Heechee rendezvous (26 page)

“Essie, spit it out! What is it?”

She sat down on the communicator’s bench, fanning herself. “That rogue Wan,” she said. “Is here! Is talk of entire asteroid complex. I am astonished you have not heard. Woosh! I ran so! I was afraid you would be upset.”

I smiled forgivingly. “The operation was weeks ago, Essie,” I reminded her. “I’m not that delicate-or that likely to get all in an uproar over Wan, for that matter. Have a little more confidence in me!”

She looked at me narrowly, then nodded. “Is true,” she admitted. “Was foolish. Well, I get back to work,” she went on, standing up and moving to the door. “But remember, Albert-no interfacing with net until I come back!”

“Wait!” I cried. “You haven’t heard my news.” She paused long enough to let me say proudly, “I’ve found a name for the ship. The True Love. What do you think?”

She took a long time to think that over, and her expression was a lot more tentative, and a lot less delighted, than I might have expected. Then she said, “Yes, is very good name, Robin. God bless her and all who sail in her, eh? Now must go.”

After twenty-five years I still did not entirely understand Essie. I told Albert so. He was sitting at his ease on Essie’s dressing-table bench, observing himself in the mirror, and he shrugged. “Do you suppose she didn’t like the name?” I asked him. “It’s a good name!”

“I should have thought so, Robin,” he agreed, experimenting with different expressions in the mirror.

“And she didn’t seem to want to look at the ship!”

“She appeared to have something on her mind,” he agreed.

“But what? I swear,” I repeated, “I don’t always understand her.”

“I confess that I do not either, Robin. In my case,” he said, turning from the mirror to twinkled at me, “I have assumed that it is because I am mechanical and she is human. I wonder what it is in your case?”

I stared at him, a little annoyed, and then grinned. “You’re pretty funny in your new programming, Albert,” I told him. “What do you get out of pretending to look in a mirror when I know you don’t really see anything that way?”

“What do you get out of looking at the True Love, Robin?”

“Why do you always answer a question with a question?” I responded, and he laughed out loud. It was really a very convincing performance. As long as I’ve had the Albert program, he was able to laugh, and even make jokes of his own, but you always knew it was a picture laughing. You could think it was a picture of a real person if you wanted to-let’s face it, I usually did-like the picture of a person on the P-phone. But there was no, what shall I call it? No presence. Now there was. I couldn’t smell him. But I could perceive his physical presence in the room with more senses than simple sight and hearing. Temperature? Mass sensation? I don’t know. Whatever it is that tells you somebody is there with you.

“The answer really,” he said, sobering, “is that this appearance is my equivalent of a new ship, or a new Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, or whatever analogy you like to give it. I’m just sort of looking it over to see how much I like it. How do you like it, which is after all more important?”

“Don’t be humble, Albert,” I told him. “I like it very well, only I wish you were hooked up to the data nets. I’d like to know if any of the people I’ve been working on have done anything about the terrorist data, for instance.”

“I will of course do what you order me to, Robin,” he said, “but Mrs. Broadhead was very explicit.”

“No, I don’t want you blowing yourself up or damaging your subroutines. I know what I’ll do,” I said, getting up as the light bulb flashed over my head. “I’ll just go out into the passageway and plug into a comm circuit-provided,” I joked, “I haven’t forgotten how to make a call all by myself.”

“Why, of course you could do that,” he said. His tone was troubled, for some reason or other. “It isn’t necessary, though, Robin.”

“Well, no,” I said, pausing halfway to the door. “But I am curious, you know.”

“As to your curiosity,” he said, smiling at me as he poked tobacco into the bowl of his pipe-but it was a forced smile, I thought. “As to that, you must know that until we docked I was in constant touch with the net. There was no real news. It is possible, though, that the lack of news was itself interesting. Even encouraging.”

I was not entirely used to the new Albert. I sat down again, regarding him. “You’re a cryptic son of a bitch, Dr. Einstein,” I told him.

