Heechee Rendezvous Page 6

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

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

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

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

  “How long!”

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

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

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

  “I want to stop the terrorists!”

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

  “Exactly, my dear Albert.” I smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And most of its business was worrisome. There was that Mach’s Principle thing that Albert had tried and tried to explain to me that suggested somebody, maybe the Heechee, was trying to crush the universe into a ball so as to rewrite the physical laws. Incredible. Also incredibly scary, when you let yourself think about it…but millions or billions of years in the future, too, so I wouldn’t call it a really pressing worry. The terrorists and the growing armies were nearer at hand. The terrorists had hijacked a loop capsule heading for the High Pentagon. New recruits for their ranks were being generated in the Sahel, where crops had failed one more time. Meanwhile, Audee Walthers was trying to start a new life for himself without his errant wife; and meanwhile, the wife was erring with that nasty creature, Wan; and meanwhile, near the core, the Heechee Captain was beginning to think erotic thoughts about his second in command, whose friendly-name was Twice; and meanwhile, my wife, troubled about my belly, was nevertheless happily completing a deal for extending her fast-food franchise chain to Papua New Guinea and the Andaman Islands; and meanwhile—oh, meanwhile! What a lot was going on meanwhile!

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

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

  4

  Aboard the S. Ya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s in there?”

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

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

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