“You mean the Heechee killed them and poured their brains into a bottle?”
“Certainly not, Robin! First, I would hazard the opinion that the prospectors died naturally rather than being killed. That would degrade the chemistry of brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the information. And certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?”
I groaned. “Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all this quicker from straight visual synoptics.”
“Sure thing you could, Robin, but not,” he twinkled, “perhaps, as entertainingly. At any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen to have equipment to read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It seems very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same as the chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general considerations, e.g., what they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their chemistry was not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules. It seems most unlikely that a compound which represents, e.g., the ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the same in their chemistry as in ours.” He started to relight his pipe, then caught my eye and added hurriedly, “So I conclude, Robin, that these machines were designed not for Heechee brains.”
He startled me. “For humans, then? But why? How? How did they know? When—”
“Please, Robin. At your instructions, your wife has programmed me to make large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that I say. But,” he added, nodding sagely, “I have this opinion, yes.”
“Jesus,” I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I tucked it away and went on to the next worry. “What about the Old Ones? Are they human, do you think?”
He tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. “I would say not,” he said at last.
I didn’t ask him what the alternative was. I didn’t want to hear it.
When Albert had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put my legal program on. I couldn’t talk to him right away, though, because right then my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank, sliced into my chicken steak and said, “Go ahead, Morton, what’s the bad news?”
He said apologetically, “You know that Bover suit?”
“What Bover suit?”
“Trish Bover’s husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the fever and—Well. He is wrong in the law, Robin, but he denied our request for time to set a hearing date and entered summary judgment against.”
I stopped chewing. “Can he do that?” I roared through my mouthful of prime rare chicken.
“Well, yes, or at least he did it. But we’ll get him on appeal, only that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue, and he pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there’s some question whether she actually completed the mission, do you see? Meanwhile—”
Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to draw out a discussion so. “Meanwhile what, Morton?”
“Well, since the recent, ah, episode, there seems to be another complication. Gateway Corp wants to go slow until they figure out just where they are with this fever business, so they’ve accepted service of an injunction. Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with exploitation of the factory.”
I blew up. “Shit, Mort! You mean we can’t use it after we bring it all the way in from orbit?”
“I’m afraid I mean more than that,” he apologized. “You’re enjoined to stop moving it. You’re enjoined to refrain from interfering with its normal activities in any way, pending a declarative judgment. That’s Bover’s action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food by moving it to a new comet cluster you’re endangering his interest. Now, we can get that vacated, I’m sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some sort of action to stop doing everything until they get a handle on the fever.”
“Oh, God.” I put down my fork. I wasn’t hungry any more. “The only good thing,” I said, “is that’s an order they can’t enforce.”
“Because it will take so long to get a message to the Herter-Hall party, yes, Robin,” he nodded. “On the—”
He disappeared, zit. He slid diagonally away out of the tank, and Harriet appeared. She looked terrible. I have good programs for my computer help. But they don’t always bring good news. “Robin!” she cried. “There’s a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona—it’s your wife!”
“Essie? Essie? Is she sick?”
“Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in a car crash. They’ve got her on life support, but—There’s no prognosis, Robin. She isn’t responding.”
I didn’t use my priorities. I didn’t want to take the time. I went straight to the Washington office of the Gateway Corp, who went to the Secretary of Defense, who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane leaving Bolling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
The flight was three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the way. There were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn’t even want them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me—without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever—that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn’t used to happiness, hadn’t formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the “roof,” but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms, labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor’s office—he wouldn’t be using it for some time—kicked out the insurance adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from our medical program. Essie’s pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the machines for a while.
Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was simply swamped.
I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was No Visitors, and no visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door, forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor’s desk set until I found a closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it on. I couldn’t see how well Essie was doing. I couldn’t even tell for sure which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time to time to pass on little news items. She didn’t bother with messages of sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and Harriet gave callers an
image and a worried smile and a thank you without bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that kind of programming—
Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers, and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men’s room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of Mesa General until, at last, a candy-striper poked her head in the door and said, “Señor Broad’ead? Por favor.” The cop was still at the door of Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not conscious.
Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn’t enough time for anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to have one.
In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short, pot-bellied old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. “Oh, yes, Mr. Blackhead,” he said. “Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a short time toward evening.”
