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.

15 Back from the Schwarzschild Discontinuity

 

When Gelle-Klara Moynlin awoke she was not dead, as she had confidently expected to be. She was in a Heechee exploration ship. It was an armored Five by the look of it, but not the one she had been in at the last she remembered.

What she remembered was chaotic, frightful, and filled with pain and terror. She remembered it very well. It had not included this lean, dark, scowling man who wore a G-string and a scarf and nothing else. Nor had it included some strange young blond girl who was crying her eyes out. In the last memory Klara had there had been people crying, all right, oh, yes! And shrieking and cursing and wetting their underwear, because they were trapped within the Schwarzschild barrier of a black hole.

But none of those people were these people.

The young girl was bending over her solicitously. “Are you all right, hon? You’ve been through a real bad time.” There was no news for Klara in that statement. She knew how bad the time had been. “She’s awake,” the girl called over her shoulder.

The man came bounding over, pushing the girl aside. He did not waste time inquiring about Klara’s health. “Your name! Also orbit and mission number-quickly!” When she told him he didn’t acknowledge the answer. He simply disappeared and the blond girl came back.

“I’m Dolly,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck, but honestly, I was scared to death. Are you all right? You were all messed up, and we don’t have much of a medical program here.”

Klara sat up and discovered that, yes, she was messed up, all right. Every part of her ached, starting with her head, which appeared to have been bashed against something. She looked around. She had never been in a ship so full of tools and toys before, nor one that smelled so pleasantly of cooking. “Look, where am I?” she asked.

“You’re in his ship”-pointing. “His name’s Wan. He’s been wandering around, poking into black holes.” Dolly looked as though she were getting ready to cry again, but rubbed her nose and went on: “And listen, hon, I’m sorry, but all those other people you were with are dead. You were the only one alive.”

Klara caught her breath. “All of them? Even Robin?”

“I don’t know their names,” the girl apologized. And was not surprised when her unexpected guest turned her bruised face away and began to sob. Across the room Wan snarled impatiently at the two women. He was deep into concerns of his own. He did not know what a treasure he had retrieved, or how much that retrieved treasure complicated my life.

For it is pretty nearly true that I married my dear wife, Essie, on the elastic rebound from the loss of Klara Moynlin. At least, on the upsurge of feeling that came when I shed the guilt, or anyway most of the guilt, I felt for Klara’s loss.

When ultimately I found out that Klara was alive again it was a shock. But, my God, nothing-nothing—compared to the shock to Klara! Even now and in these circumstances I can’t help feeling what I can only call, incongruously enough, a physical pain when I think about my whilom most dear Klara as she found herself back from the dead. It isn’t just because of who she was, or who she was in relation to me. She deserved the compassion of anybody. Trapped, terrified, hurt, sure of dying-and then a moment later miraculously rescued. God pity the poor

 

I had not met Gelle-Klara Moynhin before her accident with the black hole. Robin couldn’t afford as sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me in those days. But I surely heard a lot about her from Robin over the years. What I mostly heard about was how guilty he felt over her death. The two of them, with others, had gone on a science mission for the Gateway Corp to investigate a black hole; most of their ships had been trapped; Robin had managed to get free.

There was no logical reason to feel guilty, of course. Moreover, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, though a normally competent female human, was in no sense irreplaceable-in fact, Robin replaced her rather swiftly with a succession of other females, finally bonding in a long-term mode with S. Ya. Lavorovna, not only a competent human female, but the one who designed me. Although I am well modeled on human drives and motivations, there are parts of human behavior I never will understand.

 

woman! God knows I do, and things did not quickly get better for her. She was unconscious half the time, because her body had taken a terrible battering. When she was awake, she was not always sure she was awake. From the tingling she felt and the warm flush and the buzzing in her ears she knew that they had been shooting her full of painkillers. Even so she ached terribly. Not just in the body. And when she was awake she could easily have been hallucinating, as far as she was able to know, because the sociopath Wan and the demoralized Dolly were not very stable figures to cling to. When she asked questions she got strange answers. When she saw Wan talking to a machine and asked Dolly what he was doing, she could make little sense of Dolly’s reply: “Oh, those are his Dead Men. He programmed them with all the mission records, and now he’s asking them about you.”

But what could that mean to someone who had never heard of Dead Men? And what could she feel when a wispy, uncertain voice from the speakers began to talk about her?

“-no, Wan, there’s nobody named Schmitz on that mission. Either ship. You see, there were two ships that went out together, and-“

“I do not care how many ships went out together!”

The voice paused. Then, uncertainly: “Wan?”

“Of course I am Wan! Who would I be but Wan?”

“Oh ... Well, no, there’s nobody there that fits your father’s description, either. Who did you say you rescued?”

“She claims to be named Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Female. Not very good-looking. About forty, maybe,” Wan said, not even looking at her to see how wrong he was; Klara stiffened and then reflected that the ordeal had no doubt made her look older than her age.

“Moynlin,” the voice whispered. “Moynlin... Gelle-Klara, yes, she was on that mission. The age is wrong, though, I think.” Klara gave a half nod, causing the throb in her head to start again, and then the voice went on. “Let me see, yes, the name is right. But she was born sixty-three years ago.”

The throbbing increased its tempo and its violence. Klara must have moaned, because the girl Dolly cried out to Wan and then leaned over her again. “You’re going to be all right,” she said, “but I’m going to get Henrietta to give you another little sleepy shot, all right? When you wake up again you’ll feel better.”

Klara gazed up at her without comprehension, then closed her eyes. Sixty-three years ago!

How many shocks can a human being stand without breaking? Klara was not very breakable; she was a Gateway prospector, four missions, all of them tough, any of them enough to give nightmares to anyone. But her head throbbed furiously as she tried to think. Time dilation? Was that the term for what happened inside a black hole? Was it possible that twenty or thirty years had sped past in the real world while she was spinning around the deepest gravity well there was?

“How about,” Dolly offered hopefully, “if I get you something to eat?” Klara shook her head. Wan, nibbling his 1ip in a surly way, lifted his head and called, “How foolish, offering her food! Give her a drink instead.”

He was not the kind of person you would want to please even by agreeing with him when he was right, but it sounded like too good an idea to pass up. She let Dolly bring her what seemed to be straight whiskey; it made her cough and splutter, but it warmed her. “Hon,” said Dolly hesitantly, “was one of those, you know, those guys that got killed, was he a special boyfriend?”

There was no reason for Klara to deny it. “Pretty much a boyfriend. I mean, we were in love, I guess. But we’d had a fight and split up, and then started to get together again, and then-And then Robin was in one ship, and I was in another-“

“Robbie?”

“No. Robin. Robin Broadhead. It was really Robinette, but he was kind of sensitive about the name-What’s the matter?”

“Rabin Broadhead. Oh, my God, yes,” said Dolly, looking astonished and impressed. “The millionaire!”

And Wan looked over, then came to stand beside her. “Robin Broadhead, to be sure, I know him well,” he boasted.

Klara’s mouth was suddenly dry. “You do?”

“Of course. Certainly! I have known him for many years. Yes, of course,” he said, remembering, “I have heard of his escape from the black hole years ago. How curious that you were there, too. We are business partners, you see. I receive from him and his enterprises nearly two-sevenths of my present income, including the royalties paid me by his wife’s companies.”

“His wife?” whispered Klara.

“Do you not listen? I said that, yes, his wife!”

And Dolly, suddenly gentle again, said: “I’ve seen her on the PV now and then. Like when they pick her for the Ten Best-Dressed Women, or when she won the Nobel Prize. She’s quite beautiful. Hon? Would you like another drink?”

Klara nodded, starting her head to throbbing again, but collected herself enough to say, “Yes, please. Another drink, at least.”

For nearly two days Wan elected to be benevolent to the former friend of his business partner. Dolly was kind, and tried to be helpful. There was no picture of S. Ya. in their limited PV file, but Dolly pulled out the hand puppets to show her what a caricature of Essie, at least, looked like, and when Wan, growing bored, demanded she do her night-club routine with them, managed to fob him off’. Klara found plenty of time to think. Dazed and battered as she was, she could still do simple arithmetic in her head.

She had lost more than thirty years of her life.

No, not out of her life; out of everybody else’s. She was no more than a day or two older than when she went into the naked singularity. The backs of her hands were scratched and bruised, but there were no age spots on them. Her voice was hoarse from pain and fatigue, but it was not an old woman’s voice. She was not an old woman. She was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, not that much over thirty, to whom something terrible had happened.

When she woke up on the second day the sharpened pains and the localized aches told her that she was no longer receiving analgesia. The sullen-faced captain was bending over her. “Open your eyes,” he snapped. “Now you are well enough to work for your passage; I think.”

What an annoying creature he was! Still, she was alive, and apparently getting well, and there was gratitude due. “That sounds reasonable enough,” Klara offered, sitting up.

“Reasonable? Ha! You do not decide what is reasonable here; I decide what is reasonable,” Wan explained. “You have only one right on my ship. You had the right to be rescued and I rescued you; now all the other rights are mine. Especially as because of you we must now return to Gateway.”

“Hon,” said Dolly tentatively, “that’s not entirely true. There’s plenty of food-“

“Not the kind of food I wish, shut up. So you, Klara, must repay me for this trouble.” He reached his hand behind him. Doily evidently understood his meaning; she moved a plate of fresh-baked chocolate brownies to his fingers, and he took one and began to eat it.

Gross person! Klara pushed her hair out of her eyes, studying him coldly. “How do I repay you? The way she does?”

“Certainly the way she does,” said Wan, chewing, “by helping her maintain the ship, but also-Oh! Ho! Ha-ha, that is funny,” he gasped, spraying crumbs of chocolate on Klara as he laughed. “You think I meant in bed! How stupid you are, Klara, I do not copulate with ugly older women.”

Klara wiped the crumbs off her face as he reached for another brownie. “No,” he said seriously, “it is more important than that. I want to know all about black holes.”

She said, trying to be placating, “It all happened very fast. There’s not much I can tell you.”

“Tell what you can tell, then! And listen, do not try to lie!”

Oh, my God, thought Klara, how much of this must I put up with? And “this” meant more than the bullying Wan; it meant all of her resumed and wholly disoriented life.

The answer to “how much” turned out to be eleven days. It was time enough for the worst of the bruises to fade on her arms and body, time enough for her to get to know Dolly Walthers, and pity her, to know Wan, and despise him. It was not time enough for her to figure out what to do with her life.

But her life did not wait until she was ready for it. Ready or not, Wan’s ship docked on Gateway. And there she was.

The very smells of Gateway were different. The noise level was different-much louder. The people were radically different. There did not seem to be a single living one among them for Klara to recognize from her last time there-thirty years, or not much more than thirty days, in the past, depending on whose clock you timed by. Also so many of them were in uniform.

That was quite new to Klara, and not at all pleasing. In the “old days” however subjectively recent those old days were-you saw maybe one or two uniforms a day, crewpersons on leave from the four-power guard cruisers mostly. Certainly you never saw one of them carrying a weapon. That was not true any longer. They were everywhere, and they were armed.

Debriefing had changed along with everything else. It had always been a nuisance. You’d come back to Gateway filthy and exhausted and still scared, because up until the last minute you hadn’t been sure you’d make it, and then the Gateway Corp would sit you down with the evaluators and the data compilers and the accountants. Just what did you find? What was new about it? What was it worth? The debriefing teams were the ones charged with answering questions like that, and how they scored a flight made the difference between abject failure and-once in a great while-wealth beyond dreaming. A Gateway prospector needed skills simply to survive, once he had closed himself into one of those unpredictable ships and launched himself on his Mad Magic Mystery Bus Ride. But to prosper he needed more than skills. He needed a favorable report from the debriefing team.

Debriefing had always been bad news, but now it was worse. There wasn’t a debriefing team from the Gateway Corp anymore. There were four debriefing teams, one from each of the four guardian powers. The debriefing had been moved to what had once been the asteroid’s principal night club and gambling casino, the Blue Hell, and there were four separate little rooms, each with a flag on the door. The Brazilians got Dolly. The People’s Republic of China snatched Wan off the floor. The American MP took Klara by the arm, and when the lieutenant of MPs in front of the Soviet cubicle frowned and patted the butt of his Kalashnikov, the American scowled right back, his hand resting on his Colt.

It didn’t really make any difference, because as soon as Klara was through with the Americans, the Brazilians took their turn with her, and when you are invited somewhere by a young soldier with a sidearm it makes little difference whether it is a Colt or a Paz.

Between the Brazilians and the Chinese Klara crossed paths with Wan, sweating and indignant, on his way from the Chinese to the Russians, and realized she had something to be thankful for. The interrogators were rude, overbearing, and nasty with her, but they seemed to be worse with Wan. For reasons she didn’t know, each of his sessions was lasting twice as long as her own. Which was already very long. Each team in turn pointed out that she was supposed to be dead; that her bank account had long since reverted to the Gateway Corp; that there was no mission payment due her for traveling with Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz, since it was not an officially authorized Gateway mission; and, as for any payment that might have been due for her trip to the black hole, well, she hadn’t come back in that vessel, had she? With the Americans she claimed at least a science bonus-whoever else had been inside a black hole? They told her the matter would be taken under advisement. The Brazilians told her it was a matter for four-power negotiation. The Chinese said it all hinged on an interpretation of the award made to Robinette Broadhead, and the Russians had no interest in that subject at all, because what they wanted to know was whether Wan had given any indication of terrorist leanings.

