Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  I don’t like being reminded I owe a favor, either, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything. Janie Yee-xing put her hand on his bad wrist—gently. “Just tell him what you’ve got,” she ordered.

  “Tell me what?” I demanded, and the son of a gun shrugged and said, the way you might tell me you’d found my car keys on the floor:

  “Why, tell you that I’ve found what I think is a real, live Heechee.”

  12

  God and the Heechee

  I found a Heechee…I’ve got a fragment of the True Cross…I talked with God, literally I did—those statements are all in the same league. You don’t believe them, but they scare you. And then, if you find they’re true, or if you can’t be sure they’re not—then it’s miracle time, and scared-to-death time. God and the Heechee. When I was a kid I didn’t distinguish greatly between them, and even as a grownup the confusion was still there.

  It was past midnight when I was finally willing to let them go. By then I’d sucked them dry. I had the datafan they’d swiped from the S. Ya. I had brought Albert in on the discussion to ask all the questions his fertile digital mind could invent. I was feeling pretty rotten and frayed, and the analgesia had long worn off, but I couldn’t go to sleep. Essie announced firmly that if I was determined to kill self with overexertion she was at least going to stay up to enjoy spectacle, and as soon as she was gently snoring on the couch I called Albert again. “One financial detail,” I said. “Walthers said he’d passed up a million-dollar bonus to give this to me, so transfer, ah, two million to his account right away.”

  “Certainly, Robin.” Albert Einstein never gets sleepy, but when he wants to indicate that it’s past my bedtime he is perfectly capable of yawning and stretching. “I should remind you, though, that the state of your health—”

  I told him what he could do with the state of my health. Then I told him what he could do with his idea of putting me in the hospital the next day. He spread his hands gracefully. “You’re the boss, Robin,” he said humbly. “Still, I’ve been thinking.”

  It is not true that Albert Einstein does not spend any time thinking. Since he moves at nuclear-particle speeds, however, the time involved is not usually perceptible to flesh-and-blood human beings like myself. Unless he wants it to be, usually for dramatic effect. “Spit it out, Albert.”

  He shrugged. “It is only that in your precarious health, I do not like to see you excited without reason.”

  “Reason! Jesus, Albert, sometimes you really act like a dumb machine. What more reason could anybody have than finding a living Heechee?”

  “Yes,” he said, puffing his pipe judiciously, and changed the subject. “From the sensor readings I am receiving, Robin, I would think you must be in considerable pain.”

  “How bright you are, Albert.” The fact of the matter was that the churning in my gut had shifted gears. Now there was a mixer blade pureeing my belly, and every spin was a separate hurt.

  “Should I wake Mrs. Broadhead and inform her?”

  That message was in code. If we woke Essie to tell her something like that, it would at once result in her throwing me into bed, summoning the surgical programs, and delivering me over to all the cossetting and curing Full Medical Plus could offer. The truth was it was beginning to look attractive. Pain scared me as dying did not. Dying was something you could get over and done with, at least, while pain looked unending.

  But not right then! “No way, Albert,” I said, “at least not until you come out with whatever you’re being so coy about. Are you telling me that I made a wrong assumption somewhere along the line? If so, tell me where.”

  “Only in terming Audee Walthers’s perception a Heechee, Robin,” he said, scratching his chin with the stem of his pipe.

  I sat up straight, and grabbed at my stomach because the sudden motion had not been a good idea. “What the hell else could it be, Albert?”

  He said solemnly, “Let us review the evidence. Walthers said that the intelligence he perceived seemed to be slowed down, even stopped. This is consistent with the hypothesis it is Heechee, since they are thought to be in a black hole, where time is slowed.”

  “Right. Then why—”

  “Second,” he went on, “the detection was in interstellar space. This is also consistent, since the Heechee are known to have that capability.”

  “Albert!”

