He frowned. “We don’t know how to decode the damn things.”
“We will. Now that we know what they are, we’ll figure out a way to make them work. We’ve got the revelation. All we need is the engineering. We ought to—” I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going to say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the market, but that was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched to, “We ought to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall expedition isn’t our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about national interests loses a lot of weight.”
He accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that didn’t look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. “It’s an argument. I’ll tell it to the committee.”
“I was hoping you’d do more than that, Senator.”
“If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don’t have that authority. I’m only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go home and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that’s the limit of it.”
“And what’s the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover’s claim?”
He hesitated. “I think it’s worse than that. I think the sentiment’s to expropriate you all. Then it’s a Gateway Corporation matter, which means it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course, in the long run, you’ll all get reimbursed—”
I slammed the cup back into its saucer. “Fuck the reimbursement! Do you think I’m in this for the money?”
Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think he trusts me, but there wasn’t any friendly look on his face when he said, “Sometime I wonder just why you are in it, Robin.” He looked at me for a moment without expression. I knew he knew about me and Klara, and I also knew he’d been a guest at Essie’s table at Tappan. “I’m sorry about your wife’s illness,” he said at last. “I hope she’s all better real soon.”
I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to tell her to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get their hands on. She had about a million messages, but I would only take one—and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be seeing the doctors in about an hour. I didn’t have time for the rest, because I had somewhere to go.
It is not easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the doormen have their orders, and they know who rates priority. I had to climb up on the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver the address, he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written down. It wasn’t my bad Portuguese. He didn’t really want to go to Free Town.
So we drove out past the old cathedral, under the immense Gateway tower, along the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two kilometers of it. That was the green space, the cordon sanitaire the Brazilians defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the shantytown. As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in the Wyoming food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this was a different stink. Not just the stench of oil. This was open-air toilets and rotting garbage—two million people without running water in their homes. The shanties had sprung up in the first place to give construction workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream city. They were supposed to disappear when the city was finished. Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.
The taxi-driver pushed his cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow alleys, muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people moved slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along beside us. I made him take me to the exact place, and get out and ask where Senhor Hanson Bover lived, but before he found out I saw Bover himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home. As soon as I paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.
Bover did not stand up as I came toward him. He was chewing on some kind of sweet roll, and didn’t stop doing that, either. He just watched me.
By the standards of the barrio, he lived in a mansion. Those old trailers had two or three rooms inside, and he even had a little patch of something or other green growing alongside the step. The top of his head was bare and sunburned, and he was wearing dirty denim cut-offs and a tee-shirt printed with something in Portuguese that I didn’t understand, but looked dirty too. He swallowed and said, “I would offer you lunch, Broadhead, but I’m just finishing eating it.”
“I don’t want lunch. I want to make a deal. I’ll give you fifty percent of my interest in the expedition plus a million dollars cash if you drop your suit.”
He stroked the top of his head gingerly. It struck me strange that he got burned so fast, because I hadn’t noticed sunburn the day before—but then I realized I hadn’t noticed baldness, either. He had been wearing a toupee. All dressed up for his mingling with class society. No difference. I didn’t like the man’s manners, and I didn’t like the growing cluster of audience around us, either. “Can we talk this over inside?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He just pushed the last bite of the roll into his mouth and chewed it while he looked at me.
That was enough of that. I squeezed past him and climbed the steps into the house.
The first thing that hit me was the stink—worse than outside, oh, a hundred times worse. Three walls of the room were taken up with stacks of cages, and breeding rabbits in every cage. What I smelled was rabbit shit, kilos of it. And not just from rabbits. There was a baby with a soiled diaper being nursed in the arms of a skinny young woman. No. A girl; she looked fifteen at the most. She stared up worriedly at me, but didn’t stop nursing.
So this was the dedicated worshipper at his wife’s shrine! I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud.
Coming inside had not been such a good idea. Bover followed me in, pulling the door shut, and the stink intensified. He was not impassive now, he was angry. “I see you don’t approve of my living arrangements,” he said.
I shrugged. “I didn’t come here to talk about your sex life.”
“No. Nor do you have any right to. You wouldn’t understand.”
I tried to keep the conversation where I wanted it to be. “Bover,” I said, “I made you an offer which is better than you’ll ever get in a court, and a lot more than you had any reason to hope for. Please accept it, so I can go ahead with what I’m doing.”
He didn’t answer me directly that time, either, just said something to the girl in Portuguese. She got up silently, wrapped a cloth around the baby’s bottom, and went out on the steps, closing the door again behind her. Bover said, as though he hadn’t heard me, “Trish has been gone for more than eight years, Mr. Broadhead. I still love her. But I’ve only got one life to live and I know what the odds are against ever sharing any of it with Trish again.”
