Heechee rendezvous (35 page)

But not for five people.

We weren’t doing nothing. We were doing everything we could think to do. Walthers and Yee-xing tinkered together piloting programs of their own-tried them-could not override what Albert had done. Essie did more than any of us, for Albert was her creation and she would not, could not, admit herself beaten. Check and recheck; write test programs and watch them come up blank; she hardly slept. She copied Albert’s entire program into a spare datafan and tried that-still hoping, you see, that the fault was mechanical somewhere. But if so it carried over into the new storage. Dolly Walthers uncomplainingly fed the rest of us, stayed out of our way when we thought we might be getting somewhere (though we never were), and let us talk ideas out when we were stumped (which was often). And I had the hardest job of all. Albert was my program, said Essie, and if he would reply to anyone he would reply to me. So I sat there and talked to him. Talked to the air, really, because I had no evidence at all that he was listening as I reasoned with him, chatted with him, called his name, yelled at him, begged him.

He did not answer, not even a flicker in the air.

When we took a break for food Essie came to stand behind me and rub my shoulders. It was my larynx that was wearing out, but I appreciated the thought. “At least,” she said shakily, to the air more than to me, “must know what he’s doing, I think. Must realize supplies are limited. Must provide for return to civilization for us, because Albert could not deliberately let us die?” The words were a statement. The tone wasn’t.

“I’m certain of it,” I said, but did not turn around so that she could see my face.

“I, too,” she said in a dismal tone as I pushed away my plate; and Dolly, to change the subject, said in a motherly way:

“Don’t you like my cooking?”

Essie’s fingers stopped massaging my shoulders and dug in. “Robin! You don’t eat!”

And they were all looking at me. It was actually funny. We were out in the middle of nowhere at all with no good way of getting home, and four people were staring at me because I didn’t eat my dinner. It was Essie, of course, clucking over me in the early stages of the trip, before Albert went mute; they suddenly realized that I might not be well.

In point of fact I wasn’t. I tired quickly. My arms felt tingly, as though they had gone to sleep. I had no appetite-had not eaten much for days, and bad escaped notice only because usually we ate in quick gobbles when we found time. “It helps to stretch out the supplies.” I smiled, but nobody smiled back.

“Foolish Robin,” hissed Essie, and her fingers left my shoulders to test the temperature of my forehead. But that was not too bad, because I’d been gulping aspirin when no one was looking. I assumed an expression of patience.

“I’m fine, Essie,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie-a little wishful thinking, maybe, but I wasn’t sure I was sick. “I guess I should have been checked over, but with Albert out of commission-“

“For this? Albert? Who needs?” I craned my neck, puzzled, to look at Essie. “For this need only subset medic program,” she said firmly.

“Subset?”

She stamped her foot. “Medic program, legal program, secretarial program-all subsumed into Albert program, but can be accessed separately. You call medic program this instant!”

I gaped at her. For a moment I couldn’t speak, while my mind raced. “Do as I say!” she shouted, and at last I found my voice.

“Not the medical program!” I cried. “There’s something better than that!” And I turned around and bellowed to thin air:

“Sigfrid von Shrink! Help! I need you desperately!”

There was a time in the year of my psychoanalysis when I hung on hooks while I waited for Sigfrid to appear. Sometimes I had a real wait, for in those days Sigfrid was a patched-together program of Heechee circuits and human software, and none of the software was my wife Essie’s. Essie was good at her trade. The milliseconds of response time became nano-, pico-, femtoseconds, so that Albert could in real time respond as well as a human-well, hell, no! Better than any human!

And so when Sigfrid did not at once appear it was the feeling you get when you turn a switch and the light doesn’t go on because it’s burned out. You don’t waste your time flicking the switch back and forth. You know. “Don’t waste time,” said Essie over my shoulder. If a voice can be pale, hers was.

