11 Meeting in Rotterdam

 

There he stood, this fellow with a face like a tan avocado, blocking my way. I identified the expression before I recognized the face. The expression was obstinacy, irritation, fatigue. The face that displayed them belonged to Audee Walthers, Jr., who (my secretarial program had not failed to tell me) had been trying to get in touch with me for several days. “Hello, Audee,” I said, really very cordially, shaking his hand and nodding to the pretty Oriental-looking young woman beside him, “it’s great to see you again! Are you staying at this hotel? Wonderful! Listen, I’ve got to run, but let’s have dinner-set it up with the concierge, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” And I smiled at him, and smiled at the young woman, and left them standing there.

Now I don’t pretend that was really good manners, but as it happens I actually was in a hurry, and besides, my gut was giving me fits. I put Essie in a cab going one way and caught another to take me to the court. Of course, if I had known then what he was waiting to tell me, I might have been more forthcoming with Walthers. But I didn’t know what I was walking away from.

Or what I was walking toward, for that matter.

For the last little bit I actually did walk, because traffic was more than normally snarled. There was a parade getting ready to march, as well as the normal congestion around the International Palace of Justice. The Palace is a forty-story skyscraper, sunk on caissons into the soapy soil of Rotterdam. On the outside it dominates half the city. On the inside it’s all scarlet drapes and one-way glass, the very model of a modern international tribunal. it is not a place where you go to to plead to a parking ticket.

It is not a place where individual human beings are considered very much at all, in fact, and if I had any vanity, which I do, I would preen myself on the fact that the lawsuit in which I was technically one of the defendants actually had fourteen different parties at interest, and four of them were sovereign states. I even had a suite of rooms reserved for my private use in the Palace itself, because all parties at interest did. But I didn’t go there right away. It was nearly eleven o’clock and therefore at least an even chance that the court would have started its session for the day, so I smiled and pushed my way right into the hearing room. It was crowded. It was always crowded, because there were celebrities to be seen at the hearings. In my vanity I had thought I was one of them, and I expected heads to turn when I came in. No heads. No turning. Everybody was watching half a dozen skinny, bearded persons in dashikis and sandals, sitting in a corral at the plaintiffs’ end of the room, drinking Cokes and giggling among themselves. The Old Ones. You didn’t see them every day. I gawked at them like everybody else, until there was a touch on my arm and I turned to see Maitre Ijsinger, my flesh-and-blood lawyer, gazing reprovingly at me. “You are late, Mijuheer Broadhead,” he whispered. “The Court will have noticed your absence.”

Since the Court was busy whispering and arguing among themselves over, I gathered, the question of whether the diary of the first prospector to locate a Heechee tunnel on Venus should be admitted as evidence, I doubted that. But you don’t pay a lawyer as much as I was paying Maitre Ijsinger to argue with him.

Of course, there was no legal reason for me to pay him at all. As much as the case was about anything, it was about a motion on the part of the Empire of Japan to dissolve the Gateway Corporation. I came into it, as a

 

The Heechee, thinking that the australopithecines they discovered when they first visited the Earth would ultimately evolve a technological civilization, decided to preserve a colony of them in a sort of zoo. Their descendants were “the Old Ones.” Of course, that was a wrong guess on the part of the Heechee. Australopithecus never achieved intelligence, only extinction. It was a sobering reflection for human beings to realize that the so-called Heechee Heaven, later rechristened the S. Va. Broadhead-far the largest and most sophisticated starship the human race had ever seen-was in fact only a sort of monkey cage.

 

major stockholder in the S. Ya.’s charter business, because the Bolivians had brought suit to have the charter revoked on the grounds that the financing of the colonists amounted to a “return to slavery.” The colonists were called indentured servants, and I, among others, had been called a wicked exploiter of human misery. What were the Old Ones doing there? Why, they were parties at interest, too, because they claimed that the S. Ya. was their property-they and their ancestors had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Their position in the court was a little complicated. They were wards of the government of Tanzania, because that’s where their ancestral Earth home had been decreed to be, but Tanzania wasn’t represented in the courtroom. Tanzania was boycotting the Palace of Justice because of an unfavorable decision over their sea-bottom missiles the year before, so its affairs were being handled by Paraguay-which was actually taking an interest mostly because of a border dispute with Brazil, which in turn was present as host to the headquarters of the Gateway Corp. You follow all this? Well, I didn’t, but that was why I hired Maitre Ijsinger.

If I let myself get personally involved in every lousy multimillion dollar lawsuit, I’d spend all my time in court. I’ve got too much to do with the remainder of my life for that, so in the normal course of events I would have let the lawyers fight it out and spent my time more profitably, chatting with Albert Einstein or wading along the Tappan Sea with my wife. However, there were special reasons for being here. I saw one of them, half asleep, on a leather chair near the Old Ones. “I think I’ll see if Joe Kwiatkowski wants a cup of coffee,” I told Ijsinger.

Kwiatkowski was a Pole, representing the East Europe Economic Community, and one of the plaintiffs in the case. Ijsinger turned pale. “He’s an adversary!” he hissed.

