14 The New Albert
Everyone conspired against me-even the wife of my bosom-even my trusted data-retrieval program. In the brief moments they allowed me to be awake they gave me a free choice. “You can go to the clinic for a complete checkup,” said Albert, sucking judiciously at his pipe.
“Or can stay the damn hell asleep until are damn sure you are all better,” said Essie.
“Ah-ha,” I said, “I thought so! You’ve been keeping me unconscious, haven’t you? It’s probably been days since you knocked me out and let them cut me open.” Essie avoided my eyes. I said nobly, “I don’t blame you for that, but, don’t you see, I want to go look at this thing Walthers found! Can’t you understand that?”
She was still not meeting my eyes. She glowered at the hologram of Albert Einstein. “Seems damn peppy today. You keeping this khuligan tranked up good?”
Albert’s image coughed. “Actually, Mrs. Broadhead, the medical program advised against any unnecessary sedation at this point.”
“Oh, God! Will be awake, bothering us day and night! That settles it, you Robin, you go to clinic tomorrow.” And all the time she was snarling at me, her hand was on the back of my neck, caressing; words can be liars, but you can feel the touch of love.
So I said: “I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll go to the clinic for the complete physical on condition that if I pass you don’t give me any more arguments about going into space.”
Essie was silent, calculating, but Albert cocked an eyebrow at me. “I think that might be a mistake, Robin.”
“That’s what us human beings are for, to make mistakes. Now, what’s for dinner?”
You see, I bad calculated that if I showed a happy appetite they would take it as a good sign, and maybe they did. I had also calculated that my new ship wouldn’t be ready for several weeks, anyway, so there was no real hurry-I wasn’t about to take off in another cramped, smelly Five when I had a yacht of my own coming along. What I had not calculated on was that I had forgotten how much I hated hospitals.
When Albert examined me, he measured my temperature bolometrically, scanned my eyes for clarity and my skin for external blemishes like burst blood vessels, pumped hypersound through my torso to peer at the organs inside, and sampled the contributions I left in the toilets for biochemical imbalances and bacteria counts. Albert called these procedures noninvasive. I called them polite.
The diagnostic procedures at the clinic didn’t bother to be polite. They weren’t really painful. They numbed the surface of my skin before going much farther, and once you get inside the surface there aren’t that many nerve endings to worry about. All I really felt were tweaks and pokes and tickles. But a lot of them, and besides, I knew what they were doing. Hair-thin light pipes were peering around the inside of my belly. Needle-sharp pipettes were sucking out plugs of tissue for analysis. Siphons were sipping up my bodily fluids; sutures were checked, scars were appraised. The whole thing took less than an hour, but it seemed longer and, honestly, I’d rather have been doing something else.
Then they let me put my clothes back on and I was allowed to sit down in a comfortable chair in the presence of a real-live human doctor. They even let Essie sit in, but I didn’t give her a chance to talk. I got in first. “What do you say, Doe?” I asked. “How long after the operation can I go into space? I don’t mean rockets, I mean a Lofstrom loop, about as traumatic as an elevator. You see, the loop just sort of pulls you along on a magnetized ribbon-“
The doctor held up his hand. He was a plump, white-haired Santa Claus of a man, with a neat, close-trimmed white beard and bright blue eyes. “I know what a Lofstrom loop is.”
“Good, I’m glad of that. Well?”
“Well,” he said, “the usual practice after surgery such as yours is to avoid anything like that for three to four weeks, but-“
“Oh, no! Doc, no!” I said. “Please! I don’t want to have to hang around for practically a month!”
He looked at me and he looked at Essie. Essie wouldn’t meet his eyes, either. He smiled. “Mr. Broadhead,” he said, “I think you should know two things. The first is that it is often desirable to keep a convalescent patient unconscious for some time. With electrically stimulated muscle exercise, massage, good diet, and proper nursing care there is no impairment of function, and it’s a lot easier on the patient’s nervous system. And everybody else’s, too.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, not very interested. “What’s the other thing?”
“The other thing is that you were operated on forty-three days ago this morning. You can do just about anything you want to now. Including taking a ride on a loop.”
