d terminated the
earlier  trials,  with  the  other  members  of  her  tribe: poor match of
chemistry  to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding.
One  by  one  the  Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and
solved  them.  Her  experiment  failed,  or  succeeded only in part, for a
different  reason.  There  was not enough of an identity in the being that
could  be recognized as "Squint" to preserve. She was not a biography, not
even  a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain
and illustrated with fear.
   But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.
   In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth's sun from
half  a  light-year  out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They
were leading lives quite different from Squint's-lives marked by automatic
care,  heuristic  tests  and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized
that,  although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent,
they  contained  the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the
process along.
   Not  much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal
of  the  colony  from its prehistoric African home and Squint's death. The
Heechee  were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much.
They had much longer-range plans than that.
   As  their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else
long  before  any  true  intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of
Squint's  descendants,  they  built  accordingly.  They so constructed and
programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for
it  to  be  supplied with CHONfood from a convenient processor of cometary
material,  which  they  had  already set operating to serve other of their
installations,   and   which  was  potentially  equally  long-lived.  They
constructed  machines  to  sample  the  skills  of  the descendants of the
newborns  from  time  to  time,  and to repeat, as often as necessary, the
attempt  to  file  their identities in machine storage for later review if
any  of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would
have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.
   Still,  their  plans  encompassed  very  many  alternatives,  all going
simultaneously;  because the object of their plans was of great concern to
them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.
   Since  Squint  could  not  communicate,  or act, in any useful way, the
Heechee  experimenters  thriftily  wiped  the  effective  sections  of her
storage  and  kept  her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for
consultation  by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was
this  that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived
all  those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data
for  use  by  whatever  generations might be able to understand them. They
tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed
the  rest  of  that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to
run.
   For eight hundred thousand years.

   "Danine," Hooay was moaning, "Danine, are you dead?"
   She  looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked
like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet's tail wagging below.
"Help  me  up,  Hooay,"  she sobbed. "Take me back." Of them all, this had
been  the  worst.  She  felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world
would   never   be   the   same  again.  Janine  did  not  know  the  word
"australopithecine,"  but  she  knew that the life she had just shared had
been  an animal's. Worse than an animal's, because somewhere in Squint had
been  the  spark  of  the  invention  of  thinking,  and thus the unwanted
capacity to fear.
   Janine  was  exhausted  and  she  felt  older  than  the Oldest One. At
just-turned  fifteen,  she was not a child any more. That account had been
overdrawn.  There  was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled
chamber  that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively,
"Danine? What's wrong?"
   "There is a joke to tell you," she said.
   "You do not look like joking," he said.
   "It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with
my  sister  to  breed  them.  But  my  sister cannot breed. She has had an
operation so that she can never again bear a child."
   "That  is not a good joke," he protested. "No one would do a thing like
that!"
   "She did it, Hooay." She added quickly, "Do not be frightened. You will
not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me."
   Her  soft  eyes were brimming with tears. "How can I not be frightened?
Perhaps  I  should  awaken  the  Oldest One to tell him..." Then the tears
spilled over; he was terrified.
   She  comforted  him  and  coaxed  him, until other Old Ones came and he
spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her
ears  to  their  excited,  woeful  chatter. She did not sleep, but she was
lying  with  her  eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door.
When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.
   "Wan," she said, "I want you to put your aims around me."
   He looked at her grumpily. no one had told him what this was about, and
Wan,  too,  had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible.
He  had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested,
had  not  accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had
met  the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the
corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes.
"Are you afraid you will fall down?" he shrilled.
   "I  am  not  afraid  of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly.
Don't squeak."
   He  looked  startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she
had tried to teach him. "Then why?"
   "Oh,  Wan." She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his
personal  space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do.
His  arms went around her automatically both at the same height, as though
she  were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades.
She  pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away.
"Do you remember what this is, Wan?"
   "Of course! It is 'kissing'."
   "But  we  are  doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this."
She  protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it
back  and  forth  across  his closed ones. "I think," she said, moving her
head  away,  "that  that  is  a better way, don't you? It makes me feel-it
makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up."
   Alarmed,  he  tried  to  step  back, but she followed him closely. "Not
really throw up, just real funny."
   He  stayed  tensely  near  her,  face held away, but his expression was
troubled.  Carefully  keeping  the pitch of his voice down, he said, "Tiny
Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes
to see if the other person is in heat."
   "In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say 'in love'."
   "I  think that 'in love' is different," he said stubbornly, "but anyway
to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says..."
   She put her hands on his shoulders. "Tiny Jim isn't here."
   "No, but Paul doesn't want us to..."
   "Paul  isn't  here,"  she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of
her  fingers to see what that felt like. "Lurvy isn't here either. Anyway,
none  of what they think matters." The way it felt, she decided, was quite
strange.  It  wasn't  really  as though she were going to throw up, but as
though  some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a
sensation  like  nothing  she  had  ever  known  before. It was not at all
unpleasant.  "Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off
mine."
   After they had practiced kissing again she said, "I think we should not
be  standing  up now." And some time later, when they were lying down, she
opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
   As  he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. "If I do that,"
he said, "perhaps you will get pregnant."
   "If you don't do that," she said, "I think I will die."
   When  Janine  woke  up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed,
sitting  at  the  side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall.
Janine's  heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later.
The  youthful  face  seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and
pain.
   "I love you, Wan," she said.
   He  stirred  and  shrilled,  "Oh,  yes..."  Then  he caught himself and
dropped his voice to a grumble, "Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do
not know what they will do."
   "Probably they won't hurt you, Wan."
   Scornfully,  "Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have
lived  all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I
am  worried about you." He added gloomily, "They are very noisy out there,
too. Something is happening."
   "I  don't  think  they will hurt us-any more, I mean," Janine corrected
herself,  thinking  about  the  dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries
were  coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor's voice
hailed Hooay outside the door.
   There  was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood.
But  when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at
them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. "Perhaps I will not have to breed
you, Danine, after all," he said, kind but frightened. "But Danine! Oowan!
There  is  a  terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has
run away!"
   Wan  and  Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of
the  Old  Ones.  They  were  milling  around  in  panic. Three of them lay
sprawled  and  snoring  where  they  had been dumped-Tar and two others of
Lurvy's guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought
back  in  fear  and  disgrace  for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay
motionless  but  alert  on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around
his perimeter.
   To  the  flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his
thoughts.  He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood
nor  challenged.  Neither  Wan  nor  Janine,  nor  any of his near hundred
quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his
circulating  memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his
children had failed to carry out their orders.
   The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example.
The  hundred-odd  others  would  also  have  to  be punished-somewhat more
lightly, so that the race would not become extinct-for failing to keep the
three  to  their  duty. As for the intruders-there was no punishment grave
enough  for  them!  Perhaps  they  should  be  abolished,  like  any other
challenging  organism  that  threatened  to damage its host. Perhaps worse
than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.
   But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw
the  ripple  of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One
rose to his extended height and spoke. "The female is to be recaptured and
preserved," he said. "This is to be done at once."
   He  stood  there,  wobbling  uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were
performing  erratically.  He  allowed  himself to kneel once more while he
pondered  his  options.  The  exertion of going to the control room to set
course-the  turmoil  in  his mind that had led him to do it-half a million
years  of  existence,  all  had  taken  their  toll.  He  needed  time  to
"rest"-time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what
damage  they  could,  and  perhaps time no longer would be enough. "Do not
wake  me  again  till this is done," he said, and the lights resumed their
random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.
   Janine,  circled in Wan's arm-his body half toward the Oldest One, half
sheltering   her,   trembling  with  fear-knew  without  being  told  that
"preserved" meant killed. She was frightened, too.
   But she was also puzzled.
   The  Old  Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not
fallen  asleep  by  chance.  Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun.
Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.
   For  that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later
and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.
   She  was  not  surprised  to  see  her  sister run in, waving a gun and
calling  to  them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped
over  the  sleeping  form  of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very
much  surprised,  to  see  that with them was another armed man she almost
recognized.  She  was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child.
But  he  looked  like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts
from  Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and
holidays: Robin Broadhead.


        15 Older Than the Oldest One

   Not at his worst-not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One
himself  and  as dead as dead Payter-had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful
creature  waving  a  gun  at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the
skungy, month-old beard the man's face looked like a mummy's. He stank.
   "You'd better take a bath!" Paul snapped. "And put that silly gun away."
   The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. "You're Paul Hall," it
said, squinting at him. "For God's sake, do you have anything to eat?"
   Paul  stared  past  him.  "Isn't  there plenty still left in there?" He
pushed  into  the  ship  and  found  that, of course, there were stacks of
CHON-food  packets  exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into
the  water  bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the
ship  was  puddled  and  muddied.  Paul offered a ration. "Keep your voice
down," he ordered. "And by the way, who are you?"
   "I'm Robin Broadhead. What do you do with this?"
   "Bite  into  it,"  snapped  Paul,  exasperated-less  because of the man
himself,  or even because of the way he smelled, than because he was still
shaking.  He  had  been  terrified that it would be an Old One he had come
across so unexpectedly. But-Robin Broadhead! What was he doing here?
   But  he  could  not  put  the  question just then. Broadhead was almost
literally  starving.  He turned the flat pillow of food over in his hands,
frowning  and  shaking,  and  then  bit into a corner of it. As soon as he
found  it  could  be  chewed  he  wolfed it down, crumbs spilling from his
mouth. He stared up at Paul while he jammed his mouth full faster than his
teeth  could  deal with it. "Take it easy," Paul said, alarmed. But he was
too late. The unfamiliar food, after so long a deprivation, did what could
have  been  expected  of  it.  Broadhead choked, gagged and vomited it up.
"Damn you!" Paul snarled. "They'll smell you all the way to the spindle!"
   Broadhead  leaned  back, gasping. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I thought I was
going to die. I pretty near did. Can you give me some water?"
   Paul  did,  a couple of sips at a time, and then allowed the man just a
corner  of  one  of  the brown and yellow packets, the blandest there was.
"Slowly!"  he ordered. "I'll give you more later." But he was beginning to
realize  how  good it was to have another human being there after-what was
it?  it  must have been two months, at least, of his solitary skulking and
hiding  and  plotting.  "I  don't know what you're doing here," he said at
last, "but I'm glad to see you."
   Broadhead  licked  the  last  crumbs  off his lips and managed to grin.
"Why,  that's  simple,"  he  said,  eyes avidly on the rest of the food in
Paul's hands. "I came here to rescue you."