I turned and smiled shakily at her. “I guess things are worse than we thought,” I said. Her face was pale, all right. I put my hand on hers. “Takes me right back,” I said, making conversation so that we would not have to face just how much worse things were. “When I was in analysis with Sigfrid, waiting for him to show up was the worst part. I would always get uptight, and ...” Well, I was rambling. I might have gone on doing it forever if I hadn’t seen in Essie’s eyes that I didn’t have to.

I turned around and heard his voice at the same time: “I am sorry to hear that it was so difficult for you, Robin,” said Sigfrid von Shrink.

Even for a holographic projection, Sigfrid looked rather poorly. He was there with his hands clasped on his lap, sitting uncomfortably on nothing at all. The program had not troubled to furnish him with chair or pad. Nothing. Just Sigfrid, looking, for one of the few times in my recollection of him, quite ill at ease. He gazed around at the five of us, all staring at him, and sighed before returning to me. “Well, Robin,” he said, “would you like to tell me what is bothering you?”

I could hear Audee Walthers take a breath to answer him, and Janie click her tongue to stop him, because Essie was shaking her head. I didn’t look at any of them. I said, “Sigfrid, old tin whiz, I have a problem that’s right down your alley.”

He looked at me under his brows. “Yes, Robin?”

“It’s a case of fugue.”

“Severe?”

“Incapacitating,” I told him.

He nodded as though it were what he had been expecting. “I do prefer that you not use technical terms, Robin.” He sighed, but his fingers were lacing and relacing themselves in his lap. “Tell me. Is it yourself that you are asking me to help?”

“Not really, Sigfrid,” I admitted. The whole ballgame could have blown up then. I think it almost did. He was silent for a moment, but not at all still-his fingers snaked in and out of each other, and there was a bluish sparkle in the air around the outlines of his body when he moved. I said, “It’s a friend of mine, Sigfrid, maybe the closest friend I have in the world, and he is in bad trouble.”

“I see,” he said, nodding as though he did-which I expect was true enough. “I suppose you know,” he mentioned, “that your friend cannot be helped unless he is present.”

“He’s present, Sigfrid,” I said softly.

“Yes,” he said, “I rather thought he was.” The fingers were still now, and he leaned back as though there were a chair for him to lean against. “Suppose you tell me about it ... and”-with a smile, which was the most welcome thing I had ever seen in my life-“this time, Robin, you may use technical terms if you wish.”

Behind me I heard Essie softly exhale, and realized both of us bad been trying to hold our breaths. I reached back for her hand.

“Sigfrid,” I said, beginning to hope, “as I understand it, the term fugue refers to a flight from reality. If a person finds himself in a double-bind situation-excuse me, I mean if he finds himself in a position when one very powerful drive is frustrated by another, so he can’t live with the conflict-he turns his back on it. He runs away. He pretends it doesn’t exist. I know I’m mixing up several different schools of psychotherapy here, Sigfrid, but have I got the general idea right?”

“Close enough, Robin. At least I understand what you are saying.”

“An example of that might be”-I hesitated-“perhaps someone very deeply in love with his wife, who finds out that she’s been having an affair with his best friend.” I felt Essie’s fingers tighten on mine. I hadn’t hurt her feelings; she was encouraging me.

“You confuse drives and emotions, Robin, but that doesn’t matter. What are you leading up to?”

I didn’t let him rush me. “Or another example,” I said, “might be religious. Someone with a heartfelt faith, who discovers there is no God. Do you follow me, Sigfrid? It’s been an article of faith with him, although he knows there are a lot of intelligent people who disagree-and then, little by little, he finds more and more support for their belief, and finally it’s overwhelming ...

He nodded politely, listening, but his fingers had begun to writhe again.

“So finally he has to accept quantum mechanics,” I said.

And that was the second point at which it all could have gone right out the chute. I think it nearly did. The hologram flickered badly for a moment, and the expression on Sigfrid’s face changed. I can’t say what it changed to. It wasn’t anything I recognized; it was as though it had blurred and softened.

