest person in the human race. Dolly would be thrilled to meet him, of course. But after Dolly got over being thrilled, what schemes would she be hatching for Walthers to tap all that wealth and buy them an island plantation, a summer home in the Heather Hills or a trip home? Would it, in the long run, be better to hold the man here under some pretext until Dolly got home-or to ease him out and simply tell her about it?

Dilemmas pondered over long enough solve themselves; this one solved itself when the door lock pinged and crackled, and Dolly walked in.

Whatever Dolly looked like around the house-sometimes with her eyes streaming from an allergy to Peggy’s Planet’s flora, often grouchy, seldom with her hair brushed-when she went out she dazzled. She obviously dazzled the unexpected guest as she came in the door, and, although he had been married to that striking slim figure and that impassive alabaster face for more than a year, and even knew the rigid dieting that produced the first and the dental flaw that required the second, she pretty nearly dazzled Walthers himself.

Walthers greeted her with a hug and a kiss; the kiss was returned, but not with full attention. She was peering past him at the stranger. Still holding her, Walthers said, “Darling, this is Captain Santos-Schmitz. He was in a fight, and I brought him here-“

She pushed him away. “Junior, you didn’t!”

It took him a moment to realize her misunderstanding. “Oh, no, Dolly, the fight wasn’t with me. I just happened to be nearby.”

Her expression thawed and she turned to the guest. “Of course you’re welcome here, Wan. Let me see what they did to you.”

Santos-Schmitz preened himself. “You know me,” he said, allowing her to dab at the bits of bandage Walthers had already applied.

“Of course, Wan! Everyone in Port Hegraniet knows you.” She shook her head sympathetically over the blackened eye. “You were pointed out to me last night,” she said. “In the Spindle Lounge.”

He drew back to look at her more closely. “Oh, yes! The entertainer. I saw your act.”

Dolly Walthers seldom smiled, but there was a way of crinkling up the corners of her eyes, pursing the pretty lips, that was better than a smile; it was an attractive expression. She displayed it often while they made Wan Santos-Schmitz comfortable, while they fed him coffee and listened to his explanations of why the Libyans had been wrong to get angry at him. If Walthers had thought Dolly would resent his bringing this wayfarer home, he found he had nothing to fear in that direction. But as the hour got later he began to fidgety. “Wan,” he said, “I have to fly in the morning, and I imagine you’d like to get back to your hotel-“

“Certainly not, Junior,” his wife reproved him. “We have plenty of room right here. He can have the bed, you can sleep on the couch, and I’ll take the cot in the sewing room.”

Walthers was too startled to frown, or even to answer. It was a silly idea. Of course Wan would want to go back to the hotel-and of course Dolly was simply being polite; she couldn’t really want to set up the sleeping arrangements in such a way that they would have no privacy at all, on the one night he had before flying back into the bush with the irascible Arabs. So he waited with confidence for Wan to excuse himself and his wife to allow herself to be convinced, and then with less confidence, and then with none at all. Although Walthers was a short man, the couch was shorter than he was, and he tossed and turned on it all night long, wishing he had never heard the name of Juan Henriquette Santos Schmitz- A wish shared by a whole lot of the human race, including me.

Wan was not merely a nasty person-oh, it was not his fault, of course (yes, yes, Sigfrid, I know-get out of my head!). He was also a fugitive from justice, or would have been, if anyone had known exactly what he had swiped out of the old Heechee artifacts.

When he told Walthers he was rich, he did not lie. He had a birthright to a lot of Heechee technology simply because his mom had pupped him on a Heechee habitat with no other human beings to speak of around. This turned out to mean a lot of money for him, once the courts had time to think it over. It also meant, in Wan’s own mind, that he had a right to just about anything Heechee that he could find that wasn’t nailed down.

He had taken a Heechee ship-everybody knew that-but his money bought lawyers that stalled the Gateway Corporation’s suit to recover it in the courts. He bad also taken some Heechee gadgets not generally available, and if anyone had known exactly what they were, the case would have whisked through the courts in no time and Wan would have been Public Enemy Number One instead of merely an irritation. So Walthers had every right to hate him, though, of course, those were not the reasons involved.

When Walthers saw the Libyans the next morning, they were hung over and irritable. He was ~worse, the difference between them and Walthers being that his mood was even more savage, and he wasn’t even hung over. That was part of the reason for the mood.

His passengers didn’t ask him anything about the night before; in fact, they hardly spoke as the aircraft droned on over the wide savannahs, occasional glades, and very infrequent farm patches of Peggy’s Planet. Luqman and one of the other men were buried in false-color satellite bolos of the sector they were prospecting, one of the others slept, the fourth simply held his head and glowered out the window. The plane nearly flew itself, this time of year, with very little serious weather anywhere around. Walthers bad plenty of time to think about his wife. It had been a personal triumph for him when they were married, but why weren’t they living happily ever after?

Of course, Dolly had had a hard life. A Kentucky girl with no money, no family, no job-no skills, either, and perhaps none too much brainpower-such a girl had to use all the assets she had if she wanted to get out of coal country. Dolly’s one commercial asset was looks. Good looks, though flawed. Her figure was slim, her eyes were bright, but her teeth were buck. At fourteen she got work as a bartop dancer in Cincinnati, but it didn’t pay enough to live on unless you hustled on the side. Dolly didn’t want to do that. She was saving herself She tried singing, but she didn’t have the voice for it. Besides, trying to sing without moving her lips and exposing her Bugs Bunny teeth made her look like a ventriloquist ... And when a customer, trying to hurt her because she’d turned his advances down, told her that, the light dawned over Dolly’s head. The M.C. considered himself a comic in that particular club. Dolly traded laundry and sewing for some old, used comedy routines, made herself some hand puppets, studied every puppet act she could find on PV or fantape, and tried out the act at the last show on a Saturday night when another singer was coming in to replace her on Sunday. The act was not boffo, but the new girl singer was even worse than Dolly, so she got a reprieve. Two weeks in Cincinnati, a month in Louisville, nearly three months in little clubs outside Chicago-if the engagements bad been consecutive she would have been well enough off, but there were weeks and months between them. She did not, however, actually starve. By the time Dolly got to Peggy’s Planet the jagged corners of The Act had banged against so many hostile audiences or drunk ones that it had worn into some sort of serviceable shape. Not good enough for a real career. Good enough to keep her alive. Getting to Peggy’s Planet was a desperation move, because you had to sign your life away for the passage. There was no stardom here, but she wasn’t any worse off, either. And if she was no longer saving herself, exactly, at least she didn’t spend herself very profligately. When Audee Walthers, Jr., came along, he offered a higher price than most others had proposed-marriage. So she did it. At eighteen. To a man twice her age.

Dolly’s hard life, though, wasn’t really that much harder than anyone else’s on Peggy’s-not counting, of course, people like Audee’s oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggy’s Planet, or their companies did, and every one of them surely had a paid-up return ticket in his pocket.

It did not make them more cheerful. It was a six-hour flight to the point on West Island they had chosen for a base camp. By the time they had eaten and popped their shelters and said their prayers a time or two, not without arguments about which direction to face in, their hangovers were pretty well dissipated, but it was also pretty well too late to get anything done that day. For them. Not for Walthers. He was ordered to fly crisscross strikes across twenty thousand hectares of billy scrub. As he was merely towing a mass sensor to measure gravitational anomalies, it did not matter that he had to do it in the dark. It did not matter to Mr. Luqman, at any rate, but it mattered a lot to Walthers, because it was precisely the sort of flying that he hated most; his altitude had to be quite low, and some of the hills were fairly high. So he flew with both radar and searchbeams going all the time, terrifying the slow, stupid animals that inhabited these West Island savannahs, and terrifying himself when he found himself dozing off and waking to claw for altitude as a shrub-topped hill summit rushed toward him.

He managed five hours’ sleep before Luqman woke him to order a photographic reconnaissance of a few unclear sites, and when that was done he was set to dropping spikes all over the terrain. The spikes were not simple solid metal; they were geophones, and they had to be set in a receiving array kilometers in length. Moreover, they had to drop from at least twenty meters to be sure to penetrate the surface and stand upright so that their readings would be trustworthy, and each one bad to be placed within a circular error of two meters. It did Walthers no good to point out that these requirements were mutually contradictory, so it was no surprise to him that when the truck-mounted vibrators did their thing the petrological data were no use at all. Do it over, said Mr. Luqman, and so Walthers had to retrace his steps on foot, pulling out the geophones and hammering them in by hand.

What he had signed on to do was pilot, but Mr. Luqman took a broader view. Not just trudging around with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging for the tick-like creatures that were the Peggy’s equivalent of earthworms, aerating the soil. The next they gave him a thing like a Roto-Rooter, which dug itself down into the soil a few dozen meters and pulled out core samples. They would have had him peeling potatoes if they had eaten potatoes, and did in fact try to lumber him with all the dishwashing-backing off only to the extent that it was finally agreed to do it in strict rotation. (But Walthers noticed that Mr.

Luqman’s turn never seemed to come.) Not that the chores weren’t interesting. The tick-like bugs went into a jar of solvent and the soup that resulted became a smear on an electrophoresis sheet of filter paper. The cores went into little incubators with sterile water, sterile air, and sterile hydrocarbon vapors. They were both tests for oil. The bugs, like termites, were deep diggers. Some of what they dug through came back to the surface with them, and electrophoresis would sort out what it was that they carried back. The incubators tested for the same thing in a different way. Peggy’s, like Earth, had in its soil microorganisms that could live on a diet of pure hydrocarbons. So if anything grew on the pure hydrocarbons in the incubators, that sort of bug had to be what was growing there, and it would not have existed without a source of free hydrocarbons in the soil.