   Broadhead  had  been  dehydrated and almost asphyxiated, but not really
starved. He kept down the crumbs Paul let him have and demanded more; kept
that  down  too,  and  was even able to help Paul clean up the mess he had
made. Paul found him clean clothes from Wan's sparse store in the ship-the
garments  were too long and too slim by far, but the waistband of the kilt
did not really need to close all the way-and led him to the largest of the
water troughs to get himself clean. It wasn't daintiness. It was fear. The
Old  Ones did not hear any better than human beings, nor see even quite as
well.  But  their  noses  were astonishingly acute. After two weeks of the
narrowest  of  escapes,  in  his first terrified blundering around Heechee
Heaven  after  Wan  and Lurvy had been captured, Paul had learned to bathe
three times a day.
   And much more.
   He  took  post  at  a juncture of three corridors, mounting guard while
Broadhead got the worst of his thirty days in a Heechee ship off his skin.
Rescue  them!  In  the first place, it wasn't true. Broadhead's intentions
were  more  subtle  and  complicated  than  that.  In  the  second  place,
Broadhead's  plans  were  not the same as those Paul had been maturing for
two months. He had some notion of tricking information out of the Dead Men
and only the haziest notion of what to do with the information when he got
it.  And  he  expected  Paul to help him carry two or three metric tons of
machinery around Heechee Heaven, never mind the risk, never mind that Paul
might  have  ideas of his own. The trouble with being rescued was that the
rescuers  expected  to be in charge of the operation. And expected Paul to
be grateful!
   Well,  he  admitted to himself, turning slowly to keep each corridor in
view-though  the  Old  Ones were less diligent in patrolling than they had
been  at  first-he would have been grateful enough if Broadhead had showed
up  at  first, in those days of panic when he ran and hid and did not dare
either stay or leave; or again, a couple of weeks later, when he had begun
to  work  out  a  plan,  had  dared  to go to the Dead Men's room and make
contact  with the Food Factory-and learned that Peter Herter was dead. The
shipboard computer was no use to him, too stupid and too overburdened even
to  relay  his  messages  to  Earth.  The  Dead Men were maddeningly. Were
maddening.  He was entirely on his own. And slowly his nerve came back and
he  began  to  plan.  Even to act. When he found that he could dare coming
quite  near the Old Ones provided he bathed enough to leave no odor trace,
he  began  his plan. Spying. Scheming. Studying. Recording-that was one of
the  hardest parts. It is very difficult to keep records of how your enemy
behaves,  what paths are frequented and on what occasions none of them are
likely  to  be  about, when you have nothing to write with. Or a watch. Or
even  the change of day and night, unheard of in the steady blue glow from
the  Heechee-metal walls. It had finally occurred to him to use the habits
of  the  Old Ones themselves as his chronometer of their behavior. When he
saw a party of them going back toward the spindle where the Oldest One lay
motionless,  they  were getting ready to sleep. When he saw a party moving
away,  it  meant  the  beginning  of a new day. They all slept at once, or
almost all, out of some imperative he could not imagine; and so there were
times  when he dared come nearer and nearer to the place where Wan, Janine
and  Lurvy  were  kept.  Had  even seen them once or twice, daring to hide
behind  a  berryfruit bush as the Old Ones were beginning to stir, peering
between the branches and then racing breathlessly away. He knew. He had it
all  worked  out. There were no more than a hundred or so of the Old Ones,
and they traveled usually in parties of only two or three.
   Remained  the  question  of  how  to deal with, even, a party of two or
three.
   Paul  Hall,  leaner  and  angrier  than  he  had ever been in his life,
thought  he  knew how to do that. In his first panicked days of flight and
hiding,  after  the others had been captured, he had blundered far and far
into  the  green and red corridors of Heechee Heaven. In some of them even
the  lights were fading and sparse. In some of them the air had a sour and
unhealthful  tang, and when he slept there he awoke with his head pounding
and  thick.  In  all of them there were objects, machines, gadgets things;
some  of  them  still  purring  or  ticking  quietly  to  themselves, some
flickering with a ceaseless rainbow of lights.
   He  could not stay in those places, because there was no food or water,
and  he  could  not  find what he most sought. There were no real weapons.
Perhaps  the  Heechee  had not needed them. But there was one machine that
had a gate of metal strips at one side and, when he wrenched them away, it
did  not  blow up or electrocute him, as he had half thought it would. And
he  had  a  spear.  And half a dozen times he encountered what looked like
smaller, more complicated versions of the Heechee tunnelers.
   And  some  of  them  still  worked.  When  the Heechee built they built
forever.
   It  took Paul three frightened, thirsty, baffling days of experiment to
make any of them function, stopping to creep back to the gold corridors or
the  ship for food and water, always sure that the thundering noise of the
machine  would  draw  the Old Ones down on him before he was ready. But it
did not. He learned to squeeze the nipple that hung down from the steering
yoke  to  make  the  ready lights spring into life, to shove the ponderous
knurled  wheel  forward or back to make it advance or retreat, to tread on
the  oval  floorplate that caused the blue-violet glow to lance out before
the  machine,  softening  even  the Heechee metal it touched. That was the
noisy part. Paul feared greatly that he would destroy something that would
wreck Heechee Heaven itself, if he did not bring down a search party. When
he  came  to move the machine to the place he had picked out it was almost
quiet, oozing forward on its rollogons. And he stopped to consider.
   He knew where the Old Ones went, and when.
   He  had  a  spear that could kill a single Old One, maybe could let him
defeat even two or three if he came on them by surprise.
   He possessed a machine that could annihilate any number of Old Ones, if
he could only get them to mass in front of it.
   It  all  added up to a strategy that might even work. It was chancy-oh,
God, it was chancy! It depended on at least half a dozen trials by combat.
Even  though  the  Old Ones did not seem to seek him armed, who was to say
that they might not learn? And what arms might they have? It meant killing
some  of  them,  one  by  one,  so  expertly and carefully that he did not
attract  the  attention  of  the whole tribe until he was ready for it-and
then  attracting  them all at once, or so large a majority of them that he
could  handle  the  rest  with his spear. (Was that really a good gambling
bet?) And, above all, it meant that the Oldest One, the great machine Paul
had  only  glimpsed  once or twice at long range and about whose powers he
knew nothing, must not intervene, and how likely was that?
   He had no sure answers. He did have hopes. The Oldest One was too large
to move easily through any of the corridors but the gold-skeined ones. Nor
did  it seem to move frequently at all. And perhaps he could somehow trick
it,  too,  before  the devouring haze of the tunneling machine-which could
not,  in  this place, really be a tunneling machine, but seemed to work in
about the same way. At every step the odds were against him, true.
   But  at every step there was at least a slim chance for success. And it
was not the risk that stopped him at the last.
   The  Paul  Hall  who  stole about and schemed in the tunnels of Heechee
Heaven,  half  crazed  with  anger and fear and worry for his wife and the
others, was not entirely crazy. He was the same
   Paul  Hall  whose  gentleness and patience had made Dorema Herter marry
him,  who  had  accepted  her  saucy,  sometimes  bratty little sister and
abrasive  father  as part of the bargain. He wanted very much to save them
and bring them to freedom. Even at risk. There was always a way out of the
risk  for  him,  if only to crawl aboard Wan's ship and return to the Food
Factory  and thus-slowly, alone and mournful, but safe-ultimately to Earth
and wealth.
   But, apart from risk, what was the cost?
   The  cost  was  wiping  out  perhaps an entire population of living and
intelligent  creatures. They had taken his wife from him, but they had not
really  harmed  her. And, try as he would, Paul could not convince himself
he had the right to exterminate them.
   And  now here was this "rescuer," this nearly dead castaway named Robin
Broadhead,  who  listened  sketchily to Paul's plan and smiled loftily and
said,  politely enough, "You're still working for me, Hall. We'll do it my
way."
   "The hell we will!"
   Broadhead stayed polite enough, and even reasonable-it was amazing what
a bath and a little food had done for him. "The key," he said, "is to find
out  what  we're up against. Help me lug this information-processing stuff
to  where  the Dead Men are, and we'll take care of that. That's the first
thing."
   "The first thing is rescuing my wife!"
   "But  why, Hall? She's all right where she is-you said so yourself. I'm
not  talking  about  forever. One day, maybe. We find out what we can from
the  Dead  Men.  We tape it all, pump them dry if we can. Then we take the
tapes and stick them in my ship, and then..."
   "No."
   "Yes!"
   "No,  and  keep your God-damned voice down!" They squared off like kids
in  a schoolyard, both flushed and furious, their eyes locked. Until Robin
Broadhead  grimaced  and shook his head and said, "Oh, hell. Paul? Are you
thinking what I'm thinking?"
   Paul  Hall  let  himself  relax. After a second he said, "Actually, I'm
thinking  the  two  of  us  would do better to figure out what is the best
thing to do, instead of arguing about who makes the decision."
   Broadhead  grinned.  "That was what I was thinking, all right. You know
what  my  trouble is? I'm so surprised to be still alive that I don't know
how to adjust to it."

