're  being sued, Robin," he said. "The Food Factory Exploitation Corp.,
the  Gateway  Corp.,  plus Paul Hall, Dorema Herter-Hall and Peter Herter,
both  in  propria  persona  and as guardian for codefendant Janine Herter.
Plus the Foundation and you personally."
   "I seem to have a lot of company, at least. Do I have to worry?" Pause.
Thoughtfully, "I think you might, a little. The suit is from Hanson Bover.
Trish's  husband, or widower, depending on how you look at it." Morton was
shimmering a little. It's a defect in his program, and Essie keeps wanting
to  fix  it-but it doesn't affect his legal ability and I kind of like it.
"He  has  got himself declared conservator of Trish Bover's assets, and on
the basis of her first landing on the Food Factory he wants a full mission
completed share of whatever comes out of it."
   That  wasn't  too  funny. Even if we couldn't move the damn thing, with
the new developments that bonus might be quite a lot. "How can he do that?
She  signed  the  standard  contract,  didn't she? So all we have to do is
produce  the  contract.  She didn't come back, therefore she doesn't get a
share."
   "That's the way to go if we wind up in court, yes, Robin. But there are
one  or  two  rather  ambiguous  precedents.  Maybe not even ambiguous-her
lawyer  thinks  they're  good,  even  if  they  are a little old. The most
important  one was a guy who signed a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to do
a  tightrope  walk over Niagara Falls. no performance, no pay. He fell off
halfway. The courts held that he had given the performance, so they had to
pay up."
   "That's crazy, Morton!"
   "That's  the case law, Robin. But I only said you might have to worry a
little.  I  think  probably  we're  all right, I'm just not sure we're all
right.  We  have to file an appearance within two days. Then we'll see how
it goes."
   "All right. Shimmer away, Morton," I said, and got up, because by now I
was  absolutely sure it was time for lunch. In fact, Essie was just coming
through the door, and, to my disappointment, she was fully dressed.
   Essie is a beautiful woman, and one of the joys of being married to her
for  five  years  is  that every year she looks better to me than the year
before.  She  put  her  arm  around my neck as we walked toward the dining
porch  and  turned  her  head  to  look at me. "What's matter, Robin?" she
asked.
   "Nothing's  the  matter,  dear S. Ya.," I said. "Only I was planning to
invite you to shower with me after lunch."
   "You  are  randy  old goat, old man," she said severely. "What is wrong
with  showering  after dark, when we will then naturally and inevitably go
to bed?"
   "By  dark I have to be in Washington. And tomorrow you're off to Tucson
for  your  conference,  and  this  weekend I have to go for my medical. It
doesn't matter, though."
   She  sat  down  at  the  table.  "You are also pitifully bad liar," she
observed.  "Eat  quickly, old man. One cannot take too many showers, after
all."
   I  said,  "Do  you  know,  Essie,  that  you  are  a thoroughly sensual
creature? It's one of your finest traits."
   The  quarterly  statement on my food mines holdings was on my desk file
in  my  Washington  suite  before  breakfast. It was even worse than I had
expected;  at  least  two  million dollars had burned up under the Wyoming
hills, and another fifty thousand or so more was smoldering away every day
until  they  got the fire all out. If they ever did. It did not mean I was
in  trouble,  but it might mean that a certain amount of easy credit would
no  longer  be  easy. And not only did I know it, but by the time I got to
the  Senate hearing room it appeared that all of Washington knew it too. I
testified quickly, along the same lines I had testified before, and when I
was  through  Senator  Praggler  recessed  the  hearing and took me out to
brunch. "I can't figure you out, Robin," he said. "Didn't your fire change
your mind about anything?"
   "No, why should it? I'm talking about the long pull."
   He  shook  his  head. "Here's somebody with a sizeable position in food
mine  stocks-you-begging  for  higher  taxes  on  the  mines! Doesn't make
sense."
   I  explained it to him all over again. Taken as a whole, the food mines
could  easily  afford  to  allocate,  say,  ten  percent of their gross to
restoring  the  Rockies after scooping out the shale. But no company could
afford  to  do it on its own. If we did it, we'd just lose any competitive
position,  we'd be undersold by everybody else. "So if you put through the
amendment,  Tim,"  I said, "we'll all be forced to do it. Food prices will
go  up,  yes-but  not a lot. My accountants say no more than eight or nine
dollars a year, per person. And we'll have an almost unspoiled countryside
again."
   He  laughed.  "You're  a  weird one. With all your do-gooding, and with
your money, not to mention those things..." he nodded at the Out bangles I
still  wore  on  my arm, three of them, signifying three missions that had
each scared the hell out of me when I earned them as a Gateway prospector,
"why don't you run for the Senate?"
   "Don't  want  to,  Tim.  Besides, if I ran from New York I'd be running
against  you  or Sheila, and I don't want to do that. I don't spend enough
time in Hawaii to make a dent. And I'm not going to move back to Wyoming."
   He  patted me on the shoulder. "Just this once," he said, "I'm going to
use  a  little  old-fashioned  political  muscle.  I'll  try  to  get your
amendment  through  for you, Robin, though God knows what your competitors
are going to do to try to stop it."
   After  I  left him I dawdled back to the hotel. There was no particular
reason  to  hurry  back to New York, with Essie in Tucson, so I decided to
spend  the rest of the day in my hotel suite in Washington-a bad decision,
as  it  turned  out,  but  I  didn't  know that then. I was thinking about
whether  I  minded being called a "do-gooder" or not. My old psychoanalyst
had  helped  me  along  to  a  point where I didn't mind taking credit for
things I thought deserved credit, but most of what I did I did for me. The
revegetation amendment wouldn't cost me a dime; we'd make it up in raising
prices,  as  I  had explained. The money I put into space might pay off in
dollar  profits-probably  would,  I  figured-but anyway it was going there
because  space  was  where my money had come from. And besides, I had some
unfinished  business  out  there.  Somewhere.  I  sat  by my window on the
penthouse  floor  of  the hotel, forty-five stories up, looking toward the
Capitol  and  the  Washington  Monument,  and  wondered  if  my unfinished
business was still alive. I hoped so. Even if she was hating me still.
   Thinking  about  my  unfinished business made me think of Essie, by now
arriving  in Tucson, and that gave me a twinge of worry. We were about due
for another attack of the 130-day fever. I hadn't thought about that early
enough.  I  didn't  like  the  idea of her being three thousand kilometers
away,  in  case it was a bad one. And, although I am not a jealous person,
even  if it was a mild, but lecherous and orgiastic one, as they seemed to
be  becoming  more  and  more  frequently,  I really preferred that she be
lecherous and orgiastic with me.
   Why  not?  I  called  Harriet  and  had  her make me reservations on an
afternoon flight to Tucson. I could conduct my business as well from there
as  anywhere  else,  if  not  quite  as  comfortably.  And  then I started
conducting  some of it. Albert first. There was nothing significantly new,
he  said,  except  that the boy seemed to be developing a bad cold. "We've
instructed  the  Herten-Hall  party to administer standard antibiotics and
symptom-suppressants,"  he told me, "but they will not receive the message
for some weeks, of course."
   "Serious?"
   He  frowned,  puffing  at his pipe. "Wan has never been exposed to most
viruses  and  bacteria," he said, "so I can't make any definite statement.
But,  no,  I  would  hope  not.  In  any  case, the expedition has medical
supplies and equipment capable of dealing with most pathologies."
   "Do you know anything more about him?"
   "A  great  deal,  but  not anything that changes my previous estimates,
Robin."   Puff,   puff.   "His   mother   was   Hispanic  and  his  father
American-Anglo,  and  they  were  both Gateway prospectors. Or so it would
seem.  So, apparently, in some way, were the personalities he refers to as
the 'Dead Men,' although it is still unclear just what those are."
   "Albert,"  I  said,  "look  up  some old Gateway missions, at least ten
years  back.  See  if you can find one that had an American and a Hispanic
woman on it-and didn't come back."
   "Sure  thing,  Bob."  Some  day I must tell him to change to a snappier
vocabulary,  but  actually  he works very well as he is. He said almost at
once,  "There  is  no  such  mission.  However,  there  was a launch which
contained a pregnant Hispanic woman, still unreported. Shall I display the
specs?"
   "Sure  thing, Albert," I said, but he is not programmed to pick up that
sort  of nuance. The specs didn't tell much. I hadn't known the woman; she
was  before my time. But she had taken a One out after surviving a mission
in which her husband and the other three crew members had been killed in a
Five.  And  had  never  been  heard  of  again.  The  mission was a simple
go-out-and-see-what-you-get.  What  she  had  got had been a baby, in some
strange place.
   "That doesn't account for Wan's father, does it?"
   "No,  Robin,  but  perhaps he was on another mission. If we assume that
the  Dead  Men  are in some way related to unreturned missions, there must
have been several."
   I said, "Are you suggesting that the Dead Men are actual prospectors?"
   "Sure thing, Robin."
   "But how? You mean their brains might have been preserved?"
   "Doubt  it, Robin," he said, rekindling his pipe thoughtfully. "There's
insufficient  data,  but  I'd  say  whole-brain  storage is no more than a
point-one probability."
   "Then what are the other points?"
   "Perhaps  a  readout  of  the  chemical  storage  of  memory-not a high
probability,  perhaps  put  it  at point-three. Which is still the highest
probability we've got. Voluntary interface on the part of the subjects-for
instance,  if they talked all their memories onto tape somehow-really low.
Point-zero  zero  one,  tops.  Direct  mental  link-what  you  might  call
telepathy  of some sort-about the same. Means unknown, point-five plus. Of
course,  Robin,"  he  added  hurriedly,  "you  realize  that  all of these
estimates are based on insufficient data and on inadequate hypotheses."
   "I suppose you'd do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct"
   "Sure  thing,  Bob. and I am about to request such a hookup through the
Herter-Hall   shipboard   computer,   but  it  needs  careful  programming
beforehand.  It  is  not  a very good computer, Robin." He hesitated. "Uh,
Robin? There is one other interesting thing."
   "What's that?"
   "As  you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when
it  was  discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the
number  of  ships  remained the same-not counting the Herter-Hall ship and
the  one  in  which  Wan  arrived  two  days ago, of course. But it is not
certain they are the same ships."
   "What?"
   "It  isn't certain, Robin," he emphasized. "One Heechee ship looks very
much like another. But careful scan of the approach photos seems to show a
different  orientation  on  the  part  of  at least one of the large ones.
Possibly  all three. As though the ships that were there had left, and new
ones had docked."
   A  cold feeling went up and down my spine. "Albert," I said, finding it
hard to get the words out, "do you know what that suggests to me?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he  said  solemnly,  "it suggests that the Food
Factory is still in operation. That it is converting the cometary gases to
CHON-food. And sending them somewhere."
   I swallowed hard, but Albert was still talking. "Also," he said, "there
is  quite a lot of ionizing radiation in the environment I have to admit I
don't know where it comes from."
   "Is that dangerous to the Herter-Halls?"
   "No,  Robin, I would say not. no more than, say, piezovision broadcasts
are to you. It is not the risk, it is that I am puzzled about the source."
   "Can't you ask the Herter-Halls to check?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin.  I already have. But it'll take fifty days to get
the answer."
   I  dismissed him and leaned back in my chair to think about the Heechee
and their queer ways..
   And then it hit.
   My desk chairs are all built to maximum comfort and stability, but this
time  I  almost tipped it over. In a split second, I was in pain. Not just
in  pain;  I  was  dizzy, disoriented, even hallucinating. My head felt as
though it were about to burst, and my lungs seared like flame. I had never
felt  so  sick, in both mind and body, and at the same time I found myself
fantasizing incredible feats of sexual athletics.
   I  tried  to  get  up,  and  couldn't.  I  flopped  back  in the chair,
absolutely helpless. "Harriet!" I croaked. "Get a doctor!"
   It took her a full three seconds to respond, and then her image wavered
worse  than Morton. "Mr. Broadhead," she said, looking queerly worried, "I
cannot  account  for it, but the circuits are all busy. I... I... I..." It
was  not  just  her voice repeating, her head and body looked like a short
loop of video tape, over and over shaping the same beginning of a word and
snapping back to begin it again.
   I fell off the chair onto the floor, and my last coherent thought was:
   The fever.
   It was back. Worse than I had ever felt it before. Worse, perhaps, than
I   could   live  through,  and  so  bad,  so  painful,  so  terrifyingly,
psychotically strange that I was not sure I wanted to.


