19 The Permutations of Love

 

Who sleeps with whom? Ah, that was the question! We had five passengers, and only three staterooms to put them in. The True Love had not been planned for very many guests, and especially when the guests did not come presorted in pairs. Should we put Audee in with his wedded wife, Dolly? Or with his most recent bedmate, Janie Yee-xing? Put Audee by himself and the two women together?-and what would they do to each other if we did? It was not that Janie and Dolly were hostile to each other so much as that Audee seemed unaccountably hostile to both of them. “He cannot make up his mind which he should be true to,” said Essie wisely, “and is a man who wishes to be true to a woman, is Audee.”

Well, I understood that well enough, and even understood that more of our passengers than one suffered that problem.

But there is a word in that statement that did not apply to me, and it is the word suffered. You see, I wasn’t suffering. I was enjoying myself. I was enjoying Essie, too, because the way we solved the problem of assigning accommodations was to walk away from it. Essie and I retired to Captain’s Quarters and locked the door. We told ourselves that the reason we did was to let our three guests sort things out among themselves. That was a good reason. God knows they needed time to do that, because the interpersonal dynamics latent among the three of them were enough to explode a star; but we had other reasons, too, and the biggest of them was so that we could make love.

And so we did. Enthusiastically. With great joy. You would think that after a quarter of a century-at our advanced ages; and making allowances for familiarity and boredom and the fact that there are, after all, just so many mucous surfaces to rub against and a finite number of appurtenances to rub them with-there would be very little incentive for us to do that. Wrong. We were motivated as hell.

Perhaps because it was because of the relatively cramped quarters on the True Love. Locking ourselves into our private cabin with its anisokinetic bed gave the affair a spice of teenage fooling around on the porch, with Daddy and Mommy only a window screen away. We giggled a lot as the bed pushed us about in ingenious ways-and suffer? Not a bit of it. I hadn’t forgotten Klara. She popped into my mind over and over, often at very personal times.

But Essie was there on the bed with me, and Klara was not.

So I lay back on the bed, twitching a little now and then to feel how the bed would twitch back, and how it would twitch Essie, cuddled close into my side, and she would twitch a little-it was a little like playing three-cushion billiards, but with more interesting pieces-and thought, calmly and sweetly, about Klara.

At that moment I felt quite certain that everything would work out. What after all was wrong? Only love. Only that two people loved each other. There was nothing wrong in that! It was a complication, to be sure, that one of that particular two, e.g., me, might be also a part of another two who loved each other. But complications could be resolved-somehow or other-couldn’t they? Love was what made the universe go around. Love made Essie and me linger in Captain’s Quarters. Love was what made Audee follow Dolly to the High Pentagon; and a kind of love was what made Janie go with him; and another kind of love, or maybe the same kind, made Dolly marry him in the first place, because one of the functions of love is surely to give a person another person to organize his or her life around. And off in one stretch of the great, gassy, starry wastes (though at that moment I did not yet know it) Captain was mourning for a love; and even Wan, who had never loved anyone but himself, was in fact scouring that universe for someone to aim his love at. You see how it works? It is love that is the motivator.

“Robin?” said Essie drowsily to my collarbone. “Did that very well. My compliments.”

And, of course, she too was talking about love, although in this case I chose to accept it as a compliment to my skills in the demonstration of it. “Thank you,” I said.

“Makes me ask question, though,” she went on, drawing back to peer at me. “Are fully recovered? Gut in good shape? Two point three meters new tubing working well with old? Has Albert reported all well?”

“I feel just fine,” I reported, as indeed I did, and leaned over to kiss her ear. “I only hope the rest of the world is going as well.”

She yawned and stretched. “If you refer to vessel, Albert is quite capable of handling pilotage.”

“Ah, yes, but is he capable of handling the passengers?”

She rolled over sleepily. “Ask him,” she said.

So I called, “Albert? Come and talk to us.” I turned to look at the door, curious to see how he would manage his appearance this time, through a tangible, real door that happened to be closed. He fooled me. There was a sound of Albert apologetically clearing his throat, and when I turned back he was sitting on Essie’s dressing bench again, eyes bashfully averted.

