The smile flickered, but came back. Cassata was a small man, and pudgier than the military medics must have preferred; his thighs bulged out at the hems of his olive-drab shorts as he sat on the edge of his desk to greet us. “As I understand it, Mr. Broadhead,” he said, “your purpose here is to interview Mrs. Dolly Walthers. You may certainly do that, considering the instructions I have received, but I can’t answer your questions about security matters.”
“I didn’t ask any,” I pointed out. Then, as I felt Essie’s why-you-antagonize-this-creep? glare burning the back of my neck, I added, “Anyway, it’s very kind of you to let us do it.”
He nodded, obviously agreeing that he was very kind. “I’d like to ask you a question, though. Would you mind telling me why you want to see her?”
Essie’s glare was still burning, which kept me from telling him that I did mind. “Not at all,” I lied. “Mrs. Walthers spent some time with a very good friend of mine, whom I am anxious to see. We’re hoping she can tell us how to get in touch with, uh, with my friend.”
It was not a lot of use skipping the gender-revealing pronoun. They had surely interrogated the hell out of poor Dolly Walthers and knew that there were only two people I could mean, and of the two it was not at all likely that I would call Wan a friend. He looked at me in a puzzled way, then at Essie, then said, “Walthers is certainly a popular young lady. I won’t keep you any longer.” And he turned us over to the ensign for the conducted tour.
As a tour guide, the ensign was a flat failure. He didn’t answer questions; he didn’t volunteer information. There was a lot to be curious about, too, because the Pentagon was showing signs of recent trouble. Not physical damage, so much, but when the station had gone crazy for the earlier minute of madness the brig was damaged. Its locking program had been crashed by the duty guards. Fortunately they had wrecked it in the open position; otherwise, there would have been some sorry skeletons starving to death in the cells.
The way I found out about it was by passing through a tier of cells and observing that they were all open, with armed MPs squatting boredly in the corridors to make sure the inmates stayed inside. The ensign paused to talk briefly to the guard officer and, while we waited, Essie whispered: “If didn’t catch terrorists, what would brigadier be nice to you for?”
“Good question,” I answered. “Here’s one back. What did he mean about her being a very popular young lady?”
The ensign was scandalized by our talking in ranks. He cut short the chat with the MP lieutenant and hustled us along to a cell like any other cell, door standing open. He pointed inside. “There’s your prisoner,” he said. “You can talk to her all you like, but she doesn’t know anything much.”
“I realize that,” I said, “because if she did, you surely wouldn’t let us see her at all, would you?” I got the hot flash of another of Essie’s glares for that. She was right, too. If I hadn’t annoyed him, the ensign might have had the common decency to move back a few steps so that we could talk to Dolly Walthers in private, instead of posting himself firmly at the open door.
Or might not. The latter theory is the one that got my vote.
Dolly Walthers was a child-sized woman with a childish, high-pitched voice and bad teeth. She was not at her best. She was scared, fatigued, angry, and sullen.
And I was not all that much better. I was wholly, disconcertingly aware that this young woman before me had just spent a couple of weeks in the company of the love of my life—or one of the loves of my life—in the top two, anyway. I say this lightly enough. It wasn’t a light thing. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to say.
“Say hello, Robin,” Essie instructed.
“Miz Walthers,” I said obediently, “hello. I’m Robin Broadhead.”
She had manners left. She put out her hand like a good child. “I know who you are, Mr. Broadhead, even not counting that I met your wife the other day.” We shook hands politely and she flashed a hint of a sad smile. It wasn’t until some time later, when I saw her Robinette Broadhead puppet, that I knew what she had been smiling at. But she looked puzzled, too. “I thought they said there were four people who wanted to see me,” she said, peering past the stolid ensign in search of the others.
“Is just the two of us,” said Essie, and waited for me to speak.