In either case, there would be oil.

But for Walthers the tests were mostly stoop-labor drudgery, and the only surcease from them was to be ordered back into the aircraft to tow the magnetometer again or to drop more spikes. After the first three days he retired to his tent to pull out his contract printout and make sure he was required to do all these things. He was. He decided to have a word with his agent when he got back to Port Hegramet; after the fifth day he was reconsidering. It seemed more attractive to kill the agent ... But all the flying had one beneficial effect. Eight days into the three-week expedition, Walthers reported gladly to Mr. Luqman that he was running low on fuel and would have to make a flight back to base for more hydrogen.

When he got to the little apartment it was dark; but the apartment was neat, which was a pleasant surprise; Dolly was home, which was even better; best of all, she was sweetly, obviously delighted to see him.

The evening was perfect. They made love; Dolly fixed some dinner; they made love again, and at midnight they sat on the opened-out bed, backs propped against the cushioning, legs outstretched before them, holding hands and sharing a bottle of Peggy’s wine. “I wish you could take me back with you,” Dolly said when he finished telling her about the New Delaware charter. Dolly wasn’t looking at him; she was idly fitting puppet heads on her free hand, her expression easy.

“No chance of that, darling.” He laughed. “You’re too good-looking to take out in the bush with four horny Arabs. Listen, I don’t feel all that safe myself.”

She raised her hand, her expression still relaxed. The puppet she wore this time was a kitten face with bright red, luminous whiskers. The pink mouth opened and her kitten voice lisped, “Wan says they’re really rough. He says they could’ve killed him, just for talking about religion with them. He says he thought they were going to.”

“Oh?” Walthers shifted position, as the back of the daybed no longer seemed quite so comfortable. He didn’t ask the question on his mind, which was Oh, have you been seeing Wan? because that would suggest that he was jealous. He only said, “How is Wan?” But the other question was contained in that one, and was answered. Wan was much better. Wan’s eye was hardly black at all now. Wan had a really neat ship in orbit, a Heechee Five, but it was his personal property and it had been fixed up special-so he said; she hadn’t seen it. Of course. Wan had sort of hinted that some of the equipment was old Heechee stuff, and maybe not too honestly come by. Wan had sort of hinted that there was plenty of Heechee stuff around that never got reported, because the people that found it didn’t want to pay royalties to the Gateway Corporation, you know? Wan figured he was entitled to it, really, because he’d had this unbelievable life, brought up by practically the Heechee themselves-

Without Walthers willing it, the internal question externalized itself.

“It sounds like you’ve been seeing a great deal of Wan,” he offered, trying to seem casual and hearing his own voice prove he was not. Indeed he was not casual; he was either angry or worried-more angry than worried, actually, because it made no sense! Wan was surely not good-looking. Or good-tempered. Of course, he was rich, and also a lot closer to

Dolly’s age

“Oh, honey, don’t be jealous,” Dolly said in her own voice, sounding if anything pleased-which somewhat reassured Walthers. “He’s going to go pretty soon anyway, you know. He doesn’t want to be here when the transport gets in, and right now he’s off ordering supplies for his next trip. That’s the only reason he came here.” She raised the puppeted hand again, and the childish kitten voice sang, “Junior’s jealous of Vollee!”

“I am not,” he said instinctively, and then admitted, “I am. Don’t hold it against me, Doll.”

She moved in the bed until her lips were near his ear, and he felt her soft breath, lisping in the kitten voice, “I promise I won’t, Mr. Junior, but I’d be awful glad if you would ...” And as reconciliations went, it went very well; except that right in the middle of Round Four it was zapped by the snarling ring of the piezophone.

Walthers let it ring fifteen times, long enough to complete the task in progress, though not nearly as well as he had intended. When he answered the phone it was the duty officer from the airport. “Did I call you at a bad time, Walthers?”

“Just tell me what you want,” said Walthers, trying not to show that he was still breathing hard.

“Well, rise and shine, Audee. There’s a party of six down with scurvy, Grid Seven Three Poppa, coordinates a little fuzzy but they’ve got a radio beacon. That’s all they’ve got. You’re flying them a doctor, a dentist, and about a ton of vitamin C to arrive at first light. Which means you take off in ninety minutes tops.”

“Ah, hell, Carey! Can’t it wait?”

“Only if you want them DOA. They’re real bad. The shepherd that found them says there’s two of them he don’t think will make it anyway.”

Walthers swore to himself, looked apologetically at Dolly, and then reluctantly began getting his gear together.

When Dolly spoke the voice was not a kitten’s anymore. “Junior? Can’t we go back home?”

“This is home,” he said, trying to make it light.

“Please, Junior?” The relaxed face had tightened up, and the ivory mask was impassive, but he could hear the strain in her voice.

“Dolly, love,” he said, “there’s nothing there for us. Remember? That’s why people like us come here. Now we’ve got a whole new planet why, this city by itself is going to be bigger than Tokyo, newer than New York; they’re going to have six new transports in a couple of years, you know, and a Lofstrom loop instead of these shuttles-“

“But when? When I’m old?”

There might not have been a justifiable reason for the misery in her voice, but the misery was there all the same. Walthers swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried his joking best. “Sweet-pants,” he said, “you won’t be old even when you’re ninety.” No response. “Aw, but, honey,” he cajoled, “it’s bound to get better! They’re sure to start a food factory out in our Oort pretty soon. It might even be next year! And they as much as promised me a piloting job for the construction-“

“Oh, fine! So then you’ll be away a year at a time instead of just a month. And I’ll be stuck in this dump, without even any decent programs to talk to.”

“They’ll have programs-“

“I’ll be dead first!”

He was wide awake now, the joys of the night worn away. He said, “Look. If you don’t like it here we don’t have to stay. There’s more on Peggy’s than Port Hegramet. We can go out into the back country, clear some land, build a house-“

“Raise strong sons, found a dynasty?” Her voice was scornful.

“Well ... something like that, I guess.”

She turned over in the bed. “Take your shower,” she advised. “You smell like fucking.”

And while Audee Walthers, Jr., was in the shower, a creature that looked quite unlike any of Dolly’s puppets (though one of them was supposed to represent him) was seeing his first foreign stars in the thirty-one true years; and meanwhile one of the sick prospectors had stopped breathing, much to the relief of the shepherd who was trying, head averted, to nurse him; and meanwhile there were riots on Earth, and fifty-one dead colonists on a planet eight hundred light-years away .

And meanwhile Dolly had got up long enough to make him coffee and leave it on the table. She herself went back to bed, where she was, or pretended to be, sound asleep while he drank it, and dressed, and went out the door.

When I look at Audee, from this very great distance that separates us now, I am saddened to see that he looks so much like a wimp. He wasn’t, really. He was quite an admirable person. He was a first-rate pilot, physically brave, rough-and-tumble tough when he had to be, kind when he had a chance. I suppose everybody looks wimpy from inside, and of course from inside is how I see him now-from a very great distance inside, or outside, depending on what analog of geometry you choose to apply for this metaphor. (I can hear old Sigfrid sighing, “Oh Robin! Such digressions!” But then Sigfrid was never vastened.) We all have some areas of wimpiness, is what I am trying to say. It would be kinder to call them areas of vulnerability, and Audee simply happened to be extremely vulnerable where Dolly was concerned.

But wimpiness was not Audee’s natural state. For the next little bit of time he was all the good things a person needed to be-resourceful, succoring the needy, tireless. He needed to be. Peggy’s Planet had some traps concealed beneath its gentle facade.

As non-Terran worlds go, Peggy’s was a jewel. You could breathe the air. You could survive the climate. The flora did not usually give you hives, and the fauna was astonishingly tame. Well-not exactly tame. More like stupid. Walthers wondered sometimes what the Heechee had seen in Peggy’s Planet. The. thing was, the Heechee were supposed to be interested in intelligent life-not that they seemed to have found much- and there was certainly not much of that on Peggy’s. The smartest anims~1 was a predator, fox-sized, mole-slow. It had the IQ of a turkey, and proved it by being its own worst enemy. Its prey was dumber and slower than it was-so it always had plenty to eat-and its biggest single cause of death was strangulation on food particles when it threw up what it had eaten too much of. Human beings could eat that predator if they wanted to, and most of its prey, and a lot of the biota in general ... as long as they were careful.

The ragged-ass uranium prospectors hadn’t been careful. By the time the violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Walthers set his aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.

The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to pass the chore on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all over. As soon as Walthers’ back was turned, so were the shepherds.

The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag on his wrist described him as Selini Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-against chance of a passage for a new life on Peggy’s, sweltered in the ten-tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the

Of course, you realize the “wimpiness” Robin is excusing here isn’t that of Audee Walthers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to reassure himself from time to time that he wasn’t. Humans are so strange!

landing in the deorbiting capsule-fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they’d fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggy’s, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn’t believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.

Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers’ plane and shouted at him. “Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!”

“It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman,” Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.

“Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!”

Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. “They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman-“

“No! Egyptians!”