Time was when the road to the stars led through Guiana or Baikonur or the Cape. You had to burn about a million dollars’ worth of liquid hydrogen to get into orbit, before you could transship to something going farther away. Now we had the Lofstrom launch loops spaced around the equator, immense gossamer structures that you couldn’t see until you were almost beside them-well, within twenty kilometers, which was where the satellite landing field was. I watched it with pleasure and pride as we circled and descended to touchdown. In the seat beside me Essie was frowning and muttering to herself as she worked on some project-a new kind of computer programming, or maybe a pension plan for her Big Chon employees; I couldn’t tell which, because she was doing it in Russian. On the pull-down console in front of me Albert was displaying my new ship, rotating the image slowly while he recited the statistics of capacity, accessories, mass, and amenities. Since I had put quite a few million dollars and a lot of my time into that plaything, I was interested, but not as interested as I was in what was coming next. “Later, Albert,” I ordered, and obediently he winked out. I craned my neck to keep the loop in view as we entered final approach. Faintly, along the top of the ski-jump launch section, I could see capsules speeding up through three gravities’ acceleration and neatly, gently detaching themselves at the steepest part of the upslope to disappear into the blue. Beautiful! No chemicals, no combustion, no damage to the ozone layer. Not even the energy-wastage of a Heechee lander launch; some things we could do even better than the Heechee did!
Time was when even being in orbit was not enough, and then you had to take the long, slow Hohmann journey to the Gateway asteroid. Usually you were scared out of your bird, because everybody knew that more Gateway prospectors got killed than got rich; and because you were space sick and cramped and condemned to inhabit that interplanetary slammer for weeks or months on end before you even got to the asteroid; and most of all because you’d risked everything you owned or could borrow to pay for it. Now we had a Heechee Three chartered and waiting for us in low-Earth orbit. We could transship in our shirtsleeves and be on our way to the far stars before we’d finished digesting our last meal on Earth-that is, we could, because we had the muscle and the money to pay for it.
Time was when going out into that interstellar nothingness was a lot like playing Russian roulette. The only difference was that if the luck of the draw was favorable, whatever you found at the end of the journey might make you rich beyond richness forever-as it ultimately did me. But what you mostly got made was dead.
“Is much better now.” Essie sighed as we climbed down out of the aircraft and blinked around in the hot South American sun “Now, where is damn courtesy van from crummy fleabag hotel?”
I did not comment on her reading my mind. After all the time we had been married I was used to it. Anyway, it wasn’t telepathy; it was what any human being would think if he were doing what we were doing at that time. “I wish Audee Walthers were going with us,” I said, looking out at the launch loop. We were still kilometers away, on the far shore of Lake Tehigualpa. I could see the loop reflected in it, blue at the center of the lake, greeny-yellow near the shore, where they had sown edible algae, and it was a pretty sight.
“If you wanted him with you, should not have given him two mil to chase his wife with,” said Essie practically, and then, looking at me more closely, “How you feeling?”
“Absolutely in the pink,” I said. It wasn’t far from true. “Quit worrying about me. When you’ve got Full Medical Plus they don’t dare let you die before you reach a hundred-it’s bad for business.”
“Don’t have much to say about it,” she said gloomily, “when customer is reckless desperado who spends time chasing for make-believe Heechee Anyway,” she added, brightening, “here is van for fleabag, hop in.”
So when we were inside the van I leaned over and kissed the back of her neck-easy to do, because she had braided her long hair and brought it around her neck to tie in front like a kind of a necklace-getting ready for the launch, you see. She leaned against my lips. “Khuligan.” She sighed. “But not bad khuligan.”
The hotel wasn’t really a fleabag. They had given us a comfortable suite on the top floor, looking over the lake and the loop. Besides, we would only be in it for a few hours. I left Essie to key in her programs on the hotel PV screen while I wandered over to the window, telling myself~ indulgently, that I wasn’t really a hooligan. But that wasn’t true, because it certainly was not the act of a responsible senior citizen of wealth and substance to skylark off into interstellar space just for the glamour and excitement of it.
It occurred to me then that Essie might not be taking quite that view of my motives. She might think I was after something else.
It then occurred to me that maybe my own view was wrong. Was it really the Heechee I was looking for? Sure it was, or anyway could be; everybody was desperately curious about the Heechee. But not everybody had left something else out in interstellar space. Was it possible that somewhere in the down-deep hidden part of my mind, what was driving me out and on was the hope that somehow, somewhere, I might find that misplaced thing again? I knew what the thing was. I knew where I had left it. What I didn’t know was what I would do with it-or, more accurately, her-if I found her again.
And then I felt a sort of quivery not-quite-pain in my middle. It had nothing to do with my two point three meters of new gut. What it had to do with was the hope, or the fear, that somehow Gelle-Klara Moynlin might indeed turn up in my life again. There was more emotion left over there than I had realized. It made my eyes tear, so the spidery launch structure out the window seemed to ripple in my sight.
But there were no tears in my eyes.