“He’s also an old friend,” I told him, exaggerating the facts of the case only slightly-he had been a Gateway prospector, too, and we’d had drinks over old times before.

“There are no friends in a court action of this magnitude,” Ijsinger informed me, but I only smiled at him and leaned forward to hiss at Kwiatkowski, who came along willingly enough once he was awake.

“I should not be here with you, Robin,” he rumbled once we were in my fifteenth-floor suite. “Especially for coffee! Don’t you got something to put in it?”

Well, I had-slivovitz, and from his favorite Cracow distillery, too. And Kampuchean cigars, the brand he liked, and salt herring and biscuits to go with them all.

The court was built over a little canal off the Maas River, and you could smell the water. Because I had managed to get a window open, you could hear the boats going through under the building’s arch and traffic from the tunnel under the Maas a quarter kilometer away. I opened the window a little wider because of Kwiatkowski’s cigar, and saw the flags and bands in the side streets. “What are they parading for today?” I asked.

He brushed the question aside. “Because armies like parades,” he grunted. “Now, no fooling around, Robin. I know what you want and it is impossible.”

“What I want,” I said, “is for the Eeek to help wipe out the terrorists with the spaceship, which is obviously in the interest of everybody. You tell me that’s impossible. Fine, I accept that, but why is it impossible?”

“Because you know nothing of politics. You think the E.E.E.C. can go to the Paraguayans and say, ‘Listen, go and make a deal with Brazil, say you will be more flexible on this border dispute if they will pool their information with the Americans so the terrorist spaceship can be trapped.’”

“Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I think.”

“And you are wrong. They will not listen.”

“The Eeek,” I said patiently, having been well briefed for this purpose by my data-retrieval system, Albert, “is Paraguay’s biggest trading partner. If you whistle they jump.”

“In most cases, yes. In this case, no. The key to the situation is the Republic of Kampuchea. They have with Paraguay private arrangements. About these I will say nothing, except that they have been approved at the highest level. More coffee,” he added, holding out his coffee cup, “and this time, please, not so much coffee in it.”

I did not ask Kwiatkowski what the “private arrangements” were because, if he had been willing to tell me, he would not have called them private. I didn’t have to. They were military. All the “private arrangements” governments were making with each other these days were military, and if I had not been sweating about the terrorists I would have been sweating about the crazy way the world’s duly ordained governments were behaving. But one thing at a time.

So, on Albert’s advice, I got a lawyer from Malaysia into my private parlor next, and after her a missionary from Canada, and then a general in the Albanian Air Force, and for each one I had some bait to dangle. Albert told me what levers to pull and what glass beads to offer the natives-an extra allotment of colonization passages here, a “charitable” contribution there. Sometimes all it took was a smile. Rotterdam was the place to do it, because ever since the Palace was moved from The Hague, The Hague having been pretty well messed up in the troubles the last time some joker was fooling with a TPT, you could find anyone you wanted in Rotterdam. All kinds of people. All colors, all sexes, hi all kinds of costumes, from Ecuadorian lawyers in miniskirts to Marshall Islands thermal-energy barons in sarongs and shark’s-teeth necklaces. Whether I was making progress or not was hard to say, but at half-past twelve, my belly telling me that it was going to hurt in a serious way if I didn’t put some food in it, I knocked off for the morning. I thought longingly of our nice quiet hotel suite with a nice lukewarm steak from room service and my shoes off, but I had promised to meet Essie at her place of business. So I told Albert to prepare an estimate of what I had accomplished and recommendations about what I should do next, and fought my way to a cab.

You can’t miss one of Essie’s fast-food franchises. The glowing blue Heechee-metal arches are in just about every country of the world. As the Boss she had a roped-off section on the balcony reserved for us, and she met me coming up the stairs with a kiss, a frown, and a dilemma. “Robin! Listen! They want here to serve mayonnaise with the French fries. Should I allow?”

I kissed her back, but I was peering over her shoulder to see what ungodly messes were being set out on our tables. “That’s really up to you,” I told her.

“Yes, of course, is up to me. But is important, Robin! Have taken great care in meticulous duplication of true pommes-frites, you know. Now mayonnaise?” Then she stepped back and gave me a more thorough look, and her expression changed. “So tired! So many lines in the face! Robin, how are you feeling?”

I gave her my most charming smile. “Just hungry, my dear,” I cried, and gazed with deceitful enthusiasm at the plates before me. “Say! That looks good, what is it, a taco?”

“Is chapatti,” she said with pride. “Taco is over there. Also blini. See how you like, then.” So, of course, I had to taste them all, and it was not at all what my belly had asked for. The taco, the chapatti, the rice balls with sour fish sauce, the stuff that tasted, more than anything else, like boiled barley. They were not any of them my cup of tea. But they were all edible.

They were also all gifts of the Heechee. The great insight the Heechee had given us was that most of living tissue, including yours and mine, is made up of just four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen- C H 0 N-CHON-food. Since that is also what the gases that comprise the best part of a comet are made of, they built their Food Factory out in the Oort cloud, where our Sun’s comets hang waiting for a star to shake them loose and send them in to be pretty in our sky.