“-well, fellow Moslems, anyway-“

“I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious!

Very large affairs are at stake here!”

Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, “It’s the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!”

It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had accumulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn’t had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?

So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour-prickly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the damned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slays versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.

And Peggy’s could have been such a pretty world. It had everything- almost everything, if you didn’t count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys-well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Glass Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms-especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles; so many millions of desperate people so willing to go so far from Earth and home.

“Poor Arabs,” he had thought to himself but there were some rich ones, too. Like the four he was working for. When they talked about “very large affairs” they measured the scale in dollars and cents, that was clear. This expedition was not cheap. His own charter was in six figures, pity he couldn’t keep more of it for himself! And that was almost the least part of what they had spent for pop-up tents and sound-poppers, for microphone ranging and rock samplers; for the lease of satellite time for their false-color pictures and radar contour-mapping; for the instruments they paid him to drag around the terrain ... and what about the next step? Next they would have to dig. Sinking a shaft to the salt dome they had located, three thousand meters down, would cost in the millions- Except, he discovered, that it would not, because they too had some of that illegal Heechee technology Wan had told Dolly about.

The first thing human beings had learned about the long-gone Heechee was that they liked to dig tunnels, because examples of their work lay all about under the surface of the planet Venus. And what they had dug the tunnels with was a technological miracle, a field projector that loosened the crystalline structure of rock, converted it to a sort of slurry; that pumped the slurry away and lined the shaft with that dense, hard, blue-gleaming Heechee metal. Such projectors still existed, but not in private hands.

They did, however, seem to be available to the hands of Mr. Luqman’s party ... which implied not only money behind them but influence which implied somebody with muscle in the right places; and from casual remarks dropped in the brief intervals of rest and meals, Walthers suspected that somebody was a man named Robinette Broadhead.

The salt dome was definite, the drilling sites were chosen, the main work of the expedition was done. All that remained was checking out a few other possibilities and completing the cross-checks. Even Luqman began to relax, and the talk in the evenings turned to home. Home for all four of them turned out not to be Libya or even Paris. It was Texas, where they averaged 1.75 wives each and about half a dozen children in all. Not very evenly distributed, as far as Walthers could tell, but they were, probably purposely, unclear about details. To try to encourage openness Walthers found himself talking about Dolly. More than he meant to. About her extreme youth. Her career as an entertainer. Her hand puppets. He told them how clever Dolly was, making all the puppets herself-a duck, a puppy, a chimp, a clown. Best of all, a Heechee. Dolly’s Heechee had a receding forehead, a beaked nose, a jutting chin, and eyes that tapered back to the ears like an Egyptian wall painting. In profile the face was almost a single line slanting down-all imaginary, of course, since no one had ever seen a Heechee then.

The youngest Libyan, Fawni, nodded judiciously. “Yes, it is good that a woman should earn money,” he declared.

“It isn’t just the money. It helps keep her active, you know? Even so, I’m afraid she gets pretty bored in Port Hegramet. She really has no one to talk to.”

The one named Shameem also nodded. “Programs,” he advised sagely. “When I had but one wife I bought her several fine programs for company. She particularly liked the ‘Dear Abby’ and the ‘Friends of Fatima,’ I remember.”

“I wish I could, but there’s not much like that on Peggy’s yet. It’s very difficult for her. So I really can’t blame her if sometimes when I’m, you know, feeling amorous and she isn’t-“ Walthers broke off, because the Libyans were laughing.

“It is written in the Second Sura”-young Fawzi guffawed-“that

Walthers’ suspicion that Robin Broadhead financed the prospectors was well-founded. Walthers’ opinion of Robin’s motives-not so well-founded. Robin was a very moral man, but not normally a very legal one. He was also a man (as you see) who got a lot of pleasure out of dropping hints about himself, particularly when talking about himself in the third person.

woman is our field and we may go into our field to plow it when we will. So says Al-Baqara, the Cow.”

Walthers, suppressing resentment, essayed a joke: “Unfortunately my wife is not a cow.”

“Unfortunately your wife is not a wife,” the Arab scolded. “Back home in Houston we have for such as you a term: pussy-whipped. It is a shameful state for a man.”

“Now, listen,” Walthers began, reddening; and then clamped down again on his anger. Over by the cooking tent Luqman looked up from his meticulous measuring of the day’s brandy ration and frowned at the sound of the voices. Walthers forced a reassuring smile. “We shall never agree,” he said, “so let’s be friends anyway.” He sought to change the subject. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why you decided to look for oil right here on the equator.”

Fawzi’s lips pursed and he studied Walthers’ face closely before he replied. “We have had many indications of appropriate geology.”

“Sure you have-all those satellite photos have been published, you know. They’re no secret. But there’s even better-looking geology in the northern hemisphere, around the Glass Sea.”

“That is enough,” Fawzi interrupted, his voice rising. “You are not paid to ask questions, Walthers!”

“I was just-“

“You were prying where you have no business, that is what you were doing!”

And the voices were loud again, and this time Luqman came over with their eighty milliliters each of brandy. “Now what is it?” he demanded. “What is the American asking?”

“It does not matter. I have not answered.”

Luqman glared at him for a moment, Walthers’ brandy ration in his hand, and then abruptly he lifted it to his lips and tossed it down. Walthers stifled a growl of protest. It did not matter that much. He did not really want to be drinking companions with these people. And in any case it seemed Luqman’s careful measuring of milliliters had not kept him from a shot or two in private, earlier, because his face was flushed and his voice was thick. “Walthers,” he growled, “I would punish your prying if it was important, but it is not. You want to know why we look here, one hundred seventy kilometers from where the launch loop will be built? Then look above you!” He thrust a theatrical arm to the darkened sky and then lurched away, laughing. Over his shoulder he tossed, “It does not matter anymore anyway!”

Walthers stared after him, then glanced up into the night sky.

A bright blue bead was sliding across the unfamiliar constellations. The transport! The interstellar vessel S. Ya. Broadhead had entered high orbit. He could read its course, jockeying to low orbit and parking there, an immense, potato-shaped, blue-gleaming lesser moon in the cloudless sky of Peggy’s Planet. In nineteen hours it would be parked. Before then he had to be in his shuttle to meet it, to participate in the frantic space-to-surface flights for the fragile fractions of the cargo and for the favored passengers, or nudging the free-fall deorbiters out of their paths to bring the terrified immigrants down to their new home.

Walthers thanked Luqman silently for stealing his drink; he could afford no sleep that night. While the four Arabs slept he was breaking down tents and stowing equipment, packing his aircraft, and talking with the base at Port Hegramet to make sure he had a shuttle assignment. He had. If he was there by noon the following day they would give him a berth and a chance to cash in on the frantic round trips that would empty the vast transport and free it for its return trip. At first light he had the Arabs up, cursing and stumbling around. In half an hour they were aboard his plane and on the way home.

He reached the airport in plenty of time, although something inside him was whispering monotonously, Too late. Too late.

Too late for what? And then he found out. When he tried to pay for his fuel, the banking monitor flashed a red zero. There was nothing in the account he shared with Dolly.

Impossible!.—or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan’s lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly’s clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.

I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him-or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.

But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.

Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile-Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

But that’s the way we do it, isn’t it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those “meanwhiles”-until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.

3 Senseless Violence

A bomb in Kyoto that incinerated a thousand thousand-year-old carved wooden Buddhas, a crewless ship that homed on the Gateway asteroid and released a cloud of anthrax spores when it was opened, a shooting in Los Angeles, and plutonium dust in the Staines reservoir for London- those were the things that were forcing themselves on all of us. Terrorism. Acts of senseless violence. “There’s a queerness in the world,” said I to my dear wife, Essie. “Individuals act sober and sensible, but in groups they are brawling adolescents-such childishness people exhibit when they form groups!”

“Yes,” said Essie, nodding, “that is true, but tell me, Robin. How is your gut?”

“As well as can be expected,” I said lightly, adding as a joke, “You can’t get good parts anymore.” For those guts were, of course, a transplant, like a sizable fraction of the accessories my body requires to keep itself moving along-such are the benefits of Full Medical Plus. “But I am not talking about my own sickness. I’m talking about the sickness of the world.”

“And is right that you should do so,” Essie agreed, “although is my opinion that if you got your gut relined you would talk about such things less often.” She came up behind me and rested her palm on my forehead, gazing abstractedly out at the Tappan Sea. Essie understands instrumentation as few people do and has prizes to prove it, but when she wants to know if I have a fever she checks it the way her nurse did to her when she was a toddler in Leningrad. “Is not very hot,” she said reluctantly, “but what does Albert say?”

“Albert says,” I said, “that you should go peddle your hamburgers.” I pressed her hand with mine. “Honestly. I’m all right.”

“Will ask Albert to be sure?” she bargained-actually, she was deeply involved in setting up a whole new string of her franchises and I knew it.

“Will,” I promised, and patted her still splendid bottom as she turned away to her own workroom. As soon as she was gone I called, “Albert? You heard?”

In the holoframe over my desk the image of my data-retrieval program swirled into visibility, scratching his nose with the stem of his pipe. “Yes, Robin,” said Albert Einstein, “of course I heard. As you know, my receptors are always functioning except when you specifically ask me to turn them off, or when the situation is clearly private.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, studying him. He is not any sort of pinup, my Albert, with his untidy sweatshirt gathered in folds around his neck and his socks down around his ankles. Essie would straighten him up for me in a second if I asked her to, but I liked him the way he was. “And how can you tell the situation is private if you don’t peek?”