But when he spoke up his voice was steady. “When you talk about drives and fugues, Robin,” he said, “you are talking about human beings. Suppose the patient you are interested in isn’t human.” He hesitated, and then added, “Quite.” I made an encouraging noise, because I really didn’t know where to go from there. “That is to say, suppose he has these drives and emotions, ah, programmed into him, let us say, but only the way a human can be programmed to do something like speak a foreign language after he is fully grown. The knowledge is there, but it is imperfectly assimilated. There is an accent.” He paused. “We are not human,” he said.

Essie’s hand gripped mine tightly. A warning. “Albert is programmed with a human personality,” I said.

“Yes. As far as possible. Very far,” Sigfrid agreed, but his face was grave. “Albert is still not human, for no computer program is. I mention only that none of us can experience, for example, the TPT. When the human race is going mad with someone else’s madness, we feel nothing.”

The ground was very delicate now, thin ice crusted over a quagmire, and if I stepped too roughly what might we all fall into? Essie held my hand strongly; the others were hardly breathing. I said, “Sigfrid, human beings are all different, too. But you used to tell me that that didn’t matter a great deal. You said the problems of the mind were in the mind, and the cure for the problems was in there, too. All you did was help your patients bring them up to the surface, where they could deal with them, instead of keeping them buried, where they could cause obsessions and neuroses ... and fugue.”

“It is true that I said that, yes, Robin.”

“You just kicked the old machine, Sigfrid, right? To jar it loose from where it was stuck?”

He grinned-a pale grin, but there. “That is close enough, I suppose.”

“Right. So let me try a theory on you. Let me suggest that this friend of mine”-I didn’t dare name him again just then-“this friend of mine has a conflict he can’t handle. He is very intelligent and extremely well informed. He has access to the best and latest knowledge of science in particular-all kinds of science-physics and astrophysics and cosmology and everything else. Since quantum mechanics is at the base of it he accepts quantum mechanics as valid-he couldn’t do the job he was programmed to do without it. That’s basic to his-programming.” I had almost said “personality.”

The grin was more pain than amusement now, but he was still listening.

“And at the same time, Sigfrid, he has another layer of programming. He has been taught to think like and behave like-to be, as much as he can be-a very intelligent and wise person who has been dead for a hell of a long time and who happened to believe very strongly that quantum mechanics was all wrong. I don’t know if that would be enough of a conflict to damage a human being,” I said, “but it might do a lot of harm to-well-a computer program.”

There were actual beads of perspiration on Sigfrid’s face now. He nodded silently, and I had a bright, painful flashback-the way Sigfrid looked to me now, was that how I had looked to Sigfrid in those long-ago days when he was shrinking me? “Is that possible?” I demanded.

“It is a severe dichotomy, yes,” he whispered.

And there I bogged down.

The thin ice had broken. I was ankle-deep in the quagmire. I wasn’t drowning yet, but I was stuck. I didn’t know where to go next.

It broke my concentration. I looked around helplessly at Essie and the others, feeling very old and very tired-and a lot unwell, too. I had been so wrapped up in the technical problem of shrinking my shrink that I had forgotten the pain in my belly and the numbness in my arms; but they came back on me now. It wasn’t working. I didn’t know enough. I was absolutely certain that I bad uncovered the basic problem that had caused Albert to fugue-and nothing had come of it!

I don’t know how long I would have sat there like a fool if I hadn’t got help. It came from two people at once. “Trigger,” whispered Essie urgently in my ear, and at the same moment Janie Yee-xing stirred and said tentatively:

“There must have been a precipitating incident, isn’t that right?”

Sigfrid’s face became blank. A hit. A palpable hit.

“What was it, Sigfrid?” I asked. No response. “Come on, Sigfrid, old shrinking machine, spit it out. What was the thing that pushed Albert out the airlock?”

He looked me straight in the eye, and yet I couldn’t read his expression, because his face became fuzzy. It was almost as though it was a picture on the PV and something was breaking down in the circuits so the image was fading.