The debriefing took forever, and then there was a medical check that took almost as long. The diagnostic programs had never encountered a living human being who had been exposed to the wrenching forces behind a Schwarzschild barrier before, and they would not let her go until they had pinpointed every bone and ligament and helped themselves freely to samples of all the fluids she had. And then they released her to the accountancy section for her statement of account. It was a hardcopy chit, and all it said was:

MOYNLIN, Gelle-Klara

Current balance: 0.

Awards due: not yet evaluated.

 

Waiting outside the accountancy offices was Dolly Walthers, looking fretful and bored. “How’d you do, hon?” she asked. Klara made a face. “Oh, that’s too bad. Wan’s still in there,” she explained, “because they kept him for bloody ever in the debriefing. I’ve been just sitting here for hours. What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Klara said slowly, thinking about the very limited options one had on Gateway when one had no money.

“Yeah. Same here.” Dolly sighed. “With Wan, you know, you never know. He can’t stay anywhere very long, because they start asking questions about some of the stuff on his ship and I don’t think he got it all exactly legally.” She swallowed and said quickly, “Watch it, here he comes.”

To Klara’s surprise, when Wan looked up from the chits he was studying he beamed at her. “Ah,” he said, “my dear Gelle-Klara, I have been studying your legal position. Very promising indeed, I think.”

Promising! She glared at him with considerable dislike. “If you mean that they’ll probably toss me out into space within the next forty-eight hours for nonpayment of bills, that’s not what I call promising.”

He peered at her, decided she was joking. “Ha-ha, that is very humorous. Since you are not used to dealing with large sums of money, permit me to recommend a banking chap I find very useful-“

“Cut it out, Wan. That’s not funny.”

“Of course it’s not funny!” He scowled just as in the old days, and then his expression softened into incredulity. “Can it be-Is it possible-Have they not told you of your claim?”

“What claim?”

“Against Robinette Broadhead. My legal johnny says you might get quite fifty percent of his assets.”

“Oh, bullshit, Wan,” she said impatiently.

“Not bullshit! I have an excellent legal program! It is the doctrine of the calf follows the cow, if you understand. You should have had a full share of the survivors’ benefits from his last mission now you should have an equal share of that, and also of all that he has added to it, since it came from that original capital.”

“But-But—Oh, that’s stupid,” she snapped. “I’m not going to sue him.”

“Of course sue him! What else? How else can you get what is yours? Why, I sue as many as two hundred persons a year, Gelle-Klara. And there is a very large sum involved indeed. Do you know what Broad-head’s net worth is? Much, much more even than my own!” And then, with the jolly fraternal good-fellowship of one person of wealth to another: “Of course, there may be some inconvenience for you while the matter is being adjudicated. Allow me to transfer a small loan from my account to yours-one moment-“ He made the necessary entries on his statement chit. “Yes, there you are. Good luck!”

So there was my lost love, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, more lost than ever after she had been found. She knew Gateway well. But the Gateway she knew was gone. Her life had skipped a beat, and everything she knew or cared for or was interested in had suffered the changes of a third of a century, while she, like some enchanted princess in a forest, had slept away the time. “Good luck,” Wan had said, but what constituted good luck for the sleeping beauty whose prince had married someone else? “A small loan,” Wan had said, and it turned out that was what he had meant. Ten thousand dollars. Enough to pay her bills for a few days- and then what?

There was, thought Klara, the excitement of finding out some of the facts people like her had been dying for. So once she had found herself a room and gotten something to eat she headed for the library. It no longer contained spools of magnetic tape. Everything was now stored on some kind of second-generation Heechee prayer fans (prayer fans! so that was what they were!), and she had to hire an attendant to teach her how to use them. (“Librarian services @ $125/hr., $62.50,” said the item on her data chit.) Was it worth it?

To Klara’s disgruntled surprise, not really. So many questions answered! And, strangely, so little joy in getting the answers.

When Klara was a Gateway prospector like any other, the questions were literally a matter of life and death. What were the meanings of the symbols on the control panels of Heechee ships? What settings meant death? What meant reward? Now here were the answers, not all of them, perhaps-there was still not much clue to that great shuddery question of who the Heechee were in the first place. But thousands upon thousands of answers, even answers to questions no one had known enough to ask thirty years before.

But the answers gave her little pleasure. The questions lost their urgency when you knew the answers were in the back of the book.

The one class of questions whose answers held her interest was, I know, me.

Robinette Broadhead? Oh, surely. There was much data on him in store. Yes, he was married. Yes, he was still alive, and even well. Unforgivably, he gave every indication of being happy. Almost as bad, he was ok! He was not wizened or decrepit, of course, and his scalp still had all its hair and his face was wrinkle-free, but that was just Full Medical Plus, unfailing purveyor of health and youth to those who could afford it. Robinette Broadhead could obviously afford anything. But he was older all the same. There was a solid thickness to the neck, an assurance to the smile that looked out at her from the PV image, that had not been part of the frightened, confused man who had broken her tooth and sworn to love her always. So now Klara had a quantitative estimate for one more term: “Always.” It meant a period substantially less than thirty years.

When she bad depressed herself sufficiently in the library -she roamed about Gateway to see what changes had occurred. The asteroid had become more impersonal and more civilized. There were many commercial enterprises on Gateway now. A supermarket, a fast-food franchise, a stereotheater, a health club, handsome new tourist pensions, glittering souvenir shops. There was plenty to do on Gateway now. But not for Klara. The only thing that attracted her interest, really, was the gambling casino in the spindle, replacement for the old Blue Hell; but such luxuries she could not afford.

She could not afford much of anything, really, and she was depressed. The lady magazines of her adolescence had been full of giggly little tricks to combat depression-what they called the blahs. Clean your sink. Call somebody on the PV. Wash your hair. But she had no sink, and who was there to call on Gateway? After she bad washed her hair for the third time she began to think of the Blue Hell again. A few small bets, she decided, would do no harm to her budget even if she lost-it would only mean, really, giving up a few luxuries for a bit.

In eleven spins of the roulette wheel she was penniless.

A party of Gabonian tourists was just leaving, laughing and stumbling, and behind them, at the short, narrow bar, Klara saw Dolly. She walked over to her steadily and said, ‘Would you like to buy me a drink?”

“You bet,” said Dolly unenthusiastically, waving to the barman.

I never knew Gelle-Klara Moynhin when Robin was romantically involved with her. For that matter, I didn’t know Robinette Broadhead then, either, for he was too poor to afford so sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me. Although I cannot experience physical courage directly (since I don’t even experience physical fear), I estimate theirs very highly. Their ignorance, almost as high. They didn’t know what drove the FTL ships they flew. They didn’t know how the navigation worked, or what the controls did. They didn’t know how to read Heechee charts, and didn’t have any to read anyway, because they weren’t found for another decade after Klara was sucked into the black hole. It is astonishing to me how much meat intelligences can accomplish with so little information.

“Then could you lend me some money?”

Dolly laughed with surprise. “Lost your stake, did you? Boy, have you got a wrong number! I wouldn’t be buying drinks if some of the tourists hadn’t thrown me a couple of chips for luck.” When the highball arrived Dolly divided the small change in front of her in half and pushed a part to Klara. “You could hit Wan up again,” she said, “but he’s not in a very good mood.”

“That’s not news,” said Klara, hoping the whiskey would elevate her spirits. It did not.

“Oh, worse than usual. I think he’s going to be in the deep shit again.” She hiccoughed and looked surprised.

“What’s the matter?” Klara asked reluctantly. She knew perfectly well that once she asked, the girl would tell her, but it was, she supposed, a way of paying for the loose change.

“They’re going to catch up with him sooner or later,” Dolly said, sucking at the bottle again. “He’s such a jerk, coming here when he could have dropped you off anywhere, and got his God-damn candy and cake.”

“Well, I’d rather be here than some other place,” said Klara, wondering if it was true.

“Don’t be silly. He didn’t do it for you. He did it because he thinks he can get away with anything at all, anywhere. Because he’s a jerk.” She stared moodily at the bottle. “He even makes love like a jerk. Jerky, if you know what I mean? He even screws jerky. He comes up to me with that look on his face as if he’s trying to remember the combination to the food locker, you know? And then he gets my clothes off, and then he starts, push here, poke there, wiggle this part. I think I ought to write up an operating manual for him. The jerk.”

How many drinks the little stake lasted for Klara didn’t know-several, anyway. At some later time Dolly remembered that she was supposed to shop for brownie mix and liqueur chocolates. At a later time still Klara, now strolling around by herself, realized she was hungry. What made her know it was the smell of food. She still had some of Dolly’s loose change in her pocket. It was not enough for a decent meal, and anyway the sensible thing would be to go back to her cubicle and eat the prepaid meals, but what was the point of being sensible anymore? Besides, the smell was nearby. She passed through a sort of archway of Heechee metal, ordered at random, and sat as close as she could get to a wall. She pried the sandwich apart with a finger to see what she was eating; probably synthetic, but not any product of the food mines or sea farms she had ever tasted before. Not bad. Not very bad, anyway, although there was no dish she could think of that would have tasted really good just then. She ate slowly, analyzing each bite, not so much because the food justified it as because doing that postponed the next thing she would have to do, namely contemplate what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

And she became aware of a stir. The busgirl was sweeping the floor twice as diligently, peering over her shoulder at every stroke of the broom; the counter people were standing straighter, speaking more clearly. Someone had come in.

It was a woman, tall, not young, handsome. Thick ropes of tawny hair hung down her back, and she was conversing pleasantly, but authoritatively, with staff and customers alike while she rubbed fingers under shelves to check for grease, tasted crusts to check for crispness, made sure the napkin holders were full, retied the apron strings on the busgirl.

Klara stared at her with dawning recognition that felt more like fear. Her! The one! The woman whose picture she had seen in so many of the news stories the library had produced about Robinette Broadhead. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead opens 54 new CHON-food outlets in Persian Gulf. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead to christen converted interstellar transport. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead directs programming of expanded datastore net.

Although the sandwich was just about the last crumb of food Klara could afford to buy, she could not force herself to finish it. She sidled toward the door, face averted, crammed the plate into the waste receptacle, and was gone.

There was only one place to go. When she saw that Wan was alone in it she took it as a direct message from providence that she had made the right decision. “Where’s Dolly?” she asked.

He was lying in a hammock, sulkily nibbling on fresh papaya-bought at what incredible cost, Klara could not imagine. He said, “Where in-deed, yes, I would like to know that too! I will deal with her when she comes back, oh, yes!”

“I lost my money,” she told him.

He shrugged contemptuously.

“And,” she lied, inventing as she went along, “I came to tell you that you’ve lost, too. They’re going to impound your ship.”

“Impound!” he screeched. “The animals! The bastards! Oh, when I see Dolly, believe me-she must have told them about my special equipment!”

“Or you did,” Klara said brutally, “because you’ve sure been shooting your mouth off. You only have one chance.”

“One chance?”

“Maybe one chance, if you’re smart enough and courageous enough.”

“Smart enough! Courageous enough! You forget yourself; Klara! You forget that for the first part of my life I was all alone-“

“No, I don’t forget anything,” she said wearily, “because you sure don’t let me. It’s what you do next that counts. Are you all packed, ship’s stores all on board?”

“Stores? No, of course not. Have I not told you? Ice cream, yes, candy bars, yes, but my brownie mix and chocolates-“

“The hell with the chocolates,” said Klara, “and since she’s not here when she’s needed, the hell with Dolly, too. If you want to keep your ship, take off now.”

“Now? Alone? Without Dolly?”

“With a substitute,” said Klara tightly. “Cook, bedmate, somebody to yell at-I’m available. And skilled. Maybe I can’t cook as well as Dolly, but I can make love better. Or anyway more often. And you don’t have time to think it over.”

He stared at her slack-jawed for a long moment. Then he grinned. “Take those cases on the floor,” he ordered, “also that package under the hammock. Also-“

“Wait a minute,” she objected. “There’s a limit to what I can carry, you know.”

“As to what your limits are,” he said, “we will discover in time, I assure you. Now you may not argue. Simply take that netting and fill it and then we go, and while you are doing so I will tell you a story I heard from the Dead Men many years ago. There were these two prospectors who discovered a great prize inside a black hole and could not think how to get it out. One said finally, ‘Ah, now I know. I have brought my pet kitten along. We will simply tie her to the treasure and she will pull it out.’ And the second prospector said, ‘Oh, what a fool you are! How can a little kitten pull a treasure out of a black hole?” And the first prospector said, ‘No, it is you who are the fool. It will be easy, for, see, I have a whip.’”

16 Gateway Revisited

 

Gateway gave me all of my many millions, but it also gives me the creeps. Coming there was like meeting myself coming back. I met myself as a young, dead-broke, terrified, despairing human being whose only choices lay between leaving on a trip that might kill him and staying in a place where no one would want to live. It hadn’t changed that much. No one would still want to live there although people did and tourists were in and out all the time. But at least the trips were not as recklessly dangerous as they used to be. As we were docking I told my program Albert Einstein that I had made a philosophical discovery, namely that things even out. Gateway gets safer, and the whole home planet Earth gets more perilous. “Maybe there is a sort of law of conservation of misery that insures an average quantum value of unhappiness for every human being, and all we can really do is spread it in one direction or another?”