CHON isn’t all of it. You need a few other elements. Sulfur’s the most important, maybe, then perhaps sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, calcium-not to mention the odd dash of cobalt to make vitamin B-l2, chromium for glucose tolerance, iodine for the thyroid, and lithium, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, molybdenum, cadmium, and tin for the hell of it. You probably need the whole periodic table at least as traces, but most of the elements in quantities so small that you don’t have to worry about adding them to the stew. They show up as contaminants whether you want them or not. So Essie’s food chemists cooked up batches of sugar and spice and everything nice and produced food for everybody-not only what would keep them alive, but pretty much what they wanted to eat, wherefore the chapattis and the rice balls. You can make anything out of CHON-food if you stir it up right. Among the other things Essie was making out of it was a lot of money, and that turned out to be a game she delighted to play.

So when I finally settled down with something my stomach didn’t resist-it looked like a hamburger and tasted like an avocado salad with bacon bits in it, and Essie had named it the Big Chon-Essie was up and down every minute. Checking the temperature of the infra-red warming lights, looking for grease under the dishwashing machines, tasting the desserts, raising hell because the milkshakes were too thin.

I had Essie’s word that nothing in her chain would hurt anybody, though my stomach had less confidence in her word than I did. I didn’t like the noise from the street outside-was it the parade?-but outside of that I was as close to comfortable as I was likely to get just then. Relaxed enough to appreciate a turnaround in our status. When Essie and I go out in public, people look at us, and usually I’m the one they look at. Not here. In Essie’s franchise stores, Essie was the star. Outside the passersby were gathering to watch the parade. Inside no employee gave it a glance. They went about their jobs with all their back muscles tense, and all the surreptitious glances they sneaked went in the same direction, to the great lady boss. Well, not very ladylike, really; Essie has had the benefit of a quarter-century’s tuition in the English language from an expert- me-but when she gets excited it’s “nekulturny” and “khuligans!” all over the place.

I moved to the second-floor window to look out at the parade. It was coming straight down Weena, ten abreast, with bands and shouting and placards. Nuisance. Maybe worse than a nuisance. Across the street, in front of the station, there was a scuffle, with cops and placards, rearmers against pacifists. You couldn’t tell which was which from the way they clubbed each other with the placards, and Essie, rejoining me and picking up her own Big Chon, glanced at them and shook her head. “How’s sandwich?” she demanded.

“Fine,” I said, with my mouth full of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements. She gave me a speak-louder look. “I said it’s fine,” I amplified.

“I couldn’t hear you with all that noise,” she complained, licking her lips-she liked what she sold.

I jerked my head toward the parade. “I don’t know if this is so good,” I said.

“I think not,” she agreed, looking with distaste at a company of what I think they call Zouaves-anyway, dark-skinned marchers in uniform. I couldn’t see their national patches, but each one of them was carrying a rapid-fire shoulder weapon and playing tricks with it: spinning it around, bouncing the buttplate against the pavement and making it spring back into his hands, all without breaking stride.

“Maybe we’d better start back to the court,” I said.

She reached over and picked up the last crumb of my sandwich. Some Russian women melt down into spheres of fat when they get past forty, and some shrink and shrivel. Not Essie. She still had the straight back and narrow waist that first caught my eye. “Perhaps we should,” she said, beginning to gather up her computer programs, each on its own datafan. “Have seen enough uniforms as a child, do not specially want to see all these now.”

“You can’t really have much of a parade without uniforms.”

“Not just parade. Look. On sidewalks, too.” And it was true, about one man or woman in four was wearing some sort of uniform. It was a little surprising, because it had crept up on me. Of course, every country had always had some sort of armed forces, but they were just sort of kept in a closet, like a home fire extinguisher. People never actually saw them. But now people did, more and more.

“Still,” she said, conscientiously sweeping CHON crumbs off the table onto the disposable platelet and looking for the waste hamper, “you must be quite tired and we had better go. Give me your trash, please.”

I waited for her at the door, and she was frowning when she joined me. “Receptacle was almost full. In manual it is set forth clearly, empty at sixty-percent point-what will they do if large party leaves at once? I should go back and instruct manager-oh, hell,” she cried, her expression changing. “Have forgotten my programs!” And she dashed back up the stairs to where she had left her datafans.

I stood in the door, waiting for her, my eyes on the parade. It was quite disgusting! There were actual weapons going by, antiaircraft missile launchers and armored vehicles; and behind a bagpipe band was a company of the tommygun twirlers. I felt the door move behind me and stepped aside out of the way just as Essie pushed it open. “I found, Robin,” she said, smiling and holding the thick sheaf of fans up as I turned toward her.

And something like a wasp snarled past my left ear.

There are no wasps in Rotterdam. Then I saw Essie falling backward, and the door closing on her. It was not a wasp. It was a gunshot. One of those twirled weapons had held a live charge, and it had gone off.

I nearly lost Essie once before. It was a long time ago, but I hadn’t forgotten. All that old woe welled up as fresh as yesterday as I pulled the stupid door out of the way and bent over her. She was lying on her back, with the sheaf of tied datafans over her face, and as I lifted it away I saw that although her face was bloody her eyes were wide open and looking at me.