   It  only  took  them  six hours to haul and set up the PMAL-2 processor
where  they  wanted  it, but it was six hours of hard work. They were both
near  the  frayed end of exhaustion and it would have made sense to sleep,
but  they  were  itching  with impatience, both of them. Once they had the
main  power  source  connected  to  the program banks Albert's prerecorded
voice  instructed  them, step by step, on how to do the rest-the processor
itself  sprawled  across the corridor, the voice terminals inside the Dead
Men's chamber, next to the radio link. Robin looked at Paul, Paul shrugged
to Robin, Robin started the program. From just outside the door they could
hear  the  flat, wheedling voice from the terminal: "Henrietta? Henrietta,
dear, can you answer me?"
   Pause.  no  answer.  The  program  Albert  had written with Sigfrid von
Shrink's  help  tried again: "Henrietta, it's Tom. Please speak to me." It
would  have  been  faster  to  punch  out  Henrietta's code to attract her
attention,  but  harder  to  square  with  the pretense that her long-lost
husband had reached her from some faroff outpost by radio.
   The  voice  tried again, and once more. Paul scowled and whispered, "It
isn't working."
   "Give  it  a chance," Robin said, but not confidently. They stood there
nervously,  while  the  dead  computer  voice pleaded. And then at last, a
hesitant voice whispered, "Tom? Tomasino, is that you?"

   Paul  Hall  was  a  normal human being, squashed a little out of shape,
perhaps,  from four years of imprisonment and a hundred days of flight and
fright.  Normal enough, though, to share the normal prurience; but what he
heard  was  more  than  he  wanted to hear. He grinned in embarrassment at
Robin  Broadhead,  who  shrugged  uneasily  back.  The hurt tenderness and
spiteful  jealousy  of other people is humiliating to hear and can only be
eased by laughter; the divorce detective passes around his bootleg tape of
a wired bed for comic relief on a slow day at the office. But this was not
comic!   Henrietta,  any  Henrietta,  even  the  machine  revenant  called
Henrietta  was  not  funny  in  her moment of heart's-desire, when she was
being gulled and betrayed. The program that wooed her was skillfully done.
It apologized and begged, and it even sobbed, in rustly tape-hissing sobs,
when  Henrietta's own flat tape voice broke with sobs of spent sadness and
hopeless joy. And then, as it had been programmed to do, it settled in for
the  kill.  Would you. Dear Henrietta, could you... Is it possible for you
to tell me how to operate a Heechee ship?
   Pause. Hesitation. Then the voice of the dead woman said:
   "Why-yes,  Tomasino."  Another  pause.  It lengthened itself, until the
programmed deceiver moved in to fill the gap:
   "Because  if  you could, dear, I think I might be able to join you. I'm
in a sort of a ship. It has a control room. If I knew how to work it..."
   It   was   incredible  to  Paul  that  even  a  poorly  stored  machine
intelligence  could  succumb  to  such  transparent blandishments. Succumb
Henrietta did. It was repellent to him to take part in the fraud, but take
part  he  did, and once started Henrietta could not be stopped. The secret
of  controlling  the Heechee ships? Of course, dear Tomasino! And the dead
woman  warned her fake lover to stand by for burst transmission and hurled
out a whistling crackle of machine talk of which Paul could not understand
a  sound  and  in  which  he  could  not find a word; but Robin Broadhead,
listening  to  the  private  status-report  voice  of  the computer on his
headset,  grinned  and nodded and held up thumb and forefinger in a circle
of  success.  Paul  signed  silence  and pulled him down the corridor. "If
you've got it," he whispered, "let's get out of here!"
   "Oh,  I've  got it!" chortled Robin. "She's got it all! She was in open
circuit  with  whatever  kind  of  machine  runs this thing, it picked her
brains and she picked its, and she's telling the whole thing."
   "Great. Now let's find Lurvy!"
   Broadhead  looked  at  him,  not  angry  but pleading. "Just a few more
minutes. Who knows what else she got?"
   "No!"
   "Yes!"-and  then  they  looked  at  each  other, and shook their heads.
"Compromise,"  said Robin Broadhead. "Fifteen minutes, all right? And then
we go rescue your wife."
   They  edged  back along the corridor with smiles of rueful satisfaction
on  their  faces;  but  the  satisfaction  drained.  The  voices  were not
embarrassingly intimate now. They were worse. They were almost quarreling.
There was somehow a snap and a snarl in the flat metallic voice that said,
"You're being a pig, Tom."
   The  program  was cloyingly reasonable: "But, Henrietta, dear, I'm only
trying to find out..."
   "What  you  try  to  find out," grated the voice, "depends on what your
capacities  to learn are. I'm trying to tell you something more important!
I  tried  to  tell  you  before. I tried to tell you all the while we were
coming  out  here, but, no, you didn't want to hear, all you wanted was to
get off in the lander with that fat bitch..."
   The  program knew when to be placatory. "I'm sorry, Henrietta, dear. If
you want me to learn some astrophysics I will."
   "Damn  right  you  will!" Pause. "It's terribly important, Tom!" Pause.
And then: "We go back to the Big Bang. Are you listening, Tom?"
   "Of  course  I  am,  dear,"  said  the program in its humblest and most
endearing way.
   "All  right!  It goes back to how the universe got started, and we know
that  pretty  well-with  one  little hazy transition point that's a little
obscure. Call it Point X."
   "Are you going to tell me what 'Point X' is, dear?"
   "Shut  up,  Tom! Listen! Before Point X, essentially the whole universe
was  packed into a tiny glob, no more than a matter of kilometers through,
super-dense, super hot, so squeezed it had no structure. Then it exploded.
It  began  to  expand-up to Point X, and that part is pretty clear. Do you
follow me so far, Tom?"
   "Yes, dear. That's basically simple cosmology, isn't it?"
   Pause.  "Just  pay  attention,"  Henrietta's voice said at last. "Then,
after  Point  X,  it  continued  to expand. As it expanded, little bits of
'matter'  began  to  condense  out  of  it.  First came nuclear particles,
hadrons and pious, electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks. Then 'real'
matter.  Real hydrogen atoms, then even helium atoms. The exploding volume
of  gas  began  to  slow. Turbulence broke it into immense clouds. Gravity
pulled  the clouds into clumps. As they shrank the heat of contraction set
nuclear  reactions  going.  They  glowed.  The  first stars were born. The
rest," she finished, "is what we can see going on now."
   The  program  picked  up its cue. "I see that, Henrietta, yes. How long
are we talking about, now?"
   "Ah,  good  question,"  she  said, in a voice not at all complimentary.
"From  the beginning of the Big Bang to Point X, three seconds. From Point
X to right now, about eighteen billion years. And there we have it."
   The  program was not written to deal with sarcasm, but even in the flat
metal  voice  sarcasm  hung.  It did its best. "Thank you, dear," it said,
"and now will you tell me what is special about Point X?"
   "I  would  tell  you  in a thick minute, my darling Tomasino," she said
sunnily, "except that you are not my darling Tomasino. That ass-head would
not  have  understood one word of what I just said, and I don't like being
lied to."
   And  no  matter  what  the program tried, not even when Robin Broadhead
dropped the pretense and spoke to her direct, Henrietta would say no more.
"Hell  with  it," said Broadhead at last. "We've got enough to worry about
in  the  next  couple  of hours. We don't have to go back eighteen billion
years for it."
   He  hit a pressure release on the side of the processor and caught what
came  out:  the  thick,  soft  rag-flop  tape  that  had caught everything
Henrietta  had said. He waved it aloft. "That's what I came for," he said,
grinning.  "And now, Paul, let's take care of your little problem-and then
go home and spend our millions!"