        5 Janine

   The  difference  between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After
three  and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort
cloud,  Janine  was  no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped
being  a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein
the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do.
Janine  was  not  in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at
getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to
hand.
   When  she  left  the  others,  on the day when she met Wan, she was not
particularly  searching  for  anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not
for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she
was  tired  of  her  family.  What she wanted was something of her own, an
experience   not  shared,  an  evaluation  not  helped  by  always-present
grownups;  she  wanted  the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of
the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
   So  she  pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time
to  time  at  a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be "coffee" to
her.  It  was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you
had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
   All  of  her  senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most
fabulously  exciting,  delightfully  scary thing that had ever happened to
her.  More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than
the  stained  shorts  that had announced she had become a woman. More than
anything.  Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they
were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle
blue  light  their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen
by  that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to
chamber,  only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room
were  walls  of  rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a
huge  truncated  sphere,  top  and  bottom  sliced  off,  mirror chrome in
appearance,  queerly  powdery  to  the  touch-what was it for? Some of the
things  she  could  guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly
was  a  table.  (The  lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from
skittering  off  it  in  the  Food  Factory's gentle gravity.) Some of the
objects  had  been  identified for them by Vera, accessing the information
stores  of  Heechee  artifacts  cataloged  by the big data sources back on
Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought
to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera
was  right?  no  matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the
presence  of  space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they
reached  the  Food  Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life,
had  the  chance  to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure.
Especially  as  the  quite  adult  part of her fourteen-year-old brain was
always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was
not large enough for her to stay lost.
   So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
   Until   she   found   herself   trapped   by   the  farside  docks,  as
something-Heechee?  Space  monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife? came
shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
   And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
   Of  course,  she didn't know his name. "Don't you come any closer!" she
whimpered,  heart  in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new
breasts.  He  didn't.  He  stopped.  He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth
open,  tongue  almost  hanging  out.  He  was  tall,  skinny. His face was
triangular,  with  a  long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a
skirt and what looked like a tank-top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was
shaking  as  he  sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much
older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she
had  seen  in  years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and
began  to  do  what  Janine  had never seen any other person do she moaned
while she giggled-amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at
what  he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine
had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
   For  the  next  few  days  Janine  could not bear to let Wan out of her
sight.  She  felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his
wife. "No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it's hot!"
   "Wan, do you mean to say you've been all alone since you were three?"
   "You  have really beautiful eyes, Wan." She didn't mind that he was not
sophisticated  enough  to  respond  by  telling her that she had beautiful
eyes,  too,  because  she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in
all her parts.
   The  others  could  tell that, too, of course. Janine did not mind. Wan
had  plenty  of  senses-sharp,  eyes-bright,  obsessed  adoration to share
around.  He  slept  even  less  than  she. She appreciated that, at first,
because  it  meant  there was more of Wan to share, but then she could see
that  he  was  becoming  exhausted.  Even  ill. When he began to sweat and
tremble,  in  the room with the glittering silver-blue cocoon, she was the
one  who  cried,  "Lurvy!  I think he's going to be sick!" When he lurched
toward  the  couch she flew to his side, fingers stretched to test his dry
and  burning  forehead. The closing cover of the cocoon almost trapped her
arm,  gouging  a  long,  deep  slash  from  wrist to knuckles on her hand.
"Paul," she shouted, drawing back, "we've got to..."
   And then the 130-day madness hit them all. Worst of any time. Different
from any time. Between one heartbeat and the next Janine was sick.
   Janine  had never been sick. Now and then a bruise, a cramp, a sniffle.
Nothing  more.  For  most  of her life she had been under Full Medical and
sickness  simply  did not occur. She did not comprehend what was happening
to  her.  Her  body  raged with fever and pain. She hallucinated monstrous
strange  figures,  in  some of whom she recognized her caricatured family;
others  were  simply  terrifying  and strange. She even saw herself-hugely
bosomed  and grossly hipped, but herself-and in her belly rumbled a frenzy
to  thrust  and  thrust  into  all  the seen and imagined cavities of that
fantasy  something  that,  even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this
was  clear.  Nothing  was  clear.  The  agonies and the insanities came in
waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses
of  reality.  The  steely  blue  glow  from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and
whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and
blue  cocoon,  with  Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not
reason  or  will  that  made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or
thousandth,  try  to get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him
whimpering and shaking out.
   The hallucinations stopped at once.
   Not  quite  as  quickly,  the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they
stopped.  They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who
was  unconscious  and  breathing  in  a  way that terrified Janine, great,
hoarse,  snoring  gasps.  "Help,  Lurvy!"  she screamed. "He's dying!" Her
sister  was already beside her, thumb on the boy's pulse, shaking her head
to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
   "Dehydrated.  Fever.  Come  on," she cried, struggling with Wan's arms.
"Help  me  get  him  back  to  the  ship.  He needs saline, antibiotics, a
febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin..."
   It  took  them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine
was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy
raced  ahead  the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had
struggled  him  through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit
and  was  shouting  orders.  "Put  him down. Make him swallow this. Take a
blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base,
tell  them  we  need  medical  instructions-if he lives long enough to get
them!"
   Paul  helped  them  get Wan's clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of
the  Payter's  blankets.  Then  he sent the message. But he knew, they all
knew,  that  the  problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved
from  Earth.  Not  with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could
get  an  answer. Payter was swearing over the bio-assay mobile unit. Lurvy
and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone,
struggled  into  his  EVA  suit and exited intoš- space, where he spent an
exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes-the main one
to  the  bright  double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the
other  to  the  point  in  space  occupied  by  the Garfeld mission. Then,
clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of
them  at  max  power.  They  might be monitoring. They might not When Vera
signaled  that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth.
It  took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would
receive  his  message  was  doubtful.  It was no less doubtful that either
would  have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well
equipped  than  their  own,  and  the  people  at  the  Triton  base  were
short-timers. But if either did they could hope for a message of aid-or at
least sympathy, a lot faster than from Earth.