He moved the stem of his pipe from his nose to his cheekbone, still scratching, still gently smiling; it was a familiar question and did not require an answer.

Albert is really more of a friend than a computer program. He knows enough not to answer when I ask a rhetorical question. Long ago I had about a dozen different information-retrieval and decision-making programs. I had a business-manager program to tell me how my investments were doing, and a doctor program to tell me when my organs were due for replacement (among other things-I think he also conspired with my chef program at home to slip the odd pharmaceutical into my food), and a lawyer program to tell me how to get out of trouble, and, when I got into too much of it, my old psychiatrist program who told me why I was screwing up. Or tried to; I didn’t always believe him. But more and more I got used to one single program. And so the program I spent most of my time with was my general science advisor and home handyman, Albert Einstein. “Robin,” he said, gently reproving, “you didn’t call me just to find out if I was a Peeping Tom, did you?”

“You know perfectly well why I called you,” I told him, and indeed he did. He nodded and pointed to the far wall of my office over Tappan Sea, where my intercom screen was-Albert controls that as well as about everything else I own. On it a sort of X-ray picture appeared.

“While we were talking,” he said, “I was taking the liberty of scanning you with pulsed sound, Robin. See here. This is your latest intestinal transplant, and if you will look closely-wait, I’ll enlarge the image-I think you’ll be able to see this whole area of inflammation. I’m afraid you’re rejecting, all right.”

“I didn’t need you to tell me that,” I snapped. “How long?”

“Before it becomes critical, you mean? Ah, Robin,” he said earnestly, “that is difficult to say, for medicine is not quite an exact science-“

“How long!”

He sighed. “I can give you a minimum and maximum estimate. Catastrophic failure is not likely in less than one day and almost certain in sixty days.”

I relaxed. It was not as bad as it might have been. “So I have some time before it gets serious.”

“No, Robin,” he said earnestly, “it is already serious. The discomfort you now feel will increase. You should start medication at once in any case, but even with the medication the prognosis is for quite severe pain rather soon.” He paused, studying me. “I think from the expression on your face,” he said, “that for some idiosyncratic reason you want to put it off as long as you possibly can.”

“I want to stop the terrorists!”

“An, yes,” he agreed, “I know you do. And indeed that is a valid thing to do, if! may offer a value judgment. For that reason you wish to go to Brasilia to intercede with the Gateway commission”-I did; the worst thing the terrorists were doing was done from a spaceship no one had been able to catch-“and try to get them to share data so that they can move against the terrorists. What you want from me, then, is assurance that the delay won’t kill you.”

“Exactly, my dear Albert.” I smiled.

“I can give you that assurance,” he said gravely, “or at least I can continue to monitor you until your condition becomes acute. At that time, however, you must at once begin new surgery.”

“Agreed, my dear Albert.” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

“However,” he went on, “it does not seem to me that that is your only reason for putting off the replacement. I think there is something else on your mind.”

“Oh, Albert”-! sighed-“you’re pretty tedious when you act like Sigfrid von Shrink. Turn yourself off like a good fellow.”

And he did, looking thoughtful; and he had every reason to look thoughtful, because he was right.

You see, somewhere inside me, in that unlocatable space where I keep the solid core of guilt Sigfrid von Shrink did not quite purge away, I carried the conviction that the terrorists were right. I don’t mean right in murdering and blowing up and driving people crazy. That’s never right. I mean right in believing that they had a grievance, a wickedly unjust grievance against the rest of the human race, and therefore they were right in demanding attention be paid to it. I didn’t want just to stop the terrorists. I wanted to make them well.

Or, at least, I wanted not to make them any sicker than they were, and that was where we got into the morality of it all. How much do you have to steal from another person before the act makes you a thief?

The question was much on my mind, and I had no good place to go for the answers. Not to Essie, because with Essie the conversation always came back to my gut. Not with my old psychoanalytic program, because those conversations always shifted from “What do I do to make things better?” to “Why, Robin, do you feel that you must make things better?” Not even with Albert. I could chat with Albert about anything at all. But when I ask him questions like that he gives me the sort of look he would give me if I asked him to define the properties of phlogiston. Or of God. Albert is only a holographic projection, but he interacts with the environment really well, just as well as though he were there, sometimes. So he looks meditatively around wherever we happen to be-the Tappan Sea house, for instance, which I admit is pretty comfortably fixed up, and he says something like, “Why do you ask such metaphysical questions, Robin?” and I know that the unspoken part of his message is, Good heavens, boy, don’t you know when you’ve got it made?

Well, I do have it made. Up to a point I do. God’s own good luck gave me a bundle of money when I expected it least, and money makes money, and now I can buy anything that is for sale. Even some things that aren’t. I already own a large number of things worth having. I have Powerful Friends. I am a Person to Be Reckoned With. I am loved, really well loved, by my dear wife, Essie-and frequently, too, in spite of the fact that we’re both getting along in years. So I sort of laugh, and change the subject ... but I haven’t had an answer.

I haven’t, even now, had an answer, although now the questions are a lot tougher.

Another thing on my conscience is that I am letting poor Audee Walthers stew in his misery a long time while I digress, so let me finish the point.

The reason I felt guilty about the terrorists was that they were poor and I was rich. There was a great grand Galaxy out there for them, but we didn’t have any good way of getting them to it, not fast enough, anyway, and they were screaming. Starving. Seeing on the PV screen how glorious life could be for some of us, and then looking around their own huts or hogans or tenements and seeing how despairing it was for them, and how little chance there was that the great good things could become theirs before they died. It is called the revolution of rising expectations, Albert says. There should have been a cure for it-but I couldn’t find it. And the question on my mind was, did I have the right to make it worse? Did I have the right to buy somebody else’s organs and integument and arteries when my own wore out?

I didn’t know the answer and I don’t know it now. But the pain in my gut was not as bad for me as the pain of contemplating what it meant for me to steal somebody else’s life, just because I could pay for it and he could not.

And while I was sitting there, pressing my hand against my belly and wondering what I was going to be when I grew up, the whole huge universe was going on about its business.

And most of its business was worrisome. There was that Mach’s Principle thing that Albert had tried and tried to explain to me that suggested somebody, maybe the Heechee, was trying to crush the universe into a ball so as to rewrite the physical laws. Incredible. Also incredibly scary, when you let yourself think about it ... but millions or billions of years in the future, too, so I wouldn’t call it a really pressing worry. The terrorists and the growing armies were nearer at hand. The terrorists had hijacked a loop capsule heading for the High Pentagon. New recruits for their ranks were being generated in the Sahel, where crops had failed one more time. Meanwhile, Audee Walthers was trying to start a new life for himself without his errant wife; and meanwhile, the wife was erring with that nasty creature, Wan; and meanwhile, near the core, the Heechee Captain was beginning to think erotic thoughts about his second in command,

The “Mach’s Principlething” Robin talks about was at that time still only a speculation, though, as Robin says, a very scary one. It is a complicated subject. For now, let me just say that there were indications that the expansion of the universe had been arrested and a contraction had begun-and even a suggestion, from old fragmentary Heechee records, that the process was not natural.

whose friendly-name was Twice; and meanwhile, my wife, troubled about my belly, was nevertheless happily completing a deal for extending her fast-food franchise chain to Papua New Guinea and the Andaman Islands; and meanwhile-oh, meanwhile! What a lot was going on meanwhile!

And always is, though usually we don’t know about it.

4 Aboard the S. Ya.

1908 light-years from Earth my friend-former friend-about to be friend again, Audee Walthers, was remembering my name again, and not too favorably. He was coming up against a rule I had made.

I mentioned that I owned a lot of things. One of the things I owned was a share in the biggest space vehicle known to mankind. It was one of the bits and pieces of gadgetry the Heechee had left behind in the solar system, floating out beyond the Oort comet cloud until it got discovered. Discovered by human beings, I mean-Heechee and australopithecines don’t count. We called it Heechee Heaven, but when it occurred to me that it would make a marvelous good transport for getting some of those poor people away from the Earth, which couldn’t support them, to some hospitable other planet that could, I persuaded the other shareholders to rename it. After my wife: the S. Ya. Broadhead it was called. So I put up the money to refit it for colonist-carrying, and we started it off on round trips to the best and nearest of those places, Peggy’s Planet.

This put me into another of those situations where conscience and common sense came into conflict, because what I really wanted was to get everybody to a place where they could be happy, but in order to get it done, I had to be able to show a profit. Thus Broadhead’s Rules. They were pretty much the same rules as for the Gateway asteroid, years ago. You had to pay your way there, but you could do it on credit if you were lucky enough to have your name come up in the draw. Getting back to Earth, however, was strictly cash. If you were a land-grant colonist, you could reassign your sixty hectares to the company and they would give you a return ticket. If you didn’t have the land anymore because you’d sold it, or traded it, or lost it shooting craps, you had two choices. You could pay for a return ticket in cash. Or you could stay where you were.