But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to ask. If it had been just Essie there, perhaps I could have managed to tell Dolly Walthers what Klara had meant to me and ask for her help—any kind of help. Or if it had been just the ensign, I could have ignored him like any other piece of furniture. Or I think I could—but they were both there, and I stood tongue-tied while Dolly Walthers gazed at me curiously, and Essie expectantly, and even the ensign turned to stare.
Essie sighed, an exasperated and compassionate sound, and made her decision. She took charge. She turned to Dolly Walthers. “Dolly,” she said briskly, “must excuse my husband. Is quite traumatic for him, for reasons too complex to explain just now. Must excuse me also, please, for allowing MPs to take you away; I also have some trauma for related reasons. Important thing is what we do now. That will be as follows: First we secure your release from this place. Second we invite your company and help in voyage to locate Wan and Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You agree?”
It was all happening too fast for Dolly Walthers, too. “Well,” she said, “I—”
“Good,” said Essie, nodding. “We go to arrange this. You, Ensign! Take us back to our ship, True Love, at once, please.”
The ensign opened his mouth, scandalized, but I got in ahead of him. “Essie, shouldn’t we see the brigadier about that?”
She squeezed my hand and gazed at me. The gaze was compassionate. The squeeze was a shut-silly-mouth-Robin! warning that nearly broke my knuckles. “Poor lamb,” she said apologetically to the officer, “has just had major surgery. Is confused. To ship for his medicine, and quickly!”
When my wife Essie is determined to do something, the way to get along with her is to let her do it. What she had in mind I did not know, but what I should do about it was very clear. I assumed the demeanor of an elderly man dazed by recent surgery, and let her guide me in the wake of the ensign down the corridors of the Pentagon.
We didn’t move very fast, because the corridors of the Pentagon were pretty busy. The ensign halted us at an intersection while a party of prisoners marched past. For some reason they were clearing out an entire block of cells. Essie nudged me and pointed to the monitors on the wall. One set of them were no more than signposts, Commissary 7, Enlisted Personnel Latrines Docking V, and so on. But the other—
The other showed the docking area, and there was something big coming in. Great, hulking, human-built; you could tell it was Earth-built rather than Heechee at the first glance. It wasn’t just the lines, or the fact that it was constructed of gray steel rather than Heechee-metal blue. The proof lay in the mean-looking projectile weapons that poked their snouts out of its smooth exterior.
The Pentagon, I knew, had lost six of those ships in a row, trying to adapt the Heechee faster-than-light drive to human ships. I couldn’t complain about that; it was from their mistakes that the design for the True Love had benefited. But the weapons were not pleasant to see. You never saw one on a Heechee vessel.
“Come on,” snapped the ensign, glaring at us. “You’re not supposed to be here. Let’s move it.” He started along a relatively empty corridor, but Essie slowed him down.
“Is faster this way,” she said, pointing to the Docking sign.
“Off limits!” he snapped.
“Not for good friend of Pentagon who is unwell,” she replied, and tugged at my arm, and we headed for the densest, noisiest knots of people. There are secrets within secrets in Essie, but this one clarified itself in a moment. The commotion had been the captured terrorists being brought in from the cruiser, and Essie had just wanted to get a look at them.
The cruiser had intercepted their stolen ship just
as it was coming out of FTL. They shot it up. Apparently there had been eight terrorists on board—eight, in a Heechee ship that five persons crowded! Three of them had survived to become prisoners. One was comatose. One was missing a leg, but conscious. The third one was mad.
It was the mad one that was attracting all the attention. She was a young black girl—from Sierra Leone, they said—and she was screaming incessantly. She wore a straitjacket. By the look of it she had been kept in it for a very long time, for the fabric was stained and stinking, her hair was matted, her face was cadaverous. Somebody was calling my name, but I pressed forward along with Essie to get a better look. “Is Russian she is saying,” said Essie, her brows furrowing, “but is not very good. Georgia accent. Very strong. Says she hates us.”
“I could have figured that out,” I said. I had seen enough. When the ensign got through the crowd, yelling furious orders for people to get out of the way, I let him tug me back, and then I heard my name called again.