“It is when you say things like that, Robin”-he sighed-“that I wonder if my diagnostic programs are as good as they ought to be. Are you sure you’re not in pain from your operation?” He was, or appeared to be, sitting on the edge of the seat, guiding our vessel into landing as he talked, but I knew that his question was rhetorical. He was monitoring me all along, of course.

As soon as the ship was secured I unplugged the Albert datafan, tucked it under my arm, and headed for my new ship. “No sightseeing?” Essie asked, studying me with almost the exact expression Albert had displayed. “Then you want me to come with?”

“I’m really excited about the ship,” I said, “and I just want to go look at it. You can meet me there later.” I knew she was eager to see how her beloved franchise was getting along in this location. Of course, I did not then know who she might run into.

So I was thinking about nothing in particular as I clambered through the hatch into my own, personal, human-built interstellar space yacht, and be damned if it didn’t turn out that I was just about as excited as I had told Essie I was. I mean, talk about childhood fantasies come true! It was real. And it was all mine, and it had everything.

At least, it had almost everything. It had a master stateroom with a marvelously wide anisokinetic bed and a genuine toilet next door. It had a fully stocked larder and something very like a real kitchen. It also had two working cabins, one for Essie and one for me, that could provide concealed berths for more guests in case we ever wanted company. It had the first human-built drive system ever to be successfully proved out for a civilian faster-than-light vessel-well, some of the parts were Heechee, salvaged out of damaged exploration ships, but most of it was human-made. And it was powerful with a bigger, faster drive. It had a home for Albert, a fan socket with his name engraved over it; I slipped him into place but did not activate him, because I was enjoying my solitary prowl. It had datafans full of music and PV plays and reference works and specialist programs to do almost everything I might ever want to do, or that Essie might, either. It had a viewscreen copied from the one on the big S. Ya. transport, ten times the size of the little blurry plates in the exploration ships. It had everything I had ever thought of wanting in a ship, in fact, and the only thing it didn’t have was a name.

I sat on the edge of the big anisokinetic bed, the thrust feeling funny on my bottom, because it was all exerted upward instead of that constricting sideways squeeze you get from regular mattresses, and I thought about

 

One of the lesser artifacts the Heechee left around was the anisokinetic punch-a simple tool that could convert an impact to an equal force at some angle to the driving force. The theory of it turned out to be both profound and elegant. The use people made of it, less so-the most popular product made with anisokinetic materials was a bedding mattress with “springs” whose force was vector rather than scalar, producing what is said to be a titillating support for sexual activity. Sexual activity! How much time meat intelligences waste on that sort of thing!

 

that problem. It was a good place to do it, since the person who would occupy that bed with me was the one I wanted to name the ship after. However, I had already named the transport after her.

Of course, I thought, there were ways of dealing with that. I could call it the Sem.Ya. Or the Essie. Or the Mrs. Robinette Broadheo4 for that matter, although that was pretty stupid.

The matter was fairly urgent. We were all set to go. There was nothing to keep us on Gateway, except that I couldn’t face taking off in a ship that didn’t have a name. I found myself in the control cabin, and dropped into the pilot seat. This one was built for a human bottom, and in that way alone an immense improvement over the old style.

When I was a kid in the food mines I used to sit on a kitchen chair, in front of the radar oven, and make believe I was piloting a Gateway ship to the far corners of the universe. What I did now was just about the same thing. I reached out and touched the course wheels and made believe to squeeze the initiator teat and-and-well, I fantasized. I imagined myself dashing through space in just the same careless, adventurous, penalty-free style I had imagined as a child. Circling quasars. Speeding out to the nearby alien galaxies. Entering the silicon dust shroud around the core. Meeting a Heechee! Entering a black hole- The fantasy collapsed then, because that was too personally real, but I suddenly realized I had a name for the ship. It fit Essie perfectly, but did not duplicate the one on the S. Ya.:

True Love.

It was the perfect name!

That being so, why did it leave me feeling vaguely sentimental, lovelorn, melancholy?

It was not a thought that I wanted to pursue. Anyway, now that a name had been decided, there were things to do: The registry had to be amended, the ship’s insurance papers had to be corrected-the world had to be notified of my decision. The way to do that was to tell Albert to get it done. So I rocked the datafan that held him to make sure it was firmly seated and turned him on.

I had not got used to the new Albert, so it surprised me when he turned up not in a holograph box, not even near his datafan, but in the doorway to the main cabin. He stood there with an elbow cupped in a palm, the pipe in the free hand, gazing peacefully around for all the world as though he had just come in. “A beautiful ship, Robin,” he said. “My congratulations.”

“I didn’t know you could jump around like that!”

“I am in fact not jumping around, my dear Robin,” he pointed out amiably. “It is part of my program to give to the maximum extent possible the simulation of reality. To appear like a genie out of a bottle would not seem realistic, would it?”

“You’re a neat program, Albert,” I acknowledged, and, smiling, he said:

“And an alert one, too, if I may say so, Robin. For example, I believe your good wife is coming this way now.” He stepped aside-quite unnecessarily!-as Essie came in, panting and looking as though she were trying not to look upset.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded, suddenly alarmed.

She didn’t answer right away. “Haven’t heard, then?” she said at last.

“Heard what?”

She looked both surprised and relieved. “Albert? You have not acquired linkage with data net?”

“I was just about to do so, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said politely. “No! Do not! There is-ah-there are some adjustments in bias must make for Gateway conditions first.” Albert pursed his lips thoughtfully but did not speak; I was not so reticent.

“Essie, spit it out! What is it?”

She sat down on the communicator’s bench, fanning herself. “That rogue Wan,” she said. “Is here! Is talk of entire asteroid complex. I am astonished you have not heard. Woosh! I ran so! I was afraid you would be upset.”

I smiled forgivingly. “The operation was weeks ago, Essie,” I reminded her. “I’m not that delicate-or that likely to get all in an uproar over Wan, for that matter. Have a little more confidence in me!”

She looked at me narrowly, then nodded. “Is true,” she admitted. “Was foolish. Well, I get back to work,” she went on, standing up and moving to the door. “But remember, Albert-no interfacing with net until I come back!”

“Wait!” I cried. “You haven’t heard my news.” She paused long enough to let me say proudly, “I’ve found a name for the ship. The True Love. What do you think?”

She took a long time to think that over, and her expression was a lot more tentative, and a lot less delighted, than I might have expected. Then she said, “Yes, is very good name, Robin. God bless her and all who sail in her, eh? Now must go.”

After twenty-five years I still did not entirely understand Essie. I told Albert so. He was sitting at his ease on Essie’s dressing-table bench, observing himself in the mirror, and he shrugged. “Do you suppose she didn’t like the name?” I asked him. “It’s a good name!”

“I should have thought so, Robin,” he agreed, experimenting with different expressions in the mirror.

“And she didn’t seem to want to look at the ship!”

“She appeared to have something on her mind,” he agreed.

“But what? I swear,” I repeated, “I don’t always understand her.”

“I confess that I do not either, Robin. In my case,” he said, turning from the mirror to twinkled at me, “I have assumed that it is because I am mechanical and she is human. I wonder what it is in your case?”

I stared at him, a little annoyed, and then grinned. “You’re pretty funny in your new programming, Albert,” I told him. “What do you get out of pretending to look in a mirror when I know you don’t really see anything that way?”

“What do you get out of looking at the True Love, Robin?”

“Why do you always answer a question with a question?” I responded, and he laughed out loud. It was really a very convincing performance. As long as I’ve had the Albert program, he was able to laugh, and even make jokes of his own, but you always knew it was a picture laughing. You could think it was a picture of a real person if you wanted to-let’s face it, I usually did-like the picture of a person on the P-phone. But there was no, what shall I call it? No presence. Now there was. I couldn’t smell him. But I could perceive his physical presence in the room with more senses than simple sight and hearing. Temperature? Mass sensation? I don’t know. Whatever it is that tells you somebody is there with you.

“The answer really,” he said, sobering, “is that this appearance is my equivalent of a new ship, or a new Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, or whatever analogy you like to give it. I’m just sort of looking it over to see how much I like it. How do you like it, which is after all more important?”

“Don’t be humble, Albert,” I told him. “I like it very well, only I wish you were hooked up to the data nets. I’d like to know if any of the people I’ve been working on have done anything about the terrorist data, for instance.”

“I will of course do what you order me to, Robin,” he said, “but Mrs. Broadhead was very explicit.”

“No, I don’t want you blowing yourself up or damaging your subroutines. I know what I’ll do,” I said, getting up as the light bulb flashed over my head. “I’ll just go out into the passageway and plug into a comm circuit-provided,” I joked, “I haven’t forgotten how to make a call all by myself.”

“Why, of course you could do that,” he said. His tone was troubled, for some reason or other. “It isn’t necessary, though, Robin.”

“Well, no,” I said, pausing halfway to the door. “But I am curious, you know.”

“As to your curiosity,” he said, smiling at me as he poked tobacco into the bowl of his pipe-but it was a forced smile, I thought. “As to that, you must know that until we docked I was in constant touch with the net. There was no real news. It is possible, though, that the lack of news was itself interesting. Even encouraging.”

I was not entirely used to the new Albert. I sat down again, regarding him. “You’re a cryptic son of a bitch, Dr. Einstein,” I told him.

“Only when reporting information that is itself quite unclear.” He smiled. “General Manzbergen is not receiving calls from you just now. The senator says he has done all he can. Maitre Ijsinger says that Kwiatkowski and our friend from Malaysia have not responded to efforts to contact them on your behalf and all he got from the Albanians was a message that said ‘Don’t worry.”

“So something’s happening!” I cried, jumping up again.

“Something may be happening,” he corrected, “and if so, really, all we can do is let it happen. In any case, Robin,” he said, his tone wheedling now, “I would personally prefer that you not leave the ship at this time. For one good reason: How do you know there is not some other person here with a gun and your name on a list?”

“A terrorist? Here?”

“Here or in Rotterdam, why is one more unlikely than the other? I beg to remind you, Robin, that I am not without experience in these matters. At one time the Nazis put on my head a price of twenty thousand marks; be sure I was careful not to let anyone earn it!”

That came out of left field. I stopped in the doorway. “The whatzees?”

“The Nazis, Robin. A group of terrorists who seized control of the nation of Germany many years ago, when I was alive.”

“When you were what?”

“I mean, of course”-he shrugged-“when the real human being whose name you have given me was alive, but from my point of view that is not a distinction worth making.” He stuffed the filled pipe in his pocket absently and sat down in such a natural, friendly way that automatically I sat down again, too.

“I guess I haven’t quite got used to the new you, Albert,” I said.

“There’s no better time than the present, Robin.” He smiled, preening himself. He did have more solidity to him. The old holograms showed him in a dozen or so characteristic poses, with baggy sweater or tee shirt,

 

Although it is interesting to see myself from Robin’s point of view, it is not very enjoyable. Mrs. Broadhead’s programming constrained me to speak, act, and even think as the original Albert Einstein would have done, had he survived to assume my role. Robin seems to think that grotesque. In a sense, he is right.

Human beings are grotesque!

 

socks on or off, sneakers or slippers, pipe or pencil. Today he wore a tee shirt, to be sure, but over it was one of those baggy European sweaters that button up the front and have pockets and might as well be a jacket, really, except that they’re loosely knitted wool. There was a button on the sweater that read Two Percen6 and a faint pale stubble around the chin that suggested he hadn’t shaved that morning. Well, of course he hadn’t shaved! He never would, either, being nothing more than a holographic projection of a computer construct-but so convincing and jazzy that I almost offered to lend him my razor!

I laughed and shook my head. “What does ‘Two Percent’ mean?”

“Ah,” he said bashfully, “it was a slogan of my youth. If two percent of the human race would refuse to fight, there would be no war.”

“Do you believe that now?”

“I hope that, Robin,” he corrected. “The news is not all that conducive to hope, I must admit. Would you like to know the rest of the news?”

“I suppose I should,” I said, and watched him stroll over to Essie’s vanity. He sat on the bench before it, idly playing with her flasks of perfume and bits of feminine decoration as he talked; so normal, so human, that it distracted me from what he was saying. That was as well, for the news was all bad. The terrorists were busier than ever. The destruction of the Lofstrom loop had indeed been the first move in an insurrection, and a small, bloody war was going on all over that part of South America. Terrorists had dumped botulinus toxin into the Staines reservoir and London was going thirsty. News like that I did not want, and I told him so.

He sighed and agreed. “It was a gentler day when I was alive,” he said wistfully. “Though not perfect, to be sure. I could perhaps have been president of the state of Israel, did you know that, Robin? Yes. But I felt I could not accept. I was for peace always, and a state must sometimes make war. Loeb once told me that all politicians must be pathological, and I fear he was right.” He sat up straighter and brightened. “But there is some good news after all, Robin! The Broadhead Awards for Scientific Discovery-“

“The what?”

“You recall, Robin,” he said impatiently, “the system of awards you authorized me to inaugurate just before your operation. They have already begun to bear fruit.”

“You’ve solved the mystery of the Heechee?”

“Ah, Robin, I perceive you are joking with me,” he said in gentle reproof. “Of course, nothing so vast just yet. But there is a physicist in

Laguna Beach-Beckfurt? You know his work? The one who proposed a system for achieving flat space?”