Essie gasped and grabbed for the covers to shield her neat, modest breasts.

Now, that was a funny thing. Essie had never bothered to cover herself in front of one of her programs before. The funniest thing about it was that it did not seem strange at the time. “Sorry to intrude, my dear friends,” said Albert, “but you did call.”

“Yes, fine,” said Essie, sitting up to look at him better-but with the bedspread still clutched to her. Perhaps by then her own reaction had struck her as odd, but all she said was “So. Our guests, how are they?”

“Very well, I should say,” Albert said gravely. “They are having a three-sided conversation in the galley. Captain Walthers is preparing sandwiches, and the two young women are helping.”

“No fights? No eyes scratched out?” I asked.

“Not at all. To be sure, they are rather formal, with many ‘excuse mes’ and ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous.’ However,” he added, looking pleased with himself, “I do have a report for you on the sailship. Would you like to have it now? Or-it occurs to me-perhaps you would like to join your guests, so that you may all hear it at once.”

All my instincts were to get it right away, but Essie looked at me. “Is only polite, Robin,” she said, and I agreed.

“Splendid,” said Albert. “You will find it extremely interesting, I am sure. As do I. Of course, I have always been interested in sailing, you know,” he went on chattily. “When I was fifty the Berliner Handeisgesellschaft gave me such a fine sailboat-lost, unfortunately, when I must leave Germany because of those wicked Nazis. My dear Mrs. Broadhead, I owe you so much! Now I have all these fine memories that I did not have before! I remember my little house near Ostend, where I used to walk along the beach with Albert-that”-he twinkled-“was King Albert, of Belgium. And we would speak of sailing, and then in the evenings his wife would accompany me on the piano while I played my violin- and all this I now remember, dear Mrs. Broadhead, only because of you!”

Through the whole speech Essie had been sitting rigid beside me, staring at her creation with a face like a stone. Now she began to sputter and then she broke out in guffaws. “Oh, Albert!” she cried, reaching behind her for a pillow. She took aim and threw it right through him, to bounce harmlessly against the cosmetics beyond him. “Great funny program, you are welcome! Now get out, please. Since are so human, with memories and tedious anecdotes, cannot permit to observe me unclothed!” And he allowed himself, this time, to simply wink away, while Essie and I hugged each other and laughed. “So get dressed now,” she ordered at last, “so we can find out about sailship in mode satisfactory to computer program. Laughter is sovereign medicine, right? In that case have no further fears for your health, dear Robin, so well rejoiced a body will surely last forever!”

We headed for the shower, still chuckling-unaware that, in my case, “forever” at that moment amounted to eleven days, nine hours, and twenty-one minutes.

We had never built into the True Love a desk for Albert Einstein, particularly not one with his pipe marking his place in a book, a bottle of Skrip next to a leather tobacco jar, and a blackboard behind him half covered with equations. But there it was, and there he was, entertaining our guests with stories about himself. “When I was at Princeton,” he declared, “they hired a man to follow me around with a notebook so that if I wrote something on a blackboard he would copy it down. It was not for my benefit but for theirs-otherwise, you see, they were afraid to erase the blackboards!” He beamed at our guests and nodded genially to Essie and me, standing hand in hand at the doorway to the main lounge. “I was explaining, Mr. and Mrs. Broadhead, something of my history to these people, who perhaps have not really heard of me although I was, I must say, quite famous. Did you know, for example, that since I disliked rain, the administration at Princeton built a covered passage which you can still see, so that I could visit my friends without going outdoors?”

At least he wasn’t wearing his general’s face and Red Baron silk scarf; but he made me just a little uncomfortable. I felt like apologizing to Audee and his two women; instead, I said, “Essie? Don’t you think these reminiscences are getting a bit thick?”

“Is possible,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you wish him to stop?”

“Not really stop. He’s much more interesting now, but if you could just turn down the gain on the personalized-identity database, or twist the potentiometer on the nostalgia circuits-“

“How silly you are, dear Robin,” she said, smiling with forgiveness. Then she commanded: “Albert! Cut out so much gossip. Robin doesn’t like it.”

