I said, “What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light.”
Albert grinned ruefully. “Got me there, Robin, but we don’t know how they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole, who knows? But we don’t have any evidence of one of them ever doing it.”
I thought that over for a moment. “Yet,” I said.
“Well, yes, Robin,” he agreed. “The problem of going faster than light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the same problem.” He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, “I guess that’s about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now.”
I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. “Albert,” I said, “tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?”
“Well, Bob, sometimes it is,” he said after a moment, “like that time. But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to ‘chat.’ If you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation, involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance to the tone of the particular chat. ’Tain’t easy, Robin.”
“You’re smarter than you look, Albert,” I said.
He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop. “Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?”
I let him go, saying, “You’re a good old machine, Albert.” I stretched out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to some other program, and I couldn’t remember when.
Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our doctor—not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M.D., who came to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in a while. “Robin,” she said, “I think Essie’s out of danger.”
“That’s—marvelous!” I said, wishing I had saved words like “marvelous” for when I really meant them, because they didn’t do justice to the way I felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I had talked to—and, of course, had pumped all of Essie’s medical history back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie instead.
“But don’t go to see her tonight, Robin,” she said. “Talk to her on the phone if you want to—I prescribe it—but don’t tire her out. By tomorrow—well, I think she’ll be stronger.”
So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes—she was groggy, but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep, and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me “Bob.”
There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a long time ago, that sometimes called me “Robin” and sometimes “Bob” and even “Bobby.” I hadn’t talked to that particular program in quite a while, because I hadn’t felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.
Full Medical is—well, it’s full medical. It’s everything. If there’s a way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you’ve got it. And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it—something under one tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot. Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.
Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses moved into the suite across the hall, and at a quarter after two I rode up in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of which was the heart of me, namely my wife.
Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she couldn’t. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma’s classmate supervising a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby, watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the hospital in the hall. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. “Don’t tire her out,” he said.
“I’m getting tired of hearing that.”
He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me. He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate. There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn’t have let that happen if he hadn’t been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.
I did not then appreciate how much “making it” she was going to have to do.
She was still under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me from seeing quite how used up she looked. The day-duty nurse retreated to the sitting room, after telling me not to get Essie too tired, and we talked for a while. We didn’t say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your talkative type person. She asked me what the news was from the Food Factory, and when I had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she asked what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four or five thousand-word answers to her one-sentence questions it began to dawn on me that talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn’t tire her out.
But she was talking, and even talking coherently, and did not seem worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.
There was the usual raft of reports to get through and decisions to make. When that was done I listened to Albert’s latest reports from the Food Factory for a while and then realized it was time for me to go to sleep.
I lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn’t restless. I wasn’t exhausted. I was just letting the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I could hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie’s room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that were keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not taking it all in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours before, Essie had been dead. Kaput. Xed. No longer alive. If it hadn’t been for Full Medical, and a lot of luck, I would along about now have been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.
And inside my head there was a small minority of cells of the brain that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just might have been tidier all around if she hadn’t been brought back to life.
This had nothing to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock wh
en I heard she was hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the question came up a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever polled, however asked.
I have never been entirely sure what the word “love” means. Especially when applied to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment of dialing Albert up and asking him to explain it. But I didn’t. Albert was the wrong program to ask, and I didn’t want to start up with the right one.
The synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the Food Factory, and I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or two from the action fronts. No cable, no satellites. Their orders went out on sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could share their skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the Herter-Halls seemed like forever. Here was I at Ghent, and there were they, Andy Jackson pounding the pee out of the British weeks after the war was over at New Orleans. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on how they were to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of the boy, Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory from its course. And five thousand astronomical units away, they were doing what occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all the questions would be moot.
As Essie mended, so did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her lungs kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and I could touch her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in what went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she’d missed her conference she grinned up at me. “All on tape, dear Robin; have been playing it back when you were busy.”
“But you couldn’t give your own paper—”
“You think? Why not? I wrote ‘Robinette Broadhead’ program for you, did you not know I also wrote one for me? Conference moved in full holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text. To considerable approval. Even handled questions,” she boasted, “by borrowing your Albert program in drag.”
Well, she’s an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he brought me down. He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General, and I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me through the blue contacts. “Yes, probably,” he said. “But I’m not sure you understand how serious her injuries are, Mr. Broadhead. All that’s happening now is that she’s building up some reserves of strength. She’s going to need them.”
“Well, I know that, Doc. There’ll have to be another operation—”
“No. Not one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the next couple of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don’t want you assuming that the results are a foregone conclusion,” he lectured. “There’s a risk to every procedure, and she’s up against some hairy ones. Cherish her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I don’t guarantee it’ll happen every time.”
So I went in to see Essie in a somewhat chastened mood to get on with the cherishing.
The nurse was standing by her bed, and both of them were watching Essie’s tapes of the computer conference on her flat-plate viewer. Since Essie’s plate was slaved to the big full-holographic interactive one I had had moved into my room, there was a little yellow attention light in the corner, meant for me. Harriet had something she wanted to tell me about. It could wait; when the light began to pulse and brighten and turn to red was when it got important, and at the moment Essie was at the top of my priorities. “You can leave us for a while, Alma,” Essie said. The nurse looked at me and shrugged why-not, so I took the chair next to the bed and reached for Essie’s hand.
“It’s nice to be able to touch you again,” I said.