   In  an  hour  Wan's fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and
babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
   Mother  and  playmate,  teacher  and  at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine
became Wan's nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would
not  even  let  Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge
his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously.
She  had  no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned
looks  and  words  from  her  family left her untouched, until she brushed
Wan's  unkempt  hair  off  his  face, and Paul made a patronizing comment.
Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, "Paul, you're sickening!
Wan needs me to take care of him!"
   "And  you  do enjoy it, don't you?" he snapped. He was really angry. Of
course,  that  sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently
enough,  "Let  the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young?
Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again..."
   Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been
a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests
lay.  She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul's jealousy, because
that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
   As  he  mended  he  became  even more interesting. From time to time he
woke,  and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark,
body  olive;  but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of
bread  dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face
except  a  soft,  almost  invisible  strand  or  two-more  lip-lashes than
mustache.
   Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul
was  actually  jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a
nice  change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was
doing  was  the most significant activity of the group. The others came to
her  to  sue  for  permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was
tiring they accepted her command to stop.
   Besides,  Wan  fascinated  her. She mapped him against all her previous
experience  of  Men,  to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was
better  looking  than  the  ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as
tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against
the  only  two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of
in  years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The
backs  of  old  Peter's  hands  bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored
pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even
dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his
ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While
Paul-In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, "That's what
you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I'd puke."
   So  she  fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept.
She  shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy
to  help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes
and,  spurning  Lurvy  for  this,  patched  them and even cut down some of
Paul's  to  fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much
as she.

   As  he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less
able  to  protect  him  from  the  questions  of the others. But they were
protective,  too.  Even  old  Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its
medical  programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the
boy.  "Assassin!" raged Peter. "Has it no understanding of a young man who
has  been  so  close  to  death  that  it wishes to finish it?" It was not
entirely  consideration.  Peter  had questions of his own, and he had been
asking  them  when  Janine  would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she
would  not.  "That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you
are  in  it?  As  though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And
also  they  of  you,  isn't  that  so?"  But  when  Janine  accused him of
interfering  with  Wan's  recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for
long.
   Then  Wan  was  well  enough for Janine to allow herself a full night's
sleep  in  her  own  private,  and  when she woke her sister was at Vera's
console.  Wan  was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning
at  the  unfamiliar  machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical
report.  "Your  vital  signs  are  normal, your weight is picking up, your
antibody  levels  are  in  the normal range-I think you're going to be all
right now, Wan."
   "So  now,"  cried  her  father,  "at  last  we  can  talk?  About  this
faster-than-light  radio,  the  machines,  the  place  he  comes from, the
dreaming room?" Janine hurled herself into the group.
   "Leave him alone!" she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
   "Let  them  ask what they like, Janine," he said in his shrill, breathy
voice.
   "Now?"
   "Yes,  now!" stormed her father. "Now, this minute! Paul, come you here
and tell this boy what we must know."
   They  had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did
not  object,  and  she  could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any
longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this
interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal
permission,  coldly:  "Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don't
tire him out."
   Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. "For more than a dozen
years," he said, "every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has
gone crazy. It looks like it's your fault,

   The  boy  frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him.
"Why are you picking on him?" she demanded.
   "No one is 'picking', Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It
can't  be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts
to the world." Paul shook his head. "Dear lad, do you have any idea of how
much  trouble you've caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams
have  been  shared  by  millions  of  people. Billions! Sometimes you were
peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn't so bad. Sometimes
you  weren't.  I  don't  want  you  to  blame  yourself," he added kindly,
forestalling Janine, "but thousands and thousands of people have died. And
the property damage-Wan, you just can't imagine."
   Wan  shrilled  defensively, "I have never harmed anyone!" he was unable
to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind
that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
   "I  wish  it  were  so,  Wan,"  she  said. "The important thing is, you
mustn't do that again."
   "No more dreaming in the couch?"
   "No,  Wan."  He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. "But that
is  not  all,"  Paul  put in. "You have to help us. Tell us everything you
know.  About  the  couch.  About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light
radio, the food..."
   "Why should I?" Wan demanded.
   Patiently,  Paul  coaxed:  "Because in that way you can make up for the
fever.  I  don't  think  you  understand  how  important you are, Wan. The
knowledge  in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions
of lives, Wan."
   Wan  frowned  over  that  concept  for  a  moment,  but  "millions" was
meaningless  to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to
"five". "You make me angry," he scolded.
   "I don't mean to, Wan."
   "It  is  not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me
that," the boy grumbled spitefully. "All right. What do you want?"
   "We  want you to tell us everything you know," Paul said promptly. "Oh,
not  all  at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this
whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can,
I mean."
   "This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won't
let me use that!"
   "It is all new to us, Wan."
   "It  is  nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead
Men  are  hard  to  talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and
much of it is working, so you can see for yourself."
   "You make it sound like heaven, Wan."
   "See for yourself! If I can't dream, there is no reason to stay here!"
   Paul looked at the others, perplexed. "Could we do that?"
   "Of  course!  My  ship  will  take  us  there-not  all of you, no," Wan
corrected  himself.  "But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no
woman  for  him,  anyway,  so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even," he
added  cunningly,  "only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room
in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures..."
   "Forget that, Wan," Janine said wisely. "They'll never let us do that."
   "Not  so  fast,  my  girl,"  her  father  said. "That is not for you to
decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of
heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?"
   Janine  studied  her  father,  but his expression was bland. "You don't
mean you'd let Wan and me go there alone?"
   "That," he said, "is not the question. The question is, how can we most
rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There
is no other."
   "Well,"  said Lurvy after a moment, "we don't have to decide that right
now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives."
   Her father said, "That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of
us have less lives to wait than others."

   Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related
only  to  a  remote  past,  before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were
doing  or  planning  now:  Submit  chemical  analyses of this. X-ray that.
Measure  these  other  things.  By  now  the  slow packets of photons that
transmitted  the  word  of  their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at
Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But
they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer
than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there
for  interpretation  and  advice.  Old  Peter rejected the idea with fury.
"Those  wanderers,  gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much
to get!"
   "But  nobody's  questioning  us, Pa," Lurvy coaxed. "It's all ours. The
contracts spell it all out."
   "No!"
   So  they  fed  all  that  Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera's
small,  slow  intelligence  painfully  sorted the bits into patterns. Even
into  graphics.  The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it
was  probably  not  a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan
had  not  had  the  curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The
machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
   "Ah,  no.  They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are
quite  young.  And the breasts on the females are:" He held his hands just
below  his rib cage, to show how low they swung. "And you do not give them
the right smell."
   "Holos don't smell at all, Wan," said Paul.
   "Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much."
   And  Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the
new  revisions.  After  hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned
into  drudgery. When he began saying, "Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly
how  the  Dead  Men's  room looks," they all understood that he was merely
agreeing  with  anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave
him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors,
sound  and  vision  pickups  strapped  to  her  shoulder,  in case he said
something  of  value  or  pointed  out a treasure, and they spoke of other
things.  His  knowledge  was  as  astonishing  as his ignorance. Both were
unpredictable.
   It  was  not  only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter
would  come  up  with  a  new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its
programmed  drive,  so  that  they  could try to accomplish their original
purpose.  None  worked.  Every  day more messages came in from Earth. They
were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a
score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera's memory without bothering
to  retrieve  them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her
needs.  Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement
that  her  college  had  named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a
formal  petition  from  the city he had been born in. He read it and burst
into  laughter.  "Dortmund  still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What
nonsense!"
   "Why,  that's  really  nice,"  Lurvy  said  agreeably.  "It's  quite  a
compliment."
   "It  is quite nothing," he corrected her severely. "Burgermeister! With
what  we  have  I  could  be elected president of the Federal Republic, or
even..."  He  fell silent, and then said gloomily, "If, to be sure, I ever
see  the Federal Republic again." He paused, looking over their heads. His
lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: "Perhaps we should go
back now."
   "Aw, Pop," Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her
the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them,
until Paul cleared his throat and said:
   "Well,  that's certainly one of our options. Of course, there's a legal
question of contract..."
   Peter  shook  his  head.  "I  have thought of that. They owe us so much
already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of
the  damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won't pay..." He
hesitated,  and  then said, "No, there is no question that they won't pay.
We  simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that
we  cannot  move  the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a
return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way."
   "And what about Wan?" Janine demanded.
   "He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again,
and that is surely what is best for him."
   "Don't  you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to
sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?"
   "That  was a dream," her father said coldly. "Reality is that we cannot
do  everything.  Let  someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for
all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not
just  a  matter  of  the contract," he went on, almost pleadingly. "We are
saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising!
We will be persons of great power!"
   "No,  Pop,"  Janine  said, "listen to me. You've all been talking about
our  duty  to  help  the  world-feed people, bring them new things to make
their lives better. Well, aren't we going to do our duty?"
   He  turned on her furiously. "Little minx, what do you know about duty?
Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare
check! We must think of ourselves as well!"
   She  would have replied, but Wan's wide-eyed, frightened stare made her
stop.  "I hate this!" she announced. "Wan and I are going to go for a walk
to get away from the lot of you!"
   "He  is  not  really a bad person," she told Wan, once they were beyond
the  sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who
had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
   Wan  did  not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue
wall.  "This  is a place for water," he said, "but it is a dead one. There
are dozens of them, but almost all dead."
   Out  of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at
it  as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance
like  a  nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it
was  almost  large enough to get into, but bone dry. "You said one of them
still works, but the water isn't drinkable?"
   "Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?"
   "Well, I guess so." She added, "Really, don't let them get to you. They
just get excited."
   "Yes, Janine." But he was not in a talkative mood.
   She  said,  "When  I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they
were  scary,  but  sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as
far  as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was
a  good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but
if  I wasn't he'd bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That's what I used to
call  him,  Schwarze  Peter.  But he never gave me a lump of coal." He was
listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not
respond.  "Then my mother died," she said, "and Paul and Lurvy got married
and  I  went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn't so bad, really.
He  came  to  see  me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand
what I'm saying to you?"
   "No," he said. "What's Santa Claus?"
   "Oh, Wan!"
   So  she  explained  Santa  Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to
explain  winter  and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began
to  smile;  and  curiously,  as  Wan's  mood improved Janine's grew worse.
Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the
world  ahead.  Almost,  she  thought,  it would be better to do what Peter
proposed,  pack  it  all  in,  go  back  to  their  real  lives.  All  the
alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let
herself  feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its
way  through  space  to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What
would  they  confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there?
Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with
the  Heechee  just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical.
Like  Schwarze  Peter  or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are
tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?
   She  knew  that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not
tell  that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage
to  her.  She  could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were
afraid  but  had  made  up their minds to gamble against that fear for the
sake  of  what  might  come  of  it.  Her  own  fear was of a very special
kind-less  fear  of  what  might happen than of how badly she might behave
while  it  was  happening  to  her.  What  her  father felt was obvious to
everyone.  He  was  angry  and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying
before he cashed in on his courage.
   And  what  did  Wan  feel?  He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her
about  his  domain,  like one child guiding another through his toy chest.
Janine  knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it
was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan's complications were merely not the
same  as  her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture
that  worked.  He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it
for  a  toilet.  Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western
world  to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought
Wan   to  see  this  place  of  stains  and  smells,  but  he  was  wholly
unembarrassed.  She  could  not  even  make  him embarrassed. "I had to go
somewhere,"  he  said  sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the
ship's sanitary like everybody else.
   "Yes,  but  if  you did it the right way Vera would have known you were
sick, don't you see? She's always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff."
   "There ought to be some other way."
   "Well,  there  is." There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny
samples  from  each  of  them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan,
once  the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer,
and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to
do so, a little late. "What's the matter?"
   He was acting uncomfortable. "When the Dead Men give me a medical check
they stick things in me. I don't like that."
   "It's for your own good, Wan," she said severely. "Hey! That's an idea.
Let's go talk to the Dead Men."
   And  there  was Janine's own complicatedness. She didn't really want to
talk  to  the  Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing
place  they  were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the
place  where  the  Dead  Men  were,  which  was also the place where Wan's
dreaming  couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. "Wan," she
said, "I want to try the couch."
   He  tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his
long nose. "Lurvy told me not to do that any more," he stated.
   "I know she did. How do I get in?"
   "First  you  tell  me I must do what you all say," he complained, "then
you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing."
   She  had  already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. "Do I just
pull the top down over me?"
   "Oh,"  he  said,  shrugging, "if you've made up your mind-yes. It snaps
shut,  there,  where  your hand is, but when you want to come out you just
push."
   She  reached  for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at
his petulant, concerned face. "Does it-hurt?"
   "Hurt? No! What an idea!"
   "Well, what does it feel like?"
   "Janine,"  he  said  severely,  "you  are very childish. Why do you ask
questions  when  you  can  see  for  yourself?"  And he pushed down on the
shimmery  wire  covering,  and  the catch midway down the side rustled and
locked.  "It  is  best if you go to sleep," he called down to her, through
the shining blue network of wire.
   "But  I'm  not  sleepy,"  she objected reasonably. "I'm not anything. I
don't feel a thing..."
   And then she did.
   It  was  not  what  she  had  expected out of her own experience of the
fever;  there  was  no obsessive interference with her own personality, no
point  source  of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She
was  surrounded.  She  was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms
had  no  shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She
could  still  see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when
she  opened her eyes, and these other-souls? were not at all as real or as
immediate.  But  she  could  feel  them,  as  she  had  never felt another
presence.  Around  her.  Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were
comforting.
   When  Wan  at  last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm,
she  lay  there  staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or
the  desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they
started back.
   They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other
members  of  the  family  interrupted them, and they were furious. "Stupid
little  brat!"  Paul raged. "You ever do anything like that again and I'll
paddle your pink little ass for you!"
   "She  won't!"  her  father said grimly. "I will see to that, right now;
and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later."