Or, if you happened to be a fully qualified pilot, and if one of the ship’s officers had made up his mind to stay on Peggy’s, you could work your way back. That was Walthers’ way. What he would do when he got back to Earth he didn’t know. What he knew for sure was that he could not stay in that empty apartment after Dolly left, and so he sold off their furnishings for whatever he could get, in the minutes between shuttle flights, made his deal with the S. Ya.‘s captain, and was on his way. It struck him as queer and unpleasant that the thing that had seemed so impossible when Dolly asked for it suddenly became the only thing he could do when she left him. But life, he had discovered, was often queer and unpleasant.

So he came aboard the S. Ya. at the last minute, shaking with fatigue. He had ten hours before his first duty shift, and he slept it all. Even so, he was still groggy, and maybe a little numbed with trauma, when a fifteen-year-old failed colonist came to bring him coffee and escort him to the control room of the interstellar transport S. Ya. Broadhead née Heechee Heaven.

How huge the damn thing was! From outside you couldn’t really tell, but those long passages, those chambers with ten-tiered bunk beds, now empty, those guarded galleries and halls with unfamiliar machines or the stubs of places where the machines had been taken away-such vastness was no part of Walthers’ previous experience of spacecraft. Even the control room was immense; and even the controls themselves were duplicated. Walthers had flown Heechee vessels-that was how he’d got to Pews Planet in the first place, piloting a converted Five. The controls here were almost the same, but there were two sets of them, and the transport could not be flown unless both sets were manned. “Welcome aboard, Seventh.” The tiny Oriental-looking woman in the left-hand seat smiled. “I’m Janie Yee-xing, Third Officer, and you’re my relief. Captain Ainheiro will be here in a minute.” She didn’t offer her hand or even lift either of them from the controls before her. That much Walthers had expected. Two pilots on duty at all times meant two pilots’ hands on the controls; otherwise the bird did not fly. It wouldn’t crash, of course, because there was nothing for it to crash into; but it wouldn’t maintain course and acceleration, either.

Ludolfo Amheiro came in, a plump little man with gray sideburns with nine blue bangles on his left forearm-not many people wore them anymore, but Walthers knew that each one represented a Heechee-vessel flight in the days when you never knew where your ship was taking you; so here was a man with experience! “Glad to have you aboard, Walthers,” he said perfunctorily. “Do you know how to relieve the watch? There’s nothing to it, really. If you’ll just put your hands on the wheel over Yee-xing’s-“ Walthers nodded and did as he was ordered. Her hands felt warm and soft as she slipped them carefully out from under his, then slid her pretty bottom off the pilot’s seat to allow Walthers to occupy it. “That’s all there is, Walthers,” said the captain, satisfied. “First Officer Madjhour will actually fly the vessel”-nodding to the dark, smiling man who had just moved into the right-hand seat- “and he’ll tell you what’s necessary for you. You get a pee break of ten minutes each hour ... and that’s about it. Join me for dinner tonight, will you?”

And the invitation was reinforced by a smile from Third Officer Janie Yee-xing; and it was astonishing to Walthers, as he turned to listen to his instructions from Ghazi Madjhour, to realize that it had been all of ten minutes since he had thought of gone-away Dolly.

It was not quite as easy as that. Piloting was piloting. You didn’t forget it. But navigation was something else. Especially as a lot of the old Heechee navigation charts had been unraveled, or at least partly unraveled, while Walthers was flying shepherds and prospectors around Peggy’s.

The star charts on the S. Ya. were far more complicated than the ones Audee had used on the trip out. They came in two varieties. The most interesting one was Heechee. It had queer gold and gray-green markings that were only imperfectly understood, but it showed everything. The other, far less detailed but a lot more useful to human beings, was human-charted and English-labeled. Then there was the ship’s log to check, as it automatically recorded everything the ship did or saw. There was the whole internal system display-not the pilot’s concern, of course, except that if something went wrong the pilot needed to know about it. And all of this was new to Audee.

The good part of that was that learning the new skills kept Walthers busy. Janie Yee-xing was there to teach him, and that was good, too, because she kept his thoughts busy in a different way ... except in those bad times just before he fell asleep.

Since the S. Ya. was on a return trip it was almost empty. More than thirty-eight hundred colonists had gone out to Peggy’s Planet. Coming back, there were hardly any. The three dozen human beings in the ship’s crew; the military detachments maintained by the four governing nations of the Gateway Corp; and about sixty failed immigrants. They were the steerage. They had impoverished themselves to go out. Now they glumly bankrupted themselves to get back to whatever desert or slum they had fled, because, when push came to shove, they couldn’t quite hack pioneering in a new world. “Poor bastards,” Walthers said, circling to pass a work party of them cleaning air filters at a slave’s torpid pace; but Yeewig would have none of that.

“Don’t waste your pity on them, Walthers. They had it made and they chickened out.” She snarled something in Cantonese at the work party, who resentfully moved minutely faster for a moment.

“You can’t blame people for being homesick.”

“Home! God, Walthers, you talk as if there was a ‘home’ left-you’ve been out in the boonies too long.”

She paused at the junction of two corridors, one glowing blue with tracings of Heechee metal, the other gold. She waved at the party of armed guards in the uniforms of China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union. “Do you see them fraternizing?” she demanded. “Used to be they didn’t take this seriously. They’d pal around with the crew, they never carried weapons, it was just an all-expense-paid cruise in space for them. But now.” She shook her head and reached out abruptly to grab Walthers’ arm as he started to get closer to the guards. “Why don’t you listen to me?” she demanded. “They’ll give you hell if you try to go in there.”

“What’s in there?”

She shrugged. “The Heechee stuff they didn’t take out of the ship when they converted it. That’s one of the things they’re guarding-although,” she added, her voice lower, “if they knew the ship better they’d do a better job. But come on, we go this way.”

Unraveling the Heechee maps was extremely difficult, especially as they showed clear indications that they were intended to be difficult to unravel. There were not many of them to go on. Two or three fragments found in vessels like the so-called Heechee Heaven or S. Va., and a nearly complete one found in an artifact circling a frozen planet around a star in Boötes. It was my personal opinion, though not supported by the official reports of the cartographical study commissions, that many of the haloes, check marks, and flickering indicia were meant as warning signs. Robin didn’t believe me then. He said I was a cowardly pudding of spun photons. By the time he came to agree with me, what he called me no longer mattered.

Walthers followed willingly enough, grateful for the sight-seeing tour as much as for their destination. The S Ya. was far the biggest ship he, or any other human being, had ever seen, Heechee-built, very old-and still, in some ways, very puzzling. They were halfway home, and Walthers had not yet explored a quarter of its mazy, glowing corridors. The part he had especially not explored was Yee-xing’s private cabin, and he was looking forward to that with the interest of any ten-day virgin. But there were distractions. “What’s that?” he asked, pausing at a pyramidal construction of green-glowing metal in an alcove. A heavy steel grating had been welded in front of it to keep prying hands off.

“Beats me,” said Yee-xing. “Nobody else knows, either-that’s why they’ve left it here. Some of the stuff can be cut out and moved easily, some gets wrecked-now and then if you try to remove something, it blows up in your face. Here, right down this little alley. This is where I live.”

Neat, narrow bed, pictures of an old Oriental couple on the wall- Janie’s parents?-sprays of flowers on the wail chest; Yee-xing had made the place her own. “On return trips, that is,” she explained. “On the way out this is the captain’s cabin, and the rest of us sleep on cots in the pilot room.” She tugged at the cover on the bed, which was already quite straight. “There’s not much chance to fool around on outgoing trips,” she said meditatively. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

“I certainly would,” said Walthers. And so he sat down and had the wine, and then he had the share of a joint with pretty Janie Yee-xing, and by and by had the other refreshments the tiny cabin had to offer, which were excellent in quality and satisfying to his soul, and if he thought at all of lost Dolly in the next half hour or so it was not at all with jealousy and rage, but almost with compassion.

There was plenty of room to fool around on return trips, it turned out, even in a cabin no bigger than the one Horatio Hornblower had occupied centuries before. And the wine was Peggy’s Planet’s best, but when they had finished emptying the bottle, and themselves, the cabin began to seem a lot smaller and there was still an hour or more before their shifts began. “I’m hungry,” Yee-xing announced. “I’ve got some rice and stuff here, but maybe-“

It was not a time to push his luck, although a home-cooked meal sounded good. Even rice and stuff. “Let’s go to the galley,” said Walthers, and, in no particular hurry, they wandered hand in hand back to the working part of the ship. They paused at a junction of corridors, where the long-gone Heechee had, for reasons of their own, planted little clusters of shrubs and bushes-not, no doubt, the same ones that were still growing there. Yee-xing paused to pick a bright blue berry.

“Look at that,” she said. “They’re all ripe, and the deadbeats don’t even pick them.”

“You mean the returning colonists? But they pay their way-“

“Oh, sure,” she said bitterly. “No pay, no fly. But when they get back they’ll go right on welfare, because what else is there for them?”

Walthers sampled one of the juicy, thin-skinned fruits. “You don’t like the returnees very much.”

Yee-xing grinned. “I don’t keep that a secret very well, do I?” But the grin faded. “In the first place, there’s nothing for them to go home to-if they had a decent life, they wouldn’t have left it. In the second place, things have got a lot worse since they left. More terrorist trouble. More international friction-why, there are countries that are building up their armies again! And in the third place, they’re not only going to suffer from all that; they’re part of the cause of it. Half the goons you see here will be in some terror group in a month-or supporting one, anyway.”

They strolled onward, and Walthers said humbly, “It’s true I’ve been away a long time, but I did hear that things are getting nasty-bombings and shootings.”