“Only when reporting information that is itself quite unclear.” He smiled. “General Manzbergen is not receiving calls from you just now. The senator says he has done all he can. Maitre Ijsinger says that Kwiatkowski and our friend from Malaysia have not responded to efforts to contact them on your behalf and all he got from the Albanians was a message that said ‘Don’t worry.”

“So something’s happening!” I cried, jumping up again.

“Something may be happening,” he corrected, “and if so, really, all we can do is let it happen. In any case, Robin,” he said, his tone wheedling now, “I would personally prefer that you not leave the ship at this time. For one good reason: How do you know there is not some other person here with a gun and your name on a list?”

“A terrorist? Here?”

“Here or in Rotterdam, why is one more unlikely than the other? I beg to remind you, Robin, that I am not without experience in these matters. At one time the Nazis put on my head a price of twenty thousand marks; be sure I was careful not to let anyone earn it!”

That came out of left field. I stopped in the doorway. “The whatzees?”

“The Nazis, Robin. A group of terrorists who seized control of the nation of Germany many years ago, when I was alive.”

“When you were what?”

“I mean, of course”-he shrugged-“when the real human being whose name you have given me was alive, but from my point of view that is not a distinction worth making.” He stuffed the filled pipe in his pocket absently and sat down in such a natural, friendly way that automatically I sat down again, too.

“I guess I haven’t quite got used to the new you, Albert,” I said.

“There’s no better time than the present, Robin.” He smiled, preening himself. He did have more solidity to him. The old holograms showed him in a dozen or so characteristic poses, with baggy sweater or tee shirt,

Although it is interesting to see myself from Robin’s point of view, it is not very enjoyable. Mrs. Broadhead’s programming constrained me to speak, act, and even think as the original Albert Einstein would have done, had he survived to assume my role. Robin seems to think that grotesque. In a sense, he is right.

Human beings are grotesque!

socks on or off, sneakers or slippers, pipe or pencil. Today he wore a tee shirt, to be sure, but over it was one of those baggy European sweaters that button up the front and have pockets and might as well be a jacket, really, except that they’re loosely knitted wool. There was a button on the sweater that read Two Percen6 and a faint pale stubble around the chin that suggested he hadn’t shaved that morning. Well, of course he hadn’t shaved! He never would, either, being nothing more than a holographic projection of a computer construct-but so convincing and jazzy that I almost offered to lend him my razor!

I laughed and shook my head. “What does ‘Two Percent’ mean?”

“Ah,” he said bashfully, “it was a slogan of my youth. If two percent of the human race would refuse to fight, there would be no war.”

“Do you believe that now?”

“I hope that, Robin,” he corrected. “The news is not all that conducive to hope, I must admit. Would you like to know the rest of the news?”

“I suppose I should,” I said, and watched him stroll over to Essie’s vanity. He sat on the bench before it, idly playing with her flasks of perfume and bits of feminine decoration as he talked; so normal, so human, that it distracted me from what he was saying. That was as well, for the news was all bad. The terrorists were busier than ever. The destruction of the Lofstrom loop had indeed been the first move in an insurrection, and a small, bloody war was going on all over that part of South America. Terrorists had dumped botulinus toxin into the Staines reservoir and London was going thirsty. News like that I did not want, and I told him so.

He sighed and agreed. “It was a gentler day when I was alive,” he said wistfully. “Though not perfect, to be sure. I could perhaps have been president of the state of Israel, did you know that, Robin? Yes. But I felt I could not accept. I was for peace always, and a state must sometimes make war. Loeb once told me that all politicians must be pathological, and I fear he was right.” He sat up straighter and brightened. “But there is some good news after all, Robin! The Broadhead Awards for Scientific Discovery-“

“The what?”

“You recall, Robin,” he said impatiently, “the system of awards you authorized me to inaugurate just before your operation. They have already begun to bear fruit.”

“You’ve solved the mystery of the Heechee?”