“Hey, Rob!” she said, her voice puzzled. “You punch me?”

“Hell, no! What would I punch you for?” One of the counter girls came rushing with a wad of paper napkins. I grabbed them away from her and pointed to the red-and-white striped electrovan with the words Poliklinische centrum stenciled on its side, idling at an intersection because of the parade. “You! Get that ambulance over here! And get the cops, too, while you’re at it!”

Essie sat up, pushing my arm away as cops and counter attendants swarmed around us. “Why ambulance, Robin?” she asked reasonably. “Is only a bloody nose, look!” And indeed that was all there was. It had been a bullet, all right, but it had hit the sheaf of fans and stayed there. “My programs!” Essie wailed, tugging against the policeman who wanted them to extract the bullet for evidence. But they were ruined anyway. And so was my day.

While Essie and I were having our little brush with destiny, Audee Walthers was taking his friend sightseeing around the town of Rotterdam. He had been sweating as he left me; the presence of a lot of money does that to people. The absence of money took most of the joy out of Rotterdam for Walthers and Yee-xing. Still, to Walthers, the hayseeds of Peggy’s Planet still in his hair, and to Yee-xing, rarely away from the S. Ya. and the immediate vicinity of the launch loops, Rotterdam was a metropolis. They couldn’t afford to buy anything, but at least they could look in the windows. At least Broadhead had agreed to see them, Walthers kept telling himself; but when he allowed himself to think it with some satisfaction, the darker side of Walthers responded with savage contempt: Broadhead had said he would see them. But he sure-hell hadn’t seemed very anxious about it .

“Why am I sweating?” he asked out loud.

Yee-xing slipped her arm through his for moral support. “It will be all right,” she replied indirectly, “one way or another.” Audee Walthers looked down at her gratefully. Walthers was not particularly tall, but Janie Yee-xing was tiny; all of her was tiny except for her eyes, lustrous and black, and that was surgery, a silliness from a time when she had been in love with a Swedish merchant banker and thought it was only the epicanthic fold that kept him from loving her back. “Well? Shall we go in?”

Walthers had no idea what she was talking about, and must have shown it by his frown; Yee-xing butted his shoulder with her small, close-cropped head and looked up toward a storefront sign. In pale letters hanging in what looked like empty ebon space it said:

Here After

Walthers examined it and then looked at the woman again. “It’s an undertakers’,” he guessed, and laughed as he thought he saw the point of her joke. “But we’re not that bad off yet, Janie.”

“It’s not,” she said, “or not exactly. Don’t you recognize the name?” And then, of course, he did: It was one of the many Robinette Broadhead holdings on the list.

The more you learned about Broadhead, the more likely you could figure out what things would make him agree to a deal; that was sense. “Why not?” said Walthers, approving, and led her through the air curtain into the cool, dark recesses of the shop. if it was not a funeral establishment, it had at least bought from the same decorators. There was soft, unidentifiable music in the background, and a fragrance of wildflowers, although the only floral display in sight was a single sheaf of bright roses in a crystal vase. A tall, handsome, elderly man rose before them; Walthers could not say whether he had got up from one of the chairs or materialized as a hologram. The figure smiled warmly at them, tried to guess their nationalities. He got it wrong. “Guten tag “he said to Walthers, and “Gor ho oy-ney,” to Yee-xing.

“We both speak English,” Walthers said. “Do you?”

Urbane eyebrows lifted. “Of course. Welcome to Here After. Is there someone near to you who is about to die?”

“Not that I know of,” said Walthers.

“I see. Of course, we can still accomplish a great deal even if the person has already reached metabolic death, although the sooner we begin transfer the better-Or are you wisely making plans for your own future?”

“Neither one,” said Yee-xing, “we just want to know what it is you offer.”

“Of course.” The man smiled, gesturing them to a comfortable couch. He did not appear to do anything to bring it about, but the lights became a touch brighter and the music dwindled a few decibels. “My card,” he said, producing a pasteboard for Walthers and answering the question that had been bothering him: The card was tangible, and so were the fingers that handed it to him. “Let me run through the basics for you; it will save time in the long run. To begin with, Here After is not a religious organization and does not claim to provide salvation. What we do offer is a form of survival. Whether you-the ‘you’ that is here in this room at this moment-will be ‘aware’ of it or not”-he smiled-“is a matter that the metaphysicians are still arguing. But the storage of your personalities, should you elect to provide for it, is guaranteed to pass Turing’s Test, provided we are able to begin transfer while the brain is still in good condition, and the surroundings that the surviving client perceives will be those which he chooses from our available list. We have more than two hundred environments to offer, ranging-“

Yee-xing snapped her fingers. “The Dead Men,” she said, suddenly comprehending.

The salesperson nodded, although his expression tightened a bit. “That is what the originals were called, yes. I see that you are familiar with the artifact called Heechee Heaven, now being used as a transport for colonists-“

“I’m the transport’s Third Officer,” Yee-xing said, quite truthfully except for tenses, “and my friend here is her Seventh.”

