“I’ll kill the old bastard,” I said.
Essie shook her head, grinning up at me. “Not practical,” she said.
Well, maybe it wasn’t. But as soon as I had satisfied myself that Essie was all right, I called for Albert Einstein: “I want advice. Is there anything that can be done to stop Peter Herter?”
He scratched his nose.
“You mean by direct action, I assume. No, Robin. Not by any means available now.”
“I don’t want to be told that! There must be something!”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said slowly, “but I think you’re asking the wrong program. Indirect measures might work. As I understand it, you have some legal questions unresolved. If you could resolve them, you might be able to meet Herter’s demands and stop him that way.”
“I’ve tried that! It’s the other way around, damn it! If I could get Herter to stop, then maybe I could get Gateway Corp to give me back control. Meanwhile he’s screwing up everybody’s mind, and I want it stopped! Isn’t there some kind of interference we could broadcast?”
Albert sucked his pipe. “I don’t think so, Rob,” he said at last. “I don’t have a great deal to go on.”
That startled me. “You don’t remember what it feels like?”
“Robin,” he said patiently, “I don’t feel anything. It is important for you to remember that I am only a computer program. And not the right program, really, to discuss the exact nature of the signals from Mr. Herter—your psychoanalytic program might be more helpful. Analytically I know what happened—I have all the measurements of the radiation involved. Experientially, nothing. Machine intelligence is not affected. Every human being experienced something, I know because there are reports to say so. There is evidence that the larger-brained mammals—primates, dolphins, elephants—were also disturbed; and maybe other mammals were too, although the evidence is sketchy. But I have not experienced it directly… As to broadcasting an interfering pattern, yes, perhaps that could be done. But what would be the effect, Robin? Bear in mind that the interfering signal would come from a nearby point, not one twenty-five light-days away; if Mr. Herter can cause some disorientation, what would a random signal do at close range?”
“It would be bad, I guess.”
“Sure thing, Robin. Probably worse than you guess, but I could not say without experimentation. The subjects would have to be human beings, and such experiments I cannot undertake.”
Over my shoulder Essie’s voice said proudly, “Yes, you exactly cannot, as who would know better than I?”
She had come up behind me without a sound, barefoot in the thick rug. She wore a neck-to-ankle robe and her hair was done up in a turban. “Essie, what the hell are you doing out of bed?” I demanded.
“My bed has become excessively tedious,” she said, kneading my ear in her fingers, “especially occupied alone. Do you have plans for this evening, Robin? Because, if invited, I would like to share yours.”
“But—” I said, and, “Essie—” I said, and what I wanted to say was either “You shouldn’t be doing this yet!” or “Not in front of the computer!” She didn’t give me a chance to decide which. She leaned down to press her cheek against mine, perhaps so that I might feel how round and full it had once again become.
“Robin,” she said sunnily, “I am far more well than you believe. You may ask the doctor, if you wish. She will tell you how very rapidly I have healed.” She turned her head to kiss me quickly and added, “I have some affairs of my own for the next few hours. Please continue chatting with your program until then. I am sure Albert has many interesting things to tell you, isn’t that so, Albert?”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Broadhead,” the program agreed, puffing cheerfully on his pipe.
“So, then. It’s settled.” She patted my cheek and turned away, and I have to say that as she walked back to her room she did not in the least look unwell. The robe was not tight, but it was shaped to her body, and the shape of her body was really fine. I could not believe that the wadding of bandage all along her left side was gone, but there was no sign of it.
Behind me, my science program coughed. I turned back, and he was puffing on his pipe, his eyes twinkling.
“Your wife is looking very well, Robin,” he said, nodding judiciously.
“Sometimes, Albert,” I said, “I don’t know just how anthropomorphic you are. Well. What very interesting things do you want to tell me about?”
“Whatever you want to hear, Robin. Shall I continue on the subject of Peter Herter? There are some other possibilities, such as the abort mode. That is, setting aside for the moment the legal complications, it would be possible to command the shipboard computer, known as ‘Vera,’ to explode the fuel tanks on the orbital craft.”
