“You surely look about as well as a person can get,” I said, and must have been smiling because her pale, perfect eyebrows came down in a frown.
“Are you amused at spectacle of horny wife?” she demanded.
“Oh, no! No, it is not that at all,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I was just wondering a moment ago why it was that anybody would want to live the way I do. Now I know.”
Well. We made love tentatively and slowly, and then when I found out she wasn’t going to break we did it again, rougher and rowdier. Then we ate most of the food that was waiting for us on the sideboard, and lounged around and hugged each other until we made love again. After that we just sort of drowsed for a while, spooned together, until Essie commented to the back of my neck, “Pretty impressive performance for old goat, Robin. Not too bad for seventeen-year-old, even.”
I stretched and yawned where I lay, rubbing my back against her belly and breasts. “You sure got well in a hurry,” I commented.
She didn’t answer, just nuzzled my neck with her nose. There is a sort of radar that cannot be seen or heard that tells me true. I lay there for a moment, then disengaged myself and sat up. “Dearest Essie,” I said, “what aren’t you telling me?”
She lay within my arm, face against my ribs. “About what?” she asked innocently.
“Come on, Essie.” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Do I have to get Wilma out of bed to tell me?”
She yawned and sat up. It was a false yawn; when she looked at me her eyes were wide awake. “Wilma is most conservative,” she said, shrugging. “There are some medicines to promote healing, corticosteroids and such, which she did not wish to give me. With them there is some slight risk of consequences many years from now—but by then, no doubt, Full Medical will be able to cope, I am sure. So I insisted. It made her angry.”
“Consequence! You mean leukemia!”
“Yes, perhaps. But most likely not. Certainly not soon.”
I got out of the bed and sat naked on the edge so that I could see her better. “Essie, why?”
She slipped her thumbs under her long hair and pushed it back away from her face to return my stare. “Because I was in a hurry,” she said. “Because you are, after all, entitled to a well wife. Because it is uncomfortable to pee through a catheter, not to say unaesthetic. Because was my decision to make and I made it.” She threw the covers off her and lay back. “Study me, Robin,” she invited. “Not even scars! And inside, under skin, am fully functional. Can eat, digest, excrete, make love, conceive your child if we should wish. Not next spring or maybe next year. Now.”
And it was all true. I could see it for myself. Her long pale body was unmarked—no, not entirely; down her left side was an irregular paler patch of new skin. But you had to look to see it, and there was nothing else at all to show that a few weeks earlier she had been gouged, and mutilated, and in fact dead.
I was getting cold. I stood up to find Essie’s robe for her and put my own on. There was still some coffee on the sideboard, and still hot. “For me too,” Essie said as I poured.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“When I am tired,” she said practically, “you will know, because I will roll over and go to sleep. Has been very long time since you and I were like this, Robin. Am enjoying it.”
She accepted a cup from me and looked at me over the rim as she sipped it. “But you are not,” she observed.
“Yes I am!” And I was; but honesty made me add, “I puzzle myself sometimes, Essie. Why is it that when you show me love it comes out in my head feeling like guilt?”
She put down her cup and lay back. “Do you wish to tell me about it, dear Robin?”
“I just have.” Then I added, “I suppose, if anybody, I should call up old Sigfrid von Shrink and tell him.”
“He is always available,” she said.
“Hum. If I start with him God knows when I’d ever finish. Anyway, he’s not the program I want to talk to. There’s so much going on, Essie! And it’s all happening without me. I feel left out.”
“Yes,” she said, “am aware this is how you feel. Is something you wish to do, so will not feel left out any more?”
“Well—maybe,” I said. “About Peter Herter, for instance. I’ve been fooling around with a kind of an idea that I’d like to talk over with Albert Einstein.”
She nodded. “Very well, why not?” She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Hand me my slippers, please. Let us do this now.”