  “Finally,” he said calmly, disregarding the tone of my voice, “the detection was of an intelligent form of life, and other than ourselves”—he twinkled at me—“or, should I say, other than the human race, the Heechee are the only known such form. However,” he said benignly, “the duplicate ship’s log that Captain Walthers brought us raises serious questions.”

  “Get on with it, damn you!”

  “Certainly, Robin. Let me display the data.” He moved aside in his holographic frame, and a ship’s chart leaped into existence. It showed a distant pale blob, and along the right-hand margin symbols and numerals danced. “Note the velocity, Robin. Eighteen hundred kilometers a second. That is not an impossible velocity for a natural object—say, a condensation from the wave-front of a supernova. But for a Heechee vessel? Why would it be going so slowly? And does that in fact look like a Heechee vessel?”

  “It looks like nothing at all, for God’s sake! It’s just a blur. At extreme range. You can’t tell a thing.”

  The small figure of Albert to one side of the chart nodded. “Not as it is, no,” he admitted, “but I have been able to enhance the image. There is, of course, other negative evidence. If indeed the source is a black hole—”

  “What?”

  He affected to misunderstand me. “I was saying that the hypothesis that the source is in a black hole is not consistent with the total absence of gamma or X-radiation from that region, as would presumably occur from infall of dust and gas.”

  “Albert,” I said, “sometimes you go too far!”

  He gazed at me with hooded-eyed concern. I know that those calm stares of Albert’s, and his pretenses of forgetting things, are only contrivances for effect. They do not reflect any appropriate reality—especially the times when he looks right into my eyes. The imaged eyes in Albert’s holopics see no more than the eyes in a photograph. If he senses me, and he surely did sense me good, it was through camera lenses and hypersound pulses and capacitance probes and thermal imagers, none of which are located anywhere near the eyes of the image of Albert. But there are, all the same, moments when those eyes seem to be looking right into my soul. “You want to believe they are Heechee, don’t you, Robin?” he asked softly.

  “None of your business! Show me this enhanced image!”

  “Very well.”

  The image mottled…marbled…cleared; and I was looking at an immense dragonfly. It more than filled the screen in Albert’s little peepshow. Most of its gauzy wings could be made out only by the stars they obscured. But where all the wings came together there was a cylindrical object with points of light gleaming on its surface, and some of that light glittered off the wings themselves.

  “It’s a sailship!” I gasped.

  “Yes. A sailship,” Albert agreed. “A photonic spacecraft. Its only propulsion is from light pressure against the array of sails.”

  “But Albert—But Albert, that must take forever.”

  He nodded. “In human terms, yes, that is a good description. At its estimated velocity the trip from, say, the Earth to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take approximately six hundred years.”

  “My God. Six hundred years in that little thing?”

  “It isn’t little, Robin,” he corrected me. “It is more distant than you perhaps realize. My ranging data is only approximate, but my best estimate is that the distance from sailtip to sailtip is not less than one hundred thousand kilometers.”

  On the damask couch Essie snorted, changed position, opened her eyes to look at me, said accusingly, “Still up, eh!” and closed her eyes again—all without waking up.

 
I sat back, and fatigue and pain swarmed over me. “I wish I were sleepy,” I said. “I need to let all this simmer awhile before I can take it in.”

  “Of course, Robin. I’ll tell you what I suggest,” Albert said cunningly. “You didn’t have much for dinner, so why don’t I make you up some nice split-pea soup, or maybe some fish chowder—”

  “You know what puts me to sleep, don’t you?” I said, almost laughing, glad to have my thoughts brought back to the mundane. “Why not?”

  So I moved back to the dining alcove. I let Albert’s bartender subroutine fix me a nice hot buttered rum, and Albert himself appeared in the PV-frame over the sideboard to keep me company. “Very nice,” I said, finishing it. “Let’s have another before I eat, all right?”

  “Certainly, Robin,” he said, fiddling with his pipestem. “Robin?”

  “Yes?” I said, reaching for the new drink.

  “Robin”—bashfully—“I’ve got an idea.”