“Hell it would! We’d destroy the greatest treasure we’ve ever found!”
“Sure thing, Robin, and it’s even worse than that. The chance of an external explosion damaging the installation Mr. Herter is using is quite small. It might only anger him. Or strand him there, to do as he chooses, as long as he lives.”
“Forget it! Don’t you have anything good to tell me about?”
“As a matter of fact, Robin,” he grinned, “I do. We’ve found our Rosetta stone.” He shrank away to a dwindling spray of colored flecks and disappeared. As a luminous spindle-shaped mass of lavender color replaced him in the tank, he said, “That is the image of the beginning of a book.”
“It’s blank!”
“I haven’t started it yet,” he explained. The shape was taller than I, and about half as thick as it was tall. It began to shift before my eyes; the color thinned out until I could see through it clearly and then one, two, three dots began to appear inside it, points of bright red light that spun themselves out in a spiral. There was a sad chittering sound, like telemetry or like the amplified chirps of marmosets. Then the picture froze. The sound stopped. Albert’s voice said:
“I have stopped it at this point, Robin. It is probable that sound is language, but we have not yet been able to isolate semantic units from it. However, the ‘text’ is clear. There are one hundred thirty-seven of those points of light. Now watch while I run a few more seconds of the book.”
The spiral of 137 tiny stars doubled itself. Another coil of dots lifted itself from the original and floated to the top of the spindle, where it hung silently. The chitter of language began again and the original spiral expanded itself, while each of the dots began to trace a spiral of its own. When it was finished there was one large spiral, composed of 137 smaller spirals, each composed of 137 dots. Then the whole red pattern turned orange and it froze.
“Do you want to try to interpret that, Robin?” Albert’s voice asked.
“Well, I can’t count that high. But it looks like 137 times 137, right?”
“Sure thing, Robin. 137 squared, making 18,769 dots in all. Now watch.”
Short green lines slashed the spiral into ten segments. One of the segments lifted itself off, dropped to the bottom of the spindle and turned red again. “That’s not exactly a tenth of the number, Robin,” said Albert. “By counting you find that there are now 1,840 dots at the bottom. I’ll proceed.” Once again, the central figure changed color, this time to yellow. “Notice the top figure.” I looked closely, and saw that the first dot had turned orange, the third yellow. Then the central figure rotated itself on the vertical axis and spun out a three-D column of spirals, and Albert said, “We now have a total of 137 cubed dots in the central figure. From here on,” he said kindly, “it gets a little tedious to watch. I’ll run it through quickly.” And he did, patterns of dots flying around and isolating themselves, colors changing through yellow to avocado, avocado to green, green to aqua, aqua to blue, and on through the spectrum, nearly twice. “Now, do you see what we have? Three numbers, Robin. 137 in the center. 1,840 down at the bottom. 137 to the eighteenth power, which is roughly the same as 10 to the thirty-eighth, at the top. Or, in order, three dimensionless numbers: the fine s
tructure constant, the ratio of the proton to the electron and the number of particles in the universe. Robin, you have just had a short course in particle theory from a Heechee teacher!”
I said, “My God.”
Albert reappeared on the screen, beaming. “Exactly, Robin,” he said.
“But Albert! Does that mean you can read all the prayer fans?”
His face fell. “Only the simple ones,” he said regretfully. “This was actually the easiest. But from now on it’s quite straightforward. We play every fan and tape it. We look for correspondences. We make semantic assumptions and test them in as many contexts as we can find—we’ll do it, Robin. But it may take some time.”
“I don’t want to take time,” I snarled.
“Sure thing, Robin, but first every fan must be located, and read, and taped, and coded for machine comparison, and then—”
“I don’t want to hear,” I said. “Just do it—what’s the matter?”
His expression had changed. “It’s a question of funding, Robin,” he said apologetically. “There’s a great deal of machine time involved here.”
“Do it! As far as you can go. I’ll have Morton sell some more stock. What else have you got?”