So it wasn’t the ensign? In fact, it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. It came from the knot of prisoners being moved out of their cells, and I saw who it was. The Chinese girl. Janie something. “Good God,” I said to the ensign, “what have you arrested her for?”
He rasped, “That is a military matter and none of your business, Broadhead. Come on! You don’t belong here!”
There was no point in arguing with a man who had made up his mind. I didn’t ask him again. I just walked over to the line and asked Janie. The other prisoners were all female, all military personnel, no doubt in for overstaying a furlough or punching somebody like the ensign in the mouth—all good people, I was sure. They were quiet, listening. “Audee wanted to come up here because they had his wife,” she said, with a look on her face as though she were saying “his case of tertiary syphilis.” “So we took a shuttle up, and as soon as we got here they stuck us in the brig.”
“Now, Broadhead,” the ensign shouted, “that’s the last straw. You come on out of there or you’re under arrest yourself!” And his hand was on the holster that once more contained a sidearm. Essie sailed by, smiling politely.
“Is now no more need for concern, Ensign,” she said, “for there is True Love waiting for us. So we are out of hair now. Remains only to fetch brigadier here to settle remaining questions.”
The ensign goggled. “Ma’am,” he stuttered, “ma’am, you can’t get the brigadier here!”
“Of course can! Husband requires medical treatment, therefore must be here to receive. Brigadier Cassata is courteous man, right? West Point? Many courses in deportment, courtesy, covering coughs and sneezes? And also please tell brigadier is excellent bourbon here which poor sick husband requires assistance to dispose of.”
The ensign stumbled away hopelessly. Essie looked at me and I looked at Essie. “Now what?” I asked.
She smiled and patted my head. “First I instruct Albert about bourbon—and other things,” she said, turning to deliver a couple of quick sentences in Russian, “and then we wait for brigadier to show up.”
It didn’t take long for the brigadier to arrive, but by the time he had gotten there I had almost forgotten him. Essie was engaged in a lively chat with the guard the ensign had left, and I was thinking. What I was thinking about mostly, for a change, was not Klara but the mad African woman and her almost as mad associates. They scared me. Terrorists scared me. In the old days there was a PLO and an IRA and Puerto Rican nationalists and Serbian secessionists and German and Italian and American rich kids asserting their contempt for their daddies—oh, lots of terrorists, all sizes, all kinds—but they were all separate. The fact that they had got together scared me. The poor and the furious had learned to join their rages and resources, and there was no question at all that they could make the world listen. Capturing one ship would not stop them; it would only make their efforts bearable for a while—or almost bearable.
But to solve their problem—to ease their rage and supply their needs—more was needed. The colonization of worlds like Peggys Planet was the best and maybe the only answer, but it was slow. The transport could take three thousand eight hundred poor people to a better life each month. But each month something like a quarter of a million new poor people were being born, and the fatal arithmetic was easy to do:
250,000
–3,800
246,200
new poor people to deal with each month. The only hope was new and bigger transports, hundreds or thousands of them. A hundred would keep us even with the present level of misery. A thousand would cure it once and for all—but where were the thousand big ships to come from? It had taken eight months to build the True Love, and a lot more of my money than I had really intended. What would it cost to build something a thousand times as big?
The brigadier’s voice took my mind off these reflections. “It is,” he was saying, “flatly impossible! I let you see her because I was asked to. To take her away with you is out of the question!” He glowered at me as I joined them, taking Essie’s hand.
“Also,” she said, “is question of male Walthers and Chinese woman. We wish them also.”
“We do?” I asked, but the brigadier wasn’t listening to me.
“What else, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “You wouldn’t like me to turn over my section of the Pentagon? Or give you a cruiser or two?”
Essie shook her head politely. “Our ship is more comfortable, thank you.”
“Jesus!” Cassata wiped his brow and allowed Essie to lead him into the main lounge for the promised bourbon. “Well,” he said, “there’s no real charge against Walthers and Yee-xing. They had no right coming up here without clearance, but if you take them away again we can forget that one.”