  I was in a good mood to hear ideas, so I cocked an eyebrow at him as permission to go on. “Walthers gave me the notion: Institutionalize what you did for him. Set up annual awards. Like to Nobel prizes, or the Gateway science bonuses. Six prizes a year, a hundred thousand dollars each, each one for someone in a particular field of science and discovery. I have prepared a budget”—he moved to one side, turning his head to glance toward a corner of the viewing frame; a neatly printed prospectus appeared there—“showing that for a nominal outlay of six hundred thousand a year, nearly all of which would be recouped through tax savings and third-party participation—”

  “Hold it, Albert. Don’t be my accountant. Be my science advisor. Prizes for what?”

  He said simply, “For helping to solve the riddles of the universe.”

  I sat back and stretched, feeling very relaxed and warm. And benign, even to a computer program. “Oh, hell, Albert, sure. Go ahead. Isn’t the soup ready yet?”

  “Right this minute,” he said obligingly, and so it was. I dipped a spoon into it, and it was fish chowder. Thick. White, with lots of cream.

  “I don’t see the point, though,” I said.

  “Information, Robin,” he said.

  “But I thought you got all that sort of information anyway.”

  “Of course I do—after it’s published. I have a conceptually keyed search program going all the time, with more than forty-three thousand subject flags, and as soon as something on, say, Heechee language transcription appears anywhere it automatically goes into my store. But I want it before it’s published, and even if it isn’t published. Like Audee’s discovery, do you see? Winners each year chosen by a jury—I would be glad”—he twinkled—“to help you select the juries. And I have proposed six areas of inquiry.” He nodded toward the display; the budget disappeared, replaced by a neat tabulation:

  Heechee communications translation.

  Observations and interpretation of the missing mass.

  Analysis of Heechee technology.

  Amelioration of terrorism.

  Amelioration of international tensions.

  Nonexploitive life extension.

  “They all sound very commendable,” I said approvingly. “The soup’s fine, too.”

  “Yes,” he said, “the chefs are very good at following instructions.” I glanced up at him drowsily. His voice seemed gentler—no, perhaps the word is sweeter—than before. I yawned, trying to focus my eyes.

  “Do you know, Albert,” I said, “I never noticed it before, but you look a little like my mother.”

  He put down his pipe and regarded me sympathetically. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”

  I regarded my faithful hologram with drowsy pleasure. “I guess that’s right,” I conceded. “Maybe it’s not my mother you look like, though. Those big eyebrows—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Robin,” he said gently.

  “It doesn’t, does it?” I agreed.

  “So you might just as well go to sleep,” he finished.

  And that seemed like such a good idea that I did. Not right away. Not abruptly. Just slowly, gently; I lingered half awake and I was absolutely comfortable and absolutely relaxed, so I didn’t quite know where half awake ended and all-asleep began. I was in a dream or a reverie, that in-between state when you suspect you are sleeping but don’t care much, and the mind wanders. Oh, yes, my mind wandered. Very far. I was chasing around the universe with Wan, reaching into one black hole after another in search of something very important to him, and also very important to me, though I didn’t know why. There was a face involved, not Albert’s, not my mother’s, not even Essie’s, a woman’s face with great dark eyebrows…

  Why, I thought, with pleased surprise, the son of a bitch has doped me!

  And meanwhile, the great Galaxy turned and tiny particles of organic matter pushed slightly less tiny particles of metal and crystal across the spaces between the stars; and the organic bits experienced pain and desolation and terror and joy in all their various ways; but I was all the way asleep and it did not matter to me a bit. Then.

