Beyond the Blue Event Horizon h-2

by Pohl Frederik

“I do not feel well,” he announced.

  Pause. Then, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Hester.” Poor stupid Vera had just so much capacity. She was processing a burst of messages from Earth, endeavoring to carry on a conversation with the Dead Men by means of the faster-than-light radio, encoding and transmitting all of her own telemetry-all at once. She simply did not have time for his queasiness. But his accelerating unease would not be denied: a sudden rush of saliva under the tongue, a quick shuddering of the diaphragm. He barely made it to the sanitary, giving back, there, all he had taken. For the last time, he swore. He did not want to live so long as to see those God-bedamned organic compounds reworked for one more passage through his gut. When he was sure he had stopped vomiting he marched over to the console and pushed the override buttons. “All functions in standby except this,” he ordered. “Monitor my bio-assay at once.”

  “Very well,” she said at once,”. . . Mr. Hester.” Silence for a moment, while the unit in the sanitary made what it could of what Peter had just deposited. “You are suffering from food poisoning,” she reported,”. . . Mr. Hester.”

  “So! This I already know. What is to be done about it?”

  Pause, while her tiny brain revolved the problem. “If you could add water to the system, the fermentation and recycling would be under better control,” she said, “. . . Mr. Hester. At least one hundred liters. There has been considerable loss due to evaporation in the much larger volume of space now available, as well as the stocks withdrawn for the remainder of your party. My recommendation is that you replenish the system with available water as soon as possible.”

  “But that is not fit to drink for pigs even!”

  “The solutes present problems,” she acknowledged. “Therefore I recommend that at least half of any added water be distilled first. The system should be able to cope with the remainder of the solutes. . . Mr. Hester.”

  “God in Heaven! Am I to build a still out of nothing, and become a water-carrier too? And what of the bio-assay mobile unit, so that this will not happen again?”

  Vera sorted through the questions for a moment. “Yes, I think that would be appropriate,” she agreed. “If you wish, I will provide construction plans. Also. . . Mr. Hester, you may wish to consider relying more heavily on CHON-food for your diet, since you do not appear to have severe adverse reactions to it.”

  “Apart of course from the fact that it tastes like dog-biscuit,” he sneered. “Very well. Complete the construction plans at once. Hard copy, making use of available materials, do you understand?”

  “Yes. . . Mr. Hester.” The computer was silent for a time, inventorying redundant parts and materials, devising linkages that would do the job. It was a formidable task for Vera’s limited intelligence. Peter drew a cup of water and rinsed out his mouth, then grimly unwrapped one of the least unattractive CHON tablets and nibbled off a tentative corner. While he waited to see if he would throw up again he faced the possibility that he might in fact die here, and alone. He did not even have the option he had thought was his, of casting everything adrift and returning to Earth by himself-not, at least, unless he first added water as ordered, and did his best to insure that nothing else would go wrong.

  And yet it was every day so increasingly tempting. .

  To be sure, that would mean casting his daughters and his son-in-law adrift.

  But would they ever return? Suppose they did not. Suppose that rude boy turned the wrong switch, or ran out of fuel. Or anything. Suppose, in short, they died. Must he then wither on the vine until he also was dead? And what benefit would that be to humanity, if he perished here, and the whole thing to do over again with a new crew. . . and himself, Schwarze Peter, done out of reward, done out of fame and power, done out of life itself?

  Or-an idea struck him-was there another option? This bedamned Food Factory itself, so set on continuing its course. What if he could find the controls that directed it so? What if he could learn to change those directions, so that it could bring him back to Earth not in three years and more, but at once, in days? To be sure, that would doom his family, would it not? But perhaps not! Perhaps they would return, if they returned at all, to the Food Factory itself, wherever it might be. Even in close orbit around Earth! And how marvelously that would solve everyone’s problems at once-He threw the remainder of the packet into the sanitary, to add to the store of organics. “Du bist verruckt, Peter!” he snarled to himself. The flaw in that dream could not be ignored: he had sought with all his might, and the controls to the Food Factory were not to be found.