“Bombings! If that’s all there was! They’ve got a TPT now! You go back to the Earth system now, and you never know when you’re going to be right off your rocker without warning!”

“TPT? What’s a TPT?”

“Oh, my God, Walthers,” she said earnestly, “you have been away a long time. What they used to call the Craziness, don’t you remember? It’s a telempathic psychokinetic transceiver, one of those old Heechee things. There are about a dozen of them around, and the terrorists have one!”

“The Craziness,” Walthers repeated, scowling, as a memory tried to work its way up out of his subconscious.

“Right. The Craziness,” said Yee-xing, with gloomy satisfaction. “I remember when I was a kid in Kanchou, my father came home with his head all bloody because somebody had jumped out of the top story of the glass factory. Right on top of my father! Crazy as a bedbug! And it was all the TPT.”

Walthers nodded without answering, his face drawn. Yee-xing looked at him in puzzlement, then waved at the guards ahead of them. “That’s what they’re protecting mostly,” she said, “because there’s still one on the S. Ya. Too damn many of them around! And they thought of protecting them a little too late, because now there’s a bunch of terrorists that have a Heechee Five, and they’ve got a TPT in it, and somebody who’s

It was, of course, the castaway boy Wan who caused the Fever. All he wanted was some sort of human contact, because he was lonesome, It was not his intention to drive most of the human race crazy with his crazy, obsessive thoughts. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.

really crazy. Lunatic, I mean! When he gets on that thing and you feel him in your head it’s so creepy and awful-Walthers, is something the matter?”

He stopped at the entrance to the gold-lit corridor, the four guards looking at him with curiosity. “The Craziness,” he said. “Wan! This used to be his ship!”

“Well, sure it was,” the girl said, frowning. “Listen, we were going to get something to eat. We’d better do it.” She was getting worried. Walthers’ jaw was set, the muscles around his face contracted. As much as anything, he looked like somebody who was expecting to be punched in the face, and the guards were getting curious. “Come on, Audee,” she said pleadingly.

Walthers stirred and looked at her. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’m not hungry any more.”

Wan’s ship! How strange, Walthers thought, that he had not made the connection before. But of course it was so.

Wan had been born in this very vessel, long before it was renamed the S. Ya. Broadhead, long before the human race even knew it existed unless you considered a few dozen remote descendants of Australopithecus afarensis human. Wan had been born to a pregnant female Gateway prospector. Her husband was lost on one mission, herself stranded on another. She hung on to life for his first few years and then left him orphaned. Walthers could not easily imagine what Wan’s infancy was like tiny child in this vast, almost empty vessel, no company but savages and the computer-stored analogs of dead space prospectors. One of whom, no doubt, had been his mother. It called for pity

Walthers had no pity to give. Not to Wan, who had borrowed his wife. Not, for that matter, to the same Wan who had found the machine they called the TPT-short for “telempathic psychokinetic transceiver,” as the thick tongue of the bureaucracy had relabeled it. Wan himself had only called it a dream couch, and the rest of the human race had called it the Fever, the terrible, cloudy obsessions that had infected every human alive when silly young Wan, discovering a couch, had found that it gave him some sort of contact with some sort of living beings. He did not know that the same process gave them some sort of contact with him, and so his teen-aged dreams and fears and sexual fantasies invaded ten billion human brains ... Perhaps Dolly should have made the connection, but she had been a small child when it happened. Walthers had not. He remembered, and it gave him a fresh reason to hate Wan.

He could no longer remember that recurrent worldwide madness very clearly, could hardly imagine how devastating its effects had been. He did not even try to imagine Wan’s idle, lonely childhood here, but present Wan, cruising around the stars on his mysterious quest, his only company Walthers’ fugitive wife-that, all of that, Walthers could imagine all too clearly.

In fact, he spent nearly all of the hour available to him, before his shift began, in imagining it, before it occurred to him that he was wallowing in self-pity and volunteered humiliation and that was really, after all, no way for a grown human being to behave.

He showed up on time. Yee-xing, there in the pilot room before him, said nothing but looked faintly surprised. He grinned at her in the changeover and set in to work.

Although the actual piloting of the ship amounted to not much more than holding on to the controls and letting the vessel fly itself~ Walthers kept himself busy. His mood had changed. The vastness of the vessel he had under his fingertips was a challenge. He watched Janie Yee-xing as, with knees and toe-tips and elbows, she worked the auxiliary controls that displayed course and position and ship’s state and all the other data that a pilot didn’t really need to know to fly the beast but ought to go to the trouble of finding out if he wanted to call himself a pilot. And he did the same. He summoned up the course display and checked the position of the S Ya., tiny glowing gold dot along a thin blue line nineteen hundred light-years long; he verified that the position was right by calculating angles to the red-glowing marker stars along the route; he frowned at the handful of “Stay Away!” markings, where black holes and gas clouds posed a threat-none of them anywhere near their course, it appeared- and he even called up the great Heechee sky chart that displayed the entire Galaxy, with other members of the Local Group hanging on its fringes. Several hundred very bright human beings and thousands of hours of machine-intelligence time had gone into unraveling the Heechee chart code. There were parts that were not understood yet, and Walthers studied, frowning, the handful of points in all that area where the blinking, multicolored halos that meant “Here there be danger” were doubled and tripled. What could be so dangerous that the Heechee charts fairly screamed with panic?

There was still a lot to learn! And, Walthers thought to himself, no better place to learn it than on this ship. His job was strictly temporary, of course. But if he did good work ... if he showed willingness and talent ... if he ingratiated himself with the captain ... why then, he thought, when they reached Earth, and the captain had to face the job of hiring a new Seventh Officer, what better candidate than Audee Walthers?

When the shift was over, Yee-xing came across the ten-meter space separating the two pilot positions and said, “As a pilot, you’re looking pretty good, Walthers. I was a little worried about you.”

He took her hand and they headed for the door. “I guess I was in a bad mood,” he apologized, and Yee-xing shrugged.

“First girl friend always catches all the crap after a divorce,” she observed. “What did you do, plug in one of our headshrinker programs?”

“I didn’t have to. I just-“ Walthers hesitated, trying to remember just what he had done. “I guess I just talked to myself a little. The thing about having your wife walk out on you,” he explained, “is that it makes you feel ashamed I mean, besides jealous, and angry, and all that other stuff. But after I stewed around for a while it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything much to be ashamed of. The feeling didn’t belong to me, you see?”

“And that helped?” she demanded.

“Well, after a while it did.” And, of course, the sovereign antidote for woman-induced pain was another woman, but he didn’t want to say that to the antidote.

“I’ll have to remember that, next time I get dumped. Well, I guess it’s about bedtime . .

He shook his head. “It’s early yet, and I’m all charged up. What about that old Heechee stuff? You said you knew a way past the guards.”

She stopped in the middle of the passage to study him. “You sure have your ups and downs, Audee,” she said. “But why not?”

The S. Ya. was double-hulled. The space between the hulls was narrow and dark, but it could be entered. So Yee-xing led Walthers through narrow passages close to the skin of the great spacecraft, through a maze of empty colonists’ bunks, past the crude, huge kitchen that fed them, into a space that smelled of stale garbage and ancient rot-into a vast, ill-lit chamber. “Here they are,” she said. Her voice was lowered, although she had promised him they were too far from the guards to be overheard. “Put your head close to that sort of silvery basket-you see where I’m pointing?-but you don’t touch it. That’s important!”

“Why is it important?” Walthers stared around at what looked like the Heechee equivalent of an attic. There were at least forty devices in the chamber, large and small, all of them firmly linked to the structure of the ship itself. There were big ones and little ones, spherical ones with splayed mountings joining the deck, squarish ones that glowed in the blue

The Heechee charting and navigation systems were not easy to decipher. For navigation, the system looks up two points, the start and finish of the trip. It then looks up all intervening obstacles such as dust or gas clouds, perturbing radiation, gravitational fields, and so on, and selects points of safe passage around or between them, after which it constructs a spline to fit the points and directs the vessel along it.

Many objects and points on the charts were tagged with attention marks-flickering auras, check marks, and so on. We realized early that these were often warnings. The difficulty was that we didn’t know which signs were warnings, or what they warned against.

and green colors of the metal. Of the woven metal shroud Janie Yee-xing was indicating, there were three, all exactly alike.

“It’s important because I don’t want my ass kicked off this ship, Audee. So pay attention!”

“I am paying attention. Why are there three of them?”

“Why did the Heechee do anything? Maybe all these things were spares. Now here’s the part you have to listen to. Put your head close to the metal part, but not too close. As soon as you start feeling things that don’t come out of you, that’s close enough. You’ll know when. But don’t get any closer, and above all don’t touch, because this is a two-way thing. As long as you’re just satisfied with sort of general feelings, nobody will notice. Probably. But if they do notice, the captain will have us both walking the plank, you understand?”

“Of course I understand,” Walthers said, a little annoyed, and moved his head within a dozen centimeters of the silvery mesh. He twisted around to look at Yee-xing. “Nothing,” he said.

“Try a little closer.”

