Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  The ragged-ass uranium prospectors hadn’t been careful. By the time the violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Walthers set his aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.

  The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to pass the chore on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all over. As soon as Walthers’s back was turned, so were the shepherds.

  The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag on his wrist described him as Selim Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-against chance of a passage for a new life on Peggys, sweltered in the ten-tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the landing in the deorbiting capsule—fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they’d fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggys, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn’t believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.

  Of course, you realize the “wimpiness” Robin is excusing here isn’t that of Audee Walthers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to reassure himself from time to time that he wasn’t. Humans are so strange!

  Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers’s plane and shouted at him. “Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!”

  “It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman,” Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.

  “Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!”

  Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. “They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman—”

  “No! Egyptians!”

  “—well, fellow Moslems, anyway—”

  “I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious! Very large affairs are at stake here!”

  Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, “It’s the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!”

  It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had accumulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn’t had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?

  So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour—prickly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the damned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slavs versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.

  And Peggys could have been such a pretty world. It had everything—almost everything, if you didn’t count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys—well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Glass Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms—especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles—so many millions of desperate people so willing to go so far from Earth and home.

  “Poor Arabs,” he had thought to himself but there were some rich ones, too. Like the four he was working for. When they talked about “very large affairs” they measured the scale in dollars and cents, that was clear. This expedition was not cheap. His own charter was in six figures—pity he couldn’t keep more of it for himself! And that was almost the least part of what they had spent for pop-up tents and sound-poppers, for microphone ranging and rock samplers; for the lease of satellite time for their false-color pictures and radar contour-mapping; for the instruments they paid him to drag around the terrain…and what about the next step? Next they would have to dig. Sinking a shaft to the salt dome they had located, three thousand meters down, would cost in the millions—

  Except, he discovered, that it would not, because they too had some of that illegal Heechee technology Wan had told Dolly about.

  The first thing human beings had learned about the long-gone Heechee was that they liked to dig tunnels, because examples of their work lay all about under the surface of the planet Venus. And what they had dug the tunnels with was a technological miracle, a field projector that loosened the crystalline structure of rock, converted it to a sort of slurry; that pumped the slurry away and lined the shaft with that dense, hard, blue-gleaming Heechee metal. Such projectors still existed, but not in private hands.

  They did, however, seem to be available to the hands of Mr. Luqman’s party…which implied not only money behind them but influence…which implied somebody with muscle in the right places; and from casual remarks dropped in the brief intervals of rest and meals, Walthers suspected that somebody was a man named Robinette Broadhead.

  The salt dome was definite, the drilling sites were chosen, the main work of the expedition was done. All that remained was checking out a few other possibilities and completing the cross-checks. Even Luqman began to relax, and the talk in the evenings turned to home. Home for all four of them turned out not to be Libya or even Paris. It was Texas, where they averaged 1.75 wives each and about half a dozen children in all. Not very evenly distributed, as far as Walthers could tell, but they were, probably purposely, unclear about details. To try to encourage openness Walthers found himself talking about Dolly. More than he meant to. About her extreme youth. Her career as an entertainer. Her hand puppets. He told them how clever Dolly was, making all the puppets herself—a duck, a puppy, a chimp, a clown. Best of all, a Heechee. Dolly’s Heechee had a receding forehead, a beaked nose, a jutting chin, and eyes that tapered back to the ears like an Egyptian wall painting. In profile the face was almost a single line slanting down—all imaginary, of course, since no one had ever seen a Heechee then.

  The youngest Libyan, Fawzi, nodded judiciously. “Yes, it is good that a woman should earn money,” he declared.

  “It isn’t just the money. It helps keep her active, you know? Even so, I’m afraid she gets pretty bored in Port Hegramet. She really has no one to talk to.”

  The
one named Shameem also nodded. “Programs,” he advised sagely. “When I had but one wife I bought her several fine programs for company. She particularly liked the ‘Dear Abby’ and the ‘Friends of Fatima,’ I remember.”

  “I wish I could, but there’s not much like that on Peggys yet. It’s very difficult for her. So I really can’t blame her if sometimes when I’m, you know, feeling amorous and she isn’t—” Walthers broke off, because the Libyans were laughing.

  “It is written in the Second Sura”—young Fawzi guffawed—“that woman is our field and we may go into our field to plow it when we will. So says Al-Baqara, the Cow.”

  Walthers’s suspicion that Robin Broadhead financed the prospectors was well-founded. Walthers’s opinion of Robin’s motives—not so well-founded. Robin was a very moral man, but not normally a very legal one. He was also a man (as you see) who got a lot of pleasure out of dropping hints about himself, particularly when talking about himself in the third person.

  Walthers, suppressing resentment, essayed a joke: “Unfortunately my wife is not a cow.”

  “Unfortunately your wife is not a wife,” the Arab scolded. “Back home in Houston we have for such as you a term: pussy-whipped. It is a shameful state for a man.”

  “Now, listen,” Walthers began, reddening; and then clamped down again on his anger. Over by the cooking tent Luqman looked up from his meticulous measuring of the day’s brandy ration and frowned at the sound of the voices. Walthers forced a reassuring smile. “We shall never agree,” he said, “so let’s be friends anyway.” He sought to change the subject. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why you decided to look for oil right here on the equator.”

  Fawzi’s lips pursed and he studied Walthers’s face closely before he replied. “We have had many indications of appropriate geology.”

  “Sure you have—all those satellite photos have been published, you know. They’re no secret. But there’s even better-looking geology in the northern hemisphere, around the Glass Sea.”

  “That is enough,” Fawzi interrupted, his voice rising. “You are not paid to ask questions, Walthers!”