   In the deep, restless sleep of the Oldest One there were no dreams, but
there were irritations.
   The  irritations came faster and faster, more and more urgent. From the
time  the  first  Gateway  prospectors  had terrifyingly come until he had
written  (he  thought)  the  last of them off, only the wink of an eye-not
more  than  a  few years, really. And until the strangers and the boy were
caught, hardly a heartbeat; and until he was awakened again to be told the
female  had  escaped  no  time  at  all-none!  Hardly even time for him to
decouple sensors and effectors and settle down; and now there was still no
peace.  The children were panicked and quarrelsome. It was not their noise
alone  that  disturbed  him.  Noise  could not awaken the Oldest One; only
physical  attack,  or  being  addressed directly. What was most irritating
about  this  racket  was  that  it was not quite addressed to him, but not
quite  not,  either.  It was a debate-an argument; a few frightened voices
demanding  he  be  told something at once, a few even more frightened ones
pleading against it.
   And  that  was  incorrect.  For half a million years the Oldest One had
trained his children in manners. If he was needed, he was to be addressed.
He  was  not  to  be  awakened  for  trivial  causes, and certainly not by
accident.  Especially  now. Especially when each effort of waking was more
of  a  drain on his ancient fabric and the time was in sight when he might
not wake at all.
   The fretful rumpus did not stop.
   The  Oldest  One  called  on  his  external  sensors and gazed upon his
children.  Why  were  so  few  of them there? Why were nearly half of them
sprawled on the floor, evidently asleep?
   Painfully  he  activated  his communications system and spoke: "What is
happening?"
   When, quailing, they tried to answer and the Oldest One understood what
they  were  saying, the bands of color on his shell raced and blurred. The
female  not  recaptured.  The  younger female and the boy gone too. Twenty
more  of  the children found hopelessly asleep, and scores of others, gone
to search the artifact, not reporting back.
   Something was terribly wrong.
   Even  at  the  very  end of its useful life the Oldest One was a superb
machine.  There were resources seldom used, powers not tapped for hundreds
of  thousands of years. He rose on his rollogons to tower over the quaking
children  and  reached  down  into his deepest and least-used memories for
guidance  and  knowledge.  On  his  foreplate, between the external vision
receptors,  two  polished  blue  knobs  began  a faint drone, and atop his
carapace  a  shallow  dish  glowed  with  faint  violet light. It had been
thousands  of years since the Oldest One had used any of his more punitive
effectors,  but  as information from the great stores of memories gathered
he  began  to  believe that it was time to use them again. He reached into
the  stored  personalities,  even,  and Henrietta was open to him; he knew
what  she  had said, and what the new interlopers had asked. He understood
(what  Henrietta  had not) the meaning of the hand weapons Robin Broadhead
had been waving around; in the deepest of all memories, the ones that went
back  even  before  his own flesh-and-blood life, there was the lance that
made his own ancestors go to sleep, and this was clearly much the same.
   Here  was  trouble  on  a scale he had never known before, of a kind he
could  not readily cope with. If he could get at them... But he could not.
His  great  bulk  could not travel through the artifact's passages, except
the  gold-skeined  ones; the weapons that were ready to destroy would have
no  targets.  The  children? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps they could hunt out and
overcome the others; certainly it was worth the effort to order them to do
so, the few survivors, and he did. But in the rational, mechanical mind of
the  Oldest One the capacity for computation was unimpaired. He could read
the odds well. They were not good.
   The question was, was his great plan endangered?
   The  answer  was yes. But there, at least, there was something he could
do. The heart of the plan was the place where the artifact was controlled.
It was the nerve center of the entire construct; it was where he had dared
to set in motion the final stages of his plan.
   Before  he  had finished framing the decision he was acting it out. The
great  metal  bulk  shifted  and  turned,  and  then rolled out across the
spindle,  into  the  wide-mouthed  tunnel  that  led to the controls. Once
there, he was secure. Let them come if they chose! The weaponry was ready.
Its  great  drain on his dwindling powers was making him slow and unsteady
to move, but there was power enough. He could blockade himself and let the
flesh-and-blood  things  settle  things however they might, and then... He
stopped.  Ahead of him one of the wall-aligning machines was out of place.
It  sat squarely in the center of the corridor, and behind it... If he had
been  just  a trifle less drained, the fraction of a second faster.... But
he  was not. The glow from the wall aligner washed over him. He was blind.
He  was  deaf. He felt the external protuberances burn off his shell, felt
the great soft cylinders he rolled on melt and stick.
   The  Oldest  One did not know how to feel pain. He did know how to feel
anguish of the soul. He had failed.
   The  flesh-and-blood things had control of his artifacts, and his plans
were at an end forever.


        16 The Richest Person There Is

   My name is Robin Broadhead, and I am the richest person there is in the
whole  solar  system.  The  only  one who comes close is old Bover, and he
would  come  a  lot closer if he hadn't thrown half of his money into slum
clearance  and  urban  rehabilitation  and  a lot of what was left into an
inch-by-inch scan of trans-Plutonian space, looking for the ship with what
was  left of his wife, Trish. (What he is going to do with her if he finds
her  I  can't  imagine.)  The  surviving Herter-Halls are also filthy with
money.  That's  a  good  thing,  especially for Wan and Janine, who have a
complicated  relationship  to  sort  out,  in  a complicatedly unwelcoming
world.  My  wife, Essie, is in the best of health. I love her. When I die,
that  is,  when  even  Full  Medical  can't patch me up any more, I have a
little plan about how to deal with someone else I love, and that satisfies
me.  Almost  everything  satisfies  me.  The  only exception is my science
advisor, Albert, who keeps trying to explain Mach's Principle to me.
   When  we  took  over  Heechee Heaven, we got it all. The way to control
Heechee  ships.  The way to build Heechee ships, including the theory that
makes  it  possible  to  go  faster  than  light.  No,  it doesn't involve
"hyperspace"  or  the  "fourth dimension". It is very simple. Acceleration
multiplies  mass,  so  says  Einstein-the real one, not Albert. But if the
rest  mass  is  zero it does not matter how many times you multiply it. It
remains zero. Albert says that mass can be created, and proves it by basic
logical  principles:  it exists, therefore it can be created. Therefore it
can  be  eliminated, since what can be made to be can also be made to stop
being.  That  is  the Heechee secret, and with Albert's help to set up the
experiment, and Morton's help to coerce the Gateway Corp into making ships
available,  we  tried  it  out.  It  didn't  cost  me  a  cent; one of the
advantages  of  great  wealth  is that you don't have to spend it. All you
have  to  do  is get other people to spend it for you, and that's what law
programs are for.
   So  we sent two Fives out at once from Gateway. One was on lander power
only,  and  it  contained two people and a cylinder of solid aluminum with
strain detectors attached. The other held a full crew, ready for an actual
mission.  The instrument ship had a live camera pickup with an image split
three  ways:  one  on  the gravity meter, one on the second ship, one on a
cesium-atom digital clock.
   To my eyes the experiment didn't show a thing. The second ship began to
disappear, and the gravity meter recorded its disappearance. Big deal! But
Albert  was  elated. "Its mass began to disappear before it did, Robin! My
God.  Anyone  could  have tried that experiment any time in the last dozen
years! There's going to be at least a ten-million-dollar science bonus for
this!"
   "Put  it in petty cash," I said, and stretched, and rolled over to kiss
Essie, because we happened to be in bed at the time.
   "Is  very  interesting,  dear  Robin," she said drowsily, and kissed me
back.  Albert  grinned and averted his eyes, partly because Essie has been
tinkering  with  his  program  and partly because he knew as well as I did
that what she said was politely untrue. Astrophysics did not much interest
my  Essie. What interested her was the chance to play with working Heechee
machine intelligences, and that interested her very much. Eighteen hours a
day  much,  until  she  had tracked down all the major systems in what was
left  of  the  Oldest  One,  and  the Dead Men, and the Dead Non-Men whose
memories  went  back  to  an African savannah the better part of a million
years  ago.  Not  that she cared a lot about what was in the memories; but
how  it  was  there  was  her  very  business, at which she was very good.
Reshuffling  my  Albert  program  was  the  least of what Essie got out of
Heechee  Heaven.  What  we all got was a very great deal indeed. The grand
charts  of  the Galaxy, showing everywhere the Heechee had been. The grand
charts of black holes, showing where they are now. Even where Kiara is. As
one  tiny  fringe benefit, I even got the answer to one question that on a
purely subjective level had been interesting me very much: why was I still
alive?  The  ship  that carried me to Heechee Heaven had flipped over into
deceleration  mode  after  nineteen  days.  By  all the laws of parity and
common  sense,  that  meant  it  would not arrive for another nineteen, by
which  time I should have been surely dead; but in fact it docked in five.
And I wasn't dead at all, or not quite; but why?
   Albert  gave me the answer. Every flight ever successfully completed in
a  Heechee ship had been between two bodies that, relatively, were more or
less  at  rest-a few tens or at most a few hundreds of kilometers a second
difference  in  their  relative  velocities. no more. Not enough to make a
difference. But my flight had been pursuing an object itself in very rapid
motion. It had been almost all acceleration. The slowdown had taken only a
tiny fraction of the speedup. And so I lived.
   And  all that was very satisfying, and yet... And yet there is always a
price.
   There  always  has  been.  Every  big jump forward has carried a hidden
cost,  all  through  history. Man invented agriculture. That meant someone
had  to  plant  de  cotton  and  someone had to hoe de corn. And dat's how
slavery  was  born.  Man  invented  the  automobile, and got a dividend of
pollution and highway death. Man got curious about the way the sun shines,
and  out of his curiosity came the H-bomb. Man found the Heechee artifacts
and  tracked  down  some  of  their  secrets. And what did we get? For one
thing, we got Payter, almost killing a world, with a power no one had ever
had  before  him. For another we got some brand-new questions, the answers
to  which  I  have  not yet quite nerved myself up to face. Questions that
Albert  wants to try to answer, about Mach's Principle; and that Henrietta
raised, with her talk about Point X and the "missing mass". And a very big
question  in  my own mind. When the Oldest One broke Heechee Heaven out of
its  orbit  and sent it flying through space toward the core of the Galaxy
what, exactly, was he heading toward?