  The frying-bacon sound of the hard-copy printer rescued him from his thoughts. He pulled the sheets out of the machine and frowned over them for a moment. So much work! Twenty hours, at least! And not merely time, but so much of it was hard physical labor! He would have to go out into space to reclaim piping from the struts that were meant to hold the auxiliary transmitters in place, cut them loose, bring them inside; and only then begin to weld them together and form them into a spiral. Simply for the condensation section of the still! He saw that he was beginning to shake-He barely made it to the sanitary in time. “Vera!” he croaked.

  “I must have medication for this!”

  “At once. . . Mr. Hester. Yes. In the medical kit you will find tablets marked-“

  “Dumbhead! The medical kit is gone to Cuckooland!”

  “Oh, yes . .. Mr. Hester. One moment. Yes. I have programmed appropriate pharmaceuticals for you. It will take about twenty minutes for them to be prepared.”

  “In twenty minutes I could be dead,” be snarled. But there was no help for it, and so he sat and stewed for twenty minutes, the pressures mounting. Illness, hunger, loneliness, overwork, resentment, fear. Anger! That was what, in the end, they all fused into. Anger. Many vectors. One vector sum. By the time Vera’s dispensary popped out his pills, it had submerged all the others. He swallowed them greedily and retired to his private to see what would happen.

  Actually they did appear to work. He lay back while the fires in his belly damped themselves, and fell imperceptibly asleep.

  When he woke he felt at least physically better. He washed himself, brushed his teeth, brushed his thinning yellow hair, and only then noticed the Christmas tree of attention-demanding lights around Vera’s console. On the screen in bright red letters were the words:

  GENTLY REQUEST PERMISSION TO RESUME NORMAL MODES.

  He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten to cancel the override. When he ordered the computer to get back to business there was an instant explosion of bells and signal lights, a cascade of hard copy out of the printer and a voice. His elder daughter’s voice, out of Vera’s taped storage: “Hello, Pop. Sorry we couldn’t reach you to tell you we arrived safely. We’re going to explore now. Talk to you later.”

  Because Peter Hester loved his family, the joy of their safe arrival flooded his heart and sustained him-for hours. For almost two days. But joy does not flourish in an existence of irritations and worries. He spoke to Lurvy-twice; for no more than thirty seconds each time. Vera simply could not handle more. Vera was harder pressed than Peter himself, stripped and rearranged as she was, handling two-way traffic between Heechee Heaven and the Earth, deferring top priority action commands when even higher priorities demanded attention. The one voice link with the Heechee place could not handle the volume it was given to carry, and mere chitchat between father and daughter could not be allowed.

  That was not unjust, Peter conceded. Such marvels they were finding! What was unjust was that he himself was out of it. What was unjust was that among the urgent and meaningful traffic, Vera found time to pass on to him a hodgepodge of commands meant for himself. None reasonable. Some impossible to carry out. Redeploy the thrusters. Inventory CHON-food. Submit by return message complete analysis a cm by 3 cm by 12.5 cm packets in red and lavender wrappers. Do not submit unnecessary analyses! Submit metallurgical analysis “dreaming couch”. Do not attempt physical study “dreaming couch”. Query Dead Men re Heech
ee Drive. Query Dead Men re control panels. Query Dead Men. How easy that was to command! How hard to carry out, when they maundered and scolded and rambled and complained when he could hear them at all, and when most often he was forbidden to take time on the FTL voice circuit anyway. Some of the orders from Earth contradicted others, and most of them came out of order, with obsolete priority designations. And some did not come at all. Poor Vera’s storage circuits were soon approaching overload, and she tried to rid herself of unnecessary data by hard-printing it for him to, somehow, attend to; but that made problems of its own,, because the recycling system that fed the printer rolls was the same one that fed him, and the organics were already depleted. So Peter had to open and dump CHON-food into the sanitary and then get busy on the still.