“Of course, my dear Semya,” he said politely. “No doubt you wish to hear about the sailship, in any case.” He stood up behind his desk-that is, his holographic but physically nonexistent image rose behind his equally nonexistent hologram of a desk; I had to keep reminding myself of that. He picked up a blackboard eraser and began to wipe away the chalk, then recollected himself. With an apologetic glance at Essie, he reached for a switch on the desk instead. The blackboard vanished. It was replaced by the familiar pebbly greeny-gray surface of a Heechee ship’s viewscreen. Then he pressed another switch, and the pebbly gray disappeared, replaced this time by a view of a star chart. That was realistic, too-all it took to convert any Gateway ship’s screen to a usable picture was a simple bias applied to the circuits (though a thousand explorers had died without finding that out). “What you see,” he said genially, “is the place where Captain Walthers located the sailship, and as you see, there is nothing there.”

Walthers had been sitting quietly on a hassock before the imitation fireplace, as far as possible from either Dolly or Janie-and each of them was as far as possible from the other, and also very quiet. But now Walthers spoke out, stung. “Impossible! The records were accurate! You have the data!”

“Of course they were accurate,” Albert soothed, “but, you see, by the time the scout ship arrived there the sailship was gone.”

“It couldn’t have gone very far if its only drive was from starshine!”

“No, it could not. But it was absent. However,” Albert said, beaming cheerfully, “I had provided for some such contingency. If you remember, my reputation-in my former self I mean-rested on the assumption that the speed of light was a fundamental constant, subject,” he added, blinking tolerantly around the room, “to certain broadenings of context that we have learned from the Heechee. But the speed, yes, is always the same-nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second. So I instructed the drone, in the event that the sailship was not found, to remove itself a distance of three hundred thousand kilometers times the number of seconds since the sighting.”

“Great clever egotistical program,” Essie said fondly. “That was some smart pilot you hired for scout ship, right?”

Albert coughed. “It was an unusual ship, as well,” he said, “since I did foresee that there might be special needs. I fear the expense was rather high. However, when the ship had reached the proper distance, this is what it saw.” And he waved a hand, and the screen showed that multi-winged gossamer shape. No longer perfect, it was folding and contracting before our eyes. Albert had speeded up the action as seen from the scout, and we watched the great wings roll themselves up ... and disappear.

Well. What we saw, you have already seen. The way in which you were advantaged over us was that you knew what you were seeing. There we were, Walthers and his harem, Essie and me. We had left a troublesome human world to chase after a troublesome puzzle, and there we saw the thing we were aiming at being-being eaten by something else! It looked exactly that way to our shocked and unprepared eyes. We sat there frozen, staring at the crumpled wings and the great glistening blue sphere that appeared from nowhere to swallow them.

I became aware that someone was chuckling gently, and was shocked for the second time when I realized who it was.

It was Albert, sitting now on the edge of his desk and wiping away a tear of amusement. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but if you could see your faces.”

“Damn great egotistical program,” Essie grated, no longer fondly, “stop crap immediately. What is going on here?”

Albert gazed at my wife. I could not quite decipher his expression: The look was fond, and tolerant, and a great many other things that I did not associate with a computer-generated image, even Albert’s. But it was also uneasy. “Dear Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “if you did not wish me to have a sense of humor you should not have programmed me so. If I have embarrassed you I apologize.”

“Follow instructions!” Essie barked, looking baffled.

“Oh, very well. What you have seen,” he explained, turning pointedly away from Essie to lecture to the group, “is what I believe to be the first known example of an actual Heechee-manned operation in real time. That is, the sailship has been abducted. Observe this smaller vessel.” He waved a negligent hand, and the image spun and flowed, magnifying the scene. The magnification was more than the resolution of the scout ship’s optics were good for, and so the edge of the sphere became pebbly and fuzzy.

But there was something behind it.

There was something that moved slowly into eclipse behind the sphere. Just as it was about to disappear Albert froze the picture, and we were looking at a blurry, fish-shaped object, quite tiny, very poorly imaged. “A Heechee ship,” said Albert. “At least, I have no other explanation.”