“I envy you,” the salesman said, and the expression on his face suggested that he really meant it. Envy did not keep him from delivering his sales pitch and Walthers listened attentively, Janie Yee-xing’s hand holding his. He appreciated the hand; it kept him from thinking about the Dead Men and their protégé, Wan-or, at least, about what Wan was likely to be doing at that moment.

The original Dead Men, the salesperson declared, were unfortunately rather botched; the transfer of their memories and personalities from the wet, gray storage receptacle in their skulls to the crystalline datastores that preserved them after death had been accomplished by unskilled

 

When the programs and databases for the so-called Dead Men became available for study, my creator, S. Ya. Broadhead, was naturally greatly interested. She set herself the task of duplicating their work. The most complex task was, of course, the transcription of the database of a human brain and nervous system, which is stored chemically and redundantly, onto the Heechee datafans. She did very well. Not only well enough to franchise the Here After chain, but well enough-well—to create me. The Here After storage was based on her earliest research. Later on she got better-better even than the Heechee for she was able to combine not only their techniques but independent human technology. The Dead Men could never pass a Turing Test. Essie Broadhead’s works, after a while, could. And did.

 

labor, using equipment that had been designed for quite a different species in the first place. So the storage was imperfect. The easiest way to think of it, the salesman explained, was to think the Dead Men had been so stressed by their unskilled transfer that they had gone mad. But that happened no longer. Now the storage procedures had been so refined that any deceased could carry on a conversation with his survivors so deftly that it was just like talking to the real person. More! The “patient” had an active life in the datastores. He could experience the Moslem, Christian, or Scientological Heaven, complete with, respectively, beautiful boys scattered like pearls on the grass, choirs of angels, or the presence of L. Ron Hubbard himself. if his bent was not religious, he could experience adventure (mountain-climbing, skin-diving, skiing, hang-gliding, and free-fall T’ai chi were popular selections), listening to music of any kind, in any company he chose... and, of course (the salesman, failing to estimate reliably the relationship between Walthers and Yee-xing, delivered the information without color), sex. All varieties of the sexual experience. Over and over.

“How boring,” said Walthers, thinking about it.

“For you and me,” the salesman granted, “but not for them. You see, they don’t remember the programmatic experiences very clearly. There’s an accelerated decay bias applied to those datastores. Not to the others. If you talk to a dear one today and come back a year from now and pick up the conversation, he’ll remember it exactly. But the Programmed experiences dwindle fast in their memories-just as recollection of pleasure, you see, so that they want to experience them again and again.”

“How horrible,” said Yee-xing. “Audee, I think it’s time we went to the hotel.”

“Not yet, Janie. What was that about talking to them?”

The salesman’s eyes gleamed. “Certainly. Some of them really enjoy talking, even to strangers. You have a moment? It’s very simple, really.” As he was talking he led them to a PV console, consulted a silk-bound directory, and punched out a series of code numbers. “I’ve actually be-come friendly with some of them,” he said bashfully. “When things are slow at the store, a lot of the time I call one of them up and we have a nice chat-Ah, Rex! How are you?”

“Why, I’m just fine,” said the handsome, bronzed senior citizen who appeared in the PV. “How nice to see you! I don’t think I know your friends?” he added, peering in a friendly way at Walthers and Yee-xing. If there was an ideal way for a man to appear when he passed a certain age, this was it; he had all his hair and seemed to have all his teeth; his face showed laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but was otherwise Unlined, and his eyes were bright and warm. He acknowledged the introductions politely. Questioned about what he was doing he shrugged modestly. “I’m about to sing the Catulli Carmina with the Wien Staatsoper, you know.” He winked. “The lead soprano is very beautiful, and I think those sexy lyrics have been getting to her in rehearsal.”

“Amazing,” murmured Walthers, gazing at him. But Janie Yee-xing was less enchanted.

“We really don’t want to keep you from your music,” she said politely, “and I’m afraid we’d better get along.”

“They’ll wait,” Rex declared fondly. “They always do.”

Walthers was fascinated. “Tell me,” he said, “when you talk about, ah, companionship in this, ah, state-can you have your choice of any companions you want? Even if they’re still alive?”

The question was aimed at the salesman, but Rex spoke first. He was gazing shrewdly and sympathetically at Walthers. “Anyone at all,” he said, nodding as though they shared a confidence. “Anyone living or dead or imaginary. And, Mr. Walthers, they’ll do anything you want them to!” The figure chuckled. “What I always say,” he added, “is that what you call ‘life’ is really only a sort of entr’acte to the real existence you get here. I just can’t understand why people put it off for so long!”

The Here Afters were, as a matter of fact, one of the little spinoff enterprises that I was fondest of, not because they earned much money. When we discovered that the Heechee had been able to store dead minds in machines a light clicked. Well, says I to my good wife, if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, says my good wife to me, no reason at all, Robin, to be sure, just give me a little time to work out the encoding. I had not made any decision about whether I wanted it done to me, when and if. I was quite sure, though, that I didn’t want it done to Essie, at least not right then, and so I was glad that the bullet had done no more than puff her nose.