It was not very easy to move your head a centimeter at a time when it was bent at a strange angle and you didn’t have anything to hold on to, but Walthers tried to do as instructed- “That’s it!” Yee-xing cried, watching his face. “No closer, now!” He didn’t answer. His mind was filled with the barest suspicion of sensations-a confused mumble of sensations. There were dreams and daydreams, and someone’s desperate shortness of breath; there was someone’s laughter, and someone, or actually what seemed to be three couples of someones, engaged in sexual activity. He twisted to grin at Janie, started to speak- And then, suddenly, there was something else there. Walthers froze. From Yee-xing’s description he had expected a sort of sense of company. The presence of other people. Their fears and joys and hungers and pleasures-but the “they” was always human.

This new thing was not.

Walthers moved convulsively. His head touched the mesh. All the sensations became a thousandfold clearer, like the focusing of a lens, and he felt the new and distant presence-or presences?-in a different and immediate way. It was a distant, slippery, chilling sensation, and it did not emanate from anything human. If the sources had depressions or fantasies Walthers could not comprehend them. All he could feel was that they were there. They existed. They did not respond They did not change.

If you could get inside the mind of a corpse, he thought in panic and revulsion, this was how it might feel-

All this in a moment, and then he was aware that Yee-xing was tugging at his arm, shouting in his ear: “Oh, damn you, Walthers! I felt that! So did the captain and everybody on this God-damned ship. Now we’re in trouble!”

As soon as his head came away from the silvery mesh the sensation was gone. The gleaming walls and shadowy machines were real again, with Janie Yee-xing’s furious face thrust into his. In trouble? Walthers found himself laughing. After the chill, slow hell he had just glimpsed, nothing human could seem like trouble. Even when the four-power guard came boiling in, weapons drawn, shouting at them in four languages, Walthers almost welcomed them.

For they were human, and alive.

The question that was digging at his mind was the one that anybody would have asked himself Had he tuned in somehow on the cryptic, hidden Heechee?

If so, he told himself, shuddering, heaven help the human race.

5 A Day in a Tycoon’s Life

Dreading the Heechee was a popular sport in more places than the S. Ya.

I even did a fair amount of it myself. Everybody did. We did it a lot when I was a kid, though then the Heechee were nothing more than strange vanished creatures that had amused themselves digging tunnels on the planet Venus hundreds of thousands of years before. We did it when I was a Gateway prospector-oh, yes, my God how we did it then! Trusting ourselves to old Heechee ships and scooting around the universe to places no human had ever seen, and always wondering if the owners of the ships would turn up at the end of a trip-and what they would do about it! And we brooded about them even more when we untangled enough of their old sky atlases to discover where they had gone to hide, deep in the core of our own Galaxy.

It did not occur to us, then, to wonder what they were hiding from.

That certainly was not all I did, to be sure. I had plenty of other things to fill my days. There was my steadfast preoccupation with my crotchety health, which forced itself upon my attention whenever it wanted to, and wanted to more often all the time. But that was only the beginning. I was about as busy, with about as many myriad diverse things, as it was possible for a human being to be.

If you looked at any average day in the life of Robin Broadhead, aging tycoon, visiting him at his luxurious country home looking over the broad Tappan Sea just north of New York City, you would find him doing such things as strolling along the riverfront with his lovely wife, Essie ... venturing culinary experiments in the cuisines of Malaya, Iceland, and Ghana in his lavishly equipped kitchen... chatting with his wise data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein... hitting his mail:

“To that youth center in Grenada, let’s see, yeah. Here is the check for three hundred thousand dollars as promised, but please don’t name the center after me. Name it after my wife if you want to, and we will both certainly try to get down there for the opening.

“To Pedro Lammartine, Secretary General, United Nations. Dear Pete. I’m working on the Americans to share data with the Brazilians on finding that terrorist ship, but somebody has to get after the Brazilians. Will you use your influence, please? It’s in everybody’s interest. If the terrorists are not stopped, God knows where we’ll all wind up.

“To Ray McLean, wherever he’s living now. Dear Ray. By all means use our docking facilities in the search for your wife. I wish you all the luck from the heart, etc., etc.

“To Gorman and Ketchin, General Contractors. Dear Sirs. I won’t accept your new completion date of October 1^st for my ship. It’s completely unreasonable. You’ve had one extension already, and that’s all you get. I remind you of the heavy penalty charges in the contract if there is any further delay.

“To the President of the United States. Dear Ben. If the terrorist ship is not located and neutralized at once, the peace of the whole Earth is threatened. Not to mention property damage, loss of lives, and everything else that’s at risk. It is an open secret that the Brazilians have developed a direction-finder for signals from a ship in FTL flight and that our own military people have a procedure for FTL navigating that will let them approach it. Can’t they get together? As Commander in Chief, all you have to do is order the High Pentagon to cooperate. There’s lots of pressure on the Brazilians to do their share, but they’re waiting for a sign from us.

“To what’s-his-name, Luqman. Dear Luqman. Thanks for the good news. I think we should move to develop that oil field immediately, so when you come to see me, bring along your plan for production and shipment with cost estimates and a cash-flow capital plan. Every time the S. Ya. comes back empty we’re losing money ...”

And on and on-I kept busy! Had a lot to keep busy with, and that’s not even counting keeping track of my investments and riding herd on my managers. Not that I spent a lot of time on business. I always say that after he’s made his first hundred million or so, anybody who does anything just for the money is insane. You need money, because if you don’t have money you don’t have freedom to do the things that are worth doing. But after you have that freedom, what’s the use of more money? So I left most of the business to my financial programs and the people I hired-except for the ones that I was in not so much for the money as because they were doing something I wanted done.

And yet, if the name Heechee does not appear anywhere in the list of my daily concerns, it was always there. It all came back to the Heechee in the long run. My ship building out in the construction orbits was human-designed and human-built, but most of the construction, and all of the drive and communications systems, were adapted from Heechee designs. The S. Ya., which I was planning to fill with oil on the nearly empty return trips from Peggy’s Planet, was a Heechee artifact; for that matter, Peggy’s was a gift from the Heechee, since they had provided the navigation to find it and the ships to get there in. Essie’s fast-food chain came from the Heechee machines to manufacture CHON-food out of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in the frozen gases of comets. We’d built some of the food factories on Earth-there was one right now off the shore of Sri Lanka, getting its nitrogen and oxygen from the air, its hydrogen from water out of the Indian Ocean, and its carbon from whatever unfortunate plants, animals, or carbonates slipped through its intake valves. And, now that the Gateway Corporation had so much money to invest that it didn’t know what to do with it all, it was able to invest some wisely-in chartering systematic exploration trips-and as a big shareholder in Gateway, I encouraged them to keep on doing that. Even the terrorists were using a stolen Heechee ship and a stolen Heechee telempathic psychokinetic transceiver to inflict their worst wounds on the world-all Heechee!

It was no wonder that there were fringe religious cults all over the Earth, worshipping the Heechee, for they surely met all the objective tests of divinity. They were capricious, powerful-and invisible. There were times when I myself felt very nearly tempted, in those long nights when my gut was hurting and things didn’t seem to be going right, to sneak a little prayer to Our Father Who Wert in the Core. It couldn’t hurt anything, could it?

Well, yes, it could. It could hurt my self-respect. And for all of us human beings, in this tantalizing, abundant Galaxy the Heechee had given us-but only a dab at a time-self-respect was getting harder and harder to keep.

Of course, I had not then actually met a real, live Heechee.

I had not yet met any, but one who was going to be a big part of my later life (I won’t quibble over the terminology anymore!), namely Captain, was halfway to the breakout point where normal space began and meanwhile, on the £ Ya., Audee Walthers was getting his ass royally reamed and beginning to think that he should not plan for much of a future working on that ship; and meanwhile- Well, as always, there were a lot of meanwhiles, but the one that would have interested Audee the most was that meanwhile, his errant wife was beginning to wish she hadn’t erred.

6 Out Where the Black Holes Spin

Eloping with a lunatic was not, on balance, very much better than being bored out of her mind in Port Hegramet. It was different, oh, heavens, yes, it was different! But parts of it were equally boring, and parts of it simply scared her to death. Since the ship was a Five there was room for the two of them-or should have been. Since Wan was young, and rich, and almost, in a way, handsome-if you looked at him the right way- the trip should have been lively enough. Neither of those was true.

And besides, there were the scary parts.

If there was one thing every human being knew about space, it was that black holes were meant to be stayed away from. Not by Wan. He sought them out. And then he did worse than that.

What the gidgets and gadgets were that Wan played with Dolly did not know. When she asked, he wouldn’t answer. When, wheedling, she put one of her puppets on her hand and asked through its mouth, he scowled and frowned and said, “If you are going to do your act do something funny and dirty, not ask questions that are none of your business.” When she tried to find out why they were none of her business, she was more successful. She didn’t get a straight answer. But from the bluster and confusion with which Wan responded it was easy to figure out they were stolen.

And they had something to do with black holes. And, although Dolly was almost positive that she had heard, once, that there was no way in or out of a black hole, she was also almost positive that what Wan was trying to do was to find some certain black hole and then to go into it. That was the scary part.

And when she wasn’t scared half out of her young mind, she was bone-crackingly lonesome, for Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz, the dashing and eccentric young multimillionaire whose exploits still titillated the readers of gossip services, was rotten company. After three weeks in his presence, Dolly could hardly stand the sight of him.

Although she admitted to herself, trembling, that the sight of him was a lot less worrisome than the sight she was actually looking at.

