Heechee rendezvous (18 page)

“What a rotten thing human being is,” she offered, and then reversed herself. “No. Am unjust. One human being can be quite fine, even as fine as we four sitting here. Not perfect. But on a statistical basis out of let us say one hundred chances to display kindness, altruism, decency-all these traits we humans esteem, you see-will in fact perform no fewer than twenty-five of them. But nations? Political groups? Terrorists?” She shook her head. “Out of one hundred chances, zero,” she said. “Or perhaps one, but then, you may be sure, with some trick up sleeve. You see, wickedness is additive. Is perhaps one grain in each human being. But add up quantity of say ten million human beings in even small country or group, equals evil enough to damage entire world!”

“I’m ready for dessert,” I said, gesturing to the waiters.

You would think that was a broad enough hint for any guest to take, especially considering that they already knew we’d had a bad day, but Walthers was obstinate. He lingered over dessert. He insisted on telling me his life’s story, and he kept looking at the waiters, and all in all I was getting quite uncomfortable, not just in the belly.

Essie says I am not patient with people. Perhaps so. The friends I am most comfortable interacting with are computer programs rather than flesh and blood, and they don’t have feelings to hurt-well, I’m not sure that’s true for Albert. But it is for, say, my secretarial program or my chef. It is certain that I was getting impatient with Audee Walthers. His life had been a dull soap opera. He had lost his wife and his savings. He had made unauthorized use of equipment on the S. Ya. with Yee-xing’s connivance and got her fired. He had spent his last dime to get here to Rotterdam, reason not specified, but clearly it had something to do with me.

Well, I am not unwilling to “loan” money to a friend down on his luck but, see, I was in no mood. It was not just the fright over Essie or the screwed-up day, or the nagging worry about whether the next nut with a gun would actually get me. there was my damned gut giving me fits. At last I told the waiters to clear off, though Walthers was still lingering over his fourth cup of coffee. I stomped over to the table with the liqueurs and cigars and glowered at him as he followed. “What is it, Audee?” I said, no longer polite. “Money? How much do you need?”

And I got such a look from him! He hesitated, watching while the last of the waiters filed out through the pantry, and then he let me have it. “It isn’t what I need,” he said, his voice trembling, “it’s what you’re willing to pay for something you want. You’re a real rich man, Broadhead. Maybe you don’t worry about people who stick their asses in a crack for you, but I made the mistake of doing it twice.”

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.”

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 £ 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’ 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:

1.
 
Heechee communications translation.