Achiever returned into the room, rubbing his chest muscles indecisively. “But same is only conjecture. How can ascertain same is true if is not attempted?”
“Don’t try it,” advised an amiable voice from the doorway Achiever had just left. When Stan turned he saw another of those insubstantial and uninvited visitors, this one female. She was conspicuously good-looking, too, and, in a low-cut gown with a diamond-shaped chunk cut out over her abdomen, not overdressed. “The Heechee lady has it right, hon. My name’s Sindi Gaslakhpard. You can call me just Sindi. I’m machine-stored like all the rest of us on this tub, so don’t get any ideas about jumping us when we aren’t looking. You can’t hurt us, and we’re always looking.”
She advanced into the room, giving Estrella a look of curiosity and Stan one of some admiration. “Considering you’re all natural, hon,” she told him, “you’re not so bad. Anyway, I’m here on business. Wan’s gonna be on the screens any minute now, and he sent word he wants you to watch so you won’t do anything stupid. So Horace’s activated your screens, and you better watch. Got it?” She glanced around the four of them like a kindergarten teacher checking her class for washed faces and combed hair, stopping at Estrella. The woman regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. Then, “Hon,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you, you don’t have to look that way. If you went ahead and got yourself machine-stored you could get your face fixed.” And then, pop, she was gone.
The lookplates all went on at once. Achiever hurled himself at them. If he expected to see the man Sindi had talked about he was disappointed, for each screen showed a different image. Two were displaying curious-looking spacecraft of a design Stan didn’t recognize. A third and a fourth displayed individual stars, or different views of the same star, one so brightly hot that its light was almost bluish, the other a lemony-yellow sun not unlike old Earth’s. The fifth—
But Stan never got a chance to see what was on the fifth lookplate, because all at once and all together the screens began flashing great gouts of bright green light and emitting a high-pitched scream. The visual display showed nothing but the exterior of one of those odd-looking spacecraft. The Heechee-language jabbering that went with it meant nothing to Stan or Estrella. It did to both of the Heechee in the room with them, though; they were shouting at each other at once. Stan shouted at Salt for attention. “What’s happening?”
Salt was actually wringing her long, bony hands. She had to try three times before getting an answer out: “Persons on lookplate speak of happening extremely terrible, possessing danger of terrible devastation. Here! Now! Look at lookplates!”
As she spoke the ship disappeared from all the lookplates. It was replaced by a human face, a face Stan had seen before and almost recognized even before it said its name. “I am Wan Enrique Santos-Smith,” it told them—in English! “You people have illegally taken some property which belongs to me. I am talking about the fifty-four kind of human beings, now held in captivity on what you call One Moon Planet of Pale Yellow Star Fourteen.”
“Stan?” Estrella whispered. “What’s the matter with his picture? Why does it jiggle around like that?” Stan shook his head at her; Wan was still talking.
“I was the one who discovered these people,” he said, his tone belligerent. “I want them. So what I’m going to do, I’m dispatching a spaceship to that planet to pick them up. I’m warning you, nobody better try to interfere with my crews, because if these Old Ones aren’t immediately boarded onto my ship as soon as it gets there I’m just going to have to punish you. You know what you call Planetless Very Large Very Hot White Star. We’ve got this weapon that can really mess that star up. I don’t mean like a gun or anything. I mean something so powerful that it can make that whole star blow up, and if you don’t do what I say it’ll do it. If you think I’m bluffing, you just ask your Stored Minds, because they’ve seen what we did to—What do you call it?” His face disappeared from the lookplate for a moment, then returned. “To the largest moon of Solitary Gas Giant Planet of Small Yellow Star Twenty-Two. If I give the order, the star’s going to explode. Then a whole bunch of you are going to die.”
And slowly the images faded away.
By then Estrella was clinging to Stan’s hand even more tightly than he was holding hers. “Salt?” she implored. “What’s going on?”
Salt didn’t answer. She was shrieking questions they couldn’t understand at Achiever, who didn’t answer because he was frantically working to try to restore pictures to the lookplates. When he had failed he stared at them for a moment, then made a harsh moaning noise. “Is a great peril,” he said hollowly. “Can be little or no doubt.”
Stan squeezed Estrella’s hand even harder. “Then you think all this is real?”
“I am indeed so thinking,” Achiever said gloomily. “What am I also thinking, you wish to know? I am also thinking that you and I and ship mentioned in threat are all also part of it.”
18
* * *
The Threat
I
Being chef to thousands, does take time. Some of my special meal orders had been backing up while I was visiting with Thermocline, so my first job was getting out several hundred of them. There was a ceviche of Moreton Bay bugtails for an old lady nostalgic for Australia, some dried cod with leeks and milk for a couple of former Italians, and I hadn’t filled Thermocline’s order, either. I got busy on them all.
Over the next few seconds or so these orders of my clients kept me busy. I wasn’t simply “kept” busy, either, because the demands of the Core’s rapidly increasing populations of human immigrants, along with the much smaller but very discerning number of Heechee sophisticates, grew almost exponentially.