“If we can figure out how to run the Heechee ships properly we might be able to go out and find Trish,” I said. I didn’t pursue that; all it was doing was making him look at me with active hostility, as though he thought I were trying to con him. I said, “A million dollars, Bover. You can be out of this place tonight. Forever. With your lady and your baby and your rabbits, too. Full Medical for all of them. A future for the kid.”
“I told you you wouldn’t understand, Broadhead.”
I checked myself and only said, “Then make me understand. Tell me what I don’t know.”
He picked a soiled baby dress and a couple of pins off the chair the girl had been sitting on. For a moment I thought he had relapsed into hospitality, but he sat there himself and said, “Broadhead, I’ve lived for eight years on welfare. Brazilian welfare. If we hadn’t raised rabbits we wouldn’t have had meat. If we didn’t sell the skins I wouldn’t have bus fare to meet you for lunch, or to go to my lawyer’s office. A million dollars won’t pay me for that, or for Trish.”
I was still trying to keep my temp
er, but the stink was getting to me, and so was his attitude. I switched strategies. “Do you have any sympathy for your neighbors, Bover? Do you want to see them helped? We can end this kind of poverty forever, Bover, with Heechee technology. Plenty of food for everybody! Decent places to live!”
He said patiently, “You know as well as I do that the first things that come from Heechee technology—any technology—don’t go to people in the barrio. They go to make rich people like you richer. Oh, maybe sooner or later it might all happen, but when? In time to make any difference to my neighbors?”
“Yes! If I can make it happen faster I will!”
He nodded judgmatically. “You say you will do that. I know I will, if I get control. Why should I trust you?”
“Because I give you my word, you stupid shit! Why do you think I’m cutting corners?”
He leaned back and looked up at me. “As to that,” he said, “why, yes, I think I know why you’re in such a hurry. It doesn’t have much to do with my neighbors or me. My lawyers have researched you quite carefully, Broadhead, and I know all about your girl on Gateway.”
I couldn’t help it. I exploded. “If you know that much,” I yelled, “then you know I want to get her out of where I put her! And I’ll tell you this, Bover, I’m not going to let you and your jailbait whore keep me from trying!”
His face was suddenly as red as the top of his head. “And what does your wife think about what you’re doing?” he asked nastily.
“Why don’t you ask her yourself? If she lives long enough for you to hassle her. Fuck you, Bover, I’m going. How do I get a taxi?” He only grinned at me. Meanly. I brushed past the woman on the stoop and left without looking back.
By the time I got back to the hotel I knew what he was grinning about. It had been explained to me by two hours of waiting for a bus, in a square next to an open latrine. I won’t even say what riding that bus was like. I’ve traveled in worse ways, but not since I left Gateway. There were knots of people in the hotel lobby, and they looked at me strangely as I walked across the floor. Of course, they all knew who I was. Everybody knew about the Herter-Halls, and my picture had been on the PV along with theirs. I had no doubt that I looked peculiar, sweated, and still furious.
My console was a fireworks display of attention signals when I slammed myself into my suite. The first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom, but over my shoulder, through the open door, I called: “Harriet! Hold all messages for a minute and give me Morton. One way. I don’t want a response, I just want to give an order.” Morton’s little face appeared in the corner of the display, looking antsy but ready. “Morton, I just came from Bover. I said everything I could think of to him and it did no good, so I want you to get me private detectives. I want to search his record like it’s never been searched before. The son of a bitch must have done something wrong. I want to blackmail him. If it’s a ten-year-old parking ticket, I want to extradite him for it. Get busy on that.” He nodded silently, but didn’t go away, meaning that he was doing what I had said but wanted to say something himself, if only I would let him. Over him was the larger, waiting face of Harriet, counting out the minute’s silence I had imposed on her. I came back into the room and said, “All right, Harriet, let’s have it. Top priority first, one at a time.”
“Yes, Robin, but—” She hesitated, making swift evaluations. “There are two immediate ones, Robin. First, Albert Einstein wishes to discuss with you the capture of the Herter-Hall party, apparently by the Heechee.”
“Captured! Why the hell didn’t you—” I stopped; obviously she couldn’t have told me, because I was out of communication entirely for most of the afternoon. She didn’t wait for me to figure that out but went on:
“However, I think you would prefer to receive Dr. Liederman’s report first, Robin. I’ve been putting through a call, and she’s ready to talk to you now, live.”
That stopped me.
“Do it,” I said, but I knew it couldn’t be anything good, to make Wilma Liederman report live and in person. “What’s the matter?” I asked as soon as she appeared.
She was wearing an evening dress, with an orchid on her shoulder, first time I had seen her like that since she came to our wedding. “Don’t panic, Robin,” she said, “but Essie’s had a slight setback. She’s on the life-support machines again.”