“No. I don’t even know what flat space is.”

“Well,” he said, resigning himself to my ignorance, “that doesn’t matter just now, I think, but he is now working on a mathematical analysis of the missing mass. It appears, Robin, that the phenomenon is quite recent! Somehow mass has been added to the universe, within the last few million years!”

“Oh, wow,” I said, attempting to look comprehending. I did not deceive him.

He said patiently: “If you recall, Robin, some years ago the Dead Man the woman, that is-from what is now the S. Ya. Broadhead led us to believe that this phenomenon had something to do with an act of the Heechee. We discounted this at the time, since there seemed to be no reason for it.”

“I remember,” I said, only partly untruthfully. I did remember that Albert had had the wild idea that for some reason, not specified, the Heechee were collapsing the universe back to its primordial atom, so as to bring about a new Big Bang and thus a new universe with somewhat different physical laws. Then he had changed his mind. He had surely explained all the reasoning to me at the time, but I had surely not remined it. “Mach?” I said. “Something about this fellow Mach? And somebody named Davies?”

“Exactly right, Robin!” he applauded, beaming on me with delight. “Mach’s Hypothesis suggested a reason for doing it, but Davies’s Paradox made it unlikely that the reason would work. Now Beckfurt has shown analytically that Davies’s Paradox need not apply, only assuming that the number of expansions and contractions of the universe is finite!” He got up and roamed around the room, too pleased with himself to sit still. I could not see what he was rejoicing over.

“Albert,” I said unsteadily, “are you telling me that it may be so that the universe is coming crashing around our ears, and we’ll all be squeezed into-what do you call it?-phloem?”

“Exactly, my dear boy!”

“And this makes you happy?”

“Precisely! Oh,” he said, coining to a halt at the doorway and gazing at me, “I see your problem. It will not happen soon. A matter of at least some billions of years, to be sure.”

I sat back, staring at him. This new Albert was going to take some getting used to. He did not seem to notice anything amiss; he was babbling on happily about all the half-baked notions that had been pouring

 

Robin did not quite understand Davies’s Paradox, but then he didn’t even understand the more famous Olbers’s Paradox, which bothered astronomers way back in the nineteenth century. Olbers said: If the universe is infinite, there should be an infinite number of start That means that we should see not individual stars in a black sky, but a solid dome of starlight, blinding white. And he proved it mathematically. (What he didn’t know was that the stars were grouped into galaxies, which changed the mathematics.) So a century later Paul Davies said:

If it’s true that the universe is cyclical, expanding and contracting over and over, then if it is possible for a little bit of matter or energy to stay out of the crunch and cross over to the next universe, then in infinite time that leftover light would increase infinitely and we’d have an Olbers sky again. What he didn’t know was that the number of oscillations in which a little bit of the energy was left out was not infinite. We happened to be in the very first of them.

 

in on him ever since the awards were announced, and what interesting notions he had thought of because of them.

Thought of?

“Wait a minute,” I said, frowning, because there was something I didn’t quite understand. “When?”

“When what, Robin?”

“When were you doing this thinking? You’ve been turned off, except when we’ve been talking-“

“Exactly, Robin. When I was ‘turned off,’ as you put it.” He twinkled. “Now that Mrs. Broadhead has provided me with a hardwired, built-in database, I do not cease to exist when you dismiss me, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And it is such a great pleasure to me, you have no idea! Simply to think! All of my life it is what I have most wanted. As a young man I would weep for the chance to sit and only think-to do such things, for example, as reconstructing proofs of well-known mathematical and physical theorems. Now I can do it very often, and so much more quickly than when I was alive! I am deeply grateful to your wife for this.” He cocked an ear. “And here she is coming again, Robin,” he said. “Mrs. Broadhead? I have just remembered to express to you my gratitude for this new programming.”

She looked at him in a puzzled way, then shook her head. “Dear Robin,” she said, “I have something I must tell you. One moment.” She turned to Albert and shot three or four fast Russian sentences at him. He nodded, looking grave.

It takes me a long time to see what is before me sometimes, but by now it was evident. Something was going on that I should know about. “Come on, Essie,” I said, alarmed, and even more alarmed because I didn’t know what I was alarmed about. “What’s happening? Has Wan done something?”

She said soberly, “Wan has left Gateway, and not a moment too soon, to be sure, since is in trouble with Gateway Corp and with many others as well. But is not of Wan I wish to speak. Is of woman I observed in my shop. She did closely resemble, dear Robin, woman whom you loved before me named Gelle-Klara Moynlin. So close that I thought perhaps a daughter.”

I stared at her. “What-How do you know what Klara looked like, anyway?”

“Oh, Robin,” she said impatiently. “Twenty-five years and I a specialist in data retrieval. You think I would not arrange to know? Know her exactly, Robin. Every datum on record.”

“Yes, but-she never had a daughter, you know.” I stopped, suddenly wondering if indeed I would know. I had loved Klara very much, but not for very long. It was quite possible there were things in her history she had not got around to telling me.

“Actually,” said Essie apologetically, “first guess was maybe she was your own daughter. Only theory, you know. But was possible. Could have knocked lady up, you know. But now-“ She turned to Albert questioningly. “Albert? Have completed search?”

“I have, Mrs. Broadhead.” He nodded, looking grave. “There is nothing in Gelle-Klara Moynlin’s record to suggest she ever bore a child.”

“And?”

He reached for his pipe and fumbled with it. “There is no question about the identity, Mrs. Broadhead. She checked in two days ago, with Wan.”

Essie sighed. “Then,” she said bravely, “is no doubt at all. Woman in shop was Klara herself, no impostor.”

At that moment, trying to take in what I had been told, what I wished for most in the world, or at that moment most urgently at any rate, was the soothing, healing presence of my old analysis program, Sigfrid von Shrink. I needed help.

Klara? Alive? Here? And if this impossibility was true, what should I do about it?

It was easy enough for me to tell myself I owed Klara nothing I had not already paid. The coin I paid in was a long time of mourning, a deep and abiding love, a sense of loss that even three decades had not entirely cured. She had been taken away from me, across a gulf I could not span, and the only thing that made that bearable to me was that I had finally come to believe that it was Not My Fault.

But the gulf had somehow spanned itself. Here she was! And here was I, with a well-established wife and a well-ordered life, and no room in it for the woman I had promised to love exclusively and always.

“Is more,” said Essie, watching my face.

I was not keeping up with the conversation very well. “Yes?”

“Is more. Wan arrived with two women, not one. Second woman was Dolly Walthers, unfaithful wife of person we saw in Rotterdam, you know? Young person. Weeping, eye makeup smeared-pretty young woman, but not in pretty frame of mind. U.S. military police arrested her when Wan left without clearance, so I went to talk to her.”

“Dolly Walthers?”

“Oh, Robin, listen to me, please! Yes, Dolly Walthers. Could tell me very little, though, because MPs had other plans for her. Americans wanted to take her to High Pentagon. Brazilian MPs tried to stop them. Big argument, but Americans finally won.”

I nodded to show I was comprehending. “I see. The Americans have arrested Dolly Walthers.”

Essie studied me sharply. “Are you all right, Robin?”

“Certainly I’m all right. I’m only a little worried, because if there’s friction between the Americans and the Brazilians I hope it doesn’t keep them from putting their data together.”

“Au,” said Essie, nodding, “now is clear. Could tell you were worried about something, was not sure what it was.” And then she bit her lip. “Excuse me please, dear Robin. I am a little upset, too, I think.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, twitching irritably as the anisokinetic mattress poked at her. “Practical matters first,” she said, frowning. “What do we do now? These are alternatives. One, go off to investigate object Walthers detected, as planned. Two, attempt to discover more information about Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Three, eat something and get good night’s sleep before doing anything else-for,” she added reprovingly, “must not forget, Robin, you are still somewhat convalescent from major abdominal surgery. I personally lean toward third alternative, what do you think?”

As I was mulling over this difficult question Albert cleared his throat. “Mrs. Broadhead? It has occurred to me that it would not be very expensive, a few hundred thousand dollars perhaps, to charter a One for a few days and send it on a photoreconnaissance mission.” I peered at him, trying to follow his meaning. “That is,” he explained, “we could have it seek the object you are interested in, locate it, observe it, and report to us. Single-passenger ships are not in great demand now, I believe, and at any rate there are several available here on Gateway.”

“What a good idea!” Essie cried. “Settled then, all right? Arrange same, Albert, and at same time cook us up something delicious for first meal on, ah, on new ship True Love.”

Myself interposing no objection, that is what we did. Myself interposed no objection because myself was in shock. The worst thing about being in shock is that you don’t know it while you’re in it. I thought I was quite lucid and aware. So I ate whatever it was they put in front of me, and did not notice anything strange until Essie was tucking me into the big bouncy bed. “You haven’t been saying anything,” I said.

“Is because last ten times I spoke to you, dear Robin, you did not respond,” she said, not accusingly at all. “Will see you in morning.”

I figured the implications of that out pretty quickly. “You’re going to sleep in the guest cabin, then?”

“Yes. Not in anger, dear, or even in sorrow. Just to let you be by yourself for a bit, all right?”

“I guess so. I mean, yes, sure, honey, that’s probably a good idea,” I said, beginning to register the notion that Essie really was upset and even to think that I should concern myself about it. I took her hand and kissed the wrist before letting it go, and bestirred myself to offer some conversation. “Essie? Should I have consulted you before naming the ship?”

She pursed her lips. “True Love is good name,” she said judiciously. But she did seem to have reservations, and I didn’t know why. “I would have asked you,” I explained, “but it seemed tacky to do that. I mean, to ask the person you’re naming it after, like asking you what you want for your birthday instead of thinking up something by myself.”

She grinned, relaxing. “But Robin dear, you always do ask me that. Is not important, really. And yes, True Love is truly excellent name, now that I know particular true Jove you had in mind is me.”

I think probably Albert had been fooling around with his little magic sleeping potions again, because I went right off. But I didn’t stay asleep. Three or four hours later I was lying in the anisokinetic bed, wide awake, fairly tranquil, very perplexed.

Out on the perimeter of the Gateway asteroid, where the docking pits are, there is a little bit of centrifugal force because of rotation. Down becomes up. Only in the True Love it didn’t. Albert had turned the ship on, and the same force that kept us from floating around in flight was also neutralizing and reversing the thrust of the asteroid’s spin; I was gently held to the gentle bed. I could feel the faint hum of the ship’s housekeeping systems as they changed the air and kept the pressure in the plumbing and did all the other little chores that made the ship alive. I knew that if I said Albert’s name he would appear for me-how, exactly, I didn’t know, and it was almost worth summoning him to see whether he would choose to walk through the door or maybe crawl out from under the bed to amuse me. I suppose there was a mood elevator in the food as well as a sleepy drink, because I felt quite at ease with my problems-although that feeling did nothing to solve them.

Which problems to solve? That was the first problem. My priorities had been reordered so many times in the past few weeks that I didn’t know which to put on top of the pile. There was the hard, harmful problem of the terrorists, and that was important to solve for more reasons than my own; but that had moved down a notch when I heard what

Audee Walthers had produced as a new problem for me in Rotterdam. There was the problem of my health, but that seemed temporarily, at least, in abeyance. And there was the new and insoluble problem of Klara. Any one of them I could have dealt with. All four of them I could deal with, too-one way or another-but, specifically, how? What should I do when I got up?

I didn’t know the answer to that, and so I didn’t get up.

I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke again I was not alone. “Good morning, Essie,” I said, reaching out for her hand.

“Good morning,” she said, pressing my hand to her cheek in the fond, familiar way. But she had an unfamiliar subject to discuss. “Are feeling all right, Robin? Good. I have been thinking about your situation.”

“I see,” I said. I could feel myself tensing up; the peaceful relaxation was being nibbled away. “What situation is that?”

“The Klara Moynlin situation, to be sure,” she said. “I see is difficult for you, Robin dear.”

“Oh,” I said vaguely, “these things happen.” It was not a situation I could discuss easily with Essie, but that didn’t stop Essie from trying to discuss it with me.

“Dear Robin,” she said, her voice calm and her expression gentle in the dim night light of the room, “is no use your keeping all this to self. Bottle up, it will explode.”

I squeezed her hand. “Have you been taking lessons from Sigfrid von Shrink? That’s what he always used to tell me.”

“Was good program, Sigfrid. Please believe, I understand what is in your heart.”

“I know you do, only-“

“Only”-she nodded-“is embarrassing to talk of this with me, who am Other Woman in case. Without whom would be no problem.”

“That’s not true, damn it!” I had not intended to yell, but maybe there was, after all, something bottled up.

“Incorrect, Robin. Is true. If I did not exist could go look for Klara, no doubt find her, then decide what to make of this worrying situation. Might become lovers again. Might not-is young woman, Klara, might not want raddled old spare-parts wreck for lover, eh? I foreclose this option. I am sorry.”

She thought for a moment, then corrected herself. “No, is not true; I am not a bit sorry we love each other. Value that very greatly-but problem remains. Only, Robin! There is no guilt in this for anyone! You deserve none, I accept none, certainly Klara Moynlin has earned none. So all guilt, worry, fear, is all in your head. No, Robin, do not mistake me; what is in head can hurt very powerfully, especially for person with well-developed conscience like you. But is paper tiger. Blow on it, it goes away. Problem is not Klara’s reappearance; problem is you feel guilt.”