“Now? But it’s late. You shouldn’t be—”
“Robin,” she said kindly, “I too have talked with Sigfrid von Shrink. Is good program, even if not written by me. Says you are good man, Robin, well adjusted, generous, and to all of this I also can testify, not to add excellent lover and much fun to be with. Come into study.” She took my hand as we walked into the big room looking over the Tappan Sea and sat before my console in the comfortable loveseat. “However,” she went on, “Sigfrid says you have great talent for inventing reasons not to do things. So I will help you get off dime. Daite gorod Polymat.” She was not talking to me, but to the console, which sprang at once into light. “Display both Albert and Sigfrid programs,” she ordered. “Access both files in interactive mode. Now, Robin! Let us pursue questions you have raised. After all, I am quite interested too.”
This wife of so many years, this S. Ya. Lavorovna I married, she surprises me most when I least expect it. She sat quite comfortably beside me, holding my hand, while I talked quite openly about doing the things that I had most wanted not to want. It was not just a matter of going to Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory and stopping old Peter Herter from messing up the world. It was where I might go after that.
But at first it did not look as though I were going anywhere. “Albert,” I said, “you told me that you had worked out a course setting for Heechee Heaven from Gateway records. Can you do that for the Food Factory too?”
The two of them were sitting side by side in the PV tank, Albert puffing on his pipe, Sigfrid, hands clasped and silent, attentively listening. He would not speak until I spoke to him, and I was not doing that. “’Fraid not,” Albert said apologetically. “We have only one known setting for the Food Factory, Trish Bover’s, and that’s not enough to be sure. Maybe point-six probable that it would get a ship there. But then what, Robin? It couldn’t come back. Or at least Trish Bover’s didn’t.” He settled himself comfortably, and went on, “There are, of course, certain alternatives.” He glanced at Sigfrid von Shrink beside him. “One might so manipulate Herter’s mind by suggestion that he would change his plans.”
“Would that work?” I was still talking to Albert Einstein. He shrugged, and Sigfrid stirred but did not speak.
“Oh, do not be such a baby,” Essie scolded. “Answer, Sigfrid.”
“Gospozha Lavorovna,” he said, glancing at me, “I think not. I believe my colleague has raised this possibility only so that I might dismiss it. I have studied the records of Peter Herter’s transmissions. The symbolism is quite obvious. The angelic women with the raptor beaks—what is a ‘hooked nose,’ gospozha? Think of Payter’s childhood, and what he heard of the ‘cleansing’ of the world of the evil Jews. There is also the violence, the punitive emotions. He is quite ill, has in fact already suffered one coronary attack, and is no longer rational; he has, in fact, regressed to quite a childish state. Neither suggestion nor appeals to reason will work, gospozha. The only possibility would be perhaps long-term analysis. He would not likely agree, the shipboard computer could not well handle it and, in any case, there is not time. I cannot help you, gospozha, not with any real chance of success.”
Long and long ago I spent a couple of hundred mostly very unpleasant hours listening to Sigfrid’s reasonable, maddening voice, and I had not wanted ever to hear it again. But, you know, it wasn’t all that bad.
Beside me, Essie stirred, “Polymath,” she called, “have fresh coffee prepared.” To me she said, “I think will be here for some t
ime.”
“I don’t know for what,” I objected. “I seem to be stymied.”
“And if you are,” she said comfortably, “we need not drink the coffee but can go back to bed. Meanwhile am quite enjoying this, Robin.”
Well, why not? I was strangely no more sleepy than Essie appeared to be. In fact, I was both alert and relaxed, and my mind had never been clearer. “Albert,” I said, “is there any progress on reading the Heechee books?”
“Not much, Robin,” he apologized. “There are other mathematical volumes such as the one you saw, but as yet no language—Yes, Robin?”
I snapped my fingers. The vagrant thought that had been in the back of my mind had come to the fore. “Gosh numbers,” I said. “Those numbers the book showed us. They’re the same as the ones the Dead Men call ‘gosh numbers.’”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he nodded. “They are basic dimensionless constants of the universe, or at least of this universe. However, there is the question of Mach’s Principle, which suggests—”
“Not now, Albert! Where do you suppose the Dead Men got them?”