Well, somewhat more. It involved us with the Rotterdam police. The uniformed sergeant introduced us to the brigadier, who took us in his big fast car with the lights going to the bureau and offered us coffee. Then Brigadier Zuitz showed us into the office of Inspector Van Der Waal, a great huge woman with old-fashioned contact lenses making her eyes bulge out with sympathy. It was How unpleasant for you, Mijnheer, and I hope your wound is not painful, Mevrouw, as she was leading us up the stairs-stair&-to the office of Commissaris Lutzlek, who was a different kettle of fish altogether. Short. Slim. Fair, with a sweet boy’s face, though he had to be at least fifty to have become a Principal Commissaire. You could imagine him putting his thumb in the dyke and hanging in there forever, if he had to, or until he drowned. But you could not imagine him giving up. “Thank you for coming in about this business in the Stationsplein,” he said, making sure we had seats.

“The accident,” I said.

“No. Regretfully, not an accident. If it had been an accident, it would have been a matter for the municipal police rather than for me. So therefore this inquiry, for which we ask your cooperation.”

I said, to put him in his place, “Our time is pretty valuable to be spent in this sort of thing.”

He was not puttable. “Your life is even more valuable.”

“Oh, come on! One of the soldiers in the parade was doing his twirling act, and he had a round in his gun and it went off.”

“Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “first, no soldier had a round in his gun; the guns are without firing pins in any case. Second, the soldiers are not even soldiers; they are college students hired to dress up for parades, just like the guards at Buckingham Palace. Third, the shot did not come from the parade.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the gun has been found.” He looked very angry. “In a police locker! This is quite embarrassing to me, Mijnheer, as you can imagine. There were many extra policemen for the parade, and they used a portable dressing-room van. The ‘policeman’ who fired the weapon was a stranger to others in the unit, but then they were drawn from many detachments. Come to clean up after the parade, he dressed quickly and left, with his locker open. There was nothing in it but the uniform- stolen, I suppose—and the gun, and a picture of you. Not of Mevrouw. Of you.”

He sat back and waited. The sweet boy’s face was peaceful.

I was not. It takes a minute to sink in, the announcement that somebody has the fixed intention of killing you. It was scary. Not just being killed; that’s scary by definition, and I can testify to how scared I can get when it looks like death is near, out of unforgotten and even repeated experience. But murder is worse than ordinary death. I said, “You know how that makes me feel? Guilty! I mean, I must have done something that really made somebody hate me.”

“Exactly so, Mijnheer Broadhead. What do you suppose it could have been?”

“I have no idea. If you find the man, I suppose you can find the reason. That shouldn’t be too hard-there must be fingerprints or something? I saw news cameras, perhaps there’s even a picture of him on somebody’s film-“

He sighed. “Mijnheer, please do not tell me how to conduct police routine. All those things are of course being followed up, plus depth interviews with everyone who might have seen the man, plus sweat analysis of the clothes, plus all other means of identification. I am assuming this man was a professional, and therefore those means will not succeed. So we approach it from the other direction. Who are your enemies, and what are you doing in Rotterdam?”

“I don’t think I have any enemies. Business rivals, maybe, but they don’t assassinate people.”

He waited patiently, so I added, “As to what I’m doing in Rotterdam, I think that’s quite well known. My business interests include some share in the exploitation of some Heechee artifacts.”

“This is known,” he said, not quite so patient.

I shrugged. “So I am a party in a suit at the International Palace of Justice.”

The commissaris opened one of his desk drawers, peered inside, and slammed it again moodily. “Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “you have had many meetings here in Rotterdam not connected with this suit, but instead with the question of terrorism. You wish it stopped.”

“We all want that,” I said, but the feeling in my belly was not just my degenerating pipes. I had thought I was being very secretive.

“We all want it, but you are doing something about it, Mijnheer. Therefore I believe you now do have enemies. The enemies of us all. The terrorists.” He stood up and offered us the door. “So while you are in my jurisdiction I will see that you have police protection. After that, I can only urge caution, for I believe you are in danger from them.”

“Everybody is,” I said.

“Everybody is at random, yes. But you are now a particular case.”

Our hotel had been built in the palmy days, for big-spending tourists and the jet-set rich. The best suites were decorated for their tastes. Not always for ours. Neither Essie nor I was into straw mats and wood-block pillows, but the management moved all that out and moved in the right kind of bed. Round and huge. I was looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it. Not so much use out of the lobby, which was a kind of architecture I hated: cantilevered walkways, more fountains than Versailles, so many mirrors that when you looked up you thought you were in outer space. Through the good offices of the commissaris, or anyway of the young cop he sent to escort us home, we were spared that. We were whisked through a service entrance, up a padded elevator that smelled of room-service food, to our own landing, where there had been a change in the decoration. Just across from our suite door there was a marble Winged Venus in the stairwell. Now it had a companion in a blue suit, a perfectly ordinary-looking man, studiously not meeting my eye. I looked at the cop escorting us. She grinned in embarrassment, nodded to her colleague in the stairwell, and closed the door behind us.