“Something nice, Robin,” he grinned, shrinking in size until he was just a little face in the corner of the tank. Colors flowed in the center of the display and fused into a set of Heechee controls, displaying a pattern of color on five of the ten panels. The others were blank. “Know what that is, Robin? That’s a composite of all the known Gateway flights that wound up at Heechee Heaven. All the patterns you see are identical in all seven known missions. The others vary, but it’s a pretty good conjecture that they are not directly involved in course-setting.”
“What are you saying, Albert?” I demanded. He had caught me by surprise. I found that I was beginning to shake. “Do you mean if we set ship controls for that pattern we could get to Heechee Heaven?”
“Point nine five yes, Robin,” he nodded. “And I have identified three ships, two on Gateway and one on the Moon, that will accept that setting.”
I put on a sweater and walked down to the water. I didn’t want to hear any more.
The trickle pipes had been busy. I kicked my shoes off to feel the damp, pillowy grass and watched some boys, wind-trolling for perch, near the Nyack shore, and I thought: This is what I bought by risking my life on Gateway. What I paid for with Klara’s.
And: Do I want to risk all this, and my life, again?
But it wasn’t really a question of “want to.” If one of those ships would go to Heechee Heaven and I could buy or steal a passage on it, I would go.
Then sanity saved me, and I realized I couldn’t, after all. Not at my age. And not the way Gateway Corp was feeling about me. And, most of all, not in time. The Gateway asteroid orbits at right-angles to the ecliptic, just about. Getting there from Earth is a tedious long job; by Hohmann curves twenty months or more, under forced acceleration more than six. Six months from now those ships would have been there and back.
If they were coming back, of course.
The realization was almost as much of a relief as it was a sick, hungry sense of loss.
Sigfrid von Shrink never told me how to get rid of ambivalence (or guilt). He did tell me how to deal with them. The recipe is, mostly, just to let them happen. Sooner or later they burn themselves out. (He says.) At least, they don’t have to be paralyzing. So while I was letting this ambivalence smolder itself into ash I was also strolling along the water, enjoying the pleasant under-the-bubble air and gazing proudly at the house I lived in and the wing where my very dear, and for some time wholly platonic, wife was, I hoped, getting herself good and rested. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t doing it alone. Twice a taxicart had brought someone over from the tube stop. Both of them had been women; and now another taxicart pulled up and let out a man, who gazed around quite unsurely while the taxi rolled itself around the circle and hurried off to its next call. I somehow doubted that he was for Essie; but I could think of no reason why he would be for me, or at least why he could not be dealt with by Harriet. So it was a surprise when the rifle-speaker under the eaves swiveled around to point at me and Harriet’s voice said, “Robin? There’s a Mr. Haagenbusch here. I think you ought to see him.”
That was very unlike Harriet. But she was usually right, so I strolled up the lawn, rinsed my bare feet at the French windows and invited the man into my study. He was a pretty old specimen, pink-skin bald, with a dapper white pair of sideburns and a carefully American accent—not the kind people born in the United States usually have. “Thank you very much for seeing me, Mr. Broadhead,” he said, and handed me a card that read:
Herr Doktor Advokat Wm. J. Haagenbusch
“I’m Pete Herter’s lawyer,” he said. “I flew this morning from Frankfort because I want to make a deal.”
How very quaint of you, I thought; imagine coming in person to conduct business! But if Harriet wanted me to see this old flake she had probably talked it over with my legal program, so what I said was, “What kind of a deal?”
He was waiting for me to tell him to sit down. I did. I suspected he was also waiting for me to order coffee or cognac for two, as well, but I didn’t particularly want to do that. He took off black kid gloves, looked at his pearly nails and said: “My client has asked for $250,000,000 paid into a special account plus immunity from prosecution of any kind. I received this message by code yesterday.”
I laughed out loud. “Christ, Haagenbusch, why are you telling me? I haven’t got that kind of money!”