He paused, frowning. Tapping out his pipe, he glanced at Sigfrid before he said, “I would conjecture that the Dead Men interfaced with the Heechee machine intelligence. No doubt there was some transmission both ways.”
“My very thought! What else do you conjecture the Dead Men might know?”
“That is very difficult to say. They are very incompletely stored, you know. Communication was extremely difficult at best and has now been interrupted entirely.”
I sat up straight. “And what if we got back in communication? What if somebody went to Heechee Heaven to talk to them?”
He coughed. Trying not to be patronizing, he said, “Robin, several members of the Herter-Hall party, plus the boy, Wan, have failed to get clear answers from them on these questions. Even our machine intelligence has succeeded only poorly—though,” he said politely enough, “that is primarily because of the necessity to interface with the shipboard computer, Vera. They are poorly stored, Robin. They are obsessive, irrational and often incoherent.”
Behind me Essie was standing with the tray of coffee and cups—I had hardly heard the bell from the kitchen to say it was ready. “Ask him, Robin,” she commanded.
I did not pretend to misunderstand. “Hell,” I said, “all right, Sigfrid. That’s your line of work. How do we trick them into talking to us?”
Sigfrid smiled and unlaced his hands. “It is good to speak to you again, Robin,” he said. “I would like to compliment you on your very considerable progress since we spoke last—”
“Get on with it!”
“Of course, Robin. There is one possibility. The storage of the female prospector, Henrietta, seems rather complete, except for her one obsession, that is, with the unfaithfulness of her husband. I think that if a machine program were written from what we know of her husband’s personality and interfaced with her—”
“Make a fake husband for her?”
“Essentially, yes, Robin,” he nodded. “It wouldn’t have to be exact. Because the Dead Men in general are so poorly stored, any responses that were inappropriate might be overlooked. Of course, the program would be quite—”
“Stow it, Sigfrid. Can you write a program like that?”
“Yes. With help from your wife, yes.”
“And then how do we get it in contact with Henrietta?”
He looked sidewise at Albert. “I believe my colleague can help there.”
“Sure thing, Sigfrid,” Albert said cheerily, scratching one foot with the toe of the other. “One. Write the program, with ancillaries. Two. Read it into a PMAL-2 flip processor, with a gigabit fast-access memory and necessary slave units. Three. Put it in a Five and fire it off to Heechee Heaven. Then interface it with Henrietta and start the interrogation. I’d give that, oh, maybe a point-nine probability of working.”
I frowned. “Why ship all that machinery around?”
Patiently he said, “It’s c, Robin. The speed of light. Lacking an FTL radio, we have to ship the machine to where the job is.”
“The Herter-Hall computer has an FTL radio.”
“Too dumb, Robin. Too slow. And I haven’t told you the worst part. All that hardware is pretty big, you know. It would just about fill a Five. Which means it arrives naked and undefended at Heechee Heaven. And we don’t know who is going to meet it at the dock.”
Essie was sitting beside me again, looking beautiful and concerned, holding a cup of coffee. I took it automatically and swallowed a gulp. “You said ‘just about,’” I pointed out. “Does that mean a pilot could go along?”
“’Fraid not, Robin. There’s only room for about another hundred and fifty kilos.”
“I only weigh half that!” I felt Essie tense beside me. We were getting right down to it, now. I felt more clearheaded and sure of myself than in weeks. The paralysis of inaction was loosening every minute. I was aware of what I was saying, and very conscious of what it meant to Essie—and unwilling to stop.
“That’s true, Robin,” Albert conceded, “but do you want to get there dead? There’s food, water, air. Your round-trip standard allowance, with all provision for regeneration, comes to more than three hundred kilos, and there simply is not—”
“Cut it out, Albert,” I said. “You know as well as I do that we’re not talking about a round trip. We’re talking about, what was it? Twenty-two days. That was flight time for Henrietta. That’s all I need. Enough for twenty-two days. Then I’ll be on Heechee Heaven and it won’t matter.”