It was very apparent that I had not been the only one to sleep poorly; obviously Essie had been rehearsing this speech for some time.

I sat up and sniffed the air. “Is that coffee you brought in with you?”

“Only if you want, Robin.”

“I want.” I thought for a minute while she was handing me the bottle.

“You’re certainly right,” I said. “I know this. What I don’t know, as

Sigfrid used to say, is how to integrate this knowledge into my life.”

She nodded. “I perceive I blundered,” she said. “Should have included Sigfrid subroutines in Albert program instead of, let us say, gourmet cookery. Have thought of making programming change in Albert for you, because this is on my conscience.”

“Oh, honey, that’s not your-“

“-fault, no. That is center of this conversation, correct?” Essie leaned forward to give me a swift kiss, then looked concerned. “Oh, wait, Robin, I withdraw that kiss. For what I wish to say is this: In psychoanalytical shrinkery, as you have so often explained to me, the analyst is not important. What is important is what happens in the head of analysand, e.g., you. So the analyst can be machine, even very rudimentary machine; or dolt with bad breath; or human with doctoral degree ... or even me.”

“You!”

She winced. “Have heard more flattering tone from you,” she complained.

“You’re going to psychoanalyze me?”

She shrugged defensively. “Yes, me, why not? As friend. As good friend, intelligent, wishing to listen, I promise not judgmental in the least. I promise this, dear Robin. As one who will let you talk, fight, shout, weep if you will, until all comes out for you to see clear what you want and feel.”

She melted my heart! All I managed to say was “Ah, Essie ...” But I could have managed to weep then without much trouble.

Instead I took another pull at the coffee and then shook my head. “I don’t think it would work,” I said. I was feeling regretful and must have sounded it, but also I was feeling-what’s the right word? Interested? Technically interested. Interested in it as a problem to be solved.

“Why not work?” she demanded combatively. “Listen, Robin, I have thought this out with care. I remember all you have told me of this, and I quote you exactly: Best part of sessions, you said, came often with Sigfrid while you were on your way to see him, rehearsing what you would say, what Sigfrid would say, what you would reply.”

“Did I say that?” It was always amazing to me how much Essie remembered of the idle chit-chat of a quarter of a century together.

“Said exactly,” she said smugly, “so why not me? Only because I am personally involved?”

“Well, that would surely make it harder.”

“The hard things do at once,” she said merrily. “Impossible sometimes take up to a week.”

“Bless you,” I said, “but-“ I thought for a moment. “See, it’s not just a question of listening. The big thing about a good shrink program is that it listens to the nonverbal stuff, too. Do you understand what I mean? The ‘me’ that does the talking doesn’t always know what it wants to say. I block it-some ‘I’ or other blocks it, because letting all that old stuff out involves pain, and it doesn’t want the pain.”

“I would hold your hand through all of the pain, dear Robin.”

“Of course you would. But would you understand the nonverbal stuff? That inside, silent ‘me’ talks in symbols. Dreams. Freudian slips. Unexplained aversions. Fears. Needs. Twitchings and blinkings. Allergies-all of those things, Essie, and a thousand more, like impotence, shortness of breath, itches, insomnia. I don’t mean I suffer from all those things-“

“Certainly not all!”

“-but they’re part of the vocabulary that Sigfrid could read. I can’t. You can’t either.”

Essie sighed and accepted defeat. “Then must go to plan B,” she said.

“Albert! Turn on lights. Come in here.”

The lights in the room came up slowly and Albert Einstein came in through the door. He didn’t exactly yawn and stretch, but he did give the impression of an elderly genius just out of the sack, ready for whatever might come but not quite fully awake yet. “Have you chartered photoreconnaissance vessel?” she demanded.

“It is already on its way, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said.

It did not seem to me that I had quite agreed to do that, but perhaps I had, I thought. “And,” she went on, “have dispatched messages as agreed?”

“All of them, Mrs. Broadhead.” He nodded. “As you instructed. To all persons high in the military establishment or government of the United States who owe Robin a favor, asking them to use their best efforts to persuade the Pentagon people to let us interview Dolly Walthers.”

“Yes. That is as instructed,” Essie agreed, and turned to me. “So you see, is now only one way to go. Go find this Dolly. Go find this Wan. Go find Klara. Then,” she said, her voice steadfast but her expression looking suddenly much less confident and a whole lot more vulnerable, “then we see what we see, Robin, and the very best of good luck to all of us.”

She was going very much faster than I could follow, and in directions I was sure I had never agreed to. My eyes were popping with astonishment. “Essie! What’s going on? Who said-“

“Person who said, dear Robin, was I. Is obvious. Cannot deal with Klara as ghost in subconscious. Can perhaps deal with real live Klara face to face. Only way to go, correct?”

“Essie!” I was deeply shocked. “You sent those messages? You forged my name? You-“

“Now, you wait, you Robin!” she said, deeply shocked herself. “What forgery? I signed messages ‘Broadhead.’ Is my name, correct? Have right to sign my name to message, correct?”

I stared at her, frustrated. Fondly frustrated. “Woman,” I said, “you’re too smart for me, you know that? Why do I get the idea that you knew every word of this conversation before we had it?”

She shrugged smugly. “Am information specialist, as I keep telling you, dear Robin. Know how to deal with information, especially twenty-five years of it on subject that I love dearly and want dearly to be happy. So, yes, I thought with care of what could be done and what you would permit, and reached inevitable conclusions. Would do much more than that if necessary, Robin,” she finished, getting up and stretching. “Would do whatever was best, not excluding going off by myself for six months or so so you and Klara can work things out.”

And so ten minutes later, while Essie and I were getting ourselves cleaned up and dressed, Albert had received departure clearance and popped the True Love free of its docking pit, and we were on our way to the High Pentagon.

My dear wife, Essie, had many virtues. One was an altruism that sometimes took my breath away. Another was a sense of humor, and sometimes she imparted that to her programs. Albert had dressed himself for the part of daring hot pilot: leather helmet with earflaps flying, Red Baron white silk scarf thrown around his neck as he sat crouched in the pilot seat, glowering ferociously at the controls. “You can cut that out, Albert,” I told him, and he turned his head and gave me a sheepish smile.

“I was only trying to amuse you,” he said, removing the helmet.

“You did that, all right.” And indeed I was amused. I was feeling rather good, all in all. The only way to deal with the terrible crushing depression of problems unmet is to meet them-one way or another-and this was surely a way. I appreciated my wife’s loving care. I appreciated the way my beautiful new ship flew. I even appreciated the neat way the holographic Albert got rid of his holographic helmet and scarf. There was no vulgar popping out of existence. He simply rolled them up and stowed them between his feet, and I guess waited to vanish them until no one was looking. “Does flying this ship take all your attention, Albert?” I asked.

“Well, not really, Robin,” he admitted. “It has full navigation programming, of course.”

“So your being there is just another way of amusing me. Then amuse me in a different way, why don’t you? Talk to me. Tell me some of that stuff you’re always anxious to show off. You know. About cosmology, and the Heechee, and the Meaning of Everything, and God.”

“If you wish, Robin,” he said agreeably, “but first perhaps you would like to see this incoming message.”

Essie looked up from the corner where she was going over her customer-comment synoptics as Albert wiped the big overhead screen of its star pictures and displayed:

Robinette, my boy, for the guy who made the

Brazilians roll over and play dead nothing is too much.

High Pentagon alerted to your visit and instructed to

extend every courtesy. The joint is yours.

Manzbergen

“By God,” said I, surprised and delighted, “they did it! They turned over the data!”

Albert nodded. “So it would appear, Robin. I think you have a right to be pleased with your efforts.”

Essie came over and kissed the back of my neck. “I endorse this comment,” she purred. “Excellent Robin! Man of great influence.”

“Aw, shucks,” I said, grinning. I couldn’t help grinning. If the Brazilians had turned over their search-and-locate data to the Americans, then the Americans could very probably put it together with their own data and find a way to deal with the damn spaceborne terrorists and their damn crazy-making TPT. No wonder General Manzbergen was pleased with me! I was pleased with myself. And it just went to show that when problems seemed absolutely overwhelming and you couldn’t decide which to tackle first, if you just tackled one of them you would find that all the others were melting away too ... “What?”

“I asked if you were still interested in carrying on a conversation,”

Albert said wistfully.

“Why, sure. I guess so.” Essie was back in her corner, but watching Albert rather than returning to her reports.

“Then if you don’t mind,” Albert said shyly, “it would give me pleasure to talk to you not about cosmology and eschatology and the missing mass, but about my own previous life, instead.”

Essie, scowling, opened her mouth to speak, but I raised a hand. “Let him talk, love. I guess my mind wouldn’t really be on the missing mass right now, anyway.”

So we flew along on that short, happy run to the High Pentagon while Albert, leaning back in the pilot seat with his hands folded over the plump tummy in the sloppy sweater, reminisced about early days in the patent office in Switzerland, and the way the queen of Belgium used to accompany his violin-playing on the piano; and meanwhile my at-third-hand friend Dolly Walthers was being questioned with great vigor by military intelligence officers~4n the High Pentagon; and meanwhile my not-quite-yet friend Captain was tidying up the traces of his intervention and grieving over his lost love; and meanwhile my once-much-more-than friend Klara Moynlin was... was . .

I didn’t know what Klara was doing meanwhile, not then I didn’t. Actually, in detail, I surely did not really want to.

17 Picking Up the Pieces

 

The hardest part of Klara’s new life was keeping her mouth shut. She had a combative nature, Klara did, and with Wan, combat was all too easy to create. What Wan wanted was food, sex, company, occasional assistance at the jobs of running the spacecraft-when he wanted them, and not at any other times. What Klara wanted was time to think. She wanted to think about this astonishing derailment of her life. The possibility of getting killed she had always faced-if not bravely, exactly, then at least steadfastly. The possibility that so weird a misadventure as being stuck on a siding, inside a black hole, for an entire generation while the world moved on without her had never crossed her mind. That needed to be thought over.

Wan had no interest in Klara’s needs. When he wanted her for something, he wanted her. When he didn’t, he made that very clear. It was not his sexual demands that troubled Klara. In general they were not much more trouble, or more personally significant, than the routine of going to the bathroom. Foreplay for Wan consisted of taking his pants off. The act was over at his pace, and his pace was rapid. The use of Klara’s body disturbed her less than the rape of her attention.

Klara’s best times were when Wan was sleeping. They did not usually last very long. Wan was a light sleeper. She would settle down for a conversation with the Dead Men, or make herself something to eat that Wan didn’t particularly like, or simply sit and stare into space-a phrase that took on new meaning when the only thing one could look at that was more than an arm’s-length away was the screen that looked out onto space itself. And just as she was relaxed the shrill, teasing voice would come: “Doing nothing again, Klara? What a lazy thing you are! Dolly would have baked a whole batch of brownies for me!” Or, worse, he would be in a playful mood. Then out would come the little paper-folds and drugstore vials and silver boxes of pink and purple pills. Wan had just discovered drugs. He wanted to share the experience with Klara. And sometimes, out of boredom and dejection, she would let herself be persuaded. She would not inject or sniff or swallow anything she could not positively identify, and she rejected a lot of the things she could. But she accepted a lot, too. The rushes, the euphoria-they didn’t last, but they were a blessed diversion from the emptiness of a life that had hiccoughed and died and was trying to start itself again. Getting stoned with Wan, or even making love with Wan, was better than trying to evade the questions that Wan asked and she did not want to answer honestly. “Klara, do you honestly think I’ll ever find my father?”

“Not a hope, Wan, the old boy’s long dead.”

Because the old boy surely was. The man who had fathered Wan had left Gateway on a solitary mission just about the time Wan’s mother began to wonder if she’d really missed her first period. The records simply posted him as missing. Of course, he could have been swallowed up by a black hole. He could still be there, frozen in time as Klara herself had been.

But the odds were very poor.

An astonishing thing to Klara-out of the million astonishing things thirty years had brought-was the easy way Wan displayed and interpreted the old Heechee navigation charts. In a good mood-almost a record, because it had lasted nearly a quarter of an hour-he had shown her the charts and marked the objects he had already visited, including her own. When the mood evaporated and he stamped off furiously to sleep, Klara had cautiously asked the Dead Men about it. It could not be said that the Dead Men really understood the charts, but the tiny bit they did know was far more than Klara’s contemporaries had ever known.

Some of the cartographical conventions were simple enough-even self-evident, like Columbus’s egg, once you’d been told what they meant. The Dead Men were pleased to tell Klara what they meant. The problem was to keep them from telling her and telling her. The colors of the objects shown? Simple, said the Dead Men; the bluer they were, the farther they were; the redder, the nearer. “That shows,” whispered the most pedantic of the Dead Men, who happened to be a woman, “that shows the Heechee were aware of the Hubble-Humason Law.”

“Please don’t tell me what the Hubble-Humason Law is,” Klara said.  ‘What about all these other markings? The things like crosses, with little extra bars on them?”

“They’re major installations,” sighed the Dead Man. “Like Gateway. And Gateway Two. And the Food Factory. And-“

“And these things like check marks?”