   The  scariest, I guess, and also the most satisfying, I know, moment of
my  life  was when we had burned the feelers off the Oldest One and, armed
with  Henrietta's  instructions,  sat  down  before  the  control board of
Heechee  Heaven. It took two to make it move. Lurvy Herter-Hall and I were
the  two  most experienced pilots present-if you didn't count Wan, who was
off  with  Janine,  rounding up the waking Old Ones to tell them there had
been a change in government. Lurvy took the right-hand seat and I took the
left  (wondering a lot just what strange-shaped butt had first sat in it).
And  there  we went. It took more than a month to get back to orbiting the
Moon,  which  was  the  point  I had picked out. It wasn't a wasted month,
there  was  plenty  to  do  on  Heechee Heaven; but it went pretty slowly,
because I was in a very big hurry to get home.
   It  took  all  the  nerve I had to squeeze that teat, but, you know, it
wasn't  all  that  hard. Once we understood that the main bank of controls
carried  the  codes  for  all  the  preset  objectives-there are more than
fifteen thousand of them, all over the Galaxy and some outside-it was just
a matter of knowing which code was which. Then, all of us really delighted
with  ourselves,  we  decided  to  show  off.  We  got  a  squawk from the
radio-astronomers  on  the  far  side  because  our  circumlunar orbit was
getting in the way of their dishes every time we came around. So we moved.
You  do  that with the secondary boards, the ones no one has ever dared to
touch  in midflight and that don't seem to do much on the original launch.
Main  boards,  preprogrammed  objectives;  secondary boards, any point you
want,  provided  you can spell out its galactic coordinates. But the joker
is  that  you  can't  use  the  secondary  boards  until you've nulled the
primaries by setting them all down to zero-that translates to a clear deep
red  color  on  each-and if any prospector ever happened to do that on his
own, he lost his programming to get back to Gateway. How simple everything
is  once you know. And so we put that big son-of-a-bitching artifact, half
a million metric tons of it, in close Earth orbit, and invited company.
   The  company  I  wanted  most  was  my  wife. What I wanted next was my
science  program, Albert Einstein-that's not really a reflection on Essie,
you  know,  because  she wrote him. It was a tossup whether I went down to
her or she came up to me, but not in her mind. She wanted to get her hands
On the machine intelligences in Heechee Heaven, I would judge, at least as
much  as  I  wanted  to  get  mine on her. In a 100-minute Earth orbit the
transmission  time  isn't  bad,  anyway.  As  soon as we were in range the
machine  Albert  had  programmed  for  me  was  talking  to  him,  pumping
everything it had learned into him, and by the time I was ready to talk to
him he was ready to talk back.
   Of course it wasn't the same. Albert in full three-dimensional color in
the  tank  at  home  was  a lot more fun to chat with than black-and-white
Albert  on  a  flat  plate in Heechee Heaven. But until some new equipment
came  up from Earth that was all I had, and anyway it was the same Albert.
"Good  to  see you again, Robin," he said benevolently, poking the stem of
his  pipe  toward  me. "I guess you know you have about a million messages
waiting for you?"
   "They'll wait." Anyway, I had already had about a million, or it seemed
that way. What they mostly said was that everybody was annoyed but, in the
long  run, delighted; and I was once again very rich. "What I want to hear
first," I said, "is what you want to tell me."
   "Sure  thing,  Robin." He tapped out his pipe, regarding me. "Well," he
said,  "technology first. We know the general theory of the Heechee drive,
and  we're  getting  a  handle  on  the faster-than-light radio. As to the
information-handling  circuits  in the Dead Men and so on-as I am sure you
know,"  he  twinkled,  "Cospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead is on her way to join
you.  I  think we may confidently expect considerable progress there, very
quickly.  In  a  few days a volunteer crew will go to the Food Factory. We
are  pretty  sure it, too, can be controlled, and if so it will be brought
into  some nearby orbit for study and, I think I can promise, duplication.
I  don't  suppose  you  want to hear about minor technology in detail just
now?"
   "Not really," I said. "Or not right at this minute."
   "Then,"  he  said,  nodding as he filled the pipe again, "let me get to
some  theoretical  considerations.  First  there  is the question of black
holes.  We  have  unequivocally  located  the one your friend, Gelle-Klara
Moynlin,  is  in. I believe it would be possible to send a ship there with
reasonable  assurance that it would arrive without serious damage. Return,
however,  is  another question. There appears to be nothing in the Heechee
stores that gives us a cookbook recipe for getting anything out of a black
hole.  Theory,  yes.  But  if one should desire to convert the theory into
practice  that  will require R&D. A lot of it. I would hesitate to promise
results  in  less  than,  say,  a  matter of years. More likely decades. I
know,"  he  said,  leaning  forward  earnestly,  "that this is a matter of
personal  importance  to  you,  Robin.  It  also  may be a matter of grave
importance  to  all  of  us,  by  which I mean not only the human race but
machine intelligences as well." I had never seen him look so serious. "You
see,"  he said, "the destination of the artifact, Heechee Heaven, has also
been unequivocally identified. May I show you a picture?"
   That  was  rhetoric,  of course. I didn't reply, and he didn't wait. He
shrank  down  into a corner of the flatplate screen while the main picture
appeared.  It  was  a wash of white, shaped like a very amateurishly drawn
Turkish  crescent.  It  was  not  symmetrical. The crescent was off to one
side,  and  the  rest  of  the  picture  was black except for an irregular
sprinkle  of light that completed the horns of the crescent and protracted
them into a hazy ellipse.
   "It  is  too  bad  you  cannot  see this in color, Robin," said Albert,
squinting up from his corner of the screen. "It is blue rather than white.
Shall  I  tell  you what you are seeing? It is orbiting matter around some
very  large  object.  The  matter to your left, which is coming toward us,
travels fast enough to emit light. The matter to the right, which is going
away,  travels  more  slowly  relative to us. What we are seeing is matter
turning  into radiation as it is drawn into an extremely large black hole,
which is located at the center of our Galaxy."
   "I thought the speed of light was not relative!" I snapped.
   He  expanded to fill the screen again. "It is not, Robin, but the orbit
velocity  of  the  matter  which  produces it is. That picture is from the
Gateway file, and until just recently it was not located in space. But now
it  is  clear that it is at, indeed that in a sense it forms, the galactic
core."
   He  paused  while he lit his pipe, looking at me steadily. Well, that's
not quite true. There was the split-second lag, and even Albert's circuits
couldn't  do  anything  about it; if I moved his gaze lingered where I had
been for just long enough to be disconcerting. I didn't rush him, and when
he had finished puffing the pipe alight he said:
   "Robin,  I  am often unsure of what information to volunteer to you. If
you  ask me a question, that's different. About any subject you suggest, I
will  tell  you  as much of what I know as you will listen to. I will also
tell you what may be so, if you ask for a hypothesis; and I will volunteer
hypotheses  when,  according  to  the constraints written into my program,
that  seems  appropriate.  Gospozha  Lavorovna-Broadhead has written quite
complex  normative  instructions for this sort of decision-making, but, to
simplify,  they come down to an equation. Let V represent the 'value' of a
hypothesis.  Let  P  represent  its  probability  of  being true. If I can
complete  the sum of VP so that it equals at least one, then I should, and
do, volunteer the hypothesis. But, oh, Robin, how hard it is to assign the
correct  numerical  values  to P and V/In the specific case now at issue I
cannot be in any way sure of any value I can give its probability. But its
importance  is  very high. To all intents, it might as well be regarded as
infinite."
   By  then  he  had  me  sweating.  What  I  know for sure about Albert's
programming  is that the longer he takes to tell me something, the less he
thinks  I  am going to like hearing it. "Albert," I said, "get the hell on
with it."
   "Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding, but unwilling to be rushed, "but
let   me   first  say  that  this  conjecture  satisfies  not  only  known
astrophysics,  although  on  a  rather  complex level, but also some other
questions, e. g., where Heechee Heaven was going when you turned it around
and  why  the  Heechee  themselves  disappeared. Before I can give you the
conjecture I must review four main points, as follows.
   "One.  The quantities Tiny Jim referred to as 'gosh numbers'. These are
numerical  quantities,  mostly  of the sort called 'dimensionless' because
they  are  the  same  in any units you measure. The mass ratio between the
electron  and  the  proton.  The  Dirac  number  to express the difference
between   electromagnetic   and   gravitational   force.   The   Eddington
fine-structure  constant.  And  so  forth.  We know these numbers to great
precision.  What  we  do  not  know  is  why  they  are what they are. Why
shouldn't the fine-structure constant be, say, 150 instead of 137-plus? If
we  understood  astrophysics-if we had a complete theory-we should be able
to  deduce these numbers from the theory. We do have a good theory, but we
can't  deduce  the  gosh  numbers  from it. Why? Is it possible," he asked
gravely, "that these numbers are in some way accidental?"
   He  paused,  puffing  on  his pipe, and then held up two fingers. "Two.
Mach's  Principle.  This  also  turns  Out to be a question, but perhaps a
somewhat  easier  one. My late predecessor," he said, twinkling a little-I
think  to  reassure  me  that  this was, indeed, easier to handle-"my late
predecessor gave us the theory of relativity, which is commonly understood
to  mean  that everything is relative to something else excepting only the
velocity  of  light.  When you are at home on Tappan Sea, Robin, you weigh
about eighty-five kilograms. That is to say, that is a measure of how much
you  and  the  planet  Earth  attract  each other; it is your weight, in a
sense,  relative  to  the Earth. We also have a quality called 'mass'. The
best measure of 'mass' is the force necessary to accelerate an object, say
you,  from  a state of rest. We usually consider 'mass' and 'weight' to be
about  the  same,  and  on  the surface of the Earth they are, but mass is
supposed  to  be  an  intrinsic  quality of matter, while weight is always
relative  to  something  else.  But,"  he  twinkled  again,  "let's  do  a
gedanke-experiment, Robin. Let's suppose that you're the only thing in the
universe.  There's  no  other  matter. What would you weigh? Nothing. What
would  your  mass  be?  Ah,  that's the question. Let's suppose you have a
little  rocket-belt  and  you  decided  to  accelerate  yourself. You then
measure  the  acceleration and compute the force to move you, and you come
out with your mass-do you? No, Robin, you do not. Because there is nothing
to  measure  movement  against! 'Moving', as a concept, is meaningless. So
mass itself-according to Mach's Principle-depends on some external system,
Mach  thought  it  might  be  what he called 'the entire background of the
universe',  to  be  meaningful.  And  according to Mach's Principle, as my
predecessor  and  others  extended  it,  so  do  all the other 'intrinsic'
characteristics  of  matter,  energy  and  space...  including  the  'gosh
numbers'. Robin, am I wearying you?"
   "You  bet  your  ass  you  are,  Albert," I snarled, "but go ahead!" He
smiled  and held up three fingers. "Three. What Henrietta called Point X'.
As  you remember, Henrietta failed her doctoral defense, but I have made a
study  of  her dissertation and I am able to say what she meant by it. For
the  first three seconds after the Big Bang, which is to say the beginning
of  the  universe  as  we  now know it, the entire universe was relatively
compact,   exceedingly   hot,   and   entirely   symmetrical.  Henrietta's
dissertation  quoted  at  length from an old Cambridge mathematician named
Tong  B.  Tang  and  others; the point they made was that after that time,
after  what  Henrietta called 'Point X', the symmetry became 'frozen'. All
the  constants  we  now  observe  became fixed at that point. All the gosh
numbers.  They  did not exist before 'Point X'. They have existed, and are
unchangeable, ever since.
   "So  at  Point  X in time, three seconds after the beginning of the Big
Bang,  something  happened.  It may have been some quite random event-some
turbulence in the exploding cloud.
   "Or it may have been deliberate."
   He stopped and smoked for a while, watching me. When I did not react he
sighed  and  held  up  four  fingers.  "Four,  Robin,  and  the last. I do
apologize   for  this  long  preamble.  The  final  point  in  Henrietta's
conjecture  had to do with 'missing mass'. There simply does not appear to
be  enough  mass  in  the  universe  to  fit the otherwise very successful
theories  of  the  Big  Bang.  Here  Henrietta made an immense leap in her
doctoral  dissertation.  She suggested that the Heechee had learned how to
create  mass  and destroy it-and in this, as we now know, she was correct,
although  it was only a guess on her part, and the seniors before whom she
conducted the defense of her dissertation were very quick to challenge it.
She then made a further leap. She suggested that the Heechee had, in fact,
caused  some mass to disappear. Not on a ship, although if she had guessed
that   she  would  have  been  correct.  On  a  very  large  scale.  On  a
universe-wide  scale,  in  fact. She conjectured that they had studied the
'gosh  numbers'  as we have, and come to certain conclusions which seem to
be  true. Here, Robin, it gets a little tricky, so pay close attention-but
we are almost home.
   "You see, these fundamental constants like the 'gosh numbers' determine
whether  or  not  life  can  exist  in the universe. Among very many other
things,  to  be sure. But if some of them were a little higher or a little
lower,  life  could  not exist. Do you see the logical consequence of that
statement?  Yes,  I think you do. It is a simple syllogism. Major premise,
the  'gosh  numbers'  are  not  fixed  by  natural law but could have been
different  if certain different events had taken place at 'Point X'. Minor
premise,  if they were different in certain directions, the universe would
be  less  hospitable  to  life.  Conclusion?  Ah,  that's the heart of it.
Conclusion:  If  they  were  different  in  certain  other directions, the
universe might be more hospitable to life."
   And  he  stopped  talking,  and  sat regarding me, reaching down into a
carpet slipper with one hand to scratch the sole of his foot.
   I  don't  know  which of us would have out-waited the other then. I was
trying  to digest a lot of very indigestible ideas, and old Albert, he was
determined  to  give  me time to digest them. Before either of those could
happen Paul Hall came trotting into the cubicle I had made my own yelling,
"Company! Hey, Robin! We've got visitors!"
   Well,  my  first  thought was Essie, of course; we'd talked; I knew she
was  on  her  way to the Kennedy launchport at least, even if not actually
waiting  there  for our orbit to settle down and get off. I stared at Paul
and  then  at  my  watch.  "There hasn't been time," I said, because there
hadn't.
   He was grinning. "Come and see the poor bastards," he chortled.
   And that's what they were, all right. Six of them, crammed into a Five.
Launched  from  Gateway  less than twenty-four hours after I had taken off
from  the  Moon,  carrying enough armament to wipe out a whole division of
Oldest  Ones,  ready  to  save  and profit. They had flown all the way out
after  Heechee  Heaven,  reversed  course  and  flown  all  the  way back.
Somewhere  en  route  we  must  have  passed them without knowing it. Poor
bastards!  But  they  were pretty decent guys, volunteers, taking off on a
mission  that  must  have  seemed  insecure  even  by Gateway standards. I
promised  them that they would get a share of the profits there was plenty
to  go  around. It wasn't their fault that we didn't need them, especially
considering how much we might have needed them if we had.
   So  we  made  them  welcome.  Janine  proudly  showed them around. Wan,
grinning  and  waving  his sleep-gun around, introduced them to the gentle
Old  Ones,  placid  in  the face of this new invasion. And by the time all
that  settled  down I realized that what I needed most was food and sleep,
and I took both.
   When  I woke up the first news I got was that Essie was on her way, but
not due for a while yet. I fidgeted around for a while, trying to remember
everything  Albert  had  said,  trying to make a mental picture of the Big
Bang  and that critical third-second instant when everything got frozen...
and  not  really  succeeding.  So  I  called  Albert again and said, "More
hospitable how?"
   "Ah,  Robin,"  he  said-nothing  ever  takes  him by surprise "that's a
question  I can't answer. We don't even know what all the Machian features
of  the universe are, but maybe... Maybe," he said, showing by the crinide
at  the  corners of his eyes that he was only guessing to humor me, "maybe
immortality?  Maybe  a  faster  synaptic speed of an organic brain, i. e.,
higher intelligence? Maybe only more planets that are suitable for life to
evolve?  Any  of the above. Or all of them. The important thing is that we
can theorize that such 'more hospitable' features could exist, and that it
should  be  possible  to  deduce  them  from  a  proper theoretical basis.
Henrietta  went  that  far.  Then  she  went a little further. Suppose the
Heechee  (she  suggested)  learned  a  little  more  astrophysics than we,
decided  what the right features would be-and set out to produce them! How
would they go about it? Well, one way would be to shrink the universe back
to  the  primordial  state,  and start over again with a new Big Bang! How
could  that  happen?  If  you  can create and destroy mass-easy! Juggle it
around.  Stop the expansion. Start it contracting again. Then somehow stay
outside of the point concentration, wait for it to explode again-and then,
from  outside  the  monobloc,  do  whatever  had  to be done to change the
fundamental  dimensionless  numbers of the universe, so that a new one was
born that would be-well, call it heaven."
   My eyes were popping. "Is that possible?"
   "To  you  or  me?  Now? No. Absolutely impossible. Wouldn't have a clue
where to begin."
   "Not to you or me, dummy! To the Heechee!"
   "Ah,  Robin,"  he  said  mournfully, "who can say? I don't see how, but
that  doesn't mean they wouldn't. I can't even guess how to manipulate the
universe  to  make it come out right. But that might not be necessary. You
have to assume they would have some way of existing, essentially, forever.
That's  necessary  even to do it once. And if forever, why, then you could
simply  make  random  changes  and  see  what  happened, until you got the
universe you wanted."
   He  took  time  to look at his cold pipe thoughtfully for a moment, and
then  put  it  in his sweatshirt pocket unlit. "That's as far as Henrietta
got  with her dissertation before they really fell in on her. Because then
she  said that the 'missing mass' might in fact prove that the Heechee had
really begun to interfere with the orderly development of the universe-she
said  they  were  removing  mass from the outer galaxies to make them fall
back more rapidly. Perhaps, she thought, they were also adding mass at the
center-if  there  is  one.  And  she  said that that might explain why the
Heechee had run away. They started the process, she guessed, and then went
off  to  hide somewhere, in some sort of timeless stasis, maybe like a big
black  hole,  until  it ran its course and they were ready to come out and
start things over again. That's when it really bit the fan! no wonder. Can
you  imagine  a  bunch of physics professors trying to cope with something
like  that?  They  said  she should try for a degree in Heechee psychology
instead of astrophysics. They said she had nothing to offer but conjecture
and  assumption-no  way to test the theory, just a guess. And they thought
it was a bad one. So they refused her dissertation, and she didn't get her
doctorate,  and so she went off to Gateway to be a prospector and wound up
where  she  is.  Dead.  And,"  he  said thoughtfully, pulling the pipe out
again,  "I do actually, Robin, think she was wrong, or at least sloppy. We
have  very  little  evidence  that  the  Heechee  had  any possible way of
affecting matters in any galaxy but our own, and she was talking about the
entire universe."
   "But you're not sure?"
   "Not a bit sure, Robin."
   I yelled, "Don't you at least have a fucking guess?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin," he said gloomily, "but no more than that. Please
calm  yourself.  See,  the  scale  is wrong. The universe is too big, from
anything  we  know.  And the time is too short. The Heechee were here less
than  a  million years ago, and the expansion time of the universe to date
is something like twenty thousand times that long-recoil time could hardly
be  less.  It's  mathematically  bad odds that they would have picked that
particular time to show up."
   "Show up?"
   He  coughed. "I left out a step, Robin. There's another guess in there,
and  I'm  afraid  it's  my  own.  Suppose this is the universe the Heechee
built.  Suppose  they somehow evolved in a less hospitable one, but didn't
like  it,  and  caused  it to contract to make a new one, which is the one
we're  in.  That  doesn't fit badly, you know. They could have come Out to
look around, maybe found it just the way they wanted it. And now maybe the
ones who did the exploring have gone back to get the rest of them."
   "Albert! For Christ's sake!"
   He  said  gently,  "Robin, I wouldn't be saying these things if I could
help  it.  It's  only  a  conjecture.  I don't think you have any idea how
difficult  it  is for me to conjecture in this way, and I wouldn't be able
to  do it except for-well, here's the thing. There is one possible way for
something  to  survive a contraction and a new Big Bang, and that is to be
in  a place where time effectively stops. What kind of place is that? Why,
a  black  hole. A big one. One big enough so that it is not losing mass by
quantum  tunneling,  and  therefore can survive indefinitely. I know where
there's  a black hole like that, Robin. Mass, about fifteen thousand times
the  sun. Location, the center of our Galaxy." He glanced at his watch and
changed  expression. "If my calculations are close, Robin," he said, "your
wife should be arriving about now."
   "Einstein! The first damn thing she's going to do is rewrite you!"
   He  twinkled. "She already has, Robin," he pointed out, "and one of the
things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by
some comical or personally rewarding comment."
   "You're telling me I ought to be all tensed up?"
   "Well,  not  really, Robin," he said. "All this is quite theoretical-if
that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps
not.  That  black  hole  in  the  center  of  our  Galaxy  is at least one
possibility  for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight
time  in  a  Heechee  ship,  not  all that distant. And-I said that we had
determined  the  objective of the Oldest One's course? That was it, Robin.
It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around."