And it wasn’t an optical illusion. “My God!” I shouted. “Essie!” And she hurried over to stand beside me and look at the tiny flare of light from a capsule on the launch run, and the shaking, shuddering of the whole thread-thin structure. Then there was the noise-a single faint blast like a distant cannon shot, and then the lower, slower, longer thunder of the immense loop tearing itself apart. “My God,” Essie echoed faintly, clutching my arm. “Terrorist?”
And then she answered herself. “Of course terrorist,” she said bitterly. “Who else could be so vile?”
I had opened our windows to get a good look at the lake and the loop; good thing, because that meant they weren’t blown in. Others in the hotel were not so lucky. The airport itself wasn’t touched, not counting the occasional aircraft sent flying because it wasn’t tied down. But the airport officials were scared. They didn’t know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution-no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 x lO8 Joules to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another.
I asked Albert later because I couldn’t ask him then. Naturally, the first thing I did was to try to’ key him up, or any other data-retrieval or information program that could tell me what was going on. The comm circuits were jammed; we were cut off. The broadcast PV was still working, though, so we stood and watched that mushroom cloud grow and listened to damage reports. One shuttle had been actually accelerating on the ribbon when it blew-that was the first explosion, perhaps because it had carried a bomb. Three others had been in the loading bypass. More than two hundred human beings were now hamburger, not counting the ones they hadn’t counted yet who had been working on the launcher itself, or had been in the duty-free shops and bars underneath it, or maybe just out for a stroll nearby. “I wish I could get Albert,” I grumbled to Essie.
“As to that, dear Robin,” she began hesitantly, but didn’t finish, because there was a knock on the door; would the señor and the señora come at once to the Bolivar Room, por favor, as there was a matter of the gravest emergency.
The matter of the gravest emergency was a police checkup, and you never saw such a checking of passports. The Bolivar Room was one of those function things that they divide up for meetings and open for grand banquets, and one partitioned-off part of it was filled with turistas like us, many of them squatting on their baggage, all looking both resentful and scared. They were being kept waiting. We were not. The bellhop who fetched us, wearing an armband with the initials “S.ER.” over his uniform, escorted us to the dais, where a lieutenant of police studied our passports briefly and then handed them back. “Señor Broadhead,” he said in English, accent excellent, touches of American Midwest, “does it occur to you that this act of terrorist violence may in fact have been aimed personally at you?”
I gawked. “Not until now,” I managed. He nodded.
“Nevertheless,” he went on, touching a PV hard-copy printout with his small, graceful hand, “we have received from Interpol a report of a terrorist attempt on your life only two months ago. Quite a well-organized one. The commissaris in Rotterdain specifically suggests that it did not appear random, and that further attempts might well be made.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Essie leaned forward. “Tell me, Teniente,” she said, regarding him, “is this your theory?”
“Ah, my theory. I wish I had a theory,” he said furiously. “Terrorists? No doubt. Aimed against you? Possibly. Aimed against the stability of our government? Even more possibly, I think, as there has been widespread dissatisfaction in rural areas; there are even reports, I tell you in confidence, that certain military units may be planning a coup. How can one know? So I ask you the necessary questions, such as, have you seen anyone whose presence here struck you as suspicious or coincidental? No? Have you any opinion as to who attempted to assassinate you in Rotterdam? Can you shed any light at all on this terrible deed?”
The questions came so fast that it hardly seemed he expected answers, or even wanted them. That bothered me nearly as much as the destruction of the loop itself; it was a reflection, here, of what I had been seeing and sensing all over the world. A sort of despairing resignation, as though things were bound to get worse and no way could be found to get them better. It made me very uncomfortable. “We’d like to leave and get out of your way,” I said, “so if you’re through with your questions-“
He paused before he answered, and began to look like someone with a job he knew how to do again. “I had intended to ask you a favor, Señor Broadhead. Is it possible that you would allow us to borrow your aircraft for a day or two? It is for the wounded,” he explained, “since our own general hospital was unfortunately in the direct path of the loop cables.”
I am ashamed to say I hesitated, but Essie did not. “Most certainly yes, Teniente,” she said. “Especially as we will need to make a reservation for another loop in any event before we know where we want to go to.”
He beamed. “That, my dear señora, we can arrange for you through the military communications. And my deepest thanks for your generosity!”
Services in the city were falling apart, but when we got back to our suite there were fresh flowers on the tables, and a basket of fruits and wine that had not been there before. The windows had been closed. When I opened them I found out why. Lake Tehigualpa wasn’t a lake anymore. It was just the heat sink where the ribbon was supposed to dump in case of the catastrophic failure of the loop that no one believed would ever happen. Now that it had happened the lake had boiled down to a mud wallow. Fog obscured the loop itself, and there was a stink of cooked mud that made me close the window again quickly enough.