“Wan calls them question marks,” whispered the tiny voice. Indeed, they did look like that, a little, if you took the dot at the bottom of the question mark and turned the rest of it upside down. “Most of them are black holes. If you change the setting to twenty-three, eighty-four-“

“Please be still!” cried Wan, appearing disheveled and irritated from his bunk. “I cannot sleep with all this foolish yelling~”

“We weren’t yelling, Wan,” Klara said peaceably.

‘Weren’t yelling!” he yelled. “Mali!” He stomped over to the pilot seat and sat down, fists clenched on his thighs, shoulders hunched, glowering at her. “What if I want something to eat now?” he demanded.

“Do you?”

He shook his head. “Or what if I wanted to make love?”

“Do you?”

“Do I, do I! It is always an argument with you! And you are not really a very good cook and, also, in bed you are far less interesting than you claimed. Dolly was better.”

Klara found she was holding her breath, and forced herself to release it slowly and silently. She could not force herself to smile.

Wan grinned, pleased to see that he bad scored on her. “You remember Dolly?” he went on jovially. “That was the one you persuaded me to abandon on Gateway. There they have the rule of no pay, no breathe, and she had no money. I wonder if she is still alive.”

“She’s still alive,” gritted Klara, hoping it was true. But Dolly would always find someone to pay her bills. ‘Wan?” she began, desperate to change the subject before it got worse. ‘What do those yellow flashes on the screen mean? The Dead Men don’t seem to know.”

“No one knows. If the Dead Men do not know, is it not foolish to think I would know? You are very foolish sometimes,” he complained. And in the very nick of time, just as Klara was reaching the boiling point, the thin voice of the female Dead Man came again:

“Setting twenty-three, eighty-four, ninety-seven, eight, fourteen.”

‘What?” said Klara, startled.

“Setting twenty-three-“ The voice repeated the numbers. “What’s that?” Klara asked, and Wan took it upon himself to answer. His position had not changed, but the expression on his face was different less hostile. More strained. More fearful.

“It is a chart setting, to be sure,” he said.

“Showing what?”

He looked away. “Set it and find out,” he said.

It was difficult for Klara to operate the knurled wheels, for in all her previous experience such ~n act was tantamount to suicide: the chart-displaying function had not been learned, and a change in the settings almost invariably meant an unpredictable, and usually fatal, change in course. But all that happened was that the images on the screen flickered and whirled, and steadied to show-what? A star? Or a black hole? Whatever it was, it was bright cadmium yellow on the screen, and around it flickered no fewer than five of the upside-down question marks. “What is it?” she demanded.

Wan turned slowly to stare at it. “It is very big,” he said, “and very far away. And it is where we are going now.” All that combativeness was gone from his face now. Klara almost wished it were back, for what had replaced it was naked, unrelieved fear.

And meanwhile- Meanwhile, the task of Captain and his Heechee crew was nearing the end of its first phase, though it brought no joy to any of them. Captain was still grieving for Twice. Her slim, sallow, shiny body, emptied of personality, had been disposed of. At home it would have gone to join the other refuse in the settling tanks, for the Heechee were not sentimental about cadavers. On shipboard there were no settling tanks, so it had been jettisoned into space. The part of Twice that remained was in store with the rest of the ancestral minds, and as Captain roamed about his new and unfamiliar ship he touched the pouch where she was stored from time to time without knowing that he did it.

It was not just the personal loss. Twice was their drone controller, and the cleanup job could not be done properly without her. Mongrel was doing her best, but she was not primarily an operator of enslaved equipment. Captain, standing nervously over her, was not helping much. “Don’t kill your thrust yet, that’s no stable orbit!” he hissed, and, “I hope those people don’t get motion sickness, the way you’re jerking them around.” Mongrel pulsed her jaw muscles but did not respond. She knew why Captain was so tense and withdrawn.

But at last he was satisfied and tapped Mongrel on the shoulder to signify that she could discharge cargo. The great bubble lurched and revolved. A line of dark appeared from pole to pole, and it opened like a flower. Mongrel, hissing with satisfaction at last, disengaged the crumpled sailship and allowed it to slide free.

“They got a rough ride,” commented the communications officer, coming over to stand beside his captain.

Captain twitched his abdomen, in the Heechee equivalent of a shrug.

The sailship was quite clear of the opened sphere now, and Mongrel began to close the great hemisphere. “What about your own task, Shoe? Are the human beings still chattering?”

“More than ever, I’m afraid.”

“Massed minds! Have you made any progress in translating what they’re yelling about?”

“The minds are working on it.” Captain nodded gloomily and reached for the eight-sided medallion clipped to the pouch between his legs. He stopped himself barely in time. The satisfaction he might gain from asking the minds how they were getting along with the translation would not justify the pain of hearing Twice among them. Sooner or later he would hear her, necessarily. Not yet.

He blew air through his nostrils and addressed Mongrel. “Button it up, power it down, let it float there. We can’t do any better than that for now. Shoe! Transmit a message to them. Tell them we’re sorry we can’t fix them up any better right now but we’ll try to come back. White-Noise!

Plot all vessels in space for me.”

The navigator nodded, turned to his instruments, and in a moment the screen filled with a whirling mass of yellow-tailed comets. The color of the nucleus indicated distance, the length of the tail velocity. “Which one is the fool with the corkscrew?” Captain demanded, and the screen contracted its field to show one particular comet. Captain hissed in astonishment. That particular ship, last time he looked, had been safely moored in its home system. Now it was traveling at very high velocity indeed, and had left its home far behind. “Where is he going?” he demanded.

White-Noise twitched his corded face muscles. “It’ll take a minute, Captain.”

“Well, do it!”

Under other circumstances, White-Noise might have taken offense at Captain’s tone. Heechee did not talk uncivilly to each other. The circumstances, however, were not to be ignored. The fact that these upstart humans were in possession of black-hole-piercing equipment was terribly frightening in itself. The knowledge that they were filling the air with their loud, foolish communications was worse. Who knew what they would do next? And the death of a shipmate was the final straw, making this trip just about the worst since those long-ago days, before White-Noise had been born, when they learned of the existence of the others

“It doesn’t make sense,” White-Noise complained. “There’s nothing along their course that I can see.”

Captain scowled at the cryptic graphics on the screen. Reading them was a task for a specialist~. but Captain had to have a smattering of everyone’s skills and he could see that along the plotted geodesic there was nothing in reasonable range. “What about that globular cluster?” he demanded.

“I don’t think so, Captain. It’s not directly in line of flight, and there’s nothing there. Nothing at all, really, all the way to the edge of the Galaxy.”

“Minds!” said a voice from behind them. Captain turned. The black-hole piercer, Burst, was standing there, and all his muscles were rippling madly. The man’s fear communicated itself to Captain even before Burst said tightly:

“Extend the geodesic.” White-Noise looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Extend it! Outside the Galaxy!”

The navigator started to object, then caught his meaning. His own muscles were twitching as he obeyed. The screen flickered. The fuzzed yellow line extended itself. It passed through regions where there was nothing else on the screen at all, undiluted black space, empty.

Not quite empty.

A deep-blue object emerged from the darkness of the screen, paling and yellowing. It was quintuply flagged. There was a hiss from every member of the crew as it steadied, and stopped, and the fuzzy yellow geodesic reached out to touch it.

The Heechee looked at each other, and not one of them had a word to say. The one ship that could do the greatest damage one could imagine was on its way to the place where the damage was waiting to be done.

18 In the High Pentagon

 

The High Pentagon isn’t exactly a satellite in geostationary orbit. It’s five satellites in geostationary orbit. The orbits are not precisely identical, so all five of these armored, pulse-hardened chunks of metal waltz around each other. First Alpha’s on the outside and Delta’s nearest the Earth, then they swing awhile and it’s Epsilon that’s facing out and maybe Gamma that’s inboard, swing your partners, do-si-do, and so on. Why, one might ask, did they do it that way instead of just building one big one? Well, one is answered, five satellites are five times as hard to hit as one satellite. Also, I personally think, because both the Soviet Orbit Tyuratam and the Peep-China command post are single structures. Naturally the U. S. of A. wanted to show that they could do the job better. Or at least different. It all dated from the time of the wars. At one time, they said, it had been the very latest in defense. Its huge nuke-fueled lasers were supposed to be able to zap any enemy missile from fifty thousand miles away. Probably they indeed could-when they were built-and for maybe three months after that, until the other fellows began using the same pulse-hardening and radar-decoy tricks and everybody was back to Go. Unfortunately they all “went,” but that’s a whole other story.

So we never saw four-fifths of the Pentagon, except on our screens. The hunk they vectored us in on was the one that held crew quarters, administration-and the brig. That was Gamma, sixty thousand tons of metal and meat, about the size of the Great Pyramid and pretty much the same shape, and we found out right away that no matter how open-handed General Manzbergen had been back on Earth, here in orbit we were about as welcome as a cold sore. For one thing, they kept us waiting for permission to unseal. “Suppose they must have been hard-hit in the minute madness,” Essie speculated, scowling at the viewscreen, which showed nothing but the metal flank of Gamma.

“That’s no excuse,” I said, and Albert chipped in his two cents’ worth:

“They were not hit so hard but that they were ready to hit much harder, I’m afraid. I have seen too much war; I do not like such things.” He was fingering his Two Percent button and acting, for a hologram, rather nervous. What he said was true enough. A couple weeks earlier, when the terrorists had zapped everybody from space with their TPT, the whole station had gone crazy for a minute. Literally one minute; it was no more than that. And a good thing it was no longer, because in that one minute eight of the eleven duty stations that had to be manned in order to aim a proton beam at terrestrial cities were in fact manned. And raring to go.

That wasn’t what was troubling Essie. “Albert,” she said, “do not play games that make me nervous. You have not in fact seen any war, ever. You are only a program.”

He bowed. “As you say, Mrs. Broadhead. Please? I have just received permission for us to unseal and you may enter the satellite.”

So we entered, with Essie looking thoughtfully over her shoulder at the program we left behind. The ensign waiting for us did not seem enthusiastic. He ran his thumb over the ship’s data chip as though he were trying to make sure the magnetic ink didn’t come off. “Yeah,” he said, “we got a signal about you. Only thing, I’m not sure if the brigadier can see you now, sir.”

“It was not a brigadier we wished to see,” Essie explained sweetly, “simply a Mrs. Dolly Walthers, whom you are holding here.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. But Brigadier Cassata has to sign your pass, and right now we’re all pretty busy.” He excused himself to whisper into a phone, then looked happier. “If you’ll just come with me, sir and ma’am,” he said, and conducted us out of the port at last.

You lose the habit of maneuvering in low-G or zero-G if you don’t practice it, and I was long out of practice. Also I was rubbernecking. All this was new to my experience. Gateway is an asteroid, tunneled out by the Heechee long ago and every interior surface lined by them with their favorite blue-glowing metal. The Food Factory, Heechee Heaven, and all of the other large structures I had visited in space were also Heechee construction. It was confusing for me to be for the first time in a very large human-made space artifact. It seemed more alien than anything Heechee. No familiar blue glow, just painted steel. No spindle-shaped chamber at the core. No prospectors looking sick-scared or triumphant, no museum collections of bits and pieces of Heechee technology found here and there around the Galaxy. What there was plenty of was military personnel in skintights and, for some reason, crash helmets. The curiousest thing of all was that although every one of them wore a weapons holster, all the holsters were empty.

I slowed down to point this out to Essie. “Looks like they don’t trust their own people,” I commented.

She shook me by the collar and pointed ahead, where the ensign was waiting. “Do not talk against hosts, Robin, not until are behind their backs, anyway. Here. This must be place.”

Not a minute too soon; I was beginning to run out of breath with the exertion of puffing myself along a zero-G corridor. “Right inside, sir and ma’am,” said the ensign hospitably, and of course we did as he said.

But what was inside the door was only a bare room with a couple of sit-down lashings around the walls, and nothing else. “Where’s the brigadier?” I demanded.

“Why, sir, I told you we’re all pretty busy right now. He’ll see you soon’s he can.” And, with a shark’s smile, he closed the door on us; and the interesting thing about that door, we both perceived at once, was that there was no knob on the inside surface.

Like everybody, I have had fantasies of being arrested. You’re busy with your life, herding fish or balancing somebody’s books or writing the great new symphony, and all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door. “Come along without resistance,” they say, and snap the cuffs on and read you your rights, and the next thing you know you’re in a place like this. Essie shivered. She must have had the same fantasies, though if ever there was a blameless life it was hers. “Is silly,” she said, more to herself than to me. “What a pity there is no bed here. Could put the time to use.”

I patted her hand. I knew she was trying to cheer me up. “They said they were busy,” I reminded her.

So we waited.

And half an hour later, without warning, I felt Essie stiffen under the hand I had on her shoulder, and the expression on her face was suddenly raging and mad; and I felt a quick, hurting, furious jolt to my own mind- And then it was gone, and we looked at each other. It had only lasted a few seconds. Long enough to tell us just what it was they had been busy about, and why they had carried no weapons in their holsters.

The terrorists had struck again-but only a glancing blow.

When at last the ensign came back for us he was gleeful. I do not mean that he was friendly. He still didn’t like civilians. He was happy enough to have a big smile on his face and hostile enough not to tell us why. It had been a long time. He ~’didn’t apologize, just conducted us to the commandant’s office, grinning all the way. And when we got there, pastel-painted steel walls with its West Point holoscape on the wall and its sterling silver smoke eater trying vainly to keep up with his cigar, Brigadier Cassata was smiling, too.