That, of course, didn’t mean that I had forgotten what Thermocline had told me. I can’t pretend that I was actually preparing threat estimates and making contingency plans. I wish I could, but in fact I was giving the consideration of Thermocline’s information no more than ten percent of my capacity.
All the same, it was not a total surprise when a queer green flash appeared on all of my screens at once, along with the beginnings of a deep roaring sound.
I knew what that sound was. It was the beginning of what would have been a shrill, high-pitched squeal for the organics, downshifted for machine-stored persons to a basso-profundo rumble. It was, in fact, the Heechee alarm system doing its work.
There is no point in acting before you know what action is required. I went on with my work, but I took the precaution of turning a lot of the new ethnic requests over to my sous-chefs. African, for instance. There had been few Africans on the Wheel, and most of them preferred French cuisine or American hamburgers. Now we were asked for peanut lamb stew and the codfish in pureed tomato they called thu djen, along with the dessert thiaky and ginger root juice as a beverage. I had never made any of those meals before, but naturally the recipes were in my datastore. The subroutines could handle that, and if any of the fish dishes arrived filleted in spite of the fact that Africans preferred their fish on the bone, and if all the rice grains hadn’t been properly broken up before cooking, they would simply have to live with it.
The opening siren of the Heechee warning had just descended to the neighborhood of middle C—for the organics, that is; for us now a sub-audible thump-thump-thump—when abruptly all of my screens at once began showing the same picture. It was what I took to be a satellite of some kind—there was a big gas giant in the background. I had just time to wonder why this quite ordinary scene was being displayed when suddenly it changed. The satellite wasn’t a satellite anymore. It was a cloud, rapidly expanding. Why or how I could not have said, but it was clearly the total disruption of that chunk of featureless rock.
So I was not surprised when my private communicator called to me in Thermocline’s voice. “Please join with me as soon as possible for a conference. Serious events have occurred.”
II
Thermocline had changed his surround quite a lot since I had seen it
last. Most of the half-dozen or so assorted chairs and perches that now furnished it were already occupied. There was Thermocline himself, looking completely unflustered although the thump-thump was still going on. Next to him was a female Heechee I had never seen before, then a human male (of course, I’m talking about simulations in every case; no organics were present.) I hadn’t met the human male, either, but I knew who he was. His name was Sigfrid von Shrink, and he was a subset of the Robinette Broadhead shipmind who was known as Albert Einstein. Next to von Shrink was Gelle-Klara Moynlin’s shipmind, Hypatia of Alexandria. Then, as I watched, an older human woman unknown to me popped into existence and took a seat, giving a nod to Hypatia.
She was evidently the last one expected, because then Thermocline said, “I thank you all for coming. I presume that all of you know who Wan Enrique Santos-Smith is, and also that you have all heard the accelerated version of his organic-time communication—” as we certainly had, and in fact were still hearing, at low volume, the organic-time drone as a background sound in Thermocline’s surround. “He had transmitted it to the Stored Minds, in electronic-time mode, which is what was forwarded to you.”
His lookplates were still cycling their alarm colors while the continuing thud-thud of the organic-time message had dropped still more in frequency. Just then the nearest of the screens erased its alarm colors. As the murky colors on the plate paled, a human face looked out at us.
I had seen Wan only once, long ago, but there was no doubt that the face on the screen was his. Improvements had been made, however. Now that he was no longer organic his skin was less sallow, his hair less wild. But the sneer was the same.
As Wan was finishing his threats, Hypatia was on her feet. “Thermocline! What the hell is he talking about? Do you guys have some kind of weapon you didn’t tell us about?”
I will say for Thermocline that he kept his temper. He let Hypatia go on for quite a while, and he just sat there and took it. The thing that struck me as curious, though, was that Hypatia was the only person in the room reacting so violently. I had expected Sigfrid to chime in, but he didn’t move and the look on his face was not so much angry as mournful.
Which told me that the news about the weapon hadn’t surprised him at all. I tucked that fact away in my datastore, in case I ever needed to be reminded that Sigfrid von Shrink didn’t usually put all his cards on the table.
Either Hypatia wore herself out, at last, or some sign from Sigfrid discouraged her from going on. Then Sigfrid was placatory. “Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t try to assign blame at this time,” he suggested. “But let me clarify a point, Thermocline. Am I correct in believing that you and the Stored Minds regard this as a serious threat?”
Thermocline looked judicious. “We do,” he said.
“The word Wan used was ‘explode.’ He didn’t simply mean to fire some sort of bomb at the star, did he?”
“Of course not. What the device does is nullify gravity. With no gravitational attraction to hold it together, the star will fly apart… Hypatia?”
She was leaning forward, ready to speak again though not, this time, with reproachful invective. “I asked Dr. Ibarruru here just to help us understand things like this; she’s an astronomer and astrophysicist. Dr. Ibarruru? Can you tell us if such a thing could happen?”
The striking elderly woman did not hesitate. “Given a device such as Thermocline describes, certainly. The star will expand at a major fraction of the speed of light. In a very short time it will become a cloud of gas.”
Thermocline looked disgruntled. “This human person may well have studied astronomy, but what can she tell us about matters here in the Core?”
