Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  “If I cannot become immortal by voyaging to another star, then at least I will father a son.”

  “No! Please! Think, my friend,” begged LaDzhaRi, “we can be home if we wish. Can return as heroes to our arcologies, can sing our eddas so the entire world will hear—” For the sludge of their homes carried sound as well as a sea, and their songs reached as far as a great whale’s.

  TsuTsuNga touched LaDzhaRi briefly, almost contemptuously, at least dismissively. “We’re not heroes!” he said. “Go away and let me do this female.”

  And LaDzhaRi reluctantly released him, and listened to the dwindling sounds as he moved away. It was true. They were failed heroes at best.

  Robin does not explain very well what the Heechee were afraid of. They had deduced that the purpose of causing the universe to contract again was to return it to the primordial atom—after which it would burst in another Big Bang and start a new universe. They further deduced that in that case, the physical laws that govern the universe might develop in a different way.

  What scared them most was the thought of beings who thought they would be happier in a universe with different physical laws.

  The sailship people were not without such human traits as pride. It did not please them to be the Heechees’—what? Slaves? Not exactly, for the only service they were required to perform was to report, via sealed-beam communicator, any evidence of other spacefaring intelligence. They were very glad to do that for their own sakes, more than for the Heechees’. If not slaves, then what?

  There was only one word that was right: pets.

  So the racial psyche of the slush dwellers contained a patch of tarnish they could never burnish away, with whatever feats of interstellar venturing they might accomplish in their vast, slow starjammers. They knew they were pets. It was not the first time for them. Long before the Heechee came they had been chattels, in almost the same way, to beings quite unlike the Heechee, or humans, or themselves; and when, generations before, their sooth-singers had roared the ancient eddas about those others into the Heechee listening machine, the slush dwellers had not failed to notice that the Heechee ran away. A pet was not the worst thing one could be.

  So love and fear were abroad in the universe. For love (what passed among the slush dwellers for love) TsuTsuNga damaged his health and risked his life. Dreaming of love, I lay in my hospice, waking less than an hour every day, while my store-bought innards reconciled themselves to the rest of me. Terrified by love, Captain saw Twice grow thinner and darker.

  For Twice had not got better once the cargo bubble was en route. The surcease had come too late. The closest thing they had to a medical specialist was Burst, the black-hole operator, but even at home, even with the finest care, few females could survive unrequited love combined with terrible strain.

  It was no surprise to Captain when Burst appeared, hangdog, pitying, and said, “I’m sorry. She is joining the massed minds.”

  It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.

  14

  The New Albert

  Everyone conspired against me—even the wife of my bosom—even my trusted data-retrieval program. In the brief moments they allowed me to be awake they gave me a free choice. “You can go to the clinic for a complete checkup,” said Albert, sucking judiciously at his pipe.

  “Or can stay the damn hell asleep until are damn sure you are all better,” said Essie.

  “Ah-ha,” I said, “I thought so! You’ve been keeping me unconscious, haven’t you? It’s probably been days since you knocked me out and let them cut me open.” Essie avoided my eyes. I said nobly, “I don’t blame you for that, but, don’t you see, I want to go look at this thing Walthers found! Can’t you understand that?”

  She was still not meeting my eyes. She glowered at the hologram of Albert Einstein. “Seems damn peppy today. You keeping this khuligan tranked up good?”

  Albert’s image coughed. “Actually, Mrs. Broadhead, the medical program advised against any unnecessary sedation at this point.”

  “Oh, God! Will be awake, bothering us day and night! That settles it, you Robin, you go to clinic tomorrow.” And all the time she was snarling at me, her hand was on the back of my neck, caressing; words can be liars, but you can feel the touch of love.

  So I said: “I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll go to the clinic for the complete physical on condition that if I pass you don’t give me any more arguments about going into space.”

  Essie was silent, calculating, but Albert cocked an eyebrow at me. “I think that might be a mistake, Robin.”

  “That’s what us human beings are for, to make mistakes. Now, what’s for dinner?”

  You see, I bad calculated that if I showed a happy appetite they would take it as a good sign, and maybe they did. I had also calculated that my new ship wouldn’t be ready for several weeks, anyway, so there was no real hurry—I wasn’t about to take off in another cramped, smelly Five when I had a yacht of my own coming along. What I had not calculated on was that I had forgotten how much I hated hospitals.

  When Albert examined me, he measured my temperature bolometrically, scanned my eyes for clarity and my skin for external blemishes like burst blood vessels, pumped hypersound through my torso to peer at the organs inside, and sampled the contributions I left in the toilets for biochemical imbalances and bacteria counts. Albert called these procedures noninvasive. I called them polite.