“Ah, Robin, I perceive you are joking with me,” he said in gentle reproof. “Of course, nothing so vast just yet. But there is a physicist in

Laguna Beach-Beckfurt? You know his work? The one who proposed a system for achieving flat space?”

“No. I don’t even know what flat space is.”

“Well,” he said, resigning himself to my ignorance, “that doesn’t matter just now, I think, but he is now working on a mathematical analysis of the missing mass. It appears, Robin, that the phenomenon is quite recent! Somehow mass has been added to the universe, within the last few million years!”

“Oh, wow,” I said, attempting to look comprehending. I did not deceive him.

He said patiently: “If you recall, Robin, some years ago the Dead Man
the woman, that is-from what is now the S. Ya. Broadhead led us to believe that this phenomenon had something to do with an act of the Heechee. We discounted this at the time, since there seemed to be no reason for it.”

“I remember,” I said, only partly untruthfully. I did remember that Albert had had the wild idea that for some reason, not specified, the Heechee were collapsing the universe back to its primordial atom, so as to bring about a new Big Bang and thus a new universe with somewhat different physical laws. Then he had changed his mind. He had surely explained all the reasoning to me at the time, but I had surely not remined it. “Mach?” I said. “Something about this fellow Mach? And somebody named Davies?”

“Exactly right, Robin!” he applauded, beaming on me with delight. “Mach’s Hypothesis suggested a reason for doing it, but Davies’s Paradox made it unlikely that the reason would work. Now Beckfurt has shown analytically that Davies’s Paradox need not apply, only assuming that the number of expansions and contractions of the universe is finite!” He got up and roamed around the room, too pleased with himself to sit still. I could not see what he was rejoicing over.

“Albert,” I said unsteadily, “are you telling me that it may be so that the universe is coming crashing around our ears, and we’ll all be squeezed into-what do you call it?-phloem?”

“Exactly, my dear boy!”

“And this makes you happy?”

“Precisely! Oh,” he said, coining to a halt at the doorway and gazing at me, “I see your problem. It will not happen soon. A matter of at least some billions of years, to be sure.”

I sat back, staring at him. This new Albert was going to take some getting used to. He did not seem to notice anything amiss; he was babbling on happily about all the half-baked notions that had been pouring

Robin did not quite understand Davies’s Paradox, but then he didn’t even understand the more famous Olbers’s Paradox, which bothered astronomers way back in the nineteenth century. Olbers said: If the universe is infinite, there should be an infinite number of start That means that we should see not individual stars in a black sky, but a solid dome of starlight, blinding white. And he proved it mathematically. (What he didn’t know was that the stars were grouped into galaxies, which changed the mathematics.) So a century later Paul Davies said:

If it’s true that the universe is cyclical, expanding and contracting over and over, then if it is possible for a little bit of matter or energy to stay out of the crunch and cross over to the next universe, then in infinite time that leftover light would increase infinitely and we’d have an Olbers sky again. What he didn’t know was that the number of oscillations in which a little bit of the energy was left out was not infinite. We happened to be in the very first of them.

in on him ever since the awards were announced, and what interesting notions he had thought of because of them.

Thought of?

“Wait a minute,” I said, frowning, because there was something I didn’t quite understand. “When?”

“When what, Robin?”

“When were you doing this thinking? You’ve been turned off, except when we’ve been talking-“

“Exactly, Robin. When I was ‘turned off,’ as you put it.” He twinkled. “Now that Mrs. Broadhead has provided me with a hardwired, built-in database, I do not cease to exist when you dismiss me, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And it is such a great pleasure to me, you have no idea! Simply to think! All of my life it is what I have most wanted. As a young man I would weep for the chance to sit and only think-to do such things, for example, as reconstructing proofs of well-known mathematical and physical theorems. Now I can do it very often, and so much more quickly than when I was alive! I am deeply grateful to your wife for this.” He cocked an ear. “And here she is coming again, Robin,” he said. “Mrs. Broadhead? I have just remembered to express to you my gratitude for this new programming.”