We tried room service. It worked. They served us a really nice dinner, apologizing only because they couldn’t send the wine steward up to decant our claret-he was in “Los Servicias emergencias de la Republica” and had had to report for duty. So had the suite’s regular ladies’ maid and, although they promised that a regular floor maid would be up in an hour to unpack the bags for us, meanwhile, they stood against the walls in the foyer.
I’m rich, all right, but I’m not spoiled. At least I don’t think I am. But I do like service, especially the service of the fine computer programs Essie has written for me over the years. “I miss Albert,” I said, looking out at the foggy nighttime scene.
“Can find nothing to do without your toys, eh?” scoffed Essie, but she seemed to have something on her mind. Well. I’m not spoiled about tha4 either, but when Essie seems to have something on her mind I often conclude that she wants to make love, and from there it is not usually much of a jump for me to want to, too. I remind myself, now and then, that for most of human history, persons of our ages would have been a lot less azuative and exuberant about it-but that’s just bad luck for them. Such thoughts do not slow me down. Especially because Essie is what she is. Besides her Nobel laureate, Essie had been receiving other awards, including appearing on lists of Ten Best-Dressed Women every now and then. The Nobel was deserved, the Best-Dressed was, in my opinion, a fraud. The way S. Ya. Broadhead looked had nothing to do with what she put on, but a lot to do with what was under what she put on. What she was wearing right now was a skintight leisure suit, pale blue, unornamented; you could buy them in any discount house, and she would have won in that, too. “Come here a minute, why don’t you?” I said from the great, long couch.
“Sex fiend! Huh!”
But it was a fairly tolerant “huh.” “I just thought,” I said, “that as I can’t get Albert and we have nothing else to do-“
“Oh, you Robin,” she said, shaking her head. But she was smiling. She pursed her lips, thinking. Then she said: “I tell you what. You go fetch small traveling bag from foyer. I have little present to give you, then we see.”
Out of the bag came a box, silver-paper wrapped, and inside it a big Heechee prayer fan. It wasn’t really Heechee, of course; it was the wrong size. It was one of the kind Essie had developed for her own use. “You remember Dead Men and Here After,” she said. “Very good Heechee software, which I decided to steal. So have converted old data-retrieval program for you. Have in hand now guaranteed real Albert Einstein.”
I turned the fan over in my hands, “The real Albert Einstein?”
“Oh, Robin, so literal! Not real-real. Cannot revive dead, especially so long dead. But real in personality, memories, thoughts-pretty near, anyway. Programmed search of every scrap of Einstein data. Books. Papers. Correspondence. Biographies. Interviews. Pictures. Everything. Even cracked old film clips from, what you called them, ‘newsreels’ on ship coming to New York City in A.D. 1932 by Pathé News. All inputted to here, and now when you talk to Albert Einstein it is Albert Einstein who talks back!” She leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Then, to be sure,” she bragged, “added some features real Albert Einstein never had. Complete pilotage of Heechee vessels. All update in science and technology since A.D. 1955, time of actual Einstein passing on. Even some simpler functions from cook, secretary, lawyer, medical programs. Was no room for Sigfrid von Shrink,” she apologized, “but then you no longer need shrinkage, eh, Robin? Except for unaccountable lapse of memory.”
She was looking at me with an expression that over the past couple of decades I had come to recognize. I reached out and pulled her toward me. “All right, Essie, let’s have it.”
She settled down in my lap and asked innocently, “Have what, Robin? You talking about sex again?”
“Come on!”
“Oh ... It is nothing, to be sure. I have already given you your silver gift.”
“What, the program?” It was true that she had wrapped it in silver paper-Enlightenment exploded. “Oh, my God! I missed our silver wedding anniversary, didn’t I? When-“ But, thinking fast, I bit the question off.
“When was it?” she finished for me. “Why, now. Is still. Is today, Robin. Many congratulations and happy returns, Robin, dear.”
I kissed her, I admit as much stalling for time as anything else, and she kissed me back, seriously. I said, feeling abject, “Essie, dear, I’m really sorry. When we get back I’ll get you a gift that will make your hair stand on end, I promise.”
But she pressed her nose against my lips to stop my talking. “Is no need to promise, dear Robin,” she said, from about the level of my Adam’s apple, “for you have given me ample gifts every day for twenty-five years now. Not counting couple years when we just fooled around, even. Of course,” she added, lifting her head to look at me, “we are alone at this moment, just you and me and bed in next room, and will be for some hours yet. So if you truly wish to make hair stand on end with gift, would be pleased to accept. Happen to know you have something for me. Even in my size.”