  Even if Vera had had time for him, he had not much time for Vera. Struggle into EVA equipment. Cycle himself out on the hull of the Food Factory. Cut away tubing and bind it together. Sweat it back to the ship, always fighting the infuriating, dogged thrust of the Food Factory itself as it plunged toward somewhere or other. He could spare time only for an occasional glance at the pictures coming back from Heechee Heaven. Vera displayed them as they came in, one frame at a time; but then each one was whisked away to make storage space for the next one, and if Peter was not there to see they would go unseen. Even so, good heavens! The Dead Men, so featureless to look at. The corridors of Heechee Heaven. The Old Ones-Peter’s heart almost stopped as he looked at the great broad face of an Old One on the screen. But he had time only for a look, and then the still was done and he must go on with the next task. Build himself a yoke for his shoulders. Seam together plastic sheeting (another drain on the recycler!) to make buckets. Squat impatiently by the one functioning-barely functioning-water source, holding the flexible disk around the spout and catching the foulsmelling dribble in the bags. Tote the water back, half into the still, the other half into the recycling tanks. Sleep when he could. Eat when he could force himself. Attend to his own personal priority messages when they trickled through, and when he was too exhausted for anything physical. Another message from Dortmund, three hundred municipal workers this time-stupid Vera, for letting such trash through! A coded communication from his lawyer, meaning half an hour to translate it. And then all it said was, “Am attempting secure more favorable terms. Can promise nothing. Meanwhile advise full compliance all directives.” What a pig! Peter, swearing, sat before the console, slammed down the override key and dictated his reply:

  “Full compliance with all stupid directives will kill me, and then what?” And he sent it in the clear; let Broadhead and the Gateway Corp make what they would of it!

  And perhaps the message was no lie. In all his stress and bustle, Peter had no time for aches and pains. He ate the CHON-food and, when new regular rations began to come out of the recycler, them, too. Even when they tasted foul-sometimes turpentine, sometimes mold-he was not sick. This was not ideal. Peter knew that he was operating on stress and adrenaline, and sometime there would be a price to pay. But he could see no way to avoid paying it when due.

  And when at last he had the food processor working reasonably well once more, and had managed to catch up with what appeared the most peremptory of his own orders, he sat before Vera’s console half-dozing, and then saw the greatest marvel of all. He scowled uncomprehendingly. What was that idiot boy doing with a prayer fan? Why in the next frame was he poking it into those foolish things that looked like flowerholders? And then the next frame began to build on the screen, and Peter gave a great shout. Suddenly a picture had appeared, some sort of book-Japanese or Chinese, by the look of it.

  He was out of the ship and halfway to the Traumeplatz before his conscious mind quite articulated what some part of him had understood at once. The prayer fans! They contained information! He did not stop to wonder why the information had been in a Terrestrial language, or at least what looked like one. He had grasped the essential fact. He was determined to see for himself. Panting, he thrust himself into the room and scrabbled feverishly among the “fans”. How was it done? Why in the name of God had he not waited to see more, to be sure of what he was doing? But there were the candleholders, or flowerpots, or whatever he had thought they were; he jammed the first prayer fan to hand into the nearest one. Nothing happened.

  He tried six of them, narrow end first, wide end first, every way he could think of, before it occurred to him that perhaps not all of the reading machines were still working. And the second one he tried pulled the fan out of his hand and immediately sprang into light. He was looking at six dancers in black masks and bodystockings, and he was hearing a song he had not heard for many years.

  It was a taped PV show! No. Not even that. It was older than that. Years older, not much more recent than the first years of the discovery of the Gateway asteroid; his second wife was still alive, and Janine not born yet, when that song was new. It had been simple old television, before the Heechee piezoelectric circuits had been incorporated into communications systems for human beings. It had perhaps been part of the library of some Gateway prospector, no doubt One of the Dead Men, and somehow it had been transcribed to a prayer fan.

  What a cheat!

  But then he realized that there were thousands of prayer fans, on Earth, in the tunnels of Venus, still on Gateway itself; wherever the Heechee had been they had left them. Whatever the source of this one, most of the others must have been left by the Heechee themselves! And that alone-dear God, that alone was worth more even than the Food Factory, for it was the key to all of the Heechee’s knowledge! What a bonus there would be!