We were a particular case, all right.

I sat down and regarded Essie. Her nose was still somewhat swollen, but it did not seem to trouble her. Still, “Maybe you ought to go to bed,” I suggested.

She looked at me with tolerant affection. “For a bloodied nose, Robin? How very foolish you are. Or do you have some more interesting project in mind?”

It is a true tribute to my dear wife that as soon as she brought the subject up, my damaged day and my damaged colon to the contrary notwithstanding, I did indeed have something in mind. After twenty-five years you would think that even sex would begin to get boring. My data-retrieval friend Albert had told me about studies of laboratory animals that proved that that was inevitable. Male rats were left with their mates and their frequency of intercourse measured. There was a steady decline over time. Boredom. Then they took away the old mates and introduced new ones. The rats perked up and went to it with a will. So this was established scientific fact-for rats-but I guess that I am not, at least in that sense, a rat. In fact, I was enjoying myself quite a lot when, without warning, someone shoved a dagger right into my belly.

I couldn’t help it. I yelled.

Essie pushed me away. She sat up swiftly, calling for Albert in Russian. Obediently his hologram sprang into life. He squinted toward me and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “please, Mrs. Broadhead, place Robin’s wrist against the dispenser on the bedside table.”

I was bent double, hugging myself against the pain. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit, but what was in my gut was too bad to be expelled so easily. “Do something!” cried Essie, frantically pulling me to her bare breast as she pressed my arm against the table.

“I am already doing it, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert, and as a matter of fact I could appreciate the sudden sense of numbness as the injection needle force-sprayed something into my arm. The pain receded and became bearable. “You are not to be unduly alarmed, Robin,” Albert said kindly, “nor you, Mrs. Broadhead. I have been anticipating this sudden ischemic pain for some hours. It is only a symptom.”

“Damn arrogant program,” cried Essie, who had written him, “symptom of what?”

“Of the beginning of the final rejection process, Mrs. Broadhead. It is not yet critical, especially as I am already administering medication along with the analgesia. Still, I propose surgery tomorrow.”

I was feeling better enough already to sit up on the edge of the bed. I traced with my toe the design of arrows pointing toward Mecca that had been worked into the rug for long-gone big-spending oil magnates and said, “What about tissue match?”

“That has been arranged, Robin.”

I let go of my stomach experimentally. It didn’t explode. “I have a lot of appointments tomorrow,” I pointed out.

Essie, who had been rocking me gently, let go and sighed. “Obstinate maul Why put oft? Could have had transplant weeks ago and all this nonsense not necessary.”

“I didn’t want to,” I explained, “and anyway, Albert said there was time.”

“Was time! Oh, of course, was time. Is that reason to use time all up with fiddling and faddling until, oh, sorry, suddenly unexpected event takes place and time is all gone and you die? Like you warm and alive, Robin, not Here After program!”

I nuzzled her with my nose and chin. “Sick man! Get away from me!” she snarled, but did not draw away. “Huh! You feel better now.”

“Quite a lot better.”

“Good enough to talk sensibly and make appointment with hospital?” I blew in her ear. “Essie,” I said, “I positively will, but not right this minute, because, if I remember correctly, you and I have some unfinished business. Not Albert, though. So you will please turn yourself off, old friend.”

“Certainly, Robin.” He grinned and disappeared. But Essie held me off, staring into my face for a long time before she shook her head.

“You Robin,” she said. “You want me to write you as Here After program?”

“Not a bit,” I said, “and actually, right now that’s not what I want to discuss.”

“Discuss!” she scoffed. “Ha, I know how you discuss... . All I wanted to say is, if I do write you, Robin, you bet in some ways I write you much different!”

It had been quite a day. It was not surprising that I didn’t remember certain unimportant details. My secretary program remembered, of course, and so I got a hint when the service door to the butler’s pantry opened and a procession of room-service waiters came in with dinner. Not for two. For four.

“Oh, my God,” said Essie, striking her forehead with the back of her hand. “Your poor friend with face like frog, Robin, you have invited for dinner! And look at you! Bare feet! Sitting in underwear! Nekulturny indeed, Robin. Go and dress at once!”

I stood up, because there was no use arguing, but I argued anyway. “If I’m in my underwear, what about you?”

She gave me a scathing look. Actually, she wasn’t in her underwear; she was wearing one of those Chinese things slit up the side. It looked as much like a dress as it did a nightgown, and she used it interchangeably for both.

“In case of Nobel laureate,” she said reprovingly, “what one wears is defining what is proper. Also have showered and you have not, so do so, for you smell of sexual activity-and, oh, my God,” she added, cocking an ear to sounds at the door, “I think are here already!”

I headed for the bathroom as she went for the door, and lingered long enough to hear sounds of argument. The least expert of the room-service waiters was listening, too, a frown on his face and his hand reaching unconsciously toward the bulge under his armpit. I sighed, and left it to them, and headed for the bathroom.