  13

  The Penalties of Love

  One small bit of organic matter named Dolly Walthers was busy experiencing all of those feelings—or all but joy—and a great deal of such other feelings as resentment and boredom. In particular boredom, except at those moments when the dominant feeling in her sorry small heart was terror. As much as anything, the inside of Wan’s ship was like a chamber in some complicated, wholly automatic factory in which a small space had been left for human beings to crawl in to make repairs. Even the flickering golden coil that was part of the Heechee drive system was only partly visible; Wan had surrounded it with cupboarding to store food. Dolly’s own personal possessions—they consisted mostly of her puppets and a six-month supply of tampons—were jammed into a cabinet in the tiny toilet. All the other space was Wan’s. There was not much to do, and no room to do it in. Reading was one possible way to pass the time. The only datafans Wan owned that were readable, really, were mostly children’s stories, recorded for him, he said, when he was tiny. They were extremely boring to Dolly, though not quite as boring as doing nothing at all. Even cooking and cleaning were not as boring as nothing at all, but the opportunities were limited. Some cooking smells drove Wan to take refuge in the lander—or more often to stamp and rage at her. Laundry was easy, involving only putting their garments in a sort of pressure cooker that forced hot steam through them, but then as they dried they raised the humidity of the air and that, too, was cause for stamping and raging. He never really hit her—well, not counting what he probably thought of as amorous play—but he scared her a lot.

  He did not scare her as much as the black holes they visited, one after another. They scared Wan, too. Fear did not keep him from going on; it only made him even more impossible to live with.

  When Dolly realized that this whole mad expedition was only a hopeless search for Wan’s long-lost, and surely long-dead, father, she felt real tenderness for him. She wished he would let her express it. There were times when, especially after sex, especially on those rare occasions when he did not at once either go to sleep or drive her away from him with some cutting and unforgivably critical intimate remark—those times when, for a few minutes at least, they would hold each other in silence. Then she would feel a great yearning to make human contact with him. There were times when she wanted to put her lips to his ear and whisper, “Wan? I know how you feel about your father. I wish I could help.”

  But, of course, she never dared.

  The other thing she never dared do was to tell him that in her opinion, he was going to kill them both—until they came to the eighth hole and she had no choice. Even two days away from it—two days in faster-than-light travel, nearly a light-year in distance—it was different. “Why is it funny-looking?” she demanded, and Wan, not even looking around as he hunched before the screen, only said what she expected:

  “Shut up.” The
n he went on gabbling with his Dead Men. Once he realized she could speak neither Spanish nor Chinese he talked with them openly before her, but not in a language intelligible to her.

  “No, please, honey,” she said, a sick feeling in her stomach. “It’s all wrong!” Why wrong she could not have said. The object on the screen was tiny. It was not very clear, and it jiggled about the screen. But there was no sign of the quick coruscations of energy as stray wisps of matter destroyed themselves as infall. Yet there was something to see, a swimmy sort of blue radiance that was certainly not black.

  “Pah,” he said, sweating, and then, because he was scared as well, he ordered, “Tell the bitch what she wants. In English.”

  “Mrs. Walthers?” The voice was hesitant and faint; it was a dead person’s voice, all right, if a person’s at all. “I was explaining to Wan that this is what is called a naked singularity. That means it is not rotating, therefore it is not exactly black. Wan? Have you compared it with the Heechee charts?”

  He grumbled, “Of course, foolish, I was just about to do so!” but his voice was shaking as he touched the controls. Next to the image itself another image formed. There was the bluish, cloudy, eye-straining object. And there, on the other half of the screen, the same object, with around it a cluster of bright, short red lines and flickering green circles.

  The Dead Man said with dismal satisfaction, “It is a danger object, Wan. The Heechee have tagged it so.”

  “Idiot fool! All black holes are dangerous!” He snapped off the speaker and turned to Dolly with anger and contempt. “You’re frightened, too!” he accused, and stomped off to the stolen and frightening gadgets in the lander.

  It was not consoling to Doily to see that Wan was also shaking. She waited, staring hopelessly at the screen, for the mindtouch that would be Wan’s exploratory reaching with the TPT. It was a long wait, because the TPT did not work at interstellar distances, and she slept in fits, and woke to peer into the lander hatch to see Wan, unmoving, crouched by the glittering mesh and the diamond-bright corkscrew, and slept again.