  The diagnostic procedures at the clinic didn’t bother to be polite. They weren’t really painful. They numbed the surface of my skin before going much farther, and once you get inside the surface there aren’t that many nerve endings to worry about. All I really felt were tweaks and pokes and tickles. But a lot of them, and besides, I knew what they were doing. Hair-thin light pipes were peering around the inside of my belly. Needle-sharp pipettes were sucking out plugs of tissue for analysis. Siphons were sipping up my bodily fluids; sutures were checked, scars were appraised. The whole thing took less than an hour, but it seemed longer and, honestly, I’d rather have been doing something else.

  Then they let me put my clothes back on and I was allowed to sit down in a comfortable chair in the presence of a real-live human doctor. They even let Essie sit in, but I didn’t give her a chance to talk. I got in first. “What do you say, Doc?” I asked. “How long after the operation can I go into space? I don’t mean rockets, I mean a Lofstrom loop, about as traumatic as an elevator. You see, the loop just sort of pulls you along on a magnetized ribbon—”

  The doctor held up his hand. He was a plump, white-haired Santa Claus of a man, with a neat, close-trimmed white beard and bright blue eyes. “I know what a Lofstrom loop is.”

  “Good, I’m glad of that. Well?”

  “Well,” he said, “the usual practice after surgery such as yours is to avoid anything like that for three to four weeks, but—”

  “Oh, no! Doc, no!” I said. “Please! I don’t want to have to hang around for practically a month!”

  He looked at me and he looked at Essie. Essie wouldn’t meet his eyes, either. He smiled. “Mr. Broadhead,” he said, “I think you should know two things. The first is that it is often desirable to keep a convalescent patient unconscious for some time. With electrically stimulated muscle exercise, massage, good diet, and proper nursing care there is no impairment of function, and it’s a lot easier on the patient’s nervous system. And everybody else’s, too.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, not very interested. “What’s the other thing?”

  “The other thing is that you were operated on forty-three days ago this morning. You can do just about anything you want to now. Including taking a ride on a loop.”

  Time was when the road to the stars led through Guiana or Baikonur or the Cape. You had to burn about a million dollars’ worth of liquid hydrogen to get into orbit, before you could transship to something going farther away. Now we had the Lofstrom launch loops spaced around
the equator, immense gossamer structures that you couldn’t see until you were almost beside them—well, within twenty kilometers, which was where the satellite landing field was. I watched it with pleasure and pride as we circled and descended to touchdown. In the seat beside me Essie was frowning and muttering to herself as she worked on some project—a new kind of computer programing, or maybe a pension plan for her Big Chon employees; I couldn’t tell which, because she was doing it in Russian. On the pull-down console in front of me Albert was displaying my new ship, rotating the image slowly while he recited the statistics of capacity, accessories, mass, and amenities. Since I had put quite a few million dollars and a lot of my time into that plaything, I was interested, but not as interested as I was in what was coming next. “Later, Albert,” I ordered, and obediently he winked out. I craned my neck to keep the loop in view as we entered final approach. Faintly, along the top of the ski-jump launch section, I could see capsules speeding up through three gravities’ acceleration and neatly, gently detaching themselves at the steepest part of the upslope to disappear into the blue. Beautiful! No chemicals, no combustion, no damage to the ozone layer. Not even the energy-wastage of a Heechee lander launch; some things we could do even better than the Heechee did!

  Time was when even being in orbit was not enough, and then you had to take the long, slow Hohmann journey to the Gateway asteroid. Usually you were scared out of your bird, because everybody knew that more Gateway prospectors got killed than got rich; and because you were space sick and cramped and condemned to inhabit that interplanetary slammer for weeks or months on end before you even got to the asteroid; and most of all because you’d risked everything you owned or could borrow to pay for it. Now we had a Heechee Three chartered and waiting for us in low-Earth orbit. We could transship in our shirtsleeves and be on our way to the far stars before we’d finished digesting our last meal on Earth—that is, we could, because we had the muscle and the money to pay for it.

  Time was when going out into that interstellar nothingness was a lot like playing Russian roulette. The only difference was that if the luck of the draw was favorable, whatever you found at the end of the journey might make you rich beyond richness forever—as it ultimately did me. But what you mostly got made was dead.

  “Is much better now.” Essie sighed as we climbed down out of the aircraft and blinked around in the hot South American sun “Now, where is damn courtesy van from crummy fleabag hotel?”

  I did not comment on her reading my mind. After all the time we had been married I was used to it. Anyway, it wasn’t telepathy; it was what any human being would think if he were doing what we were doing at that time. “I wish Audee Walthers were going with us,” I said, looking out at the launch loop. We were still kilometers away, on the far shore of Lake Tehigualpa. I could see the loop reflected in it, blue at the center of the lake, greeny-yellow near the shore, where they had sown edible algae, and it was a pretty sight.