Janie Yee-xing gave a choking sound. “Are you sure?”

“No, of course not,” said Albert. “It is only a theory as yet. One never says ‘yes’ to a theory, Miss Yee-xing, only ‘maybe,’ for some better theory will surely come along and the one that has seemed best until then will get its ‘no.’ But my theory is that the Heechee have decided to abduct the sailship.”

Now, get the picture. Heechee! Real ones, attested to by the smartest data-retrieval system anyone had ever encountered. I had been looking for Heechee, one way or another, for two-thirds of a century, desperate to find them and terrified that I might. And when it happened the thing uppermost in my mind was not the Heechee but the data-retrieval system. I said, “Albert, why are you acting so funny?”

He looked at me politely, tapping his pipestem against his teeth. “In what way ‘funny,’ Robin?” he asked.

“Damn it, come off it! The way you act! Don’t you-“ I hesitated, trying to put it politely. “Don’t you know you’re just a computer program?”

He smiled sadly. “I do not need to be reminded of that, Robin. I am not real, am I? And yet the reality that you are immersed in is one for which I do not care.”

“Albert!” I cried, but he put up his hand to quiet me.

“Allow me to say this,” he said. “For me reality is, I know, a certain large quantity of parallel-processed on-off switches in heuristic conformations. If one analyzes it, it becomes only a sort of trick one plays on the viewer. But for you, Robin? Is reality for an organic intelligence very different? Or is it merely certain chemical transactions that take place in a kilogram of fatty matter that has no eyes, no ears, no sexual organs? Everything that it knows it knows by hearsay, because some perceptual system has told it so. Every feeling it has comes to it by wire from some nerve. Is it so different between us, Robin?”

“Albert!”

He shook his head. “Ah,” he said bitterly, “I know. You cannot be deceived by my trick, because you know the trickster-she is here among us. But aren’t you deceived by your own? Should I not be granted the same esteem and tolerance? I was quite an important man, Robin. Held in high regard by some very fine persons! Kings. Queens. Great scientists, and such good fellows they were. On my seventieth birthday they gave me a party-Robertson and Wigner, Kurt Goedel, Rabi, Oppenheimer-“ He actually wiped away an actual tear ... and that was about as far as Essie was willing to let him go.

She stood up. “My friends and husband,” she said, “is obviously some severe malfunction here. Apologize for this. Must pull out of circuit for complete downcheck, you will excuse, please?”

“It isn’t your fault, Essie,” I said, as kindly as I could, but she didn’t take it kindly. She looked at me in a way I hadn’t seen from her since we first began dating and I told her about all the funny jokes I used to play on my psychoanalysis program, Sigfrid von Shrink. “Robin,” she said coldly, “is all too much talk about fault and guilt. Will discuss later. Guests, must borrow my workroom for a time. Albert! Present yourself there at once for debugging!”

One of the penalties of being rich and famous is that a lot of people invite you to be their guests, and almost all of them expect to be invited back. Hosting is not one of my skills. Essie, on the other hand, really likes it, so over the years we worked out a good way to handle guests. It’s very simple. I hang around them as long as I am enjoying it-that can be several hours, sometimes five minutes. Then I disappear to my study and leave the hosting to Essie. I am particularly likely to do this when, for any reason, there is tension among the guests. It works fine-for me.

But then it stops working sometimes, and then I’m stuck. This was one of the times. I couldn’t leave them to Essie, because Essie was busy. I didn’t want to leave them alone, because we had already done that for a goodish long period. And of tension there was plenty. So there I was, trying to remember how to be gracious when I didn’t have a fallback position: “Would you like a drink?” I asked jovially. “Something to eat? There are some good programs to watch, if Essie hasn’t killed the circuits so she can deal with Albert-“

Janie Yee-xing interrupted me with a question. “Where are we going, Mr. Broadhead?”

“Well,” I said, beaming-jovial; good host; try to make the guests feel at ease, even when they ask you a perfectly good question that you haven’t thought of an answer for because you’ve been thinking about a lot of more urgent things. “I guess the question is, where would you like to go? I mean, it looks like there’s no point in chasing after the sailship.”