   They  had all become so quarrelsome! no one paddled Janine's bottom for
trying  out  the  dreaming  couch.  no  one  punished her at all. They all
punished  each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had
held  for  three  and  a  half years, because each of them enforced it for
himself,  the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old
man  did  not  speak  for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch
without  consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other
because  she  had  programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again,
when  it  was  his  turn,  because he had programmed too little. And as to
Lurvy  and  Paul-they  no  longer  slept together; they hardly spoke; they
would  surely  not  have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court
within 5,000 A. U.
   But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.
U.,  at  least  the  disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have
made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the
Food  Factory's  guidance?  Should  they  go with Wan to explore the other
place-and  if  so,  who should go and who should remain behind? They could
not  agree  on  grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of
every  hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave
it  alone  and  give  up  the  hope of some wonderful discovery that could
change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men
by  radio,  or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to
try  to  tempt  the  Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera's sound
system  in  linkage  with the "radio". But Vera could not handle much give
and  take;  and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did
not  want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera
was beaten.
   All  this  was  awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The
squabbling  made  him  confused  and  indignant.  He stopped following her
around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he
was gone.
   Fortunately  for  Janine's  pride, everyone else was gone, too-Paul and
Lurvy  outside  the  ship  to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so
that  she  had  time  to  deal  with  her  jealousy. Let him be a pig! she
thought.  It  was  stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends,
while  he  had  only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long
letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister
returning;  and  when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an
hour she was unprepared for their reaction. "Pa!" Lurvy cried, rattling at
the curtain of her father's private. "Wake up! Wan's gone!"
   As  the  old  man  came  blinking  out, Janine said disagreeably, "Now,
what's the matter with all of you?"
   "You  don't understand, do you?" Paul asked coldly. "What if he's taken
the ship?"
   It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like
a blow in the face. "He wouldn't!"
   "Would  he  not?" snarled her father. "And how do you know that, little
minx?  And  if  he does, what of us?" He finished zipping his coverall and
stood up, glowering at them. "I have told you all," he said-but looking at
Lurvy  and  Paul,  so  that  Janine understood she was not a part of their
"all"-"I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to
go  with  him  in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk
that  he  will  take  it  into  his foolish little mind to go back without
warning. That is assuredly certain."
   "And  how  do we do that?" Lurvy demanded. "You're preposterous, Pa. We
can't guard the ship day and night."
   "And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes," the old man nodded. "So we
must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy."
   Janine  flew  at him. "You monsters!" she choked. "You've been planning
this all out when we weren't around!" Her sister caught and held her.
   "Calm  down,  Janine,"  she ordered. "Yes, it's true we've talked about
it-we had to! But nothing's settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan."
   "Then settle it!" Janine flared. "I vote we go with Wan!"
   "If he hasn't gone already, by himself," Paul put in.
   "He hasn't!"
   Lurvy said practically, "If he has, it's too late for us to do anything
about it. Outside of that, I'm with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?"
   He hesitated. "I-guess so," he conceded. "Peter?"
   The  old  man said with dignity, "If you are all agreed, then what does
it  matter  how  I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go
and who is to stay. I propose..."
   Lurvy  stopped  him. "Pa," she said, "I know what you are going to say,
but  it  won't work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in
contact  with  Earth.  Janine's too young. It can't be me, because I'm the
best  pilot  and  this  is  a  chance  to learn something about piloting a
Heechee ship. I don't want to go without Paul, and that leaves you."

   They  took  Vera  apart,  component by component, and redistributed her
around  the  Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the
dreaming  chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission
still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of
what  they  were  doing  was that further communications of interest would
come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter
was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in
the  ship,  Wan  told  them;  but  Paul  would  not  be satisfied with the
automatic  replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and
he  made  them  carry  aboard  rations of their own, as much as they could
stow.  Whereupon  Wan  insisted that they stock up with water, and so they
depleted  the  recycling  stocks  in the ship to fill his plastic bags and
loaded  them,  too.  Wan's ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed
out,  because  the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during
maneuvers,  and  to keep them from floating around while they slept in the
rest  of  the  voyage-suggestion  vetoed  by  both  Lurvy  and  Paul,  who
dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in
the  ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume
and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It
was  long  and  hard  work,  though  they discovered they could ease it by
sailing  the  plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along
the  corridors  in  a  game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done.
Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill
about,  and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed
as  though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not
dead, and she said, "Pop? Don't take it so hard. We'll all be back as soon
as we can."
   He nodded. "Which comes to," he said, "let me see, forty-nine days each
way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place." But then he pushed
himself  up,  and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully,
he said, "Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?"
   Lurvy  looked  around,  considering.  "I  think not-unless you think we
should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?"
   "The  Dead  Men?"  he shrilled, grinning. "They will not know. They are
not alive, you know, they have no sense of time."
   "Then why do you like them so much?" Janine demanded.
   Wan  caught  the  note  of  jealousy  and  scowled at her. "They are my
friends,"  he said. "They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they
often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them."
   Lurvy  caught her breath. "Oh, Wan," she said, touching him. "I know we
haven't  been  as  nice  as we might. We've all been under a great strain.
We're really better people than we must seem to you."
   Old Peter had had enough. "Go you now," he snarled. "Prove this to him,
do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!"


        6 After the Fever

   Less  than  two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had
it  ever  been  as  intense.  The  most  susceptible  one  percent  of the
population  had  simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone
had been severely affected.
   I  was  one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck
in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I
wasn't  trapped  in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a
runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and
nurses  writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one
minutes  and  forty-four  seconds  of  delirious  misery, and that diluted
because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
   Of  course,  everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in
touch  with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed
for  fair.  Harriet  formed  herself  in the tank to tell me that at least
twenty-five  calls  were  coming  in  for  me-my science program, my legal
program,  three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a
few  real,  live  people.  None of them, she told me apologetically when I
asked,  was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment,
and  I  couldn't place a call from my end either. None of the machines had
been  affected  by  the  madness. They never were. The only time something
went  wrong  with them was when some live person had injected himself into
the  circuit,  for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was
happening  a  million  times  a  minute, somewhere in the world, with some
machine  or  another, it was not surprising that some things took a little
while to get going again.
   First  order  of  business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I
gave  Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports.
Quick  bulletin  from  the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate:
some  minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone
had  left  a  barrier  open  in the fish factories and six hundred million
fingerlings  swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a
minority  stockholder  in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of
the  fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot
of  others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of
a  day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal
had  produced  in  fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts
had  simply  stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions
of  people  had  been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and
southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in
California,  a  train  wreck  in  Wales,  and  a  few  as yet uncatalogued
disasters-the  computers  did  not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the
news reports were calling it the worst ever.
   By  the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were
running  again.  I  wasn't  a  captive any more. Looking out the window, I
could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on
the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been
on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had
been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of
wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she
could,  but  the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next
day.  I  couldn't even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed.
That  was  only  an  annoyance,  not  a problem. If I really wanted to get
through,  there  were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks.
But  the  rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to
surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
   And meanwhile I had time to spare.
   And  all  this time my science program had been bursting with things to
tell  me.  That  was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it
off  until  I  had  a  chance  for  a good, long natter; and that time had
arrived, "Harriet," I said, "put him on." And Albert Einstein took form in
the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. "What is it, Al,"
I asked, "something good?"
   "Sure thing, Robin! We've found out where the fever comes from-it's the
Food Factory!"

   It  was  my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind
at  once, I wouldn't have been just about the last person on Earth to find
out  that  I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first
thing  that  hit  me,  and  I  was  thinking  about possible liability and
sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me.
First  and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food
Factory  itself.  But we should have known all along. "If I had only timed
the  Onsets carefully," Albert berated himself, "we could have located the
source  years  ago.  And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with
their photonic nature."
   "Their what nature?"
   "They are electromagnetic, Robin," he explained. He tamped tobacco into
his  pipe  and  reached for a match. "You realize, of course, that this is
established  by  transmission  time-we received whatever signal caused the
madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening."
   "Wait  a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn't
this the same?"
   "Ah,  Robin!  If we only knew that!" he twinkled, lighting his pipe. "I
can  only  conjecture..."  puff, puff, "that this particular effect is not
compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that
I  cannot  even  speculate  on  at this time. And, of course," he went on,
"there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have
any answers."
   "Of  course," I said, but I didn't ask him what they were. I was on the
track  of something else. "Albert? Display the ships and stations you drew
information from in space."
   "Sure  thing,  Robin."  The  flyaway hair and the seamed, cheerful face
melted away, and at once the holographic tank filled with a representation
of circumsolar space. Nine planets. A girdle of dust that was the asteroid
belt, and a powdery shell far out that was the Oort cloud. And about forty
points  of  colored light. The representation was in logarithmic scale, to
get  it  all  in,  and  the  size  of  the planets and artifacts immensely
enlarged. Albert's voice explained, "The four green ships are ours, Robin.
The eleven blue objects are Heechee installations; the round ones are only
detected,  the  star-shaped  ones have been visited and are mostly manned.
All  the others are ships that belong to other commercial interests, or to
governments."
   I  studied the plot. Not very many of the sparks were anywhere near the
green  ship  and  blue  star  that  marked  the  Food Factory. "Albert? If
somebody  had to get another ship out to the Food Factory, which one could
get there fastest?"
   He appeared in the lower corner of the projection, frowning and sucking
his  pipe  stem.  A golden point near Saturn's rings began to flash on and
off. "There's a Brazilian cruiser just departing Tethys that could make it
in  eighteen  months," he said. "I have displayed only the ships that were
involved  in  my  radiolocation.  There  are several others..." new lights
winked  on  in  a scatter around the tank, "that could do better, provided
they have adequate fuel and supplies. But none in less than a year."
   I  sighed.  "Turn  it  off,  Albert," I said. "The thing is, we're into
something I didn't expect."
   "What's  that, Robin?" he asked, filling the tank again and folding his
hands over his belly in a comfortable way.
   "That cocoon. I don't know how to handle it. I don't even see the point
of it. What's it for, Albert? Have you got any conjectures?"
   "Sure  thing, Robin," he said, nodding cheerfully. "My best conjectures
are  a  pretty low order of probability, but that's just because there are
so   many   unknowns.   Let's   put  it  this  way.  Suppose  you  were  a
Heechee-something like an anthropologist, say-interested in keeping an eye
on  a  developing  civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so you don't
want  to  just  sit  there and watch. What you'd like to do is get a quick
estimate,  maybe  every  thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well,
given  something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the
Food  Factory  every  once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more;
climb  in  the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would
take only minutes." He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on.
"Then-but  this  is  a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn't even
assign  a  probability  rating  to  it  at all-then, if you found anything
interesting,  you could explore further. You could even do something else.
This  is  really far out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon
transmits  as  well as receives, that's what the fevers came from. Perhaps
it  can  also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of the
great  inventions  sprang up all over the world, apparently independently,
maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?"
   He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about
that.