“What?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. She’s awake, and coherent, feeling no pain, her condition is stable. We can keep her like that forever—”
“Get to the ‘but’!”
“But she’s rejecting the kidney, and the tissues around it aren’t regenerating. She needs a whole new batch of transplants. She had uremic failure about two hours ago and now she’s on full-time dialysis. That’s not the worst part. She’s had so many bits and pieces stuck in her from so many sources that her autoimmune system is all screwed up. We’re going to have to scrounge to get a tissue match, and even so we’re going to have to dope her with anti-immunes for a long time.”
“Shit! That’s right out of the Dark Ages!”
She nodded. “Usually we can get a four-four match, but not for Essie. Not this time. She’s a rare-blood to begin with, you know. She’s Russian, and her types are uncommon in this part of the world, so—”
“Get some from Leningrad, for Christ’s sake!”
“So, I was about to say, I’ve checked tissue banks all over the world. We can come close. Real close. But in her present state there’s still some risk.”
I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out her tone. “Of having to do it over, you mean?” She shook her head gently. “You mean, of—of dying? I don’t believe you! What the hell is Full Medical for?”
“Robin—she already has died of this, you know. We had to reanimate her. There’s a limit to the shock she can survive.”
“Then the hell with the operation! You said she’s stable the way she is!”
Wilma looked at the hands clasped in her lap for a moment, then up at me. “She’s the patient, Robin, not you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s her decision. She has already decided she doesn’t want to be tied down to a life-support system forever. We’re going to go in again tomorrow morning.”
I sat there staring at the tank, long after Wilma Liederman had disappeared and my patient secretarial program had formed, silently waiting for orders. “Uh, Harriet,” I said at last, “I want a flight back tonight.”
“Yes, Robin,” she said. “I’ve already booked you. There’s no direct flight tonight, but there’s one that you can transfer at Caracas, gets you in to New York about five AM. The surgery is not scheduled until eight.”
“Thank you.” She went back to silent waiting. Morton’s silly face was still there in the tank, too, tiny and reproachful down in the lower right-hand corner. He did not speak, but every once in a while he cleared his throat or swallowed to let me know he was waiting. “Morton,” I said, “didn’t I tell you to get lost?”
“I can’t do that, Robin. Not while I have an unresolved dilemma. You gave orders about Mr. Bover—”
“Damn right I did. If I can’t handle him that way maybe I’ll just get him killed.”
“You don’t have to bother,” Morton said quickly. “There’s a message from his lawyers for you. He has decided to accept your offer.”
I goggled at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “I don’t understand it either, Robin, and neither do his lawyers,” he said quickly. “They are quite upset. But there is a personal message for you, if it explains anything.”
“What’s that?”
“Quote, ‘Maybe he does understand after all.’ Close quote.”
In a somewhat confusing life, and one that is rapidly becoming a long one, I’ve had a lot of confusing days, but that one was special. I ran a hot tub and soaked in it for half an hour, trying to make my mind empty. The effort didn’t bring calm.
I had three hours before the Caracas plan
e left. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was not that there wasn’t plenty for me to do. Harriet kept trying to get my attention—Morton to firm up the contract with Bover, Albert to discuss the bioanalysis of the Heechee droppings somebody had collected, everybody to talk to me, about everything. I didn’t want to do any of them. I was stuck in my dilated time, watching the world flash past. But it didn’t flash, it crept. I didn’t know what to do about it. It was nice that Bover thought I understood so well. I wondered what he would take to explain what I understood to me.
After a while I managed to work up enough energy to let Harriet put through some of the decision-needed calls for me, and I made what decisions seemed necessary; and a while after that, toying with a bowl of crackers and milk, I listened to a news summary. It was full of talk about the Herter-Hall capture, all of which I could get better from Albert than from the PV newscasters.
And at that point I remembered that Albert had wanted to talk to me, and for a moment I felt better. It gave me a point and purpose in living. I had someone to yell at. “Halfwit,” I snapped at him as he materialized, “magnetic tapes are a century old. How come you can’t read them?”
He looked at me calmly under his bushy white brows. “You’re referring to the so-called ‘prayer fans,’ aren’t you, Robin? Of course we did try that, many times. We even suspected that there might be a synergy, and so we tried several kinds of magnetic fields at once, steady and oscillating, oscillating at different rates of speed. We even tried simultaneous microwave radiation, though, as it turned out, the wrong kind—”
I was still bemused, but not so much so that I didn’t pick up on the implication. “You mean there’s a right kind?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he grinned. “Once we got a good trace from the Herter-Hall instrumentation we just duplicated it. The same microwave radiation that’s ambient in the Food Factory, a flux of a few microwatts of elliptically polarized million-Å microwave. And then we got the signal.”
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Page 19