“No,” Yee-xing agreed.

“Then I suppose it’s up to you. I didn’t think you’d want to stay in the guardhouse-“ reminding them that I’d done them all a favor, after all.

“No,” Yee-xing said again.

“Back to the Earth, then? We could drop you at one of the loop points. Or Gateway, if you like. Or-let’s see, Audee, you’re from Venus in the first place, right? Do you want to go back there?”

It was Walthers’ turn to say, “No.” He left it at that. I thought it was very inconsiderate of my guests to give me nothing but negatives when I was trying to be hospitable to them.

Dolly Walthers bailed me out. She raised her right hand, and it had one of those hand puppets pf hers on it, the one that was supposed to look like a Heechee. “The trouble is, Mr. Broadhead,” she said, not moving her lips, in a syrupy, snaky kind of voice, “none of us have any place much to go to.”

Since that was obviously true, nobody seemed to have anything to say to it. Then Audee stood up. “I’ll take that drink now, Broadhead,” he growled. “Dolly? Janie?”

It was obviously the best idea any of us had had in some time. We all agreed, like guests arriving too early at a party, finding something to do so we would not obviously be doing nothing.

There were things to do, to be sure, and the biggest of them in my mind was not to be cordial to my company. That biggest thing wasn’t even trying to assimilate the fact that we had (perhaps) seen an actual, operating Heechee vessel with Heechee inside it. It was my gut again. The doctors said I could lead a normal life. They hadn’t said anything about one as abnormal as this, so I was feeling my age and frailty. I was glad to take my gin and water and sit down, next to the make-believe fireplace with its make-believe flames, and wait for someone else to carry the ball.

Which turned out to be Audee Walthers. “Broadhead, I appreciate your getting us out of stir, and I know you’ve got things of your own to do. I suppose the best thing is for you to set all three of us down in the handiest place you can find and go about your business.”

“Well, there are lots of places, Audee. Isn’t there one you’d like better than another?”

“What I would like,” he said, “-what I think we would all like, is to have a chance to figure out what we want to do by ourselves. I guess you’ve noticed we’ve got some personal problems that need to get worked out.” That is not the kind of statement you want to agree to, and I certainly couldn’t deny it, so I just smiled. “So what we need is a chance to get off by ourselves and talk about them.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “I guess we didn’t give you enough time, when Essie and I left you alone?”

“You left us alone. Your friend Albert didn’t.”

“Albert?” It had never occurred to me that he would present himself to guests, especially without being invited.

“All the time, Broadhead,” said Walthers bitterly. “Sitting right where you are now. Asking Dolly a million questions.”

I shook my head and held out my glass for a refill. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but I didn’t have any ideas that I thought were good. When I was young and my mother was dying-because she couldn’t afford medical care for both of us, guilt, guilt, guilt, and decided to get it for me- there was a time when she didn’t recognize me, didn’t remember my name, talked to me as though I were her boss or the landlord or some guy she’d dated before she married my father. A bad scene. It was almost worse to have her that way than to know she was dying: a solid figure crumbling before my eyes.

The way Albert was crumbling now.

“What kind of questions did he ask?” I asked, looking at Dolly.

“Oh, about Wan,” she said, fiddling with the hand puppets but speaking with her own voice-though still without moving her lips much. “About where he was going, what he was doing. Mostly he wanted me to show him all the objects Wan was interested in on the charts.”

“Show me,” I said.

“I can’t run that thing,” she said peevishly, but Janie Yee-xing got up and was at the controls before she finished talking. She touched the display board, frowned, punched out a combination, scowled, and turned back to the rest of us.

“Mrs. Broadhead must have locked it when she took your pilot out of the circuit,” she said.

“Anyway,” said Dolly, “it was all black holes, one kind or another.”

“I thought there only was one kind,” I said, and she shrugged. We were all clustered around the control seat, looking up at the viewplate, which was showing nothing but stars. “Damn him,” I said.

And from behind us Albert’s voice said frostily, “I am sorry if I have inconvenienced you, Robin.”