  Exulting, Peter tried another fan (old movie), and another (slim volume of poetry, this time in English, by someone named Eliot), and another. How disgusting! If this was what Wan had got his notions of love from, some lascivious Gateway prospector carrying pornography with him to pass the time, no wonder his behavior was so foul! But he could not remain angry long, for he had too much to be glad about. He snatched it out of the reader, and then, in the quiet, heard the distant tiny sound of Vera’s urgent-attention bell.

  It had a frightening sound, even before he got back to the ship, even before he demanded the message and heard his son-in-law’s voice, rasped with fear:

  “Urgent override priority! For Peter Hester and immediate relay to Earth! Lurvy, Janine and Wan have been captured by the Heechee, and I think they are coming after me!”

  The advantage of his new situation, and the only one, was that now that there were no more messages coming from Heechee Heaven Vera was better able to cope with her overload. Patiently Peter teased out of her all the pictures that had been transmitted before Paul’s message had been taped, and saw the knot of Heechee at the end of the corridor, the blurred struggle, half a dozen quick glimpses of the ceiling of the corridor, something that might have been the back of Wan’s head-then nothing. Or nothing that meant anything. Peter could not know that the camera had been jammed into the blouse of one of the Old Ones, but he could see that there was nothing to be seen: obscure shadowy shapes, perhaps a hint of texture.

  Peter’s mind was clear. But it was also empty. He did not allow himself to feel how empty his life had at once become. He carefully programmed Vera to go back over the voice messages and select the significant ones, and listened to what all of them had said. There was no hope in any of it. Not even when at last a new picture suddenly began to build on the screen, then another, then another. For half a dozen frames there was nothing that made sense, perhaps a fist over the lens, maybe a shot of a bare floor. Then, in one corner of the last frame, something that looked like-what? Like a Sturmkampfwagen from his earliest boyhood? But then it was gone, and the camera had once again been put where it showed nothing at all, and stayed that way through fifty frames.

  What it noticeably did not show was any sign of either of his daughters, or of Wan. And as to Paul, the old man did not have a clue; after his last frantic message he was gone.

  In some unwanted corner of his min
d he found the realization that now he might be, probably was, the sole survivor of the mission, and so whatever bonus might come to all was now his alone.

  He held the thought where he could look at it. But it meant nothing. He was now hopelessly alone, more alone than ever, as alone as Trish Bover frozen into her eternal ragged orbit that would go nowhere. Perhaps he could get back to Earth to claim his reward. Perhaps he could keep from dying. But how was he to keep from going insane?

  It took Peter a long time to fall asleep. He was not afraid of sleeping. What he dreaded was waking up afterward, and when it came it was as bad as he had feared. In the first moment it was a day like any other day, and it was only after a peaceable moment of stretching and yawning that he remembered what had happened. “Peter Hester,” he said to himself out loud, “you are alone in this very damned place, and you will die here, still alone.” He noted that he was talking to himself. Already.

  Through the habits of all those years he washed himself, cleaned his mouth, brushed his hair and then took time to snip off the loose ends around his ears and at the nape of his neck. It did not matter what he did, in any case. Having left his private, he opened two packets of CHON-food and ate them methodically before asking Vera if there were any messages from Heechee Heaven. “No,” she said, “. . . Mr. Hester, but there are a number of downlink action relays.”

  “Later,” he said. They did not matter. They would tell him to do things he had already done, perhaps. Or they would tell him to do things he had no intention of doing, perhaps to force himself outside, to rerig the thrusters, to try again. But the Food Factory would of course counter every thrust with an equal and opposite thrust of its own and continue its slow acceleration toward God, He knew what, for God, He knew why. In any event, nothing that came from Earth for the next fifty days would be relevant to the new realities.

  And in less than fifty days-In less than fifty days, what? “You talk as though you had a choice of options, Peter Hester!” he scolded himself.