Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

by Frederick Pohl

  Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the "roof," but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms, labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting city, and the madness had struck at drive time.

  When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.

  I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor's office-he wouldn't be using it for some time-kicked out the insurance adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from our medical program.

  Essie's pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the machines for a while.

  Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was simply swamped.

  I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was No Visitors, and no visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door, forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor's desk set until I found a closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it on. I couldn't see how well Essie was doing. I couldn't even tell for sure which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time to time to pass on little news items. She didn't bother with messages of sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and Harriet gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that kind of programming- Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.

  After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers, and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men's room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and said, "Senor Broad'ead? Por favor." The cop was still at the door of Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.

  Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not conscious.

  Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn't enough time for anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to have one.

  In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short, pot-bellied old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. "Oh, yes, Mr. Blackhead," he said. "Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a short time toward evening."

  I didn't bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top questions on the list: "Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is there anything she needs?-I mean anything."

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too long. "Pain we can take care of, and she's already on Full Medical. I understand you are an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing for you to do. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe there'll be something she'll need. Today, no. Her whole left side was crushed when the bus folded in on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six or seven hours, until somebody got to her."

  I didn't know I had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A little sympathy came through the contact lenses as he peered up at me. "That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life. Being squeezed was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have bled to death." He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. "Um. She's going to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two ribs. Eight, ten, fourteen-maybe twenty square inches of new skin, and there's considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we'll want a transplant."

  "If there's anything at all-"

  "Nothing at all, Mr. Blackeu," he said, folding up the paper. "Nothing now. Go away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be able to talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you're taking up."

  Harriet had already arranged for the hotel to move Essie's things out of her room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had delivered toilet stuff and a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up there. I didn't want to go out. I didn't enjoy seeing the cheerful tipplers in the lobby bar, or the streets full of people who had got safely through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing it had been for them.

  I made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much, but not in staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and played some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But when they went from Stravinsky to Carl Orff that lusty, horny Catullus poetry made me think about the last time I had played it with my lusty, horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.

  "Turn it off," I snapped and ever-vigilant Harriet stopped it in midshriek.

  "Do you want to receive messages, Robin?" she inquired froth the same audio speaker.

  I dried myself carefully, and then said: "In a minute. I might as well." Dried, brushed, in clean clothes, I sat down in front of the hotel's comm system. They weren't quite nice enough to give their guests full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a flat-plate display. She reassured me about Essie. She was continuously monitoring, and everything was going well enough-not far enough, of course. But not badly. Essie's own real flesh-and-blood doctor was in the picture, and Harriet gave me a taped message from her. It translated to don't worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don't worry quite as much as you think you ought to.

  Harriet had a batch of action messages for me to deal with. I authorized another half-million dollars for fire-fighting in the food mines, instructed Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for our man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more liquidity as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most interesting programs report in, finishing with Albert's latest synoptic from the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity and efficiency. I had accepted the fact that Essie's chances of survival were measurably improving all the time, so I didn't need to spare any energy for grief. And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love's lovely body, and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not want to explore.

  There was a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery, in the course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I didn't much like having there. That's okay. Once you take them out and look at them-well, they're pretty bad, but at least they're outside, now, not still inside and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program, Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.

  He was right, far as he went-one of the things I found unlikeable about Sigfrid was that he was infuriatingly reliably right, all too much of the time. What he didn't say was that you never got finished moving your bowels. I kept coming u
p with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.

  I turned Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent, and watched some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink out of the suite's adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn't watching the PV, and I wasn't enjoying the drink. What I was doing was encountering another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My dearest beloved wife was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care, and I was thinking about somebody else.

  I turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped onto the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. "What can I do for you, Robin?" he beamed.

  "I want you to talk to me about black holes," I said.

  "Sure thing, Robin. But we've been over this a goad many times, you know-"

  "Fuck off, Albert! Just do it. And I don't mean in mathematics, I just want you to explain them as simply as you can." One of these days I would have to get Essie to rewrite Albert's program a little less idiosyncratically.

  "Sure thing, Robin," he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He wrinkled his furry eyebrows. "Ah-ha," he said. "Uh-huh. Well, let's see."

  "Is that a hard question for you?" I asked, more surprised than sarcastic.

  "Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start. Well, let's start with light. You know that light is made up of particles called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure-"

  "Not that far back, Albert, please."

  "All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of light pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiation pressure-call it the `light pressure'-from the nuclear reaction of hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen. Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that part, Robin?"

  "I think so. Get on with it."

  "Well," he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can't help wondering if he enjoys it!-"that's one of the ways black holes get started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now go on to the next part: escape velocity."

  "I know what escape velocity is."

  "Sure thing, Robin," he nodded, "an old Gateway prospector like you. Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty kilometers an hour-it wouldn't come back. It would reach escape velocity and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you'd have to throw it a lot faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.

  "Now," he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light it again, "if you-" tap, tap, "if you were on the surface of some object that has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse. Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high, say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You couldn't throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn't quite go that fast! So even light-" puff, puff, "can't escape, because its velocity is ten thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can't escape, then nothing can escape; that's Einstein. If I may be excused the vanity." He actually winked at me over his pipe. "So that's a black hole. It's black because it can't radiate at all."

  I said, "What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light."

  Albert grinned ruefully. "Got me there, Robin, but we don't know how they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole, who knows? But we don't have any evidence of one of them ever doing it."

  I thought that over for a moment. "Yet," I said.

  "Well, yes, Robin," he agreed. "The problem, of going faster than light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the same problem." He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, "I guess that's about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now."

  I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. "Albert," I said, "tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?"

  "Well, Bob, sometimes it is," he said after a moment, "like that time. But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to `chat.' If you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation, involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance to the tone of the particular chat. `Tain't easy, Robin."

  "You're smarter than you look, Albert," I said.

  He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop. "Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?"

  I let him go, saying, "You're a good old machine, Albert." I stretched out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to some other program, and I couldn't remember when.

  Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M.D., who came to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in a while. "Robin," she said, "I think Essie's out of danger."

  "That's-marvelous!" I said, wishing I had saved words like "marvelous" for when I really meant them, because they didn't do justice to the way I felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I had talked to-and, of course, had pumped all of Essie's medical history back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie instead.

  "But don't go to see her tonight, Robin," she said. "Talk to her on the phone if you want to-I prescribe it-but don't tire her out. By tomorrow-well, I think she'll be stronger."

  So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy, but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep, and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me "Bob".

  There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a long time ago, that sometimes called me "Robin" and sometimes "Bob" and even "Bobby". I hadn't talked to that particular program in quite a while, because I hadn't felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.

  Full Medical is-well, it's full medical. It's everything. If there's a way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you've got it. And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it-something under one tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot. Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.

  Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, hear
t-lung machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of which was the heart of me, namely my wife.

  Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she couldn't. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma's classmate supervising a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby, watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the hospital in the hail. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. "Don't tire her out," he said.

  "I'm getting tired of hearing that."

  He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me. He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate. There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn't have let that happen if he hadn't been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.