   All  the  thinking  in  the  world  didn't  make  it  good,  clean fun.
Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in
fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on
Venus,  and  the  more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid,
playing  with  something he didn't understand, had plunged the whole human
race  into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing
with  things  we didn't understand, what were the Heechee going to give us
for an encore?
   To  say  nothing  of  the  queasiness of Albert's suggestion that these
creatures  had  been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe
even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
   I  told  Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about
what  was  going  on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through
the  physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the
tank,  looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept
right  on  with  his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the
transmissions  even as he was reporting on them, and be showed me selected
scenes  of  the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact.
The  damn  thing  was  still  determined  to  go  its own way. Best course
estimates  suggested  that  it  was moving toward a new cluster of comets,
several  million  miles away-at present rates, it would get there in a few
months. "Then what?" I demanded.
   Albert  shrugged  apologetically.  "Presumably  it will then stay there
until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin."
   "Then can we move it?"
   "No  evidence,  Robin.  But  it's possible. Speaking of which, I have a
theory  about  the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches
an  operating  artifact-the  Food  Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls
unlock  and  it  can  then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be
what  happened  to  Ms.  Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious
implications," he twinkled.
   I  don't  like  to let a computer program think it's smarter than I am.
"You  mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over
the  Galaxy,  because  their controls unlocked and they didn't know how to
get back?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he said approvingly. "That may account for what
Wan  calls the 'Dead Men'. We've received some conversations with them, by
the  way.  Their  responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course
we're  handicapped  by not being able to interact. But it does appear that
they are, or were, human beings."
   "Are you telling me they were alive?"
   "Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso's voice
on  a  tape  was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they
are  'alive'  now  is  a  matter  of  definition.  You  might ask the same
question..." puff, pull, "about me."
   "Huh." I thought for a minute. "Why are they so crazy?"
   "Imperfect  transcription,  I  would say. But that is not the important
thing."  I  waited  until  he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the
important  thing.  "It  seems  rather  sure, Robin, that the transcription
occurred  by  some  sort  of  chemical readout of the actual brains of the
prospectors."
   "You  mean  the  Heechee  killed  them  and  poured their brains into a
bottle?"
   "Certainly  not,  Robin!  First,  I  would  hazard the opinion that the
prospectors  died  naturally  rather than being killed. That would degrade
the  chemistry  of  brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the
information.  And  certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical
analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?"
   I groaned. "Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all
this quicker from straight visual synoptics."
   "Sure  thing  you  could,  Robin,  but  not," he twinkled, "perhaps, as
entertainingly.  At  any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen
to  have  equipment  to  read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It
seems  very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same
as  the  chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general
considerations,  e.  g.,  what  they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their
chemistry  was  not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules.
It  seems  most  unlikely  that  a  compound  which represents, e. g., the
ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the
same  in their chemistry as in ours." He started to relight his pipe, then
caught  my  eye  and  added  hurriedly,  "So I conclude, Robin, that these
machines were designed not for Heechee brains."
   He  startled  me.  "For  humans, then? But why? How? How did they know?
When..."
   "Please,  Robin.  At  your instructions, your wife has programmed me to
make  large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that
I say. But," he added, nodding sagely, "I have this opinion, yes."
   "Jesus,"  I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I
tucked  it  away  and went on to the next worry. "What about the Old Ones?
Are they human, do you think?"
   He  tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. "I would say
not," he said at last.
   I didn't ask him what the alternative was. I didn't want to hear it.
   When  Albert  had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put
my  legal  program  on. I couldn't talk to him right away, though, because
right  then  my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted
to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he
had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank,
sliced  into  my chicken steak and said, "Go ahead, Morton, what's the bad
news?"
   He said apologetically, "You know that Bover suit?"
   "What Bover suit?"
   "Trish Bover's husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We
filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the
fever  and...  Well.  He  is  wrong  in  the law, Robin, but he denied our
request  for  time  to  set  a  hearing  date and entered summary judgment
against."
   I  stopped  chewing.  "Can he do that?" I roared through my mouthful of
prime rare chicken.
   "Well,  yes,  or  at least he did it. But we'll get him on appeal, only
that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue,
and  he  pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there's some
question   whether  she  actually  completed  the  mission,  do  you  see?
Meanwhile..."
   Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to
draw out a discussion so. "Meanwhile what, Morton?"
   "Well,  since  the  recent,  ah,  episode,  there  seems  to be another
complication.  Gateway  Corp  wants  to go slow until they figure out just
where they are with this fever business, so they've accepted service of an
injunction.  Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with
exploitation of the factory."
   I  blew up. "Shit, Mort! You mean we can't use it after we bring it all
the way in from orbit?"
   "I'm  afraid I mean more than that," he apologized. "You're enjoined to
stop  moving  it.  You're  enjoined  to  refrain from interfering with its
normal  activities  in  any  way,  pending  a declarative judgment. That's
Bover's  action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food
by  moving to a new comet cluster you're endangering his interest. Now, we
can  get  that  vacated, I'm sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some
sort  of  action  to  stop doing everything until they get a handle on the
fever."
   "Oh, God." I put down my fork. I wasn't hungry any more. "The only good
thing," I said, "is that's an order they can't enforce."
   "Because  it  will  take  so  long  to get a message to the Herter-Hall
party, yes, Robin," he nodded. "On the..."
   He  disappeared,  zit.  He  slid  diagonally  away out of the tank, and
Harriet  appeared.  She  looked  terrible.  I  have  good  programs for my
computer  help. But they don't always bring good news. "Robin!" she cried.
"There's a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona-it's your wife!"
   "Essie? Essie? Is she sick?"
   "Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in
a car crash. They've got her on life support, but... There's no prognosis,
Robin. She isn't responding."