Essie has a coarse, deep chuckle. I was glad to hear it. “Touch more in a couple weeks,” she said. “Meanwhile, no rule against kissing.”
So, of course, I kissed her—hard enough so that something must have registered on her telltales, because the day nurse popped her head in the door to see what was going on. She didn’t stop us, though. We stopped ourselves. Essie reached up with her right hand—the left was still in its cast, covering God knew what—and pushed her streaky dark-blonde hair away from her eyes. “Very nice,” she judged. “Do you want to see what Harriet has to say?”
“Not particularly.”
“Untrue,” she said. “You have been talking to Dr. Ben, I see, and he has told you to be sweet to me. But you always are, Robin, only not everybody would notice.” She grinned at me and turned her head to the plate. “Harriet!” she called. “Robin is here.”
I had not until that moment known that my secretary program would respond to my wife’s commands as well as my own. But I hadn’t known she could borrow my science program, either. Especially without my knowing about it. When Harriet’s cheerful and concerned face filled the screen I told her, “If it’s business I’ll take it later—unless it can’t wait?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Harriet said. “But Albert’s desperate to talk to you. He’s got some good stuff from the Food Factory.”
“I’ll take it in the other room,” I started, but Essie put her free hand on mine.
“No. Here, Robin. I’m interested, too.”
So I told Harriet to go ahead, and Albert’s voice came on. But not Albert’s face. “Take a look at this,” Albert said, and the screen filled with a sort of American Gothic family portrait. A man and a woman—not really—a male and a female, standing side by side. They had faces and arms and legs, and the female had breasts. Both had skungy beards and long hair pulled into braids, and they were wearing wrap-around garments like saris, with dots of color brightening the drab cloth.
I caught my breath. The pictures had taken me by surprise.
Albert appeared in the lower corner of the plate. “These are not ‘real,’ Robin,” he said. “They are simply compositions generated by the shipboard computer from Wan’s description. The boy says they are pretty accurate, though.”
I swallowed and glanced at Essie. I had to control my breathing before I could ask, “Are these—are these what the Heechee look like?”
He frowned and chewed on his pipe stem. The figures on the screen rotated solemnly, as though they were doing a slow folk-dance, so that we could see all sides. “There are some anomalies, Robin. For example, there is the famous question of the Heechee ass. We have some Heechee furniture, e.g., the seats before the control panels in their ships. From these it was deduced that the Heechee bottom was not as the human bottom, because there seems to be room for a large pendulant structure, perhaps a divided body like a wasp’s, hanging below the pelvis and between the legs. There is nothing of this sort in the computer-generated image. But—Occam’s Razor, Robin.”
“If I just give you time, you’ll explain that,” I commented.
“Sure thing, Robin, but it’s a law of logic that I think you know. In the absence of evidence, it is best to take the simplest theory. We know of only two intelligent races in the history of the universe. These people do not seem to belong to ours—the shape of the skull, and particularly the jaw, is different; there is a triangular arcade, more like an ape’s than a human being’s, and the teeth are quite anomalous. Therefore it is probable that they belong to the other.”
“Is somewhat scary,” Essie offered softly. And it was. Especially to me, since you might say that it was my responsibility. I was the one who had ordered the Herter-Hall bunch to go out and look around, and if they found the Heechee in the process…
I was not ready to think of what that might mean.
“What about the Dead Men? Do you have anything on them?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, nodding his dustmop head. “Look at this.”
The pictures winked away, and text rolled up the screen:
MISSION REPORT
Vessel 5-2, Voyage O8D31. C
rew A. Meacham, D. Filgren, H. Meacham.
Mission was science experiment, crew limited to allow instrumentation and computational equipment. Maximum life-support time estimated 800 days. Vessel still unreported day 1200, presumed lost.
“It was only a fifty thousand dollar bonus—not much, but it was one of the earliest from Gateway,” Albert said over the text. “The one called ‘H. Meacham’ appears to be the ‘Dead Man’ Wan calls Henrietta. She was a sort of A.B.D. astrophysicist—you know, Robin, ‘All But Dissertation.’ She blew that. When she tried to defend it they said it was more psychology than physics, so she went to Gateway. The pilot’s first name was Doris, which checks, and the other person was Henrietta’s husband, Arnold.”
“So you’ve identified one of them? They were really real?”
“Sure thing, Robin—point nine nine sure, anyway. These Dead Men are sometimes nonrational,” he complained, reappearing on the plate. “And of course we have had no opportunity for direct interrogation. The shipboard computer is not really up to this kind of task. But, apart from the confirmation of names, the mission seems appropriate. It was an astrophysical investigation, and Henrietta’s conversation includes repeated references to astrophysical subjects. Once you subtract the sexual ones, I mean,” he twinkled, scratching his cheek with his pipestem. “For example. ‘Sagittarius A West’—a radio source at the center of the Galaxy. ‘NGC 1199.’ A giant elliptical galaxy, part of a large cluster. ‘Average radial velocity of globular clusters’—in our own galaxy, that comes to about 50 kilometers per second. ‘High-redshift OSOs’—”
“You don’t have to list them all,” I said hastily. “Do you know what they all mean? I mean, if you were talking about all those things, what would you be talking about?”
Pause—but a short one; he was not accessing all the literature on the subject, he had already done that. “Cosmology,” he said. “Specifically, I think I would be talking about the classic Hoyle-Öpik-Gamow controversy; that is, whether the universe is closed, or open ended, or cyclical. Whether it is in a steady state, or began with a big bang.”