   I  was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was
having  the  time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn't
tired  of  Essie,  so  I  stayed around until she at last admitted she had
everything  she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we
were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman
was  there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last
crumb  under her toenail. I wasn't worried. I could see that Essie was all
right,  and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then
she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep
Wan  in  shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had
set  up  a  million-dollar  research and development company-with Wilma as
president-to  see  what could be done with it, and that's how easy it was.
That's how easy it all is, when everything's going your way.
   Or  almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when
I  thought  about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the
middle of the Galaxy (if that's where they were). That is very unsettling,
you  know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out
breathing  fire  and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next
year,  why,  sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he'd said
ten  years  or  even  a  hundred  I  could have worked up pensiveness as a
minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical
times-well,  hell!  How easy is it to worry about something that might not
happen for another billion years?
   And yet the notion just would not go away.
   It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought
in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her
stretch  pants,  brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said,
"Will probably not happen, you know, Robin."
   "How  can  you  be  so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets
programmed into those ships. We've checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred
and  fifty  of  them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages
says  there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who's to say one
of them isn't racing in to tell the Heechee what we're doing right now?"
   "Dear  Robin,"  she  said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a
friendly  way,  "drink  your  coffee.  You  know nothing about statistical
mathematics and, anyway, who's to say they would mean to do us harm?"
   "They  wouldn't  have  to  mean to! I know what would happen, for God's
sake.  It's  obvious. It's what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians,
the  Eskimos,  the  American  Indians-it's  what  has always happened, all
through  history.  A  people  that  comes up against a superior culture is
destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can't survive!"
   "Always, Robin?"
   "Oh, come on!"
   "No, mean it," she insisted. "Counterexample: What happened when Romans
discovered Gauls?"
   "They conquered the shit out of them, that's what!"
   "True.  No, nearly true. But then, a couple of hundred years later, who
conquered who, Robin? The barbarians conquered Rome, Robin."
   "I'm not talking about conquest! I'm talking about a racial inferiority
complex.  What  happens  to  any  race  that  lives in contact with a race
smarter than they are?"
   "Why,  different  things  under  different circumstances, Robin. Greeks
were  smarter  than  Romans,  Robin.  Romans never had a new idea in their
lives,  except to build with or kill people with. Romans didn't mind. They
even  took  Greeks  right into their homes, to teach them all about poetry
and  history  and  science. As slaves. Dear Robin," she said, putting down
her  coffee  cup  and  coming  up  to sit next to me, "wisdom is a kind of
resource. Tell me. When you want information, who do you ask?"
   I  thought it over for a minute. "Well, Albert, mostly," I admitted. "I
see  what  you're  saying,  but that's different. It's a computer's job to
know more and think faster than I do, in certain ways. That's what they're
for."
   "Exactly, dear Robin. As far as can tell, you have not been destroyed."
She  rubbed  her  cheek  against  mine  and then sat up straight. "You are
restless," she decided. "What would you like to do?"
   "What  are  my  options?"  I asked, reaching for her, but she shook her
head.
   "Don't  mean  that,  anyway not this minute. Want to watch PV? I have a
taped section from tonight's news, when you and Wilma were scheming, which
shows your good friends visiting their ancestral home."
   "The  Old  Ones  in Africa? Saw it this afternoon." Some local promoter
had  thought  it  would be good publicity to show Olduvai Gorge to the Old
Ones.  He  was  right.  The  Old Ones didn't like it a lot-hated the heat,
chirped  grumpily  at  each  other  about  the shots they had had to take,
didn't  care much for the air flight. But they were news. So were Paul and
Lurvy,  at  the  moment in Dortmund to arrange for a mausoleum for Lurvy's
father  as soon as his remains got back from the Food Factory. So was Wan,
getting  rich  on  PV  appearances  as The Boy from Heechee Heaven; so was
Janine,  having a marvelous time meeting her singing-star pen-pals at last
in  the  flesh.  So  was  I. We were all rich in money and fame. What they
would  make of it, after all, I could not guess. But what I wanted at last
became clear. "Get a sweater, Essie," I said. "Let's go for a walk."