“No, you don’t,” he agreed. “Outside of your investment in the Herter-Hall syndicate and some fish-farm stock, you don’t have anything but a couple of places to live and some personal effects. I think you could raise six or seven million, not counting the Herter-Hall investment. God knows what that might be worth right now, everything considered.”
I sat back and looked at him. “You know I got rid of my tourist stuff. So you checked me out. Only you forgot the food mines.”
“No, I don’t think so, Mr. Broadhead. My understanding is that that stock was sold this afternoon.”
It was not altogether pleasant to find out that he knew more about my financial position than I did. So Morton had had to sell that out, too! I didn’t have time to think about what that implied just then, because Haagenbusch stroked his sideburns and went on: “The situation is this, Mr. Broadhead. I have advised my client that a contract obtained under duress is not enforceable. He therefore no longer has any hope of attaining his purposes through an agreement with the Gateway Corporation, or even with your syndicate. So I have received new instructions: to secure immediate payment of the sum I have mentioned; to deposit it in untraceable bank accounts in his name; and to turn it over to him when, and if, he returns.”
“Gateway won’t like being blackmailed,” I said. “Still, they may not have any choice.”
“Indeed they do not,” he agreed. “What is wrong with Mr. Herter’s plan is that it won’t work. I am sure they will pay over the money. I am also sure that my communications will be tapped and my offices bugged, and that the justice departments of every nation involved in the Gateway treaty will be preparing indictments for Mr. Herter when he returns. I do not want to be named in those indictments as an accomplice, Mr. Broadhead. I know what will happen. They’ll find the money and take it back. They’ll void Mr. Herter’s previous contract on grounds of his own noncompliance. And they’ll put him—him at least—in jail.”
“You’re in a tough situation, Mr. Haagenbusch,” I said.
He chuckled dryly. His eyes were not amused. He stroked his sideburns for a moment and burst out: “You don’t know! Every day, long orders in code! Demand this, guarantee that, I hold you personally responsible for this other! And then I send off a reply that takes twenty-five days to get there, by which time he has sent me fifty days of new orders and his thoughts are somewhere far beyond and he upbraids me and thr
eatens me! He is not a well man, and he certainly is not a young one. I do not truly think that he will live to collect any of this blackmail—But he might.”
“Why don’t you quit?”
“I would if I could! But if I quit, then what? Then he has no one on his side at all. Then what would he do, Mr. Broadhead? Also—” he shrugged, “he is a very old friend, Mr. Broadhead. He was at school with my father. No. I can’t quit. Also I can’t do what he asks. But perhaps you can. Not by handing over a quarter of a billion dollars, no, because you have never had that kind of money. But you can make him an equal partner with you. I think he would—no. I think he might accept that.”
“But I’ve already—” I stopped. If Haagenbusch did not know I had already given half my holdings to Bover, I wasn’t going to tell him. “Why wouldn’t I void the contract too?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You might. But I think you would not. You are a symbol to him, Mr. Broadhead, and I believe he would trust you. You see, I think I know what it is he wants from all this. It is to live the way you do, for all that remains of his life.”
He stood up. “I do not expect you to agree to this at once,” he said. “I have perhaps twenty-four hours before I must reply to Mr. Herter. Please think about this, and I will speak to you in one day.”
I shook his hand, and had Harriet order him a taxi-cart, and stood with him in the driveway until it rolled up and bore him briskly away into the early night.
When I came back into my own room Essie was standing by the window, looking out at the lights on the Tappan Sea. It was suddenly clear to me who her visitors had been this day. At least one had been her hairdresser; that tawny Niagara of hair hung true and even to her waist once more, and when she turned to smile at me it was the same Essie who had left for Arizona, all those long weeks before.
“You were so very long with that little man,” she remarked. “You must be hungry.” She watched me standing there for a moment, and laughed. I suppose that the questions in my mind were written on my face, because she answered them. “One, dinner is ready now. Something light, which we can eat at any time. Two, it is laid out in our room whenever you care to join me there. And, three, yes, Robin, I have Wilma’s assurance that all of this is quite all right. Am much more well than you think, Robin dear.”