I didn’t bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top questions on the list: “Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is there anything she needs?—I mean anything.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too long. “Pain we can take care of, and she’s already on Full Medical. I understand you are an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing for you to do. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe there’ll be something she’ll need. Today, no. Her whole left side was crushed when the bus folded in on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six or seven hours, until somebody got to her.”
I didn’t know I had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A little sympathy came through the contact lenses as he peered up at me. “That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life. Being squeezed was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have bled to death.” He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. “Um. She’s going to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two ribs. Eight, ten, fourteen—maybe twenty square inches of new skin, and there’s considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we’ll want a transplant.”
“If there’s anything at all—”
“Nothing at all, Mr. Blackett,” he said, folding up the paper. “Nothing now. Go away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be able to talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you’re taking up.”
Harriet had already arranged for the hotel to move Essie’s things out of her room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had delivered toilet stuff and a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up there. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t enjoy seeing the cheerful tipplers in the lobby bar, or the streets full of people who had got safely through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing it had been for them.
I made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much, but not in staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and played some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But when they went from Stravinsky to Carl Orff, that lusty, horny Catullus poetry made me think about the last time I had played it with my lusty, horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.
“Turn it off,” I snapped and ever-vigilant Harriet stopped it in midshriek.
“Do you want to receive messages, Robin?” she inquired from the same audio speaker.
I dried myself carefully, and then said: “In a minute. I might as well.” Dried, brushed, in clean clothes, I sat down in front of the hotel’s comm system. They weren’t quite nice enough to give their guests full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a flat-plate display. She reassured me about Essie. She was continuously monitoring, and everything was going well enough—not far enough, of course. But not badly. Essie’s own real flesh-and-blood doctor was in the picture, and Harriet gave me a taped message from her. It translated to don’t worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don’t worry quite as much as you think you ought to.
Harriet had a batch of action messages for me to deal with. I authorized another half-million dollars for fire-fighting in the food mines, instructed Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for our man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more liquidity as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most interesting programs report in, finishing with Albert’s latest synoptic from the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity and efficiency. I had accepted the fact that Essie’s chances of survival were measurably improving all the time, so I didn’t need to spare any energy for grief. And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love’s lovely body, and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not want to explore.
There was a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery, in the course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I didn’t much like having there. That’s okay. Once you take them out and look at them—well, they’re pretty bad, but at least they’re outside, now, not still inside and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program, Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.
He was right, far as he went—one of the things I found unlikeable about Sigfrid was that he was infuriatingly, reliably right, all too much of the time. What he didn’t say was that you never got finished moving your bowels. I kept coming up with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.
I turned Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent, and watched some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink out of the suite’s adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn’t watching the PV, and I wasn’t enjoying the drink. What I was doing was encountering another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My dearest beloved wife was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care, and I was thinking about somebody else.
I turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped onto the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. “What can I do for you, Robin?” he beamed.
“I want you to talk to me about black holes,” I said.
“Sure thing, Robin. But we’ve been over this a good many times, you know—”
“Fuck off, Albert! Just do it. And I don’t mean in mathematics, I just want you to explain them as simply as you can.” One of these days I would have to get Essie to rewrite Albert’s program a little less idiosyncratically.
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He wrinkled his furry eyebrows. “Ah-ha,” he said. “Uh-huh. Well, let’s see.”
“Is that a hard question for you?” I asked, more surprised than sarcastic.
“Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start. Well, let’s start with light. You know that light is made up of particles called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure—”
“Not that far back, Albert, please.”
“All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of light pressure. Take a big star—a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiat
ion pressure—call it the ‘light pressure’—from the nuclear reaction of hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen. Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that part, Robin?”
“I think so. Get on with it.”
“Well,” he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs—I can’t help wondering if he enjoys it!—“that’s one of the ways black holes get started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now go on to the next part: escape velocity.”
“I know what escape velocity is.”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he nodded, “an old Gateway prospector like you. Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough—maybe forty or fifty kilometers an hour—it wouldn’t come back. It would reach escape velocity and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you’d have to throw it a lot faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster than that—better than eleven kilometers a second.
“Now,” he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light it again, “if you—” tap, tap, “if you were on the surface of some object that had a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse. Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high, say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You couldn’t throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn’t quite go that fast! So even light—” puff, puff, “can’t escape, because its velocity is ten thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can’t escape, then nothing can escape; that’s Einstein. If I may be excused the vanity.” He actually winked at me over his pipe. “So that’s a black hole. It’s black because it can’t radiate at all.”