   We  strolled down to the edge of the icy water, holding hands. "Why, is
snowing,"  Essie  announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters
over  our  heads.  Usually  you  can't  see  it very clearly, but tonight,
edge-lighted  from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it
was  a  milky  dome,  broken  with  reflections from lights on the ground,
stretching from horizon to horizon.
   "Is it too cold for you?"
   "Perhaps  just here, near the water," she acknowledged. We climbed back
up  the  slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench
to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never
gets  really  cold  under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running
naked  through  seven  or  eight  hundred  kilometers  before  it hits the
Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob
under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.
   "Essie," I said, "I've been thinking."
   "Know that, dear Robin," she said.
   "About the Oldest One. The machine."
   "Oh,  really?"  She  pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp
from  vagrant  drifts  from  the  fountain. "Very fine machine," she said.
"Quite  tame,  since  you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external
effectors,  or  mobility,  or  access to control circuits of any kind-yes,
quite tame."
   "What  I want to know," I said, "is whether you could build one like it
for a human being."
   "Ah!"  she  said.  "Hum.  Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of
course, large sums of money, but yes."
   "And you could store a human personality in it-after the person died, I
mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?"
   "Quite  a  good  bit  better,  would  say.  Some  difficulties.  Mostly
biochemical,  not  my  department." She leaned back, looking upward at the
iridescent  bubble overhead and said consideringly: "When I write computer
program,  Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it
what  it  is  and  what  it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same.
Rests  on  direct  chemical  readout  of  brain.  Old  Ones  brain  is not
chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage
is  very  far  from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual
Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee man-aged to convert
process  without  any  apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes.
When  you  die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine,
then  put  machine  in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black
hole,  where  it  can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode
was  not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die
for,  say,  five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will
you promise that for me, please."
   There  are  times when something catches me so by surprise that I don't
know  whether  to  cry,  or  get  angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up
quickly  and  stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do,
and laughed. "Sometimes you startle me, Essie," I said.
   "But why, Robin?" She reached out and took my hand. "Suppose it was the
other  way  around,  hey?  Suppose  it was I who, many years ago, had been
through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which
someone  I  loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I
could  never  see  that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not
think  I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way,
to tell her how I felt?"
   I  started  to  answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips.
"Was  rhetorical  question,  Robin.  We both know answer. If your Kiara is
still  alive,  she  will  want  very much to hear from you. This is beyond
doubt.  So," she said, "here is plan. You will die-not soon, I hope. Brain
will  go  into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But
one  copy  flies  off  to black hole to look for Kiara, and finds her, and
says to her, 'Kiara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you
to  know  I would have given life itself to save you.' And then, Robin, do
you  know  what Kiara will answer to this strange machine that appears out
of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?"
   I  didn't!  The  whole  point  was  that I didn't! But I didn't say so,
because  Essie didn't give me a chance. She said, "Then Kiara will answer,
'Why,  Robin  dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are
the  one  whom  I  most  trust and respect and love.' I know she would say
this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me."


        17 The Place Where the Heechee Went

   At six o'clock on Robin Broadhead's tenth birthday, he had a party. The
woman  next  door  gave  him  socks,  a  board game and, as a sort of joke
present,  a  book  entitled  Everything  We  Know About the Heechee. Their
tunnels  had  only  recently  been discovered on Venus, and there was much
conjecture  about  the location of the place where the Heechee went, their
physical  appearance  and  their  purposes.  The joke part of the book was
that,  although  it  contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were
blank.
   At that same time on that same day-or at any rate, at its equivalent in
local  time,  which  was a great deal different-a person was taking a turn
under  the  stars  before  retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an
anniversary  of  a  sort,  but  not  a party. He was a long way from Robin
Broadhead's   birthday   cake   and  candles,  more  than  forty  thousand
light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a
name,  but  out  of  respect  and  because of the work he had done, he was
usually   called   something  which  translates  as  "Captain".  Over  his
squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close.
When  he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully
designed  glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his
entire  planet.  Sullen  red  type-Ms. brighter than the Moon as seen from
Earth. Three golden Cs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at.
There  were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all.
Captain  could  identify  every  star  he saw, because there were only ten
thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest
clearly   visible   to   the   naked   eye.   And  beyond  those  familiar
thousands-well,  he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled,
but  he  knew  from  his  many  spaceflights  that  past  them all was the
turbulent,  almost  invisible, bluetinged shell that surrounded everything
he  and  his  people  owned  of the universe. It was a sky that would have
terrified  a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would
happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.
   Wide  of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as
he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It
was  a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand
light-years  away  Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked
his  first  dope,  broke  a  bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on
nearly  ten  kilos  before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said
good-night  to  his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time,
his  sexual  mates  as  well),  removed  the  necklaces  of  rank from his
shoulders,  unstrapped  the  life-support  and  communications  unit  from
between  his  wide  spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped
inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft,
spongy,  dense  sleeping  litter.  The  captain's  people  had  come  from
burrowers  rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their
prehistoric  ancestors  had  slept.  When  the  captain  had  made himself
comfortable,  he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the
top  of  the  cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his
people  had  done  to  sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves
over  to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and
worrisome sleep for all of them.
   The  joke of Robin's birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was
not  quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it
was  evident  that  they  were  very  unlike  human  beings,  but  in very
significant  ways-the  same!  In  curiosity. Only curiosity could have led
them  to  visit  so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology.
Heechee  science  was  not  the  same  as human, but it rested on the same
thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stretch of the mind into
tininess  and  immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In
basic  chemistry  of  the  body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate
quite compatible food.
   What  was  central to what everyone knew about the Heechee or hoped, or
guessed-was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all
that  different  from  human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in
civilization  and  science.  Maybe  not  even  that much. And in that what
everyone  guessed  (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years
passed  between  the  time  the  first  crude Heechee ship ventured to try
mass-cancellation  as  a  means  of  transport  and  the  time  when their
expeditions  had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of
Squint's  ancestors  puzzled  over  what  to do with the antelope bone his
mother had given him.)
   Eight hundred years-but what years!
   The  Heechee  exploded.  There were a billion of them. Then ten. Then a
hundred.   They  built  wheeled  and  rollered  vehicles  to  conquer  the
unfamiliar  surface  of  their  planet,  and  in  no more than a couple of
generations  were  off  into space on rockets; a few generations more, and
they  were  searching  the  planets  of nearby stars. They learned as they
went.  They  deployed  instruments  of  immense  size and great subtlety-a
neutron star for a gravity detector; an interferometer a light-year across
to  catch  and  measure  the  radio  waves  from galaxies whose red-shifts
approached  the  limit. The stars they visited and the galaxies they gazed
at were almost identical with those seen from Earth-astronomical time does
not trouble with a few hundred thousand years-but they saw more keenly and
understood more thoroughly.
   And  what  they  saw  and  understood  was,  at  the end, of surpassing
importance  to  them. For Albert's conjecture was true-nearly true-true in
every detail up to the point at which it became terribly false.
   As a result of their understanding, the Heechee did what seemed to them
best.
   They  recalled  all their far-flung expeditions, tidying behind them to
carry away everything that might be useful and could be moved.
   They   studied   some   million  stars  and  from  those  chose  a  few
thousand-some  to  cast  away,  because they were dangerous, some to bring
together.  It  was  not hard for them to do. The ability to cancel mass or
create meant that the forces of gravity were their servants. They selected
a  population  of  stable stars and long-lived, winnowed out the dangerous
ones,  and  brought them together, or near enough together to do what they
wanted off them. Black holes come in all sizes. A certain concentration of
matter  in  a certain volume of space and gravity wraps it closed. A black
hole  can  be  as  big as a galaxy, with its component stars hardly closer
than  in  our  own.  The  Heechee's plans were not so grand. They sought a
volume  of  space  a  few  dozen light-years across, filled it with stars,
entered it in their ships..
   And watched it close around them.