   I  didn't  use  my  priorities.  I didn't want to take the time. I went
straight  to  the  Washington  office of the Gateway Corp. who went to the
Secretary  of  Defense,  who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane
leaving Boiling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
   The  flight  was  three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the
way.  There  were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn't
even  want  them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left
me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love
of  my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of
my  life  after  she  was  safely  gone, also left me-without quite dying,
because  she  was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of
reach  forever-that  also  hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I
wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot
law  to  pain.  It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between
source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable
for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
   Mesa  General  was  a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All
you  could  see  as  we  came up to it were the solar installations on the
"roof,"  but  under  them  were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms,
labs,  and  operating  theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting
city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
   When  I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I
heard  was  that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off
at  any  moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be
used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
   I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window
when  it  was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor's
office-he  wouldn't  be  using  it  for some time-kicked out the insurance
adjustor  who  had  borrowed  his  desk  and  got  on the wires. I had two
senators  on  the  line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from
our medical program.
   Essie's  pulse  had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were
good  enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the
machines for a while.
   Of  course,  Full  Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all
its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the
neck-bands  that  some  of  them  were  Full Medical too; the hospital was
simply swamped.
   I  could  not get in to see her. Intensive Care was no Visitors, and no
visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door,
forcing  himself  to  stay  awake  after a very long, hard day and feeling
mean.  I  fiddled  with  the  absent  doctor's  desk  set  until I found a
closed-circuit  line  that  looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it
on. I couldn't see how well Essie was doing. I couldn't even tell for sure
which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time
to  time  to pass on little news items. She didn't bother with messages of
sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me
a  Robinette  Broadhead  program  to  deal  with  social time-wasters, and
Harriet  gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without
bothering  to  cut  me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that
kind  of  programming.  Past  tense.  When  I realized I was thinking of a
past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
   After  an  hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers,
and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men's
room;  and  that  was  about all the diversion I had on the third floor of
Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and
said,  "Senor  Broad'ead?  Por  favor."  The  cop was still at the door of
Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but
with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
   Essie  was  under  a  positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent
patch  just  at  her  face,  so  that I could see a tube coming out of her
nostril  and  a  wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes
were  closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not
conscious.
   Two  minutes  was  all  they  allowed,  and that wasn't enough time for
anything.  Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects
under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all
for  Essie  to  sit  up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to
have one.
   In  the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short,
pot-bellied  old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked
at  a  piece  of  paper to see who it was he was talking to. "Oh, yes, Mr.
Blackhead,"  he  said.  "Your  wife  is receiving the best of care, she is
responding  to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a
short time toward evening."
   I  didn't bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top
questions  on  the  list:  "Will  she be in pain? What happened to her? Is
there anything she needs? -I mean anything."
   He  sighed  and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too
long.  "Pain  we  can  take  care of, and she's already on Full Medical. I
understand  you  are  an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing
for  you  to  do.  Tomorrow  or  the next day, maybe there'll be something
she'll  need.  Today,  no.  Her  whole  left side was crushed when the bus
folded  in  on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six
or seven hours, until somebody got to her."
   I  didn't  know  I  had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A
little  sympathy  came  through  the contact lenses as he peered up at me.
"That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life.
Being  squeezed  was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have
bled  to  death."  He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. "Um.
She's  going  to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two
ribs.  Eight,  ten,  fourteen-maybe  twenty square inches of new skin, and
there's  considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we'll want a
transplant."
   "If there's anything at all..."
   "Nothing  at all, Mr. Blackeu," he said, folding up the paper. "Nothing
now.  Go  away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be
able  to  talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you're
taking up."

   Harriet  had  already arranged for the hotel to move Essie's things out
of  her  room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had
delivered  toilet  stuff  and  a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up
there.  I  didn't  want  to  go  out.  I  didn't enjoy seeing the cheerful
tipplers  in  the  lobby  bar,  or  the streets full of people who had got
safely  through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing
it had been for them.
   I  made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much,
but  not  in  staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and
played  some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But
when  they  went  from  Stravinsky to Carl Orff that lusty, horny Catullus
poetry  made  me  think about the last time I had played it with my lusty,
horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.
   "Turn  it  off,"  I  snapped  and  ever-vigilant  Harriet stopped it in
midshriek.
   "Do  you  want to receive messages, Robin?" she inquired froth the same
audio speaker.
   I  dried  myself  carefully,  and  then  said: "In a minute. I might as
well."  Dried,  brushed,  in  clean  clothes,  I  sat down in front of the
hotel's  comm  system. They weren't quite nice enough to give their guests
full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a
flat-plate  display.  She  reassured  me about Essie. She was continuously
monitoring,  and  everything  was  going  well  enough-not  far enough, of
course.  But not badly. Essie's own real flesh-and-blood doctor was in the
picture,  and  Harriet  gave me a taped message from her. It translated to
don't  worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don't worry quite as much as you
think you ought to.
   Harriet  had  a  batch  of  action  messages  for  me  to  deal with. I
authorized  another  half-million  dollars  for  fire-fighting in the food
mines,  instructed  Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for
our  man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more
liquidity  as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most
interesting  programs  report  in, finishing with Albert's latest synoptic
from  the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity
and  efficiency.  I had accepted the fact that Essie's chances of survival
were  measurably  improving  all  the  time, so I didn't need to spare any
energy  for  grief.  And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand
how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love's lovely
body,  and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not
want to explore.

   There  was  a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery,
in  the  course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I
didn't  much  like  having  there. That's okay. Once you take them out and
look  at them-well, they're pretty bad, but at least they're outside, now,
not  still  inside  and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program,
Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.
   He was right, far as he went-one of the things I found unlikeable about
Sigfrid  was that he was infuriatingly reliably right, all too much of the
time.  What  he  didn't  say  was  that you never got finished moving your
bowels.  I  kept  coming up with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how
much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.
   I  turned  Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent,
and  watched  some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink
out  of  the  suite's  adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn't
watching  the  PV,  and  I wasn't enjoying the drink. What I was doing was
encountering  another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My
dearest  beloved  wife  was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care,
and I was thinking about somebody else.
   I  turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped
onto  the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. "What
can I do for you, Robin?" he beamed.
   "I want you to talk to me about black holes," I said.
   "Sure  thing,  Robin.  But  we've been over this a goad many times, you
know..."
   "Fuck  off, Albert! Just do it. And I don't mean in mathematics, I just
want  you to explain them as simply as you can." One of these days I would
have   to   get   Essie   to   rewrite  Albert's  program  a  little  less
idiosyncratically.
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he  said,  cheerfully  ignoring  my  temper. He
wrinkled his furry eyebrows. "Ah-ha," he said. "Uh-huh. Well, let's see."
   "Is  that  a  hard  question  for  you?"  I  asked, more surprised than
sarcastic.
   "Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start.
Well,  let's start with light. You know that light is made up of particles
called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure..."
   "Not that far back, Albert, please."
   "All  right.  But  the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of
light  pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive
as  the  sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a
billion   years.   What   keeps   it  from  collapsing  is  the  radiation
pressure-call  it  the  'light  pressure'  from  the  nuclear  reaction of
hydrogen  fusing  into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen.
Pressure  stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in
only  a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers
in  diameter  is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that
part, Robin?"
   "I think so. Get on with it."
   "Well," he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can't
help  wondering  if he enjoys it! -"that's one of the ways black holes get
started.  The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now
go on to the next part: escape velocity."
   "I know what escape velocity is."
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he nodded, "an old Gateway prospector like you.
Well.  When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from
the  surface.  It  would  probably come back, because even an asteroid has
some  gravity.  But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty
kilometers  an  hour-it wouldn't come back. It would reach escape velocity
and  just  fly  away  forever.  On  the Moon, you'd have to throw it a lot
faster  still,  say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster
than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.
   "Now," he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light
it again, "if you..." tap, tap, "if you were on the surface of some object
that  has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse.
Suppose  the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high,
say  around  three  hundred  and  ten  thousand  kilometers  a second. You
couldn't throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn't quite go that fast! So
even  light..."  puff,  puff,  "can't  escape, because its velocity is ten
thousand  kilometers  a  second  too slow. And, as we know, if light can't
escape,  then nothing can escape; that's Einstein. If I may be excused the
vanity."  He actually winked at me over his pipe. "So that's a black hole.
It's black because it can't radiate at all."
   I said, "What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light."
   Albert  grinned  ruefully.  "Got me there, Robin, but we don't know how
they  go  faster  than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole,
who knows? But we don't have any evidence of one of them ever doing it."
   I thought that over for a moment. "Yet," I said.
   "Well,  yes,  Robin,"  he  agreed.  "The  problem, of going faster than
light,  and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the
same  problem."  He  paused.  A long pause. Then, apologetically, "I guess
that's about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now."
   I  got  up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently
puffing  his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really
nothing  there,  nothing  but  a  few  interference patterns of collimated
light,  backed  up  by  some  tons of metal and plastic. "Albert," I said,
"tell  me  something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why
is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?"
   "Well,  Bob, sometimes it is," he said after a moment, "like that time.
But  I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to 'chat.' If
you  want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing
it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms
you  can  understand,  above  all  to  put it in the form of conversation,
involves  more  than  accessing  the  storage.  I have to do word-searches
through  literature  and  taped conversations. I have to map analogies and
metaphors  against  your  own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as
are  imposed  by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance
to the tone of the particular chat. "'Tain't easy, Robin."
   "You're smarter than you look, Albert," I said.
   He  tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop.
"Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?"
   I  let him go, saying, "You're a good old machine, Albert." I stretched
out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least
he  had  taken  my  mind  off  Essie  for a while, but there was a nagging
question  in  my  mind.  Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to
some other program, and I couldn't remember when.
   Harriet  woke  me  up  to say that there was an in-person call from our
doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M. D., who came
to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in
a while. "Robin," she said, "I think Essie's out of danger."
   "That's-marvelous!"  I said, wishing I had saved words like "marvelous"
for  when I really meant them, because they didn't do justice to the way I
felt.  Our  program  had  already  accessed  the Mesa General circuits, of
course.  Wilma  knew as much about her condition as the little black man I
had  talked  to-and,  of course, had pumped all of Essie's medical history
back  into  the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we
wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that
she  would  get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie
instead.
   "But don't go to see her tonight, Robin," she said. "Talk to her on the
phone   if  you  want  to-I  prescribe  it-but  don't  tire  her  out.  By
tomorrow-well, I think she'll be stronger."
   So  I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy,
but  she  knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep,
and  just  as  I  was  dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me
"Bob".
   There  was  another  program  that I had been on friendly terms with, a
long  time  ago,  that sometimes called me "Robin" and sometimes "Bob" and
even "Bobby". I hadn't talked to that particular program in quite a while,
because I hadn't felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.