Actually, it wasn’t a bathroom. All by itself it was a bath suite. The tub was big enough for two persons. Maybe for three or four, but I hadn’t been thinking in any numbers higher than two-though it did make me wonder just what those Arab tourists had liked doing in their baths~ There was concealed lighting in the tub itself, statuary surrounding it that poured out hot water or cold, a deep pile rug throughout. All the vulgar little things like toilets were in decorous little cubicles of their own. It was fancy, but it was nice. “Albert,” I called, pulling a blouse over my head, and he answered:

“Yes, Robin?”

There was no video in the bath, just his voice. I said, “I kind of like this. See if you can get me plans for putting one like this into the place at Tappan Sea.”

“Certainly, Robin,” he said, “but meanwhile, may I remind you that your guests are waiting?”

“You may, because you just did.”

“And also, Robin, you are not to overexert yourself. The medication I gave you will be of purely temporary value, unless-“

“Turn yourself off,” I ordered, and entered the main reception salon to greet my guests. A table had been set with crystal and china, candles were burning, wine was in a cooler, and the waiters were standing politely at attention. Even the one with the bulge under his arm. “Sorry I kept you waiting, Audee,” I said, beaming at them, “but it’s been a hard day.”

“Have told them,” said Essie, passing a plate to the young Oriental girl. “Was necessary, as stupid policeman at door considered them likely terrorists, too.”

“I tried to explain,” grumbled Walthers, “but he didn’t speak any English. Mrs. Broadhead had to sort him out. It’s a good thing you speak Dutch.”

She shrugged graciously. “Speak Deutsch, speak Dutch. Is same thing, provided one speaks loud. Also,” she said informatively, “is only a state of mind. Tell me, Captain Walthers. You go to speak language, other person does not understand. What do you think?”

“Well, I think I haven’t said it right.”

“Hal Exactly. But I, I think he has not understood it right. This is basic rule for speaking foreign language.”

I rubbed my belly. “Let’s eat,” I said, and led the way to the table. But I had not failed to notice the look Essie gave me, so I exerted myself to be sociable. “Well, we’re a sad-looking lot,” I said genially, making note of the cast on Walthers’ wrist, the bruise on Yee-xing’s face, Essie’s still puffy nose. “Been punching each other out, have you?”

As it turned out, that was not tactful, since Walthers promptly informed me that indeed they had, under the influence of the terrorists’ TPT. So we talked about the terrorists for a while. And then we talked about the sad condition the human race had got itself into. It was not a cheerful conversation, especially as Essie decided to get philosophical.

“What a rotten thing human being is,” she offered, and then reversed herself. “No. Am unjust. One human being can be quite fine, even as fine as we four sitting here. Not perfect. But on a statistical basis out of let us say one hundred chances to display kindness, altruism, decency-all these traits we humans esteem, you see-will in fact perform no fewer than twenty-five of them. But nations? Political groups? Terrorists?” She shook her head. “Out of one hundred chances, zero,” she said. “Or perhaps one, but then, you may be sure, with some trick up sleeve. You see, wickedness is additive. Is perhaps one grain in each human being. But add up quantity of say ten million human beings in even small country or group, equals evil enough to damage entire world!”

“I’m ready for dessert,” I said, gesturing to the waiters.

You would think that was a broad enough hint for any guest to take, especially considering that they already knew we’d had a bad day, but Walthers was obstinate. He lingered over dessert. He insisted on telling me his life’s story, and he kept looking at the waiters, and all in all I was getting quite uncomfortable, not just in the belly.

Essie says I am not patient with people. Perhaps so. The friends I am most comfortable interacting with are computer programs rather than flesh and blood, and they don’t have feelings to hurt-well, I’m not sure that’s true for Albert. But it is for, say, my secretarial program or my chef. It is certain that I was getting impatient with Audee Walthers. His life had been a dull soap opera. He had lost his wife and his savings. He had made unauthorized use of equipment on the S. Ya. with Yee-xing’s connivance and got her fired. He had spent his last dime to get here to Rotterdam, reason not specified, but clearly it had something to do with me.

Well, I am not unwilling to “loan” money to a friend down on his luck but, see, I was in no mood. It was not just the fright over Essie or the screwed-up day, or the nagging worry about whether the next nut with a gun would actually get me. there was my damned gut giving me fits. At last I told the waiters to clear off, though Walthers was still lingering over his fourth cup of coffee. I stomped over to the table with the liqueurs and cigars and glowered at him as he followed. “What is it, Audee?” I said, no longer polite. “Money? How much do you need?”

And I got such a look from him! He hesitated, watching while the last of the waiters filed out through the pantry, and then he let me have it. “It isn’t what I need,” he said, his voice trembling, “it’s what you’re willing to pay for something you want. You’re a real rich man, Broadhead. Maybe you don’t worry about people who stick their asses in a crack for you, but I made the mistake of doing it twice.”

I don’t like being reminded I owe a favor, either, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything. Janie Yee-xing put her hand on his bad wrist- gently. “Just tell him what you’ve got,” she ordered.

“Tell me what?” I demanded, and the son of a gun shrugged and said, the way you might tell me you’d found my car keys on the floor:

“Why, tell you that I’ve found what I think is a real, live Heechee.”