Hypatia gave him a hostile smirk. “Everything, Thermocline. Shortly after coming here she became machine-stored, and has been studying the Core stars ever since. Also—you probably should be informed of this—she is an old friend of Klara’s. They worked together in studying a certain supernova, and Klara has complete confidence in her.” She nodded as though that settled the matter, and perhaps it did.
Not for Thermocline, though. He seemed faintly put out. “I am sure this human woman is well qualified,” he said, not sounding sure at all, “but I also have asked an astronomical expert to join us here. Burnish? Do you concur?”
The other male Heechee flipped his wrists in assent. “I do, Thermocline.”
“And can you tell us what star Wan was talking about?”
“I think so. It’s probably the one called Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star. It’s what Dr. Ibarruru—” he gave a polite nod in her direction “—would call a young type-O star. We only brought one like it into the Core.”
“And is it dangerous?”
His expression answered that, but he made it explicit. “My best-case estimate is that the release of gravity on Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star would cause the loss of between ten and forty-four million lives, with another thirty to two hundred million suffering injury, property loss or severe environmental damage. It could be even worse.”
That’s when I raised my hand. Hypatia looked at me, one eyebrow lifted inquiringly. “Marcus, do you have a question?”
“I do indeed. This star’s name tells us that it has no planets. Why would decohering it harm any other system?”
Hypatia looked at the female human astronomer, who sighed. “There we get into stellar physics. You know, I am sure, that the fusion processes which light a star take place at its center. The energy produced there is in the form of photons, and they are not immediately released to space. A star’s interior is quite dense. Each photon is reflected by matter many times on its way to the surface, where it can be radiated into space. The time it takes for this journey is of the order of a million years.”
She went on talking, but I had stopped listening because her meaning was clear. A million years’ worth of energy, released in a matter of minutes, perhaps seconds.
I stopped her. “Thank you,” I said. “There is only one real other question. What we are going to do to prevent it?” I was looking at Thermocline.
He gave a serious nod of his squared-off head. “Nothing,” he said.
III
Since I am a reasonable being, I didn’t shout at him. I didn’t have to; others were already doing so, especially Sigfrid and the astronomers, all of whom were telling him he was making a mistake. Perhaps that is why I was the one he turned to. “Yes, Marc?” he said courteously. “Did you have something you wished to say?”
“Of course I do, Thermocline. It’s simple. We have to locate the spacecraft Wan’s message came from and destroy it.”
He raised his bony hand. “Please, Marc. The Stored Minds have in fact already triangulated the source of his transmission. Unfortunately there is no detectable ship at that point.”
That was surprising. “That’s impossible. At least there should be shipwakes—I know sorting them out might be difficult, because they persist for long periods, but they should give some indication.”
He was waving those long fingers at me again. “Also done, Marcus. There is no detectable shipwake that could represent a conventional spacecraft at that point.”
“Ah,” I said. When he used the word “conventional” he gave the answer. “Wan’s machine-stored, so he doesn’t require a full-sized ship. A messenger torpedo would do.”
“Exactly, Marc,” he said, all but beaming at me. “Accordingly, let me summarize. We can take no action to protect the protohumans as long as Wan’s threat is viable. We can do nothing about Wan as long as we can’t locate him, nor do we have any weapons to deal with him if we did—”
It was my turn to interrupt. “We don’t need conventional weapons. We could simply ram his torpedo.”
He gave me a reproving sigh. “But not without giving him plenty of time to carry out his threat. Which the Stored Minds have determined we cannot afford to do.”
Hypatia had been silent for a long time. Now she spoke up. “Then what are you going t
o do, Thermocline?”
This time the reproachful look went to her. “But I have answered that already, Hypatia. The Stored Minds have announced their decision. We will allow Wan to abduct the primitives. After that there is no reason to fear. As the Stored Minds have informed us, no sentient being would commit a violent crime after his demands were met. So we need do nothing.”
For most of the company, that ended the matter. Not for me. I said (but only to myself, not aloud), “Dear old friend Thermocline, you still don’t know humans very well.”
19
* * *
Captivity
I
What amazed Stan the most was how fast things happened in Achiever’s ship. Only a moment after they heard the ultimatum he felt that little quiver that, so Achiever told him, meant they were spaceborne again. Moments later the simulated female named Sindi Something-or-other popped up right in the middle of the four captives. “Hi,” she said. “I thought you’d like to know that we’re on our way to—what do you call it?—One Moon Planet of Pale Yellow Star Fourteen. It’ll be an hour or so before we get there, so you could take a nap if you wanted to. See you later.” She winked out of existence, only to reappear almost immediately. “Forgot to tell you. Until we get everybody on board, you all have to stay right here.” And when she was gone this time, she stayed gone.
Stan opened his mouth, but all that came out at first was, “Jesus.” Then he recollected himself. “What’s she talking about? Where can we get to that fast?”
Achiever gave him a moody look. “Can get most places, Stan. Recall my statement, this spacecraft come from Outside. New. Speedy. What I mean, goes like hell.” He stared at the wall for a moment, then added, “Meaning is, nobody can catch us.”