“Splendid!” Essie cried. “Remains now only other Walthers!”
“I could not possibly take the responsibility,” he began, and Essie did not let him finish.
“Certainly not! One understands that, of course. So we will refer to higher authority, right? Robin! Call General Manzbergen. Do here, so will be no annoying record to possibly embarrass, all right?”
There is no use arguing with Essie when she is in such a mood, and besides, I was curious to see what she was up to. “Albert,” I called. “Do it, please.”
“Sure, Robin,” he said obligingly, voice only; and in a moment the screen lit up, and there was General Manzbergen at his desk. “Morning, Robin, Essie,” he said genially. “I see you’ve got Perry Cassata there—congratulations to all of you!”
“Thank you, Jimmy,” said Essie, looking sidewise at the brigadier, “but is not what we called about, please.”
“Oh?” He frowned. “Whatever it is, do it fast, all right? I’ve got a top meeting coming up in ninety seconds.”
“Take less than that, General dear. Merely please instruct Brigadier Cassata to turn over Dolly Walthers to us.”
Manzbergen looked puzzled. “For what?”
“So can use her to locate missing Wan, General dear. Has TPT, you know. Much in everyone’s interest to make him give it back.”
He grinned fondly at her. “Minute, honey,” he said, and bent to a hushphone.
The brigadier might have been rushed, but he was on his toes. “There’s a lag,” he pointed out. “Isn’t this zero-speed radio?”
“Is burst transmission,” Essie lyingly explained. “Have only small vessel here, not much power”—another lie—“so must conserve communications energy—ah, here is general again!”
The general pointed toward Cassata. “It’s authorized,” he barked. “They’re trustworthy, we owe them a favor—and they might be able to save us a pack of future trouble. Give them whoever they want, on my authority. Now, for God’s sake, let me get to my meeting—and don’t call me again unless it’s World War Four!”
So the brigadier went away, shaking his head, and pretty soon the MPs brought Janie Yee-xing to us, and a minute later Audee Walthers, and quite a while after that Dolly Walthers. “Nice to see you all again,??
? said Essie, welcoming them aboard. “Am sure you have much to talk over among you, but first let us get away from this wicked place. Albert! Move it, please?”
“Right, Mrs. Broadhead,” sang Albert’s voice. He didn’t bother with materializing in the pilot seat; he simply walked in a door and leaned against the lintel, smiling at the company.
“Will introduce later,” said Essie. “This is good friend who is computer program. Albert? Are now safely away from Pentagon?”
He nodded, twinkling. Then before my eyes he turned from elderly man in pipe and baggy sweater to the leaner, taller, uniformed, and medaled Chief of Staff General James P. Manzbergen. “Right you are, honey,” he cried. “Now let’s get our asses into FTL before they find out we foxed them!”
19
The Permutations of Love
Who sleeps with whom? Ah, that was the question! We had five passengers, and only three staterooms to put them in. The True Love had not been planned for very many guests, and especially when the guests did not come presorted in pairs. Should we put Audee in with his wedded wife, Dolly? Or with his most recent bedmate, Janie Yee-xing? Put Audee by himself and the two women together?—and what would they do to each other if we did? It was not that Janie and Dolly were hostile to each other so much as that Audee seemed unaccountably hostile to both of them. “He cannot make up his mind which he should be true to,” said Essie wisely, “and is a man who wishes to be true to a woman, is Audee.”
Well, I understood that well enough, and even understood that more of our passengers than one suffered that problem.
But there is a word in that statement that did not apply to me, and it is the word suffered. You see, I wasn’t suffering. I was enjoying myself. I was enjoying Essie, too, because the way we solved the problem of assigning accommodations was to walk away from it. Essie and I retired to Captain’s Quarters and locked the door. We told ourselves that the reason we did was to let our three guests sort things out among themselves. That was a good reason. God knows they needed time to do that, because the interpersonal dynamics latent among the three of them were enough to explode a star; but we had other reasons, too, and the biggest of them was so that we could make love.