There were not very many good explanations possible for all this secret joffity, so I took a long leap in the dark and landed on one of them. “Congratulations, Brigadier,” I said politely, “on capturing the terrorists.”

The smile flickered, but came back. Cassata was a small man, and pudgier than the military medics must have preferred; his thighs bulged out at the hems of his olive-drab shorts as he sat on the edge of his desk to greet us. “As I understand it, Mr. Broadhead,” he said, “your purpose here is to interview Mrs. Dolly Walthers. You may certainly do that, considering the instructions I have received, but I can’t answer your questions about security matters.”

“I didn’t ask any,” I pointed out. Then, as I felt Essie’s why-you-antagonize-this-creep? glare burning the back of my neck, I added, “Anyway, it’s very kind of you to let us do it.”

He nodded, obviously agreeing that he was very kind. “I’d like to ask you a question, though. Would you mind telling me why you want to see her?”

Essie’s glare was still burning, which kept me from telling him that I did mind. “Not at all,” I lied. “Mrs. Walthers spent some time with a very good friend of mine, whom I am anxious to see. We’re hoping she can tell us how to get in touch with, uh, with my friend.”

It was not a lot of use skipping the gender-revealing pronoun. They had surely interrogated the hell out of poor Dolly Walthers and knew that there were only two people I could mean, and of the two it was not at all likely that I would call Wan a friend. He looked at me in a puzzled way, then at Essie, then said, “Walthers is certainly a popular young lady. I won’t keep you any longer.” And he turned us over to the ensign for the conducted tour.

As a tour guide, the ensign was a flat failure. He didn’t answer questions; he didn’t volunteer information. There was a lot to be curious about, too, because the Pentagon was showing signs of recent trouble. Not physical damage, so much, but when the station had gone crazy for the earlier minute of madness the brig was damaged. Its locking program had been crashed by the duty guards. Fortunately they had wrecked it in the open position; otherwise, there would have been some sorry skeletons starving to death in the cells.

The way I found out about it was by passing through a tier of cells and observing that they were all open, with armed MPs squatting boredly in the corridors to make sure the inmates stayed inside. The ensign paused to talk briefly to the guard officer and, while we waited, Essie whispered:

“If didn’t catch terrorists, what would brigadier be nice to you for?”

“Good question,” I answered. “Here’s one back. What did he mean about her being a very popular young lady?”

The ensign was scandalized by our talking in ranks. He cut short the chat with the MP lieutenant and hustled us along to a cell like any other cell, door standing open. He pointed inside. “There’s your prisoner,” he said. “You can talk to her all you like, but she doesn’t know anything much.”

“I realize that,” I said, “because if she did, you surely wouldn’t let us see her at all, would you?” I got the hot flash of another of Essie’s glares for that. She was right, too. If I hadn’t annoyed him, the ensign might have had the common decency to move back a few steps so that we could talk to Dolly Walthers in private, instead of posting himself firmly at the open door.

Or might not. The latter theory is the one that got my vote.

Dolly Walthers was a child-sized woman with a childish, high-pitched voice and bad teeth. She was not at her best. She was scared, fatigued, angry, and sullen.

And I was not all that much better. I was wholly, disconcertingly aware that this young woman before me had just spent a couple of weeks in the company of the love of my life-or one of the loves of my life-in the top two, anyway. I say this lightly enough. It wasn’t a light thing. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to say.

“Say hello, Robin,” Essie instructed.

“Miz Walthers,” I said obediently, “hello. I’m Robin Broadhead.”

She had manners left. She put out her hand like a good child. “I know who you are, Mr. Broadhead, even not counting that I met your wife the other day.” We shook hands politely and she flashed a hint of a sad smile.

It wasn’t until some time later, when I saw her Robinette Broadhead puppet that I knew what she had been smiling at. But she looked puzzled, too. “I thought they said there were four people who wanted to see me,” she said, peering past the stolid ensign in search of the others.

“Is just the two of us,” said Essie, and waited for me to speak.

But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to ask. If it had been just Essie there, perhaps I could have managed to tell Dolly Walthers what Klara had meant to me and ask for her help-any kind of help. Or if it had been just the ensign, I could have ignored him like any other piece of furniture. Or I think I could-but they were both there, and I stood tongue-tied while Dolly Walthers gazed at me curiously, and Essie expectantly, and even the ensign turned to stare.

Essie sighed, an exasperated and compassionate sound, and made her decision. She took charge. She turned to Dolly Walthers. “Dolly,” she said briskly, “must excuse my husband. Is quite traumatic for him, for reasons too complex to explain just now. Must excuse me also, please, for allowing MPs to take you away; I also have some trauma for related reasons. Important thing is what we do now. That will be as follows:

First we secure your release from this place. Second we invite your company and help in voyage to locate Wan and Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You agree?”

It was all happening too fast for Dolly Walthers, too. “Well,” she said,

“I-“

“Good,” said Essie, nodding. “We go to arrange this. You, Ensign! Take us back to our ship, True Love, at once, please.”

The ensign opened his mouth, scandalized, but I got in ahead of him.

“Essie, shouldn’t we see the brigadier about that?”

She squeezed my hand and gazed at me. The gaze was compassionate. The squeeze was a shut-silly-mouth-Robin! warning that nearly broke my knuckles. “Poor lamb,” she said apologetically to the officer, “has just had major surgery. Is confused. To ship for his medicine, and quickly!”

When my wife Essie is determined to do something, the way to get along with her is to let her do it. What she had in mind I did not know, but what I should do about it was very clear. I assumed the demeanor of an elderly man dazed by recent surgery, and let her guide me in the wake of the ensign down the corridors of the Pentagon.

We didn’t move very fast, because the corridors of the Pentagon were pretty busy. The ensign halted us at an intersection while a party of prisoners marched past. For some reason they were clearing out an entire block of cells. Essie nudged me and pointed to the monitors on the wall.

One set of them were no more than signposts, Commissary Z Enlisted Personnel Latrines Docking V, and so on. But the other- The other showed the docking area, and there was something big coming in. Great, hulking, human-built; you could tell it was Earth-built rather than Heechee at the first glance. It wasn’t just the lines, or the fact that it was constructed of gray steel rather than Heechee-metal blue. The proof lay in the mean-looking projectile weapons that poked their snouts out of its smooth exterior.

The Pentagon, I knew, had lost six of those ships in a row, trying to adapt the Heechee faster-than-light drive to human ships. I couldn’t complain about that; it was from their mistakes that the design for the True Love had benefited. But the weapons were not pleasant to see. You never saw one on a Heechee vessel.

“Come on,” snapped the ensign, glaring at us. “You’re not supposed to be here. Let’s move it.” He started along a relatively empty corridor, but Essie slowed him down.

“Is faster this way,” she said, pointing to the Docking sign.

“Off limits!” he snapped.

“Not for good friend of Pentagon who is unwell,” she replied, and tugged at my arm, and we headed for the densest, noisiest knots of people. There are secrets within secrets in Essie, but this one clarified itself in a moment. The commotion had been the captured terrorists being brought in from the cruiser, and Essie had just wanted to get a look at them.

The cruiser had intercepted their stolen ship just as it was coming out of FTL. They shot it up. Apparently there had been eight terrorists on board-eight, in a Heechee ship that five persons crowded! Three of them had survived to become prisoners. One was comatose. One was missing a leg, but conscious. The third one was mad.

It was the mad one that was attracting all the attention. She was a young black girl-from Sierra Leone, they said-and she was screaming incessantly. She wore a straitjacket. By the look of it she had been kept in it for a very long time, for the fabric was stained and stinking, her hair was matted, her face was cadaverous. Somebody was calling my name, but I pressed forward along with Essie to get a better look. “Is Russian she is saying,” said Essie, her brows furrowing, “but is not very good. Georgia accent. Very strong. Says she hates us.”

“I could have figured that out,” I said. I had seen enough. When the ensign got through the crowd, yelling furious orders for people to get out of the way, I let him tug me back, and then I heard my name called again.

So it wasn’t the ensign? In fact, it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. It came from the knot of prisoners being moved out of their cells, and I saw who it was. The Chinese girl. Janie something. “Good God,” I said to the ensign, “what have you arrested her for?”

He rasped, “That is a military matter and none of your business, Broadhead. Come on! You don’t belong here!”

There was no point in arguing with a man who had made up his mind. I didn’t ask him again. I just walked over to the line and asked Janie. The other prisoners were all female, all military personnel, no doubt in for overstaying a furlough or punching somebody like the ensign in the mouth-all good people, I was sure. They were quiet, listening. “Audee wanted to come up here because they had his wife, “she said, with a look on her face as though she were saying “his case of tertiary syphilis.” “So we took a shuttle up, and as soon as we got here they stuck us in. the brig.”

“Now, Broadhead,” the ensign shouted, “that’s the last straw. You come on out of there or you’re under arrest yourself!” And his hand was on the holster that once more contained a sidearm. Essie sailed by, smiling politely.

“Is now no more need for concern, Ensign,” she said, “for there is True Love waiting for us. So we are out of hair now. Remains only to fetch brigadier here to settle remaining questions.”

The ensign goggled. “Ma’am,” he stuttered, “ma’am, you can’t get the brigadier here!”

“Of course can! Husband requires medical treatment, therefore must be here to receive. Brigadier Cassata is courteous man, right? West Point? Many courses in deportment, courtesy, covering coughs and sneezes?

And also please tell brigadier is excellent bourbon here which poor sick husband requires assistance to dispose of.”

The ensign stumbled away hopelessly. Essie looked at me and I looked at Essie. “Now what?” I asked.

She smiled and patted my head. “First I instruct Albert about bourbon and other things,” she said, turning to deliver a couple of quick sentences in Russian, “and then we wait for brigadier to show up.”

 

It didn’t take long for the brigadier to arrive, but by the time he had gotten there I had almost forgotten him. Essie was engaged in a lively chat with the guard the ensign had left, and I was thinking. What I was thinking about mostly, for a change, was not Klara but the mad African woman and her almost as mad associates. They scared me. Terrorists scared me. In the old days there was a PLO and an IRA and Puerto Rican nationalists and Serbian secessionists and German and Italian and American rich kids asserting their contempt for their daddies-oh, lots of terrorists, all sizes, all kinds-but they were all separate. The fact that they had got together scared me. The poor and the furious had learned to join their rages and resources, and there was no question at all that they could make the world listen. Capturing one ship would not stop them; it would only make their efforts bearable for a while-or almost bearable. But to solve their problem-to ease their rage and supply their needs- more was needed. The colonization of worlds like Peggy’s Planet was the best and maybe the only answer, but it was slow. The transport could take three thousand eight hundred poor people to a better life each month. But each month something like a quarter of a million new poor people were being born, and the fatal arithmetic was easy to do:

250,000

3,800

246,200

new poor people to deal with each month. The only hope was new and bigger transports, hundreds or thousands of them. A hundred would keep us even with the present level of misery. A thousand would cure it once and for all-but where were the thousand big ships to come from? It had taken eight months to build the True Love, and a lot more of my money than I had really intended. What would it cost to build something a thousand times as big?

The brigadier’s voice took my mind off these reflections. “It is,” he was saying, “flatly impossible! I let you see her because I was asked to. To take her away with you is out of the question!” He glowered at me as I joined them, taking Essie’s hand.

“Also,” she said, “is question of male Walthers and Chinese woman. We wish them also.”

“We do?” I asked, but the brigadier wasn’t listening to me.

“What else, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “You wouldn’t like me to turn over my section of the Pentagon? Or give you a cruiser or two?”

Essie shook her head politely. “Our ship is more comfortable, thank you.”

“Jesus!” Cassata wiped his brow and allowed Essie to lead him into the main lounge for the promised bourbon. “Well,” he said, “there’s no real charge against Walthers and Yee-xing. They had no right coming up here without clearance, but if you take them away again we can forget that one.”

“Splendid!” Essie cried. “Remains now only other Walthers!”

“I could not possibly take the responsibility,” he began, and Essie did not let him finish.

“Certainly not! One understands that, of course. So we will refer to higher authority, right? Robin! Call General Manzbergen. Do here, so will be no annoying record to possibly embarrass, all right?”

There is no use arguing with Essie when she is in such a mood, and besides, I was curious to see what she was up to. “Albert,” I called. “Do it, please.”

“Sure, Robin,” he said obligingly, voice only; and in a moment the screen lit up, and there was General Manzbergen at his desk. “Morning, Robin, Essie,” he said genially. “I see you’ve got Perry Cassata there- congratulations to all of you!”

“Thank you, Jimmy,” said Essie, looking sidewise at the brigadier, “but is not what we called about, please.”

“Oh?” He frowned. “Whatever it is, do it fast, all right? I’ve got a top meeting coming up in ninety seconds.”

“Take less than that, General dear. Merely please instruct Brigadier Cassata to turn over Dolly Walthers to us.”

Manzbergen looked puzzled. “For what?”

“So can use her to locate missing Wan, General dear. Has TPT, you know. Much in everyone’s interest to make him give it back.”

He grinned fondly at her. “Minute, honey,” he said, and bent to a hushphone.

The brigadier might have been rushed, but he was on his toes. “There’s a lag,” he pointed out. “Isn’t this zero-speed radio?”