  “I was just—”

  “You were prying where you have no business, that is what you were doing!”

  And the voices were loud again, and this time Luqman came over with their eighty milliliters each of brandy. “Now what is it?” he demanded. “What is the American asking?”

  “It does not matter. I have not answered.”

  Luqman glared at him for a moment, Walthers’s brandy ration in his hand, and then abruptly he lifted it to his lips and tossed it down. Walthers stifled a growl of protest. It did not matter that much. He did not really want to be drinking companions with these people. And in any case it seemed Luqman’s careful measuring of milliliters had not kept him from a shot or two in private, earlier, because his face was flushed and his voice was thick. “Walthers,” he growled, “I would punish your prying if it was important, but it is not. You want to know why we look here, one hundred seventy kilometers from where the launch loop will be built? Then look above you!” He thrust a theatrical arm to the darkened sky and then lurched away, laughing. Over his shoulder he tossed, “It does not matter anymore anyway!”

  Walthers stared after him, then glanced up into the night sky.

  A bright blue bead was sliding across the unfamiliar constellations. The transport! The interstellar vessel S. Ya. Broadhead had entered high orbit. He could read its course, jockeying to low orbit and parking there, an immense, potato-shaped, blue-gleaming lesser moon in the cloudless sky of Peggys Planet. In nineteen hours it would be parked. Before then he had to be in his shuttle to meet it, to participate in the frantic space-to-surface flights for the fragile fractions of the cargo and for the favored passengers, or nudging the free-fall deorbiters out of their paths to bring the terrified immigrants down to their new home.

  Walthers thanked Luqman silently for stealing his drink; he could afford no sleep that night. While the four Arabs slept he was breaking down tents and stowing equipment, packing his aircraft, and talking with the base at Port Hegramet to make sure he had a shuttle assignment. He had. If he was there by noon the following day they would give him a berth and a chance to cash in on the frantic round trips that would empty the vast transport and free it for its return trip. At first light he had the Arabs up, cursing and stumbling around. In half an hour they were aboard his plane and on the way home.

  He reached the airport in plenty of time, although something inside him was whispering monotonously, Too late. Too late…

  Too late for what? And then he found out. When he tried to pay for his fuel, the banking monitor flashed a red zero. There was nothing in the account he shared with Dolly.

  Impossible!—or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan’s lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly’s clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.

  I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him—or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.

  But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self-affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.

  Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile—Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

  But that’s the way we do it, isn’t it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those “meanwhiles”—until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.

  3

  Senseless Violence

  A bomb in Kyoto that incinerated a thousand thousand-year-old carved wooden Buddhas, a crewless ship that homed on the Gateway asteroid and released a cloud of anthrax spores when it was opened, a shooting in Los Angeles, and plutonium dust in the Staines reservoir for London—those were the things that were forcing themselves on all of us. Terrorism. Acts of senseless violence. “There’s a queerness in the world,” said I to my dear wife, Essie. “Individuals act sober and sensible, but in groups they are brawling adolescents—such childishness people exhibit when they form groups!”

  “Yes,” said Essie, nodding, “that is true, but tell me, Robin. How is your gut?”

  “As well as can be expected,” I said lightly, adding as a joke, “You can’t get good parts anymore.” For those guts were, of course, a transplant, like a sizable fraction of the accessories my body requires to keep itself moving along—such are the benefits of Full Medical Plus. “But I am not talking about my own sickness. I’m talking about the sickness of the world.”

  “And is right that you should do so,” Essie agreed, “although is my opinion that if you got your gut relined you would talk about such things less often.” She came up behind me and rested her palm on my forehead, gazing abstractedly out at the Tappan Sea. Essie understands instrumentation as few people do and has prizes to prove it, but when she wants to know if I have a fever she checks it the way her nurse did to her when she was a toddler in Leningrad. “Is not very hot,” she said reluctantly, “but what does Albert say?”

  “Albert says,” I said, “that you should go peddle your hamburgers.” I pressed her hand with mine. “Honestly. I’m all right.”

&
nbsp; “Will ask Albert to be sure?” she bargained—actually, she was deeply involved in setting up a whole new string of her franchises and I knew it.

  “Will,” I promised, and patted her still splendid bottom as she turned away to her own workroom. As soon as she was gone I called, “Albert? You heard?”

  In the holoframe over my desk the image of my data-retrieval program swirled into visibility, scratching his nose with the stem of his pipe. “Yes, Robin,” said Albert Einstein, “of course I heard. As you know, my receptors are always functioning except when you specifically ask me to turn them off, or when the situation is clearly private.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, studying him. He is not any sort of pinup, my Albert, with his untidy sweatshirt gathered in folds around his neck and his socks down around his ankles. Essie would straighten him up for me in a second if I asked her to, but I liked him the way he was. “And how can you tell the situation is private if you don’t peek?”

  He moved the stem of his pipe from his nose to his cheekbone, still scratching, still gently smiling; it was a familiar question and did not require an answer.

  Albert is really more of a friend than a computer program. He knows enough not to answer when I ask a rhetorical question. Long ago I had about a dozen different information-retrieval and decision-making programs. I had a business-manager program to tell me how my investments were doing, and a doctor program to tell me when my organs were due for replacement (among other things—I think he also conspired with my chef program at home to slip the odd pharmaceutical into my food), and a lawyer program to tell me how to get out of trouble, and, when I got into too much of it, my old psychiatrist program who told me why I was screwing up. Or tried to; I didn’t always believe him. But more and more I got used to one single program. And so the program I spent most of my time with was my general science advisor and home handyman, Albert Einstein. “Robin,” he said, gently reproving, “you didn’t call me just to find out if I was a Peeping Tom, did you?”