  “If you wanted him with you, should not have given him two mil to chase his wife with,” said Essie practically, and then, looking at me more closely, “How you feeling?”

  “Absolutely in the pink,” I said. It wasn’t far from true. “Quit worrying about me. When you’ve got Full Medical Plus they don’t dare let you die before you reach a hundred—it’s bad for business.”

  “Don’t have much to say about it,” she said gloomily, “when customer is reckless desperado who spends time chasing for make-believe Heechee! Anyway,” she added, brightening, “here is van for fleabag, hop in.”

  So when we were inside the van I leaned over and kissed the back of her neck—easy to do, because she had braided her long hair and brought it around her neck to tie in front like a kind of a necklace—getting ready for the launch, you see. She leaned against my lips. “Khuligan.” She sighed. “But not bad khuligan.”

  The hotel wasn’t really a fleabag. They had given us a comfortable suite on the top floor, looking over the lake and the loop. Besides, we would only be in it for a few hours. I left Essie to key in her programs on the hotel PV screen while I wandered over to the window, telling myself, indulgently, that I wasn’t really a hooligan. But that wasn’t true, because it certainly was not the act of a responsible senior citizen of wealth and substance to skylark off into interstellar space just for the glamour and excitement of it.

  It occurred to me then that Essie might not be taking quite that view of my motives. She might think I was after something else.

  It then occurred to me that maybe my own view was wrong. Was it really the Heechee I was looking for? Sure it was, or anyway could be; everybody was desperately curious about the Heechee. But not everybody had left something else out in interstellar space. Was it possible that somewhere in the down-deep hidden part of my mind, what was driving me out and on was the hope that somehow, somewhere, I might find that misplaced thing again? I knew what the thing was. I knew where I had left it. What I didn’t know was what I would do with it—or, more accurately, her—if I found her again.

  And then I felt a sort of quivery not-quite-pain in my middle. It had nothing to do with my two point three meters of new gut. What it had to do with was the hope, or the fear, that somehow Gelle-Klara Moynlin might indeed turn up in my life again. There was more emotion left over there than I had realized. It made my eyes tear, so the spidery launch structure out the window seemed to ripple in my sight.

  But there were no tears in my eyes.

  And it wasn’t an optical illusion. “My God!” I shouted. “Essie!” And she hurried over to stand beside me and look at the tiny flare of light from a capsule on the launch run, and the shaking, shuddering of the whole thread-thin structure. Then there was the noise—a single faint blast like a distant cannon shot, and then the lower, slower, longer thunder of the immense loop tearing itself apart. “My God,” Essie echoed faintly, clutching my arm. “Terrorist?”

  And then she answered herself. “Of course terrorist,” she said bitterly. “Who else could be so vile?”

  I had opened our windows to get a good look at the lake and the loop; good thing, because that meant they weren’t blown in. Others in the hotel were not so lucky. The airport itself wasn’t touched, not counting the occasional aircraft sent flying because it wasn’t tied down. But the airport officials were scared. They didn’t know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution—no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 × 1014 Joules to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another.

  I asked Albert later because I couldn’t ask him then. Naturally, the first thing I did was to try to key him up, or any other data-retrieval or information program that could tell me what was going on. The comm circuits were jammed; we were cut off. The broadcast PV was still working, though, so we stood and watched that mushroom cloud grow and listened to damage reports. One shuttle had been actually accelerating on the ribbon when it blew—that was the first explosion, perhaps because it had carried a bomb. Three others had been in the loading bypass. More than two hundred human beings were now hamburger, not counting the ones they hadn’t counted yet who had been working on the launcher itself, or had been in the duty-free shops and bars underneath it, or maybe just out for a stroll nearby. “I wish I could get Albert,” I grumbled to Essie.

  “As to that, dear Robin,” she began hesitantly, but didn’t finish, because there was a knock on the door; would the señor and the señora come at once to the Bolivar Room, por favor, as there was a matter of the gravest emergency.

  The matter of the gravest emergency was a police checkup, and you never saw such a checking of passports. The Bolivar Room was
one of those function things that they divide up for meetings and open for grand banquets, and one partitioned-off part of it was filled with turistas like us, many of them squatting on their baggage, all looking both resentful and scared. They were being kept waiting. We were not. The bellhop who fetched us, wearing an armband with the initials “S.E.R.” over his uniform, escorted us to the dais, where a lieutenant of police studied our passports briefly and then handed them back. “Señor Broadhead,” he said in English, accent excellent, touches of American Midwest, “does it occur to you that this act of terrorist violence may in fact have been aimed personally at you?”