   From  that  time  on  the  Heechee were sealed off from the rest of the
universe, burrowed into their nest of stars. Time changed for them. Within
a black hole the flow of time slows-slows greatly. In the universe outside
more  than  three-quarters of a million years went by. Within, what seemed
to  Captain no more than a couple of decades. While they were stamping out
comfortable  nests  for  themselves  in their captured planets (long since
hewn into livability; they had had nearly a century in which to work), the
mild,  gentle  Pliocene epoch gave place to the storms and siroccos of the
Pleistocene.  The Gtinz ice crept down from the north, and retreated; then
the  Mindel,  the  Riss,  the  Worm.  The  Australopithecines  Captain had
kidnapped-to  help  along,  perhaps,  or  at least to study in the hope of
finding  hope  in  them-disappeared,  a failed experiment. Pithecanthropus
appeared,  and  was  gone;  Heidelberg man; the Neanderthalers. They crept
north  and  south  as  the ice directed, inventing tools, learning to bury
their  dead  and ring them with a circle of ibex horns, learning-beginning
to  learn-to speak. Land bridges sprouted between the continents, and were
washed  away. Over some of them scared, starving primitive tribes crept, a
wave  from  Asia  that  ultimately  flowed  down from Alaska to Cape Horn,
another  wave  that  stayed  where  it was, growing pads of fat around the
sinuses to shield its lungs against the stinging Arctic cold. The children
that  Captain fathered in the warrens of Venus, and kept with him while he
and  his  teams  surveyed the Earth and selected the most promising of its
primates  for  acquisition,  were  not  yet  fully grown when homo sapiens
learned the uses of fire and the wheel.
   And time passed.
   Each  beat  of  Captain's  twin  hearts took half a day in the universe
outside.  When  the Sumerians came down from their mountains to invent the
city  on  the  Persian  plateau, Captain was invited to participate in the
forthcoming  anniversary talk. As he prepared his guest list, Sargon built
an  empire.  While  he  instructed  his  machines with the program for the
meeting  small,  shivering  men  hewed  blue  stone  into  menhirs to form
Stonehenge.  Columbus  discovered  America  while Captain was fretful over
last-minute  cancellations and changes; he finished his evening meal while
the  first  human  rockets  tottered into orbit and decided to stretch his
legs  before  retiring as a human explorer, wild with surprise, broke into
the  first  Heechee  tunnel  on  Venus. He slept through the time of Robin
Broadhead's  growth,  puberty,  voyage to Gateway and voyages from it, the
discovery  of  the  Food Factory, the decision to explore it. He half woke
just  as  the Herter-Hall party was starting its four-year climb to orbit,
and  went  back  to  sleep-to  him  it  was the equivalent of less than an
hour-through  all  their wearying trip. Captain, after all that, was still
relatively  young.  He  had  the equivalent of a good ten years of active,
energetic  life  ahead  of him-or what the outside universe would see as a
quarter of a million years.

   The  purpose  of  the  anniversary  meeting  was  to review the Heechee
decision  to  retreat  to a black hole, and to contemplate what else might
need be done.
   It was a short meeting. All Heechee meetings were short, when they were
not   social   and   prolonged   purely   for   the  pleasure  they  gave;
machine-mediated  discussions  eliminated so much waste that the fate of a
world could be settled in minutes.
   Settled  many  things were. There was disquieting news. The F-type star
they  had,  somewhat  hesitantly,  included in their nest was showing some
signs which might indicate ultimate instability. Not soon. But it might be
well  to  consider  expelling it from their neighborhood. Some of the news
was  unhappy  but  expected.  The  most recent messenger ship from outside
revealed no trace of another spacefaring civilization coming to life. Some
of   it  was  expected  and  discounted  in  advance.  The  most  rigorous
theoretical  tests  had shown that the theory of oscillating universes was
correct;  and  that, indeed, the Mach's-Principle hypothesis (they did not
call  it  by  that name) which suggested that at an early point in the Big
Bang  the  dimensionless  numbers could be changed was valid. Finally, the
decision  to so situate themselves that time outside passed forty thousand
times  faster  than in their closed-up sphere was reopened for discussion.
Was  40,000  to  1 enough of a gain? It could be made more-as much more as
anyone could wish-simply by contracting the size of the hole, and perhaps,
at  the  same  time,  excluding  that troublesome F. Studies were ordered.
Congratulations were exchanged. The meeting was over.
   Captain,  his work for the time through, went once again to the surface
for a stroll.
   It  was  daylight  now. The transparent screens had darkened themselves
accordingly.  Even  so,  fifteen  or  twenty  bright  stars  shone  in the
blue-green  sky,  defying their sun. The captain yawned widely, thought of
breakfast,  decided  instead  to  relax.  He  sat  drowsily  in  the tawny
sunshine,   thinking   of   the   meeting  and  all  that  surrounded  it.
Heechee-human  similarities  were  great  enough  for  the captain to be a
little  disappointed,  on  the  personal  level,  that  those creatures he
himself  had  chosen  and  established  in  the  artifact  had not come to
anything  much.  Of  course, they might yet. The messenger rockets came in
only  every  year  or two, as they might have estimated it-more like every
fifty  thousand  years  by  the  standards  of human beings on Earth-and a
star-going  civilization  might  slip  between the cracks. Even if his own
project failed, there were still fifteen or sixteen others, all around the
Galaxy,   where  they  had  seen  at  least  hopeful  traces  of  some-day
intelligent   life.   But   most   were   not  even  as  advanced  as  the
Australopithecines.
   The  captain  sat  back  in  his forked bench, his life-support capsule
comfortably  resting in the angle beneath him, and squinted up at the sky.
If  they  came, he wondered, how would they know when they came? Would the
sky  split open? (Softly, he chided himself.) Would the thin Schwarzschild
shell  of their black hole simply evaporate, and a universe of stars shine
in? Not much more likely.
   But, if and when it happened, they would know. He was sure of that.
   The evidence was sure.
   It  was  not  the sort of evidence that only the Heechee could read. If
any  of  their experiments did attain civilization and science, they would
see  it too. The anisotropic nature of the 3K cosmic background radiation,
showing  an  inexplicable "drift". (Human beings had learned to read that,
if  not  to  understand  it.)  The  physical  theory  that  suggested such
fundamental  numbers  as  made  life  possible in the first place could be
changed.  (Human beings had learned to understand that, but not to be sure
it  was  true.)  The  subtle clues from distant galaxies that showed their
rate  of expansion was slowing down, had already for some of them begun to
reverse.  This was past the point of human capability for observation-yet;
but only, perhaps, by a matter of years or decades.
   When it became clear to the Heechee not only that the universe might be
destroyed  in order to rebuild it-but that Someone, somewhere was actually
doing  it-they  were appalled. Try as they would, they could get no fix on
Who was doing it, or where They might be. All that was sure was that, with
Them, the Heechee wanted no confrontation.
   So  Captain,  and all the other Heechee, wished their experiments great
wisdom  and prosperity. Out of charity and kindness. Out of curiosity. And
out  of  something  else. The experiments were more than experiments. They
were a sort of buffer state.
   If  any  of  the  experimental  races the Heechee had started truly had
flourished, they might by now be truly technological. They might by now be
finding  traces of the Heechee themselves, and how awed they might be, the
captain  thought, by those evidences the Heechee had left behind. He tried
to  smile  as  he  formed the equation in his mind: "Experiments" (are to)
"Heechee" (as) "Heechee" (are to)... "Them."
   Whoever "They" were.
   At  least, Captain thought grayly to himself, when They do come back to
reoccupy  this  universe  that  They  are  reshaping  to suit Their whims,
They'll have to get through those others before They get to us.