We all turned like the figures in one of those old German town clocks. He was sitting on the edge of the seat I had just vacated, studying us. He looked different. Younger. Less self-assured. He was turning a cigar in his hands-cigar, not the pipe-and his expression was somber. “I thought Essie was working on you,” I said-I am sure-irritably.

“She has finished, Robin. She is coming now, in fact. I think it is fair for me to say that she found nothing wrong-isn’t that right, Mrs. Broadhead?”

Essie came in the door and stopped there. Her fists were on her hips, her eyes fastened on Albert. She didn’t even look at me.

“Is right, program,” she declared gloomily. “Have found no programming error.”

“I am glad to hear that, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“Do not be glad! Fact remains, you are one screwed-up program. So tell me, intelligent program with no fault in programming, what is next step?”

The hologram actually licked its lips nervously. “Why,” said Albert hesitantly, “I would suppose you might want to check the hardware.”

“Precisely,” said Essie as she reached to pull his datafan out of its socket. I could swear I saw a fleeting expression of panic on Albert’s face, the look of a man going under the anesthetic for major surgery. Then it disappeared with the rest of him. “Go on talking,” she ordered over her shoulder, putting a loupe in her eye and beginning to scan the surface of the fan.

But what was there to talk about? We watched while she studied every corrugation of the fan. We drifted after her when, scowling, she took the fan to her workroom, and watched silently while she touched the fan with calipers and probes, plugged it in a test socket, pressed buttons, turned verniers, read results off the scales. I stood there rubbing my belly, which had begun to be unpleasant to me again, and Audee whispered, “What’s she looking for?” But I didn’t know. A nick, a scratch, corrosion, anything, and whatever it was she didn’t find it.

She stood up, sighing. “Is nothing there,” she said.

“That’s good,” I offered.

“That’s good,” she agreed, “because if was anything serious I could not fix here. But is also bad, Robin, because is obvious that buggery program is all bugged to hell. Has taught me lesson in humility, this.”

Dolly offered, “Are you sure he’s busted, Mrs. Broadhead? While you were in the other room he seemed coherent enough. A little peculiar, maybe.”

“Peculiar! Dolly-lady, all the time I check him you know what he’s talking about? Mach’s Hypothesis. Missing mass. Black holes blacker than regular black holes. Would need to be a real Albert Einstein to understand-hey! What’s that? Was talking to you?”

And when she had heard confirmation from the others she sat with her lips compressed in thought for some time. Then she shook herself “Oh, hell,” she said dismally, “is no good to try to guess at problem. Is only one person who knows what is wrong with Albert, and that is Albert himself.”

“And what if Albert won’t tell you?” I asked.

“Is wrong question,” she said, plugging in the fan. “Proper question is ‘What if Albert can’t?’”

He looked all right-almost all right, anyway. He sat fumbling with his cigar in his favorite chair-which was also my own favorite seat, but at that moment I was not disposed to argue it with him. “Now, Albert,” she said, her tone kindly but firm, “you know you are screwed up, correct?”

“A little aberrant, I think, yes,” he said apologetically.

“Aberrant as all hell, I think! Well, now here is what we do, Albert. First we ask you some simple factual questions-not about motivations, not about hard theoretical stuff! Only questions that can be resolved by objective facts. You understand?”

“Certainly I understand, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“Right. First. Understand you were chatting with guests while Robin and I were in Captain’s Chambers.”

“That is correct, Mrs. Broadhead.”

She pursed her lips. “Strikes me as unusual behavior, no? You were questioning them. Please tell us what questions were and your answers.”

Albert shifted position uneasily. “Mostly I was interested in the objects Wan was investigating, Mrs. Broadhead. Mrs. Walthers was good enough to pick them out for me on the charts.” He pointed at the display, and when we looked at it, sure enough, it was showing a series of charts, one after another. “If you look at them carefully,” said Albert, pointing with his unsmoked cigar, “you will see that there is a definite progression. His first targets were simple black holes, which are indicated on the Heechee charts by these marks like fishhooks. Those are danger signs in the Heechee cartography.”