The fact that I didn’t want any breakfast brought all of Essie’s standby systems up to full alert, but I explained it by saying that I wanted to play with my new toy. That was true. It was also true that I didn’t always eat breakfast anyway, and those two truths sent Essie off to the dining hail without me, but the final truth, that my gut did not really feel all that good, was the one that counted.
So I plugged the new Albert in to the processor, and there was a quick pinkish flare and there he was, beaming out at me. “Hello, Robin,” he said, “and happy anniversary.”
“That was yesterday,” I said, a little disappointed. I had not expected to catch the new Albert in silly mistakes.
He rubbed the stem of his pipe across his nose, twinkling up at me under those bushy white eyebrows. “In Hawaiian Mean Time,” he said, “it is, let me see”-he faked looking at a digital wristwatch that was anachronistically peeking out under his frayed pajama-top sleeve- “forty-two minutes after eleven at night, Robin, and your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary has still nearly twenty minutes to go.” He leaned forward to scratch his ankle. “I have a good number of new features,” he said proudly, “including full running time and location circuits, which operate whether I am in display mode or not. Your wife is really very good at this, you know.”
Now, I know that Albert Einstein is only a computer program, but all the same it was like welcoming an old friend. “You’re looking particularly well,” I complimented. “I don’t know if you should be wearing a digital watch, though. I don’t believe you ever had such a thing before you died, because they didn’t exist.”
He looked a little sulky, but he complimented me in return: “You have an excellent grasp of the history of technology, Robin. However, although I am Albert Einstein, as near as may be to the real thing, I am not limited to the real Albert Einstein’s capabilities. Mrs. Broadhead has included in my program all known Heechee records, for example, and that flesh-and-blood self didn’t even know the Heechee existed. Also I have subsumed into me the programs of most of our colleagues, as well as data-seeking circuits that are presently engaged in trying to establish connection with the gigabit net. In that, Robin,” he said apologetically, “I have not been successful, but I have patched into the local military circuits. Your launch from Lagos, Nigeria, is confirmed for noon tomorrow, and your aircraft will be returned to you in time to make the connection.” He frowned. “Is something wrong?”
I hadn’t been listening to Albert as much as studying him. Essie had done a remarkable job. There were none of those little lapses where he would start a sentence with a pipe in his hand and finish by gesturing with a piece of chalk. “You do seem more real, Albert.”
“Thank you,” he said, showing off by pulling open a drawer of his desk to get a match to light his pipe. In the old days he would have just materialized a book of matches. “Perhaps you’d like to know more about your ship?”
I perked up. “Any progress since we landed?”
“If there were,” he apologized, “I wouldn’t know it, because as I mentioned I have been unable to make contact with the net. However, I do have a copy of the certificate of commissioning from the Gateway Corp. It is rated as a Twelve-that is to say, it could carry twelve passengers if equipped for simple exploration-“
“I know what a Twelve would be, Albert.”
“To be sure. In any event, it has been fitted for four passengers, although up to two others can be accommodated. It was test-flown to Gateway Two and back, performing optimally all the way. Good morning, Mrs. Broadhead.”
I looked over my shoulder; Essie had finished breakfast and joined us. She was leaning over me to study her creation more carefully. “Good program,” she complimented herself, and then, “Albert! From where you get this picking nose bit?”
Albert removed a finger from a nostril forgivingly. “From unpublished letters, Enrico Fermi to a relative in Italy; it is authentic, I assure you. Are there any other questions? No? Then, Robin and Mrs. Broadhead,” he finished, “I suggest you pack, for I have just received word over the police link that your aircraft has landed and is being serviced. You can take off in two hours.”
And so it was, and so we did, happily enough-or almost happily. The last little bit, less happily. We were just getting into our plane when there was a noise from behind the passenger terminal and we turned to look.
“Why,” Essie said wonderingly, “that sounds like guns firing. And those big things in the parking lot, see them pushing aside cars? One has just now demolished a fire standpipe and water is shooting out. Can they be what I think?”
I tugged her into the plane. “They can,” I said, “if what you think they are is army tanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
We did. No problem. Not for us, anyway, even though Albert, listening in on the reopened gigabit net, reported that the teniente’s worst fears had been realized and a revolution was indeed lustily tuning up. Not for us then, at least, though elsewhere in the wide universe other things were going on that would pose for us some very large problems, and some very painful ones, and some that were both.