“Is burst transmission,” Essie lyingly explained. “Have only small vessel here, not much power”-another lie-“so must conserve communications energy-ah, here is general again!”

The general pointed toward Cassata. “It’s authorized,” he barked. “They’re trustworthy, we owe them a favor-and they might be able to save us a pack of future trouble. Give them whoever they want, on my authority. Now, for God’s sake, let me get to my meeting-and don’t call me again unless it’s World War Four!”

So the brigadier went away, shaking his head, and pretty soon the MPs brought Janie Yee-xing to us, and a minute later Audee Walthers, and quite a while after that Dolly Walthers. “Nice to see you all again,” said Essie, welcoming them aboard. “Am sure you have much to talk over among you, but first let us get away from this wicked place. Albert! Move it, please?”

“Right, Mrs. Broadhead,” sang Albert’s voice. He didn’t bother with materializing in the pilot seat; he simply walked in a door and leaned against the lintel, smiling at the company.

“Will introduce later,” said Essie. “This is good friend who is computer program. Albert? Are now safely away from Pentagon?”

He nodded, twinkling. Then before my eyes he turned from elderly man in pipe and baggy sweater to the leaner, taller, uniformed, and medaled Chief of Staff General James P. Manzbergen. “Right you are, honey,” he cried. “Now let’s get our asses into FTL before they find out we foxed them!”  ...

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.

20 Unwanted Encounter

 

The phone was ringing in Wan’s ship. Well, it was not really a phone, and it certainly wasn’t ringing; but there was the signal to show that someone was directing a message to the ship on the FTL radio. “Off!” shouted Wan, waking up indignantly from his sleep. “I will speak to no one!” And then, somewhat more awake, he looked not only angry but puzzled. “It has been turned off,” he said, staring at the FTL radio, and the look on his face went the rest of the way across the spectrum to fear.

What makes Wan less than loathsome to me, I think, is that ulcer of fear that ate away at him always. Heaven knows he was a brute. He was surly; he was a thief he cared for nothing but himself. But that only means that he was what we all once were, but we are socialized out of it by parents and playmates and school and police. No one had ever socialized Wan, and so he was still a child. “I will speak to no one!” he shouted, and woke Klara.

I can see Klara as she was then, since now I can see so much that was hidden. She was tired, she was irritable, and she had had all of Wan any person could be expected to stand. “You might as well answer it,” she said, and Wan glared at her as though she were insane.

“Answer? Of course I shall not answer! It is only at most some interfering bureaucrat to complain that I have not followed the exact proper procedures-“

“To complain that you stole the ship,” she corrected mildly, and crossed to the FFL radio. “How do you answer it?” she asked.

“Do not be foolish!” he howled. “Wait! Stop! What are you doing?”

“Is it this lever?” she asked, and his yell was answer enough. He leaped across the tiny cabin, but she was larger than he and stronger. She fended him off. The signal chirp stopped; the golden light went off; and Wan, suddenly relaxing, laughed out loud.

“Ho, what a fool you are! There is no one there,” he cried.

But he was wrong. There was a hissing sound for a moment, then recognizable words-almost recognizable, at least. A shrill and queerly stressed voice said:

“I fill to you no harrum.”

For Klara to understand what had been said took considerable thought, and then when she had understood it, it did not achieve its desired effect. Was it what it sounded like? Some stranger, with a terrible hissing speech impediment, trying to say “I will do you no harm”? And why would he say that? To be reassured that you are not in danger at a time when you had no reason to think you were is not reassuring.

Wan was scowling. “What is it?” he cried sharply, beginning to sweat. “Who is there? What do you want?”

There was no answer. The reason there was no answer was that Captain had used up his entire vocabulary and was busy rehearsing his next speech; to Wan and Klara, however, the silence had more meaning than the words. “The screen!” Wan cried. “Foolish woman, use the screen, find out what this is!”

It took time for Klara to work the controls; the use of the Heechee vision screen was a skill she had only begun to acquire on this voyage, since no one in her time had known how to operate it. It clarified to display a ship, a big one. The biggest Klara bad ever seen, far larger than any of the Fives that had operated out of Gateway in her time. “What- What-What-“ whimpered Wan, and only on the fourth try managed to complete it: “What is it?”

Klara didn’t try to answer. She didn’t know. She feared, though. She feared that it was the sight every Gateway prospector had both longed for and dreaded, and when Captain finished rehearsing and delivered his next speech she was sure:

“I ... cummin ... a-bore-ud ... tchew.”

Coming aboard! For one ship to dock with another in full drive was not impossible, Klara knew; it had been done. But no Earthly pilot had had much practice in doing it.

“Don’t let him in!” shrieked Wan. “Run away! Hide! Do something!” He glared at Klara in terror, then made a lunge for the controls.

“Don’t be a fool!” she yelled, springing to intercept him. Klara was a strong woman, but he was all she could handle just then. Mad fear made him strong. He flailed out at her and sent her reeling and, weeping with fear, leaped at the controls.

In the terror of this unexpected contact, Klara nevertheless had room for another stabbing fear. Everything she had learned about Heechee ships had taught her that you never, never tried to change course once it was established. Newer skills had made it possible to do it, she knew; but she also knew that it was not to be done lightly, only after careful calculation and planning, and Wan was in no shape for either of those.

And even so-it made no difference. The great shark-shaped ship moved closer.

In spite of herself Klara watched admiringly as the pilot of the other ship matched course change and velocity increment without difficulty. It was a technically fascinating process. Wan froze at the controls, watching it, mouth open, slobbering. Then, when the other ship loomed large and disappeared below the view of the scanners, and there was a grating sound from the lander hatch, he bellowed in fear and dove for the toilet. Klara was alone as she saw the lander hatch open and fall back; and so it was Gelle-Klara Moynlin who was the first human being to stand in the presence of a Heechee.

It rose from the hatch, stood erect, and confronted her. Less tall than she. Reeking of something ammoniacal. Its eyes were round, because that is the best design for an organ that must rotate in any direction, but they were not human eyes. There was no concentric ring of pigment around a central pupil. There was no pupil, just a cross-shaped blotch of darkness in the middle of a pinkish marble that stared at her. Its pelvis was wide. Slung below the pelvis, between what would have been its thighs if its legs had been articulated in a human way, was a capsule of bright blue metal. As much as anything else, the Heechee looked like a diapered toddler with a load in its pants.

That thought penetrated through Klara’s terror and eased it-minutely-briefly-not enough. As the creature moved forward she leaped back.

As Klara moved, the Heechee moved, too. It started as the hatch cover moved again and another one of them came through. From the tension and hesitancy of its movements it seemed to Klara that it was nearly as frightened as she, and so she said, not with the expectation of being understood but because it was impossible for her to say nothing:

“Hello, there.”

The creature studied her. A forked tongue licked the shiny black wrinkles of its face. It made a strange, purring sound, as though it were thinking. Then, in something close to recognizable English, it said: “I em Heetsee. I fill to you no harrum.”

It gazed with fascination and repugnance at Klara, then chittered briskly to the other one, who began to search the vessel. They found Wan without trouble, and without trouble moved both Klara and Wan down through the hatch, through the connected landers, into the Heechee ship. Klara heard the batches scrape closed, and then a moment later felt the lurch that meant that Wan’s ship had been cast free

She was a captive of the Heechee, in a Heechee ship.

They did not harm her. If they were intending to do it, at least they were in no hurry about it. There were five of them, and they were very busy.

What they were busy at Klara could not guess, and apparently the one with the limited English vocabulary was too busy at it to take time for the laborious task of explaining. What they really wanted from Klara at that moment was for her to stay out of the way. They had no trouble communicating that to her. They unceremoniously took her by the arm, with a leathery and painful grip, and shoved her where they wanted her.

Wan gave them no trouble at all. He lay huddled in a corner with his eyes tightly closed. When he discovered that Klara was nearby he peered at her with one eye, poked her in the spine to get her attention, and whispered: “Did he really mean he wouldn’t harm us, do you think?”

She shrugged. He whimpered almost inaudibly, then relapsed into his fetal crouch. She saw with disgust that a trickle of saliva was coming out of the side of his mouth. He was the next thing to catatonic.

If there was anyone to help her, that was not Wan. She would have to face the Heechee alone-whatever it might be that they intended.

But what was happening was fascinating. So much was new to Klara! She had spent the decades of rapid accretion of Heechee technology whirling at very nearly light-speed around the core of the black hole. Her acquaintance with Heechee vessels was limited to the antiques she and I and the other prospectors had operated out of Gateway.

This was something else. It was a lot bigger than a Five. It far outshone even Wan’s private yacht in its fittings. It didn’t have one control panel; it had three-of course, Klara did not know that two of them were for purposes other than piloting the ship itself. Those two possessed instruments and operating readouts she had never seen before. Not only was it eight or ten times the cubic volume of a Five, but relatively less of the space was taken up with equipment. It was possible to move about it quite freely! It had the standard features-the worm-shaped thing that glowed during faster-than-light travel, the V-shaped seats, and so on. But it also had blue-glowing boxes that whined and peeped and flickered with lights, and a different sort of worm-shaped crystal that, Wan told her, terrified, was for digging into black holes.

Above all, it had Heechee.

Heechee! The semi-mythical, perplexing, nearly divine Heechee! No human being had ever seen one, or even a picture. And here was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with no less than five of them all about her-growling and hissing and tweeting, and smelling quite strange.

They looked strange, too. They were smaller than human beings, and their very wide pelvises gave them a gait like a walking skeleton. Their skin was plastic-smooth and mostly dark, though there were patches and curlicues of bright gold and scarlet that looked like Indian war paint. Their physiology was not merely lean. It was gaunt. There was not much flesh on those quick, strong limbs and fingers. Although their faces seemed as though they were carved out of shiny plastic, they were at least resilient enough to allow for facial expression ... though Klara could not be sure what the expressions represented.

And swinging below the crotches of every one of them, male and female alike, was a great cone-shaped thing.

At first Klara thought it was part of their bodies, but when one of them disappeared into what she assumed was some sort of toilet it fussed for a moment and removed the cone. Was it something like a knapsack? A pocketbook? An attache case, to carry papers, pencils, and a brown-bag lunch? Whatever it was, it came off when they wanted it off. And when it was on it explained one of the great puzzles of Heechee anatomy, namely how they managed to sit down on those incredibly painful V-shaped seats. It was their dependent cones that filled the V-shaped gap. The Heechee themselves perched comfortably on the top of the cones. Klara

 

For decades the Heechee “prayer fans” were a mystery. We did not know that they were actually their equivalent of books and datastores, because the greatest minds of the time (my own included) could not find a way to read them, or even to find indications that they contained anything to be read. The reason was that although scansion was simple enough, it could only take place in the presence of a background microwave radiation. The Heechee themselves had no problem with that, because their cones produced the proper radiation all the time, since they were always in some sort of contact with the datafans that contained the stored memories of their ancestors held in their cones. Human beings could be excused for not guessing that the Heechee carried data between their legs, for human anatomy would not allow such a thing. (My own excuse is less evident.)

 

shook her head, wondering-all the idle guesses and jokes on the subject in Gateway, why had no one ever thought of that?

She felt Wan’s hot breath on the back of her neck. “What are they doing?” he demanded.

She had almost forgotten he was there. She had almost forgotten even to be afraid, so fascinated was she by what she saw. That was not prudent. Who could tell what these monsters would do with their human captives?

For that matter, who could guess what they were doing now? They were all buzzing and chirping in an agitated way, the four larger ones clustered around the smaller fifth, the one with blue and yellow markings on its-no, definitely, on her-upper arms. All five of them were paying no attention to the humans just now. They were concentrating on one of the display panels, which was showing a star chart that Klara thought vaguely familiar. A group of stars, and around them a cluster of check marks-hadn’t Wan displayed such a pattern on his own screen?

“I’m hungry,” Wan growled sullenly in her ear.

“Hungry!” Klara pulled sharply away from him, astonishment as much as revulsion. Hungry! She was nearly sick to her stomach with fear and worry-and, she realized, a queer odor, half ammonia and half rotting stump, that seemed to come from the Heechee themselves. Besides, she had to go to the bathroom ... and this other monster could think of nothing but that he was hungry! “Please shut up,” she said over her shoulder, and touched off Wan’s always available fury.

“What? Me shut up?” he demanded. “No, you shut up, foolish woman!” He almost stood up to tower over her, but got no farther than a crouch, quickly groveling back to the floor, for one of the Heechee looked up and came toward them.

It stood over them for a moment, its wide, narrow-lipped mouth working as it rehearsed what it was about to say.

“Be fair,” it pronounced distinctly, and waved a skinny arm toward the viewscreen.

Klara swallowed laughter nervously trying to bubble out of her throat. Be fair! To whom? For what?

“Be fair,” it said again, “for dese are sass sass sins.”

So there was Klara, my truest love that was. She had suffered in a matter of weeks the terror of the black hole, the shock of losing decades of the world’s life, the misery of Wan, the intolerable trauma of being taken by the Heechee. And meanwhile- And meanwhile, I had problems of my own. I had not yet been vastened and did not know where she was; I did not hear the warning to beware of the Assassins; I didn’t then know that the Assassins existed. I couldn’t reach out to comfort her in her fear-not just because I didn’t know, but because I was full of fears of my own. And the worst of them did not involve Klara or the Heechee, or even my aberrant program Albert Einstein; it was in my own belly.