   Full  Medical is-well, it's full medical. It's everything. If there's a
way  to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you've got it.
And  there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of
dollars  a  year.  Not  too  many people can afford it-something under one
tenth  of  one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot.
Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.
   Wilma  said  it  was  all right, and so did everybody else. The city of
Tucson  had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over
the  emergency  aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business
as  usual,  meaning  that  they once again had time to deliver what people
paid  for.  So  at  noon  a  private  ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung
machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses
moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up
in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of
which was the heart of me, namely my wife.
   Among   the  other  things  Full  Medical  bought  were  a  trickle  of
pain-killers  and  mood-mediators,  corticosteroids  to  speed healing and
moderators  to  keep  the  corticosteroids  from  spoiling her cells, four
hundred  kilograms  of  plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor
all  of  what  Essie  did,  and  to  intervene  to help her do it when she
couldn't.  Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the
master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma's classmate supervising
a  team  of  interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going
on,  and  I  drank  a  couple  of  cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby,
watching  the  teardrop-shaped  elevators  climb  up and down the interior
walls.  When  I  figured  I  was  allowed  back  I met the doctor from the
hospital  in  the  hail.  He  had managed to get a little sleep and he was
wearing  granny  glasses instead of the contacts. "Don't tire her out," he
said.
   "I'm getting tired of hearing that."
   He  grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me.
He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball
center  Tempe  had  ever  had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate.
There  is  something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters
who  goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the
most  reassuring  thing  of  all.  He  wouldn't have let that happen if he
hadn't been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.
   I did not then appreciate how much "making it" she was going to have to
do.
   She  was  still  under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me
from  seeing  quite how used up she looked. The dayduty nurse retreated to
the  sitting  room,  after  telling  me not to get Essie too tired, and we
talked  for  a  while.  We didn't say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your
talkative  type  person.  She  asked  me  what  the news was from the Food
Factory,  and  when  I  had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she
asked  what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four
or  five  thousand-word  answers to her one-sentence questions it began to
dawn  on  me  that  talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn't
tire her out.
   But  she  was  talking,  and  even talking coherently, and did not seem
worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.
   There  was  the  usual  raft of reports to get through and decisions to
make.  When  that  was done I listened to Albert's latest reports from the
Food  Factory  for  a  while and then realized it was time for me to go to
sleep.
   I  lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn't restless. I wasn't exhausted.
I  was  just  letting  the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I
could  hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie's
room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that
were  keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not
taking  it  all  in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours
before,  Essie  had  been  dead. Kaput. Xed. no longer alive. If it hadn't
been  for  Full  Medical,  and a lot of luck, I would along about now have
been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.
   And  inside  my  head  there was a small minority of cells of the brain
that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just
might have been tidier all around if she hadn't been brought back to life.
   This  had  nothing  to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a
lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock when I heard she was
hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the
question  came  up  a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever
polled, however asked.
   I  have never been entirely sure what the word "love" means. Especially
when  applied  to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment
of  dialing  Albert  up and asking him to explain it. But I didn't. Albert
was the wrong program to ask, and I didn't want to start up with the right
one.

   The  synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the
Food  Factory,  and  I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago
the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or
two from the action fronts. no cable, no satellites. Their orders went out
on  sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could
share  their  skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the
Herter-Halls  seemed  like  forever.  Here  was I at Ghent, and there were
they,  Andy  Jackson  pounding  the  pee out of the British at New Orleans
weeks  after the war was over. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on
how  they  were  to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of
the  boy,  Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory
from  its  course.  And  five  thousand astronomical units away, they were
doing  what  occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all
the questions would be moot.
   As  Essie  mended,  so  did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her
lungs  kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and
I  could  touch  her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in
what  went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she'd missed
her  conference  she  grinned up at me. "AU on tape, dear Robin; have been
playing it back when you were busy."
   "But you couldn't give your own paper..."
   "You think? Why not? I wrote 'Robinette Broadhead' program for you, did
you  not  know  I  also  wrote  one  for  me?  Conference  moved  in  full
holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text.
To  considerable  approval.  Even  handled  questions,"  she  boasted, "by
borrowing your Albert program in drag."
   Well,  she's an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble
is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he
brought  me  down.  He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General,
and  I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me
through the blue contacts. "Yes, probably," he said. "But I'm not sure you
understand  how  serious  her  injuries  are,  Mr.  Broadhead.  All that's
happening  now  is that she's building up some reserves of strength. She's
going to need them."
   "Well, I know that, Doe. There'll have to be another operation..."
   "No.  Not  one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the
next  couple  of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don't want you
assuming  that  the  results  are  a  foregone  conclusion,"  he lectured.
"There's  a risk to every procedure, and she's up against some hairy ones.
Cherish  her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I
don't guarantee it'll happen every time."
   So I went in to see Essie in somewhat chastened mood to get on with the
cherishing.
   The  nurse  was  standing  by  her  bed, and both of them were watching
Essie's  tapes  of  the computer conference on her flatplate viewer. Since
Essie's  plate was slaved to the big fullholographic interactive one I had
had  moved  into my room, there was a little yellow attention light in the
come;  meant for me. Harriet had something she wanted to tell me about. It
could wait; when the light began to pulse and brighten and turn to red was
when  it  got  important,  and  at  the  moment Essie was at the top of my
priorities.  "You  can  leave us for a while, Alma," Essie said. The nurse
looked at me and shrugged why-not, so I took the chair next to the bed and
reached for Essie's hand.
   "It's nice to be able to touch you again," I said.
   Essie has a coarse, deep chuckle. I was glad to hear it. "Touch more in
a couple weeks," she said. "Meanwhile, no rule against kissing."
   So,  of  course,  I  kissed her-hard enough so that something must have
registered  on her telltales, because the day nurse popped her head in the
door  to  see  what  was  going on. She didn't stop us, though. We stopped
ourselves.  Essie reached up with her right hand-the left was still in its
cast,  covering God knew what-and pushed her streaky dark-blonde hair away
from  her  eyes. "Very nice," she judged. "Do you want to see what Harriet
has to say?"
   "Not particularly."
   "Untrue,"  she  said.  "You have been talking to Dr. Ben, I see, and he
has  told  you  to  be  sweet  to  me. But you always are, Robin, only not
everybody  would  notice."  She  grinned  at me and turned her head to the
plate. "Harriet!" she called. "Robin is here."
   I  had  not  until  that  moment  known that my secretary program would
respond  to  my  wife's commands as well as my own. But I hadn't known she
could  borrow  my  science  program, either. Especially without my knowing
about  it.  When Harriet's cheerful and concerned face filled the screen I
told her, "If it's business I'll take it later-unless it can't wait?"
   "Oh,  no,  nothing like that," Harriet said. "But Albert's desperate to
talk to you. He's got some good stuff from the Food Factory."
   "I'll  take  it  in  the other room," I started, but Essie put her free
hand on mine.
   "No. Here, Robin. I'm interested, too."
   So  I  told  Harriet  to  go ahead, and Albert's voice came on. But not
Albert's  face.  "Take a look at this," Albert said, and the screen filled
with  a  sort  of  American  Gothic  family portrait A man and a woman-not
really-a male and a female, standing side by side. They had faces and arms
a