“How you know this?” Essie demanded, and then: “No, purge that question. I assume you have good reason for this assumption.”

“I do, Mrs. Broadhead. I have not been entirely forthcoming with you in this respect.”

“Ha! Are getting somewhere! Now continue.”

“Yes, Mrs. Broadhead. The simple black holes each had two check marks. Then Wan investigated a naked singularity-a nonrotating black hole, in fact the one that Robin himself had such a terrible experience with many years ago. It was there that he found Gelle-Klara Moynlin.” The image flickered, then showed the naked blue ghost star before returning to the chart. “This one has three fishhooks, meaning more danger. And finally”-wave of the hand, the picture altering to show a different section of the Heechee chart-“this is the one Mrs. Walthers identified for me as the one Wan was heading for next.”

“I didn’t say that!” Dolly objected.

“No, Mrs. Walthers,” Albert agreed, “but you did say that he looked at it frequently, that he discussed it with his Dead Men, and that it terrified him. I believe that it is the one he is aiming at.”

“Very fine,” applauded Essie. “Have passed first test admirably, Albert. Now will proceed with second part, without, this time, participation from audience,” she added, .glancing at Dolly.

“I’m at your service, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“To be sure you are. Now. Factual questions. What is meant by term missing mass?”

Albert looked uneasy, but he responded promptly enough. “The so-called missing mass is that quantity of mass which would account for various galactic orbits, but has never been observed.”

“Excellent! Now, what is Mach’s Hypothesis?”

He licked his lips. “I am not really comfortable with speculative discussions about quantum mechanics, Mrs. Broadhead. I have difficulty believing that God plays dice with the universe.”

“Have not asked for belief! Keep to rules, Albert. Am only asking for definition of widely used technical term.”

He sighed and shifted position. “Very well, Mrs. Broadhead, but allow me to put it in tangible terms. There is reason to believe that some sort of very large-scale tampering is going on with the expansion-contraction cycle of the universe. The expansion is being reversed. The contraction is being made to proceed, it would appear, to a single point-the same as before the Big Bang.”

“And what was that?” Essie demanded.

He shuffled his feet. “I really am getting quite nervous, Mrs. Broadhead,” he complained.

“But you can answer the question-in terms of what is generally believed.”

“At what point, Mrs. Broadhead? What is believed now? What was believed, let us say, before the days of Hawking and those other quantum people? There is one definite statement about the universe at its very beginning, but it is a religious one.”

“Albert,” said Essie warningly.

He grinned weakly. “I was only going to quote St. Augustine of Hippo,” he said. “When he was asked what God was doing before He created the universe, he replied that He was creating Hell for people who asked that question.”

“Albert!”

“Oh, very well,” he said irritably. “Yes. It is thought that prior to some very early time-no later than the fraction one over 10” of a second before it-relativity can no longer account for the physics of the universe and some sort of ‘quantum correction’ must be made. I am getting quite tired of this schoolboy quiz, Mrs. Broadhead.”

I have not often seen Essie shocked. “Albert!” she cried again, in a quite different tone. Not warning. Astonished, and disconcerted.

“Yes, Albert,” he said savagely, “that is who you created and who I am. Let us stop this, please. Have the goodness to listen. I do not know what happens before the Big Bang! I only know that there is someone somewhere who thinks he does know and can control it. This frightens me very much, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“Frightens’?” gasped Essie. “Who has programmed to be ‘frightened’ in you, Albert?”

“You have, Mrs. Broadhead. I can’t live with that. And I do not wish to discuss it further.”

And he winked out.

He didn’t have to do that. He could have spared our feelings. He could have pretended to exit through a door, or disappeared when we were looking the other way. He didn’t do either of those things. He just vanished. It was just as though he were a truly real human being in just such a spat, finishing it off by flouncing out and slamming the door in anger. He was too angry to be careful of appearances.

“Is not supposed to lose temper,” said Essie dismally.

But he had; and the shock of that was not nearly as great as the shock that came when we discovered that the viewscreen still would not respond to its controls, and neither would the piloting board.

Albert had locked them both. We were heading at a steady acceleration toward we did not know what.