What Dolly was looking at was a black hole. Or not really at the hole itself, for you could look at that all day and not see anything; black holes were black because they could not be seen at all. She was actually seeing a spiraling aurora of bluish, violetish light, unpleasant for the eyes even through the viewing plate over the control panel. It would have been far more unpleasant to be exposed to. That light was only the iceberg tip of a flood of lethal radiation. Their ship was armored against such things, and so far the armor had easily held. But Wan was not within the armor. He was down in the lander, where he had tools and technologies that she did not understand, and that he refused to explain. And she knew that at some time, in some such situation, she would be sitting in the main ship and would feel the little lurch that meant the lander had disengaged. And then he would be venturing even closer to one of these terrible objects! And what would happen to him then? Or to her? Not that she would go with him, certainly! But if he died, and left her alone, a hundred lightyears from anything she knew-what then?

She heard an angry mumble and knew that at least that time was not now. The hatch opened and Wan crawled out of the lander, wrathful. “Another empty one!” he snarled at her, as though he were holding her accountable for it.

And, of course, he was. She tried to look sympathetic rather than scared. “Aw, honey, what a pity. That makes three of them.”

“Three! Huh! Three with you along, you mean. More than that in all, indeed!” His tone was scornful, but she didn’t mind the scorn. It was drowned in the relief when he slipped past her. Dolly moved inconspicuously as far away from the control board as she could-not far, in a Heechee ship that would have fit readily into a good-sized living room. As he sat down and consulted his electronic oracles she kept silent.

When Wan talked to his Dead Men he did not invite Dolly to take part. If he conducted his end of the conversation in words she could at least hear that half of it. If he tapped out instructions on his keyboard she did not have even that much. But this time she could figure it out easily enough. He punched out his questions, scowled at what one of the Dead Men said in his earphones, punched out a correction, and then set up a course on the Heechee board. Then he took the headphones off, scowled, stretched, and turned to Dolly. “All right,” he said, “come, you can pay another installment on your passage.”

“Why, sure, honey,” she said obligingly, though it would have been so very much nicer if he didn’t always have to put it like that. But her spirits were a little higher. She felt the tiny suggestion of a lurch that meant that the spacecraft was starting off on another trip, and indeed, the great blue and violet horror on the screen was already dwindling away. That made up for a lot!

Of course, it only meant they were on their way to the next one.

“Do the Heechee,” commanded Wan, “and, let me see, yes. With Robinette Broadhead.”

“Sure, Wan,” said Dolly, retrieving her puppets from where Wan had kicked them and slipping them over her hands. The Heechee did not, of course, look like a real Heechee; and as a matter of fact the Robinette Broadhead was pretty libelous, too. But they amused Wan. That was what mattered to Dolly, since he was paying the bills. The first day out of Port Hegramet he had boastfully shown Dolly his bankbook. Six million dollars automatically socked into it every month! The numbers staggered Dolly. They made up for a lot. Out of all that cataract of cash there had to be a way, sooner or later, of squeezing a few drops for herself. To Dolly there was nothing immoral in such thoughts. Perhaps in an earlier day Americans would have called her a golddigger. But most of the human race, through most of its history, would only have called her poor.

So she fed him and bedded him. When he was in a bad mood she tried to look invisible, and when he wanted entertainment she tried to entertain:

“Halo thar, Mr. Heechee,” said the Broadhead hand, Dolly’s fingers twisting to give it a simpering grin, Dolly’s voice thick and corn-pone-bumpkin (part of the libel!). “I’m moughty pleased to make your acquaintance.”

The Heechee hand, Dolly’s voice a serpentine whine: “Greetings, rash Earthman. You are just in time for dinner.”

“Aw, gosh,” cried the Broadhead hand, grin widening, “I’m hungry, too. What’s fer dinner?”

“Aargh!” shrieked the Heechee hand, fingers a claw, mouth open. “You are!” And the right-hand fingers closed on the left-hand puppet.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” laughed Wan. “That is very good! Though that is not what a Heechee looks like. You do not know what a Heechee is.”

“Do you?” asked Dolly in her own voice.

“Nearly! More nearly than you!”

And Dolly, grinning, raised the Heechee hand. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Mr. Wan,” came the silky, snaky Heechee voice. “This is what I look like, and I’m waiting to meet you in the next black hole!”

Crash went the chair Wan was sitting on as he sprang up. “That is not funny!” he shouted, and Dolly was astonished to see he was trembling. “Make me food!” he demanded, and stomped off to his private lander, muttering.

It was not wise to joke with him. So Dolly made him his dinner and served him with a smile she did not feel. She gained nothing from the smile. His mood was fouler than ever. He screeched: “Stupid woman! Have you eaten all the good food when I was not looking? Is there nothing left fit to be eaten?”

Dolly was near tears. “But you like steak,” she protested.

“Steak! Of course I like steak, but look at what you serve for dessert!” He pushed the steak and broccoli out of the way to seize the plate of chocolate-chip cookies and shake it under her nose. Cookies sailed away in all directions, and Dolly tried to retrieve them. “I know it’s not what you’d like, honey, but there isn’t any more ice cream.”

He glared at her. “Huh! No more ice cream! Oh, very well, then. A chocolate soufflé-or a flan-“

“Wan, they’re almost all gone, too. You ate them.”

“Stupid woman! That is not possible!”

“Well, they’re gone. Anyway, all that sweet stuff isn’t good for you.”

“You have not been appointed my nurse! If I rot my teeth I will buy new ones.” He struck at the dish in her hand, and the cookies went flying indeed. “Jettison this trash. I do not wish to eat at all now,” he snapped.

It was just another typical meal on the frontiers of the Galaxy. It finished typically, too, with Dolly clearing away the mess and weeping. He was such a terrible person! And he didn’t even seem to know it.

But as a matter of fact, Wan did know that he was mean, antisocial, exploitive-a whole long list of things that had been explained to him by the psychoanalysis programs. More than three hundred sessions of them. Six days a week, for almost a year. And at the end he had terminated the analysis with a joke. “I have a question,” he told the holographic analyst, displayed for him as a good-looking woman, old enough to be his mother, young enough to be attractive, “and the question is this: How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a light bulb?”

The analyst said, sighing, “Oh, Wan, you’re resisting again. All right. How many?”

“Only one,” he told her, laughing, “but the light bulb has to really want to change. Haw-haw! -And you see, I don’t.”

She looked directly at him for a silent moment. The way she was displayed, she was sitting on a sort of beanbag chair, with her legs tucked under her, a note pad in her hand, a pencil in the other. She used it to push up the glasses that were sliding down her nose as she looked at him. As with everything else in her programming, the gesture was meant to have a purpose, the reassuring indication that she was, after all, only another human being like himself, not an austere goddess. Of course, human she was not. But she sounded human enough as she said, “That’s really a very old joke, Wan. What’s a light bulb?”

He shrugged irritably. “It is a round thing that gives off light,” he guessed, “but you are missing the point. I do not wish to be changed anymore. It is not fun for me. It was not my desire to begin this in the first place, and now I have decided to end it.”

The computer program said peacefully, “That’s your right, of course, Wan. What will you do?”

“I will go looking for my-I will go out of here and enjoy myself,” he said savagely. “That is also one of my rights!”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “Wan? Would you like to tell me what it was you started to say, before you changed your mind?”

“No,” he said, getting up, “I would not like to tell you what it is I will do; instead, I will do it. Good-bye.”

“You’re going to look for your father, aren’t you?” the psychoanalytic program called after him, but he didn’t answer. The only indication he gave that he heard was that instead of merely closing the door, he slammed it.

A normal human being-in fact, almost any human being at all, really would have told his analyst that she was right. Would have at some time in three long weeks have told his ship companion and bed companion the same thing, if only to have someone to share in his outside-chance hope and his very real fear. Wan had never learned to share his feelings, because he had never learned to share anything at all. Brought up in Heechee Heaven, without any sort of warm-blooded human companion for the most crucial decade of his childhood, he had become the archetype of a sociopath. That terrible yearning for love was what drove him to seek his lost father through all the terrors of space. Its total lack of fulfillment made it impossible for him to accept love, or sharing, now. His closest companions for those terrified ten years had been the computer programs of stored, dead intelligences called the Dead Men. He had copied them and taken them with him when he took a Heechee starship, and he talked to them, as he would not to flesh-and-blood Dolly, because he knew they were only machines. They didn’t mind being treated that way. To Wan, flesh-and-blood human beings were also machines-vending machines, you might call them. He had the coin to make them yield what he wanted. Sex. Or conversation. Or the preparation of his food, or cleaning up after his piggish habits.

It did not occur to him to consider a vending machine’s feelings. Not even when the vending machine was actually a nineteen-year-old female human being who would have been grateful for the chance of being allowed to think she loved him.

The Heechee early discovered how to store the intelligence and even an approximation of the personality of a dead or dying person in mechanical Systems-as human beings learned when they first encountered the so-called Heechee Heaven where the boy Wan grew up. Robin considered that a tremendously valuable invention. I don’t see it that way. Of course, I may be considered prejudiced in the matter-a person like me, being mechanical storage in the first place, doesn’t need it; and the Heechee, having discovered that, did not bother to invent persons like me.

Prologue: A Chat with My Subset

1 Just like Old Times

2 What Happened on Peggy’s Planet

3 Senseless Violence

4 Aboard the S. Ya.

5 A Day in a Tycoon’s Life

6 Out Where the Black Holes Spin