Sigfrid was looking very interested, but silent. Albert was looking concerned. He admitted, “Well, that’s true, Robin. But it’s quite a risk. There’s no margin for error at all.”
I shook my head. I was way ahead of him—way ahead, at any rate, of where he was willing to go by himself. “You said there’s a Five on the Moon that will accept that destination. Is there a what-do-you-call-it PMAL there too?”
“No, Robin,” he said, but added sadly, “However, there is one at Kourou, ready for shipment to Venus.”
“Thank you, Albert,” I said, half a snarl because it was like pulling teeth to get it out of him. And then I sat back and contemplated what had just been said.
I was not the only one who had been listening intently. Beside me Essie set down her coffee cup. “Polymath,” she commanded, “access and display Morton program, in interactive mode. Go ahead, Robin. Do what you must do.”
There was the sound of a door opening from the tank, and Morton walked in, shaking hands with Sigfrid and Albert as he glanced over his shoulder at me. He was accessing information as he stepped, and I could tell by his expression that he didn’t like what he was finding out. I didn’t care. I said, “Morton! There’s a PMAL-2 information processor at the launch base in Guiana. Buy it for me.”
He turned and confronted me. “Robin,” he said stubbornly, “I don’t think you realize how rapidly you’re eating into capital! This program is costing you over a thousand dollars a minute alone. I’ll have to sell stock—”
“Sell it!”
“Not only that. If you’re planning to ship yourself and that computer to Heechee Heaven—Don’t! Don’t even think of it! First place, Bover’s injunction still prevents it. Second place, if you should manage to get around that, you’d be liable to a contempt citation and damages that—”
“I didn’t ask you about that, Morton. Suppose I got Bover to lift his injunction. Could they stop me then?”
“Yes! But,” he added, softening, “although they could, there is some chance they would not. At least not in time. Nevertheless, as your legal advisor, I have to say—”
“You don’t have to say anything. Buy the computer. Albert and Sigfrid, program it the way we discussed. You three get out of the tank; I want Harriet. Harriet? Get me a flight, Kourou to the Moon, same ship as the computer Morton’s buying for me, soon as you can. And while you’re doing that, see if you can locate Hanson Bover
for me. I want to talk to him.” When she nodded and winked away I turned to look at Essie. Her eyes were damp, but she was smiling.
“You know something?” I said. “Sigfrid never called me ‘Rob’ or ‘Bobby’ once.”
She put her arms around me and hugged me close. “Maybe he thinks you are not to be treated like an infant now,” she said. “And neither am I, Robin. Do you think I wanted to get well only so we could make love quickly? No. It was also so you would not be held prisoner here by a wife you thought it wicked to leave. And so that I would be well able to deal with it,” she added, “when you left anyway.”
We landed at Cayenne in pitch dark and pouring rain. Bover was waiting for me as I cleared Customs, half asleep in a foam armchair by the baggage terminal. I thanked him several times for meeting me, but he shrugged it off. “We have only two hours,” he said. “Let us get on with it.”
Harriet had chartered a chopper for us. We took off over the palms just as the sun was coming up from the Atlantic. By the time we reached Kourou it was full daylight, and the lunar module was erect beside its support tower. It was tiny compared to the giants that climb up from Kennedy or California, but the Centre Spatial Guyanais gets one-sixth better performance out of its rockets, being almost on the equator, so they don’t have to be as big. The computer was already loaded and stowed, and Bover and I got aboard at once. Slam. Shove. Retching taste of the breakfast I shouldn’t have eaten on the airplane rising in my throat, and then we were under way.
It takes three days for the lunar flight. I spent as much of it as I could sleeping, the rest talking to Bover. It was the longest time I had spent out of reach of my comm facilities in at least a dozen years, and I thought it would hang heavy on my hands. It went like lightning. I woke up when the acceleration warnings went off, and watched the